Will Solace and the Socialites of Olympus University

by sarcasmandships

Summary:

Will Solace has enough problems. Between juggling two jobs, surviving pre-med classes, and making sure his roommates don’t burn down their Harlem apartment, the last thing he needs is a hopeless crush on campus legend Nico di Angelo.

But try telling that to his heart.

Nico and his rich, mysterious, ridiculously good-looking best friends (affectionately dubbed “Nico and the Seven” by students who can only dream of being that cryptic) are the stuff of gossip and wild rumours. Mafia ties? Maybe. Vampire coven? Sure. Time travelers from an alternate dimension? Definitely plausible.

Will’s sure he’s never stood a chance… until a spilled drink, a cigarette on a balcony, and one very unexpected dinner invitation send him spiralling into Nico’s orbit. Now he’s stuck somewhere between flirting and a full-blown existential crisis.

Because falling for Nico di Angelo was not part of Will’s academic plan; and he’s about to learn that extra credit doesn’t cover emotional disasters.

Notes:

So this all started because I was thinking about how the other campers must’ve gossiped constantly about the Seven and all the wild, borderline-impossible things they supposedly got up to during their quests. Like, imagine watching these half-mythical teens come back from saving the world and trying to act normal in the dining pavilion. No shot.

Then I remembered how, back in uni, my friends and I would turn complete strangers into local celebrities—like the guy who wore sunglasses to every lecture? We were convinced he was in the mafia. That chaotic energy + legendary demigods = this fic.

Hope you enjoy it! I’ve already written a good chunk of chapters, so updates should be pretty regular.

P.S. For plot convenience (and maximum drama), all the main characters are the same age in this AU. Just roll with it.

Chapter 1: How to Lose Your Dignity Before Leaving the Apartment

Will isn’t exactly sure when their interest in Nico and the Seven evolved from casual curiosity into a full-blown obsession, but at this point, they’re in way too deep to turn back.

It had started off innocently enough. After all, how could anyone not talk about the group of gorgeous, intelligent, and disgustingly wealthy socialites who descended upon their freshman orientation, somehow already bonded in an elite, unshakable circle? They had the kind of effortless mystique that would fuel campus gossip for years to come. Their nickname—the Seven—wasn’t exactly creative, but it stuck. Seven of them, all looking ethereal, almost godlike, while the rest of the incoming students shuffled around in hoodies and sweatpants, barely awake. Ignoring them was impossible.

And then their eighth, and most enigmatic, member appeared.

He arrived weeks into the semester, and the reaction across campus was instant. Some were scandalized—how had this newcomer so easily infiltrated a group so exclusive it bordered on mythic? Others smugly waited for him to be iced out, laughed at for daring to think he could just sit with them in the library.

Instead, the moment he walked in, they scrambled to their feet, squealing and hugging him like he was a long-lost treasure. The guy himself had looked miserable about all the attention, clearly wanting the floor to swallow him whole.

And just like that, the rumors began.

The newcomer wasn’t new at all. He had always been one of them—just delayed for some mysterious reason. What was he doing that made him start college late? Whispers spread like wildfire. By the time his name was known—Nico di Angelo—speculation about him had already reached legendary levels.

The campus never stopped talking about Nico and the Seven (which remained their name, because "the Eight" just didn’t have the same ring). If anything, the rumors only got wilder with each passing semester. And Will, along with his best friends and roommates—Lou Ellen and Cecil—had been drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery.

There was the rumour that Percy Jackson, marine biology major and swim team captain, was allegedly scouted for the Olympic team but turned it down because it was “too easy.” Others insisted he was a high-end fashion model moonlighting as a college student, often “spotted” at exclusive NYC events in disguise.

Annabeth Chase, architecture major and Percy’s longtime girlfriend, supposedly designed part of a major New York skyscraper while still a freshman. Rumor has it she and Percy share a fancy Upper West Side apartment, but she secretly owns multiple others across the city—projects she’s redesigning for some unknown, high-profile clientele.

Jason Grace, pre-law and perpetually polished, was once seen at 5 AM in a full suit . Cecil—who refused to explain why he was out at 5 AM—became convinced Jason was either a government plant, a spy, or both.

Piper, media and communications major, was just Piper . No last name needed. Some said she was royalty who had given up her title. Others insisted she had CIA connections . Cecil, the resident conspiracy theorist, was prepared to die on that hill.

Leo Valdez, mechanical engineering major, allegedly built a robot version of himself to attend classes so he could party on a yacht in Europe. At some point during this debauched vacation, he supposedly hacked into the stock exchange “just for fun.” Afterward, the first robot malfunctioned and had to be replaced by an upgraded version—with that, and the rumour that his Wall Street hack had had some unsavoury consequences, well according to some, the real Leo never actually came back to campus.

Frank Zhang, biology and environmental science major, supposedly had a personal recommendation letter from David Attenborough himself. His family allegedly owned a private wildlife preserve in the Amazon, and Frank was frequently spotted in the library not because he was a diligent student, but because he was hiding from government agents who wanted to seize the land.

Hazel Levesque, geology major and occasional artist, was rumored to be the heir to an underground art collection worth millions, hidden in a vault beneath NYC. Whenever she visited galleries, people assumed she was simply checking on her investments. She also once won $10,000 in a high-stakes poker game and refused to explain why she was there. The most unsettling part? She always had exact change, despite never carrying cash.

Then there’s Nico di Angelo, classics and archeology major, and the most cryptic of a group of people already so cryptic they verged on being mythological. The thing about Nico di Angelo was that no one really knew anything about him. Sure, they knew of him. He was always with Jason and the rest of their obscenely glamorous, suspiciously wealthy friend group. But while Percy, Annabeth, Piper, and the others seemed like normal rich kids—if such a thing existed—Nico was… something else entirely.

He was an enigma, a walking urban legend, and the fact that he didn’t seem to care only made people speculate even more.

“You can’t tell me that guy isn’t hiding something,” Lou Ellen had once said back in freshman year, nodding toward Nico as they sat in the campus coffee shop. Nico had been alone at a table by the window, reading a battered copy of Inferno by Dante, dressed in his usual all-black ensemble. His presence seemed to pull all the light out of the space, like the universe itself bent around him.

“Yeah, he’s hiding his chronic vitamin D deficiency,” Will had muttered.

But even then, he’d looked. Because despite himself, despite every sane part of his brain telling him not to, Will found himself paying way too much attention to Nico di Angelo.

And he wasn’t the only one.

The entire school had collectively decided that Nico was some kind of cryptid.

Rumors about him were everywhere.

Some were ridiculous. Some were oddly plausible. Some—worryingly—were probably true.

Like how no one had ever seen him drunk at a party, despite the fact that people had definitely handed him drinks. Did he just not drink? Was his tolerance that high?

Or the fact that he never carried an umbrella, no matter how much it rained in the city. Nico would just walk through storms like they didn’t touch him, dark clothes soaked through, unbothered, as if he were some gothic novel protagonist wandering the moors.

Then there was the theory that he never actually applied to this school. Because he really hadn’t been at freshman orientation. No one had ever heard him talk about an admissions process. One day, he was just… there .

Someone swore that a girl had once hit on Nico and transferred schools shortly after. Another person claimed that Nico had broken up with someone just by staring at them until they left. And then, of course, there was the whole Does Nico even sleep? debate. Because there had been multiple confirmed sightings of him wandering campus in the dead of night, dressed in the same clothes from the day before, looking pale and haunted.

Cecil, who was both Nico-obsessed and extremely online, liked to collect the best ones from the campus gossip forums.

“Listen to this,” Cecil had said one night, gleefully reading from a thread titled WTF is up with Nico di Angelo??

UnderworldIntern: “I saw him in the library at like, 3 AM. No books, just sitting there .”
SonOfSocratesProbably: “I heard he’s actually a professor’s son, but no one knows which professor.”
OracleOfGossip: “He only wears black because he once killed a man in self-defense, and it’s symbolic.”
DionysusWineMom69: “Okay, but what if he’s like, an exorcist ? Dude’s vibe is too ghostly.”
FuriesRunTheRAOffice: “…So, do we all agree he’s kinda hot though?”

At that last one, Will had immediately snatched the phone out of Cecil’s hands.

“What the hell—”

“ Interesting, isn’t it?” Cecil smirked.

“It’s not interesting.” Will scrolled back up. “He did not kill a man in self-defense.”

“Do you know that?” Lou Ellen asked, smug.

Will groaned and threw himself back against the couch. “This is ridiculous. And you guys are obsessed.”

Cecil grinned. “Says the guy who stares longingly at him in Classics.”

“I do not —”

“Will,” Lou Ellen cut in. “You rearranged your schedule to stay in that class after you realized he was in it.”

“That is a coincidence!”

Cecil and Lou Ellen just exchanged a look.

Will hated them. Except he loved them with all his heart, they’d banded together during the first week of freshman year, and even after all this time they were inseparable. They were three broke college students, crammed together in their Harlem apartment and inexplicably bonded by their love for each other, respective mommy or daddy issues, and an intense obsession with Nico and the seven. Even now, their favourite topic of conversion is circling around the apartment, which is a mess, as always. Textbooks are stacked haphazardly on the kitchen counter, a half-empty pizza box sits on the couch, and the coffee table is covered in an assortment of cheap liquor bottles—mostly whatever was on sale at the liquor store down the street. A speaker in the corner crackles out an overplayed pop song, and the air smells like alcohol, cheap aftershave, and regret.

Will is sitting cross-legged on the floor, nursing a vodka and tonic that’s mostly just vodka. The bottle sits half-empty on their scratched-up coffee table, condensation pooling around the base, a silent testament to the night’s pregame. Lou Ellen, with the precision of a surgeon, applies her eyeliner using the tiny mirror on the wall—one of the few decorative pieces in their apartment that isn’t thrifted or stolen. The eyeliner is from Aphrodite Cosmetics , the brand rumored to be owned by Piper’s mom, and it’s so ridiculously expensive that Lou Ellen only has it because one of the special effects makeup crew members at the theater gave it to her as a silent thank-you for covering their overtime.  

Cecil, meanwhile, is dramatically sprawled across the couch like a Victorian noblewoman dying of consumption, except instead of a lace handkerchief, he clutches a plastic cup filled with a suspiciously neon drink. Will doesn’t want to know what’s in it, and he doesn’t think Cecil would appreciate another lecture on why it’s not a good idea to combine absinthe, Red Bull, and orange soda, because based on the way Cecil keeps taking smug little sips, Will has a sneaking suspicion that’s exactly what he’s drinking.  

“Alright,” Cecil declares, suddenly sitting up and pointing at them with his cup like he’s about to deliver a TED Talk. “First party of junior year. A momentous occasion. Do we think Nico and his pack of cryptid socialites will actually show up this time?”  

Lou Ellen hums, still focused on perfecting her eyeliner. “Doubt it. They usually go to those bougie private parties in penthouses or secret speakeasies or whatever rich people do when they’re bored.”  

“They were at that weird underground jazz bar last week,” Will points out before he can stop himself.  

Cecil gasps, scandalized. “You saw them and didn’t tell us?”  

“I was working,” Will says. “At my job. The thing I do to afford rent.”  

He shouldn’t really be so sarcastic—he doesn’t usually work at that bar, but it’s owned by the same guy who owns the restaurant where he does work, and when his boss had asked him to pick up a bartending shift, well—he couldn’t exactly say no to the extra cash. He’s lucky he’s on a scholarship, but regardless of that, and despite his job at the restaurant, and his job at the bookstore, New York City is not cheap.  

Lou Ellen waves a dismissive hand, uninterested in the details of his financial struggles. “Whatever, what were they doing?”  

Will rolls his eyes, but the truth is—he’d noticed them the second they walked in. He always does. It’s like his brain is wired to pick up on Nico di Angelo’s presence, even in a dimly lit bar full of people who look like they stepped straight out of a Great Gatsby fever dream.  

“Nico, Frank, and Jason were at the bar, Hazel and Piper were dancing, Leo was absolutely cheating at poker with some old guy, and I’m pretty sure Annabeth and Percy were making out in a corner,” he lists off.  

Lou Ellen makes a face. “They never take a break.”  

“I respect the dedication,” Cecil says solemnly.  

Will snorts into his drink. “They were actually kicked out.”  

“What?” Lou Ellen’s eyeliner pencil slips. “Why?”  

“Leo was winning too much,” Will says. “The other bartender called him a card shark and said he was messing with the ‘integrity of the game .’”  

Cecil cackles, nearly choking on whatever unholy concoction he’s drinking. “That’s incredible. I love them.”  

“Of course you do,” Lou Ellen says, turning to Will with a slow smirk. “But you know who really loves them?”  

Will immediately groans. “No. Don’t.”  

Cecil grins like a shark scenting blood. “ William .”  

“I’m leaving,” Will announces, standing up.  

“No, no, no.” Lou Ellen grabs his arm and drags him back down. “We cannot miss an opportunity to discuss the fact that you’ve had the biggest crush on Nico di Angelo since freshman year.”  

“I have not,” Will protests, despite the heat creeping up his neck.  

“Oh, come on,” Cecil says. “You get all flustered whenever he’s even mentioned. And don’t think I didn’t notice how invested you were in that jazz bar story.”  

“I was there ,” Will argues, “they’re kind of hard not to pay attention to, and you two would never have forgiven me if I hadn’t brought back the details.”  

“Don’t pretend you’re Mr. Altruism,” Lou Ellen says, “you didn’t do it for us, you did it because you can’t keep your eyes off Nico di Angelo.”

“Shut up,” Will says weakly.  

Cecil scoffs. “Face it, dude. You’re obsessed with him.”  

Will groans and covers his face with both hands. “You guys are insufferable.”  

Lou Ellen pats his shoulder, tone far too gleeful. “And you’re hopeless. But don’t worry! Tonight’s the night ! We are manifesting a Will and Nico interaction.”  

“I don’t need an interaction.”  

“Yes, you do,” Cecil says. “You need something. A conversation. Eye contact. Maybe an accidental love confession. ”  

Will glares at them both. “None of that is happening.”  

Lou Ellen and Cecil share a look.  

“Oh, it’s definitely happening,” Cecil says, taking a slow, smug sip of his drink.  

Will exhales, long and suffering, already regretting every decision that led him to this moment. But he stays on the floor, and takes a long sip of his drink as if the vodka will somehow erase the last five minutes. It doesn’t.

“Okay, but—” Will shakes his head, trying to appear serious, though he can’t quite hide the flicker of doubt in his eyes. He leans forward, elbows on the rickety coffee table, wringing his hands together. “You guys are acting like this is even a possibility, but we don’t even know if Nico is… you know.”

Lou Ellen stares at him, her eyebrows practically touching her hairline. “Are you serious?”

Will’s attempt to hold his ground falters as Lou Ellen’s incredulity makes him feel like he’s just said the most absurd thing in the world. His hands twitch nervously, and he glances at Cecil, hoping he can somehow back him up.

Cecil, however, just lets out a loud, incredulous laugh. “Will. My dude. My guy. Have you seen him?”

Will hesitates, feeling his face warm as memories of Nico—dark eyes, messy hair, that off-hand charm—flashes through his mind. He swallows hard, but his voice remains firm. “I mean, yeah, but—”

Lou Ellen cuts him off, sitting up straighter, her eyes narrowing as if she’s about to lay down a hard truth. “Okay, first of all, have you ever seen him with a girl?”

Will falters, then bites his lip, averting his gaze to the floor. “Other than the girls in the Seven, no, but that doesn’t mean—”

Cecil points dramatically, leaning forward, his eyes gleaming with mischief. “Exactly.”

Will rolls his eyes, but it’s an automatic reaction more than anything else. Deep down, his heart skips a beat every time Nico’s name comes up. “That’s not proof of anything,” he mutters, trying to force the words out with some semblance of confidence.

“Oh, but the rumors are,” Lou Ellen says smoothly, taking a triumphant sip of her drink, clearly savoring her victory. She leans back against the couch, arms crossed, like she’s got him cornered.

Will sighs, his shoulders slumping slightly. “Not this again.”

“Yes, this again,” Cecil says, tapping his fingers against his glass. “You’re telling me you haven’t heard about Nico’s whole ‘mysterious, emotionally unavailable, king of one-night stands’ reputation?”

Will flushes. His face feels like it might catch fire. He’s heard it all—the whispers at the bookstore, the rumors passed around at work, even some of the more scandalous things customers at the bar have casually dropped about Nico. The hushed voices saying that Nico di Angelo was trouble, that he never stuck around, that he left a trail of broken hearts wherever he went.

Nico di Angelo doesn’t date. Nico di Angelo is hot but terrifying. Nico di Angelo has broken hearts in three different languages. There are rumors about him disappearing from parties with people, only for those people to return hours later looking both dazed and deeply emotionally compromised.

Cecil thinks those stories are hilarious, “that’ll be you one day,” he’d say to Will with a grin, and Will would hit him with the nearest textbook. 

“I mean, I’ve heard things, but—” Will begins, his voice cracking slightly, as if even mentioning Nico out loud makes his stomach twist in ways that nauseate and thrill him. 

“But what?” Lou Ellen leans in, her eyes sparkling with amusement. “You think it’s all made up?”

Will hesitates, biting the inside of his cheek, because, well…what makes Nico and the seven so easy and fun to speculate about is that no one knows what stories are true. But somehow, he does sense some validity to this specific line of gossip. 

He shifts uncomfortably on the floor, his mind racing as he recalls every little moment he’s witnessed Nico—the way he’d walked into the bookstore, his confident, almost reckless air, the quiet magnetism he carried even when he wasn’t trying to. Will had noticed it, all of it. He’d noticed far too much.

“No,” he admits quietly, his voice almost a whisper. “I don’t think it’s made up, I just…I don’t want to get my hopes up. Even if he is gay, who’s to say he doesn’t have a secret boyfriend? It’s not like we’d know.”

He feels his cheeks burn as he thinks about Nico—the way he looked at him once in the library, the brief moments where their gazes would meet and Will’s heart would race for reasons he still couldn’t fully understand. There’s a sinking feeling in his stomach when he thinks about how little Nico actually knew him, how he was just another face in the crowd.

But the rumors. The rumors felt like a painful reminder of how far out of reach Nico really was.

Cecil raises an eyebrow, clearly waiting for more. “If he has a boyfriend, it must be an open relationship at the least. Or he’s a serial cheater, I mean you’ve heard about him disappearing from parties with guys, only for those guys to come back looking like they just had their souls rearranged?”

Will tries to suppress a groan. He’s heard that one more times than he can count, he’s just thankful Cecil isn’t trying to drag him into the polyamourus/adulterous equation this time. 

“Yeah,” he mutters, feeling even more mortified by the mere fact that he knows all of it.

Not that he thinks about it a lot. Or what Nico must do with those guys, he doesn’t think about Nico’s lips, or his neck, or his hips. He definitely doesn’t think about his fingers, or oh gods his tongue—

Will shudders, and forces the thoughts out of his mind because he cannot afford to get a raging hard on right now where Lou Ellen and Cecil would definitely see and the teasing would reach cosmic proportions. 

“There’s a rumor he’s secretly in love with Jason,” Lou Ellen adds with a casual shrug, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world. “But he can’t admit it because it would make things awkward, them being roommates and all.”

Will’s heart clenches at the mention of Jason. Nico and Jason. The thought of it makes him uneasy in a way he tries not to dwell on too much. If Nico and Jason want to date, or hook up, or whatever that’s fine. It’s not like Will has any claim to him, though he’s pretty sure Jason and Piper have a thing—so the rumour mill tells him anyway. 

“There’s even a rumor that he once hooked up with someone in the restricted section of the library,” Lou Ellen says with a mischievous grin. “Which, personally, I think seems a bit anxiety provoking, but also, kind of hot”

Will winces, his face contorting in horror. “That’s just—I mean from a hygiene standpoint…unsanitary.”

Lou Ellen shrugs, unconcerned. “I don’t know. People have said it’s true.”

Will shakes his head, trying to shake off the uncomfortable image of Nico in the library, and refocuses. He grips the edge of the couch to steady himself, but the truth is sinking in too fast. “Look, even if all of that is true—which it’s probably not, I mean the library thing is—” Will’s voice wavers. “It still doesn’t mean he’s into guys.”

Cecil and Lou Ellen exchange a long, exasperated look. Cecil groans, rubbing his temples as if trying to stave off an impending headache. “Will. Buddy. He exclusively hooks up with dudes.”

Will nearly chokes on his drink, his hand tightening around his cup. “He does not .”

Lou Ellen shoots him a look of disbelief. “Where have you been, Will?”

Cecil throws his hands up, exasperated. “People talk, man! I know at least three guys who’ve... had an experience with him.”

Will stares at them, completely dumbfounded. “What does that even mean?”

Cecil smirks, his eyes gleaming with mischief. “It means Nico di Angelo is very much not straight and also possibly a menace.”

Will flops back against the couch, covering his face with both hands, his heart thudding painfully in his chest. “Oh my gods,” he mutters, the reality of it all starting to sink in—he’s been crushing on a guy who doesn’t even know he exists beyond some random acquaintance. And it’s getting harder and harder to pretend it doesn’t hurt.

“Oh my gods, he says,” Lou Ellen mocks, but there’s affection in her teasing tone. “Like he isn’t absolutely down bad for the guy.”

“I hate you both,” Will mutters, but there’s no real heat in it. His mind is racing too fast, drowning in a sea of hope and self-doubt all at once.

Cecil claps him on the back with a grin. “You love us. But not as much as you love Nico.”

Lou Ellen’s grin widens, her eyes glinting with excitement. “And tonight, dear William, we are going to make your dreams come true.”

Will groans, sinking deeper against the couch, his heart hammering in his chest. He’d never admit it out loud, but part of him—just a tiny, stupid part—kind of, maybe, really hoped they were right.

Chapter 2: Leo Valdez vs. Common Sense (A Losing Battle)

The party is already in full swing by the time Will starts realizing just how drunk he is. It’s not the warm, fuzzy kind of drunk either—no, it’s more like a heavy, slow-moving haze creeping in from the edges of his thoughts. His head feels like it's full of cotton, and his limbs are a little too loose for his liking. The air smells faintly of sweat and cheap beer, mingling with the faint trace of incense that some idiot decided would improve the vibe.

He hadn’t planned on drinking this much, but he also hadn’t planned on not eating all day, which is apparently a crucial step in the ‘not getting completely obliterated at a Stoll party’ process. In his defense, money has been tight, and he’d been meaning to pick up some instant ramen on his way home, but then Lou Ellen had shoved a drink into his hands, and now here they are. Six drinks in, Will can barely keep track of which one is his anymore, but it doesn’t matter. The room is spinning a little, and everything feels just a little too warm.

To make matters worse, the Stoll brothers have some sort of sixth sense for people who shouldn’t be drinking more. They’ve refilled his cup three times already, and Will—being the dumbass he is—keeps drinking it. He tries to focus on something, anything, that might make the blur in his head stop, but his eyes keep drifting back to Lou Ellen, who looks perfectly put together, leaning casually into Will’s shoulder. She’s giggling over something in the corner, her head thrown back, her eyes sparkling with that dangerous brand of mischief she always has when she’s a few drinks deep.

Meanwhile, Cecil is somewhere off conducting shady business. He'd disappeared into the crowd about twenty minutes ago, muttering something about supply and demand and how weed isn’t going to sell itself. Will watches him disappear, making a mental note to talk to him about that later.

“So, tell me, dear William,” Lou Ellen drawls, her voice slurring just enough to hint at her own buzz, “Have you spotted your true love yet?”

Will makes a face, then immediately regrets it because the effort feels like too much. “Shut up,” he mutters, but it comes out weak, a little too flat.

Lou Ellen cackles, her laugh ringing out above the music. “What? I’m just asking a question. A very innocent question.”

Will groans and lets his head thump back against the wall, the coolness of the drywall a welcome contrast to the warmth suffusing his body. "I hate you," he mutters, eyes fluttering shut.

“No, you don’t,” Lou Ellen says sweetly, her voice teasing but oddly affectionate. Then her eyes flick to the front of the apartment, and suddenly she freezes.

Will, distracted by the sensation of the wall against his head, doesn’t notice immediately. “What?” he asks, his voice thick.

Lou Ellen grips his arm tightly, the sudden movement startling him into alertness. “Oh my gods,” she breathes, her tone impossibly wide-eyed.

“What?” Will turns to look, suddenly far more sober than he was just a moment ago, his heart already kicking into overdrive as his attention snaps to where Lou Ellen is staring.

And that’s when it happens.

The air shifts.

It’s like someone’s hit pause on the entire party. Conversations lull. Heads turn. Even the Stoll brothers, who never seem fazed by anything, glance up from their beer pong game as if sensing the arrival of a force far more powerful than their petty competition.

Because they’re here.

Will’s heart does something stupid in his chest.

Nico and the Seven have arrived.

And of course they have to make an entrance.

Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase step in first, looking effortlessly stunning despite the fact that they’re in casual party clothes, though they probably cost Will’s share of rent for two months. Annabeth is saying something to Percy, who smirks before pressing a kiss to the top of her head, and Will nearly gags at how perfect they are. Disgusting.

Behind them, Jason Grace and Piper are talking in hushed tones, Jason laughing at something Piper’s said. Frank Zhang and Hazel Levesque follow closely, looking slightly bashful at all the attention. Leo Valdez, the only one who actually looks like he belongs at a Stoll party, is already making a beeline for the drinks table.

And then—there’s Nico di Angelo.

Dark clothes. Dark eyes. Dark, disinterested expression, like he’s already regretting being here. He trails a little behind Jason, hands in his pockets, radiating do not perceive me energy—though that does nothing to stop people from looking.

Because the truth is, the rumors don’t do him justice.

He’s gorgeous .

Will is staring. He knows he’s staring, and he knows Lou Ellen knows he’s staring. The panic in his chest rises like a wave, threatening to swallow him whole. His thoughts are completely out of sync with his body, which refuses to obey him as it aches with the desperate desire to look at Nico for just a little bit longer.

Lou Ellen smirks and elbows him in the side. “You’re drooling.”

Will scowls. “I am not.”

Lou Ellen ignores him. “So, thoughts? Any theories about what they did over the summer?”

Will hums, pretending to consider it for just a moment, though he’s still very aware of Nico’s presence in the room. "Well, let’s see. Percy and Annabeth were obviously on some elite couple’s vacation.”

“ Obviously ,” Lou Ellen agrees, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Jason and Piper were probably somewhere expensive. Piper posted an Instagram story at some resort in Bali last month.”

Lou Ellen nods, confirming. “And you just know Leo was up to some shit.”

“Oh, absolutely.”

A beat of silence.

Then Lou Ellen grins, glancing sideways at him. “And Nico?”

Will absolutely does not blush. "I don’t know. Probably something cool and cryptic."

Lou Ellen gasps dramatically. “Oh, you think he’s cool?”

Will groans. “I walked into that one.”

Lou Ellen beams. “Yes. Yes, you did.”

Before Will can fully process the fact that Nico di Angelo is within five feet of him, the moment is mercifully interrupted by the return of Cecil, who all but materializes beside them, looking far too smug for someone who was just doing illegal business in the middle of a party.

He slaps a wad of cash onto the table in front of them and grins. “God, I love capitalism.”

Will pinches the bridge of his nose. “Cecil.”

“What?” Cecil flops onto the couch beside them, looking entirely unbothered. “People want things, I provide them. It’s a beautiful system.”

Will gestures at the literal pile of cash. “You’re going to get arrested.”

Cecil shrugs. “Only if I get caught.”

Lou Ellen hums thoughtfully. “And, you know, it does help with rent.”

Will scowls at her. “Don’t encourage him.”

“Yeah, Will,” Cecil smirks. “Don’t pretend you don’t benefit from my supply when school stress hits.”

Will glares. “I hate you.”

Cecil just grins. “You really don’t.”

Lou Ellen leans in, clearly not dropping the topic. “C’mon, let’s focus on what’s important. Have you seen our favorite socialites yet?”

Cecil’s eyes light up. “Oh, hell yeah. You think I’d miss their grand entrance?”

Lou Ellen gestures grandly. “We were just discussing their summer vacations. What’s the word on the street?”

Cecil sits back, tapping his chin in mock thought. “Let’s see… Percy and Annabeth? Definitely yacht people. I heard a rumor that they got banned from a private island.”

Will blinks. “Wait, why?”

“No clue,” Cecil says cheerfully. “I’m choosing to believe it was espionage.”

Lou Ellen nods solemnly. “Or piracy.”

Will sighs. “I hate that that’s plausible.”

Cecil grins. “Jason and Piper? Probably spent the summer at some soul-searching retreat where they learned to communicate exclusively through meaningful glances.”

Will snorts. “Not inaccurate.”

“Leo,” Cecil continues, “was definitely kicked out of at least three casinos.”

Lou Ellen gasps. “We’re talking high roller Leo?”

Cecil nods gravely. “The very one.”

Will shakes his head. “I worry about him.”

“Don’t,” Cecil says. “It builds character.”

Lou Ellen leans forward. “And what about Nico?”

Cecil smirks. “Ah, now he’s the real enigma, isn’t he?”

Will tries very hard to look disinterested. “What’s the latest theory?”

Cecil grins. “Okay, so you know how no one ever knows what he’s doing at any given time?”

Will nods, though his thoughts are far from coherent. “Obviously.”

Cecil’s eyes sparkle. “Well, someone at this very party swears he saw Nico get into a black car with tinted windows at the end of last semester and then he disappeared for three months. Apparently he didn’t spend any of summer with the Seven.”

Will raises an eyebrow. “That’s it? He just… left?”

Cecil shrugs. “That’s what makes it so mysterious.”

Lou Ellen gasps dramatically. “Oh my gods, do you think he’s in the mafia?”

Will groans. “You guys cannot be serious.”

Cecil and Lou Ellen look at each other, then back at Will.

“We’re so serious,” Lou Ellen says solemnly.

Will puts his head in his hands.

“I bet he has a secret Italian villa,” Cecil adds, grinning mischievously.

Lou Ellen nods. “Or a castle.”

Will groans louder.

Cecil grins. “Aw, come on, Will. Don’t you want your future husband to have a castle?”

Will chokes on his drink. “Shut up.”

Lou Ellen cackles. “Gods, you’re so easy to mess with.”

Will glares at them both. “I hate you.”

Cecil leans back, smirking. “Again, you really don’t.”

Perhaps seeing the expression on Will’s face, Lou Ellen diverts the conversation, though it ends back on Nico and the Seven anyways, "apparently, Nico’s been spotted at some secret art auction in SoHo, buying ancient artifacts. Who even does that?"

Will rolls his eyes, but his lips twitch upward. "I don’t know, Lou. Maybe the same people who ‘accidentally’ book a table at a Michelin-star restaurant for breakfast?"

Cecil snorts, clearly enjoying the gossip more than he probably should. "Didn’t Percy once turn down a modeling gig to do... what was it? Fight a sea monster in the Mediterranean? I feel like that’s the least crazy rumor we’ve heard so far."

"Stop, you’re making me laugh," Will wheezes, glancing nervously at the door. He is all too aware of how ridiculous these rumors sound—but that doesn’t stop them from spreading like wildfire around campus. 

Not to mention it was a welcome distraction for them when they were buried to their eyeballs in coursework, or had dealt with a particularly nasty customer at work, or had to think too long about any of their deadbeat mother or fathers (father for Will and Cecil, mother for Lou Ellen). It was silly, and would be totally embarrassing if Nico and the Seven ever found out any of the wild theories they had about their lives, but it was always light-hearted, and funny, and just the kind of thing they needed. And if Will liked having an excuse to talk, and think about Nico all day without feeling guilty about it? Then sue him. Maybe Jason could be his lawyer, if he wasn’t too busy with his undercover work. 

Lou Ellen and Cecil descend into another squabble, debating whether or not there is tension between Frank, and Jason and Piper, given that Cecil thinks the latter are government agents and the rumour that the government is trying to take over Frank’s family’s land. Will zones out from their conversation, he’s heard it all way too many times, and for the third time in the last few minutes, his eyes flicker back to Nico. He can’t help it. There’s something magnetic about the way Nico stands there, seemingly disconnected from everything, but still holding an energy that draws people in—especially Will. Nico’s a mystery he can’t figure out, and for some reason, that makes Will want to know more.

The problem is, Will can’t seem to look away. Every time Nico shifts, his eyes seem to be on him, and before Will knows it, he’s staring, caught in that silent moment of wondering if Nico is somehow aware of him watching. The thought sends a ripple of discomfort through him, but he can’t tear his gaze away.

That's when Lou Ellen notices.

"You’re staring at him again," Lou Ellen teases, not even looking up from her phone. Her voice is quiet, but it’s enough to cut through Will’s thoughts.

"I’m not," Will protests, too quickly, his voice just a tad too high-pitched. He tries to play it off, but Lou Ellen isn’t having it.

"Uh-huh. Sure," she drawls. "You’re definitely not staring at Nico like he’s the last bottle of water on a desert island."

Cecil, overhearing the conversation, grins mischievously, leaning in with a quiet whisper, “Maybe he likes you back?”

Will chokes on his drink, nearly spitting it out. “What? No! I—I just... It’s nothing. I was just... looking around.”

"Uh-huh." Lou Ellen’s eyes are already narrowed, and she’s got that look—the one she gets when she knows something is up. "Well, you might want to look around somewhere else before Nico notices you’ve been staring at him for like, the last ten minutes."

Will’s face goes red, and his attention darts nervously around the room. He tries to laugh it off, but he’s certain it’s not working. Nico’s still standing across the room, but now, for the first time, their eyes meet. Nico doesn’t look away immediately. He just watches him for a second, and there’s a flicker of something unreadable in his gaze. It’s enough to send Will’s heart racing.

Lou Ellen leans closer, dropping her voice to a low whisper. “You’re in deep, aren’t you?”

Will laughs quietly, but the knot in his stomach tightens as he watches Nico talk to Jason, his expression softer now—relaxed, not the same icy demeanor he wore around campus. And then, without warning, Nico glances back in their direction. Again. For a moment, their eyes lock once more. Nico’s lips quirk into a barely noticeable smile, one that makes Will's heart stutter. And just like that, the room seems to go still.

“I think,” Will says, his voice barely above a whisper, “that he’s trying to kill me.”

Cecil raises his glass. "Oh, for sure, people do say he has like, lethal laser eye beams. But don’t worry, I’ve got your back. I’m not going to let you die without finding out where he disappeared to all summer."

Lou Ellen just laughs, nudging him with her shoulder. "Just talk to him, what’s the worst that could happen?"

“What’s the worst that could happen?” he squaks, “oh I don’t know? He could hear me.” 

You should just talk to him,” Lou Ellen insists, nudging Will’s arm like that would somehow make him more socially competent.

“Yeah,” Cecil adds, swirling the last of his drink in his glass. “You stare at him enough. It’s only polite at this point.”

Will groans, dragging a hand down his face. “No. Absolutely not. I am not going to just—walk over there and start a conversation. About what? ‘Hey, Nico, nice weather we’re having?’” He gestures vaguely around the dimly lit, too-crowded apartment. “At this party ?”

Lou Ellen shrugs. “Could be worse.”

“How?”

“You could be standing here not talking to him, and instead looking like you’re two seconds away from writing poetry about his eyes.”

Will clenches his jaw. He needs a break from this. From them . From the way Lou Ellen and Cecil are clearly enjoying his suffering. And from Nico, who keeps managing to exist in the same room as Will without even trying.

“I need another drink,” Will mutters, mostly to himself, as he pushes away from the wall.

“You’re already drunk,” Lou Ellen points out, but Will ignores her.

It’s fine. He just needs a moment to compose himself. Clear his head. Regain some dignity. The kitchen isn’t far—just a few steps through the hallway, past a couple of people making out against a bookshelf (Annabeth and Percy, obviously ), and—

Oh.

Oh, no .

He doesn’t even register what’s happening until it’s too late. One second, he’s walking into the kitchen, and the next—

He crashes directly into someone, his cup tipping forward, the cold liquid spilling between them.

For a single, horrifying moment, everything slows.

Will blinks. Looks down.

His drink is soaking into black fabric. A black shirt. A black jacket. And then—

Oh. Oh, god .

It’s Nico.

He just spilled his drink all over Nico di Angelo.

There’s a beat of silence. Will’s entire soul leaves his body.

Nico exhales sharply, pulling the soaked fabric away from his chest. He glances up, eyes dark, unreadable. “Huh.”

Will wants to die . Right here. Right now. Strike him down, Zeus.

“I—” His mouth opens, but no coherent words come out. “I—oh— shit —I—”

“Smooth,” Nico says flatly.

“I—Gods, I—”

Nico looks down at his shirt again, then back up at Will. His expression shifts, lips quirking just slightly. Not quite a smile, but something close.

“Was that your version of starting a conversation?”

Will doesn’t know if he’s about to throw up or run away. Maybe both. Probably both.

Lou Ellen and Cecil are never going to let him live this down.

For a moment, Will can’t do anything but stare .

Nico di Angelo is standing in front of him, dripping in whatever cheap, too-sweet drink Will had been nursing all night, and somehow, somehow , he still looks—

Well. Unfairly good .

It’s something about the way he holds himself—effortless, detached, like he’s not really part of the party but rather haunting the edges of it. His black jacket hangs open, revealing a silk shirt—now stained, clinging to his chest in a way that makes Will’s brain short-circuit. His collarbones are sharp, his skin pale in a way that should make him look sickly but instead just makes him seem otherworldly . His dark eyes flicker over Will, unreadable as ever, framed by lashes so long and thick it’s almost distracting.

He looks beautiful. And hot. And sexy . But also—

Ethereal.

Like something just slightly out of place. Like he doesn’t quite belong in this world, or maybe just doesn’t care to. Will has always thought Nico was hauntingly beautiful, but standing this close, it’s almost uncanny. Like he’s seeing something he shouldn’t.

And yet, despite all that, Will’s main takeaway is that Nico is standing here with his drink all over him, and it’s Will’s fault.

He swallows hard. Say something.

“I—I’m so sorry,” he stammers, finally wrenching himself out of whatever trance he’s in. His hands twitch at his sides, like he wants to reach out and fix it, like he could fix it. He can’t. “I didn’t— I wasn’t looking where I was—”

Nico just glances down at himself, fingers ghosting over the damp fabric. “It’s fine,” he says, but his tone is so neutral, so unbothered , that it only makes Will panic more.

“I can— I’ll get some napkins,” Will blurts, already turning toward the counter, but Nico just tilts his head slightly.

“No point.” He tugs at the fabric again, inspecting it with the same level of interest one might have for a mildly inconvenient email. “It’s silk. I’ll have to get it dry cleaned.”

Will stops mid-step.

Silk.

His gaze drops back to Nico’s shirt, and suddenly, the way it drapes over him makes so much sense . It’s not just silk—it’s expensive silk.

Of course it is.

Will tries to laugh, but it comes out strangled. “I—uh—wow, yeah, okay, um—”

Nico doesn’t even seem annoyed. He says it the same way someone might remind themselves to pick up milk from the store. Just another task on his to-do list: dry clean the designer silk shirt some idiot spilled a drink on .

Which somehow makes Will feel worse .

Because of course Nico has designer clothes. Of course he’s not worried about ruining a shirt, because he probably has ten more hanging in some massive closet.

Meanwhile, Will is wearing a thrifted t-shirt under a denim jacket that he definitely didn’t buy new. Meanwhile, Will had to talk himself out of ordering takeout this week because he needed to stretch his paycheck until his next shift. Meanwhile, Will is barely getting by, working two jobs just to afford rent and tuition, and Nico di Angelo is standing here talking about dry-cleaning silk .

Will suddenly feels very aware of the fact that he can’t even afford dry cleaning. If he ruined one of his shirts, it would just be ruined .

“I—” He swallows hard, shoulders tensing. “I’m really sorry.”

Nico waves a hand vaguely, still not seeming to care that much. “I’ll survive.”

Will definitely won’t.

Will takes a slow, steady breath. Okay. Get it together, Solace.

Because if he keeps standing here, gaping at Nico like some lovesick idiot, it’s going to be painfully obvious that he’s—well. That he’s into him .

And if he ever wants a chance with Nico— a real chance —he has to stop acting like a nervous wreck every time they interact.

He straightens his shoulders, pastes on a smile—his usual, easygoing grin, the one that gets him through stressful shifts and awkward conversations and patients who don’t listen to his medical advice. Friendly. Normal. He can do friendly and normal.

“So,” he says, forcing a light tone, “you, uh, come here often?”

Nico blinks at him.

Will instantly regrets everything .

“Wow,” Nico says flatly. “That’s what you’re going with?”

Will groans, dragging a hand down his face. “I panicked.”

Nico snorts. He shifts slightly, the movement slow and deliberate, like nothing ever rattles him. His dark eyes flicker over Will, assessing, and for a brief moment, Will wonders what he sees.

He wonders if Nico has ever looked at him and thought he’s hot . Or he’s cute . Or even just I wonder what his deal is .

Because Will knows Nico is beautiful. That’s not even a question. But there’s something about him that makes it feel unreachable . Like he exists in an entirely different world—one of designer clothes and expensive restaurants and whispered rumors that make him seem untouchable.

And yet, somehow, they’re standing here. Just the two of them.

Will clears his throat. “Okay, let me try again. Can I get you another drink? Y’know, to make up for the one I just threw all over you.”

Nico raises a brow. “You didn’t throw it.”

“Still,” Will says, shrugging, “I did ruin your silk shirt. The least I can do is pour you another drink. Unless you only drink, like… imported whiskey that costs more than my rent?”

Nico’s lips twitch—just the smallest, briefest ghost of a smile.

“No,” he says simply. “Gin and tonic.”

Of course.

Will laughs, shaking his head. “Yeah, that sounds about right.” He gestures toward the counter, where half-melted ice cubes float in a rapidly dwindling supply of liquor. “C’mon, let me at least do this much.”

Nico doesn’t argue. He doesn’t agree, either—he just gives Will another one of those unreadable looks before turning, walking toward the makeshift bar like it was his idea in the first place.

Will follows, trying very hard not to make it obvious that his heart is still hammering way too fast.

Because he doesn’t know if this is anything .

But he does know that Nico didn’t say no.

Will focuses on the drinks, if only to give himself something to do besides stand there and drown in his own awkwardness.

He pours Nico’s gin and tonic first, forcing himself to move carefully—partly because he doesn’t want to spill something again , and partly because he needs to look like he has at least some control over his motor functions.

Beside him, Nico leans against the counter, watching in that quiet, unreadable way of his. It should be unnerving. Maybe it is unnerving.

But right now, more than anything, it just feels… normal .

Which is weird.

Because for the past two years , Will has only known Nico through campus whispers and secondhand stories and the exaggerated theories he, Lou Ellen, and Cecil have spun during late-night study sessions.

Secret art auctions in SoHo.

Some kind of mafia inheritance.

Too many expensive vacations, but somehow, never any social media posts about them.

But right now, Nico doesn’t seem like some untouchable, elite mystery. He just seems… like a guy . A guy who is slightly damp from Will’s terrible coordination, waiting for a drink at a house party.

And yeah, okay, he’s also ridiculously good-looking —all sharp angles and dark, careless elegance, like he walked straight out of a black-and-white film. But there’s nothing particularly dramatic about him right now. No eerie glow, no unsettling aura.

Just Nico.

Will slides Nico’s drink over to him, then fixes his own, his mind still buzzing with everything he thinks he knows about Nico versus the reality of the person standing next to him.

For a second, he debates what to say. He wants to keep talking—to keep Nico here, in this strange but oddly comfortable moment—but he has no idea where the invisible lines are, the ones that turn a normal conversation into something Nico might shut down entirely.

So, stupidly, he blurts out, “How was your summer?”

The reaction is immediate.

Nico’s entire body stiffens, his fingers tightening slightly around his glass. His expression doesn’t change much, but his dark eyes flash with something sharp—something cold and angry, like a door slamming shut in Will’s face.

Will swallows. Okay. Bad question.

He scrambles to change the subject. “I mean—uh, how’s your first week back? Classes, y’know. Professors. Workload.”

Nico exhales slowly, and for a second, Will isn’t sure he’s going to answer. But then he relaxes just enough to take another sip of his drink, and when he speaks again, his voice is calmer.

“It’s fine,” he says, then adds, “Some of my professors are idiots, but that’s nothing new.”

Will laughs, relieved that the conversation hasn’t crashed and burned. “Yeah, I get that. Any classes you actually like this semester?”

Nico hesitates, but then—surprisingly—nods. “Yeah. I’m taking a seminar on ancient civilizations and early burial practices. It’s…” He pauses, considering his words. “It’s interesting.”

That’s an understatement.

Because for the first time all night, Nico’s expression shifts into something more open—more engaged. His usual cool detachment doesn’t disappear entirely, but there’s something different in his voice now. Something genuine .

And Will likes it.

“Ancient burial practices?” he asks, leaning in slightly. “That’s gotta be intense.”

Nico shrugs, but there’s a spark of interest in his eyes now. “It is. But it’s also fascinating. The way people viewed death—how their beliefs shaped the way they treated the dead—it tells you a lot about a civilization.”

Will nods, sipping his drink. “And you’re classics and archaeology, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cool,” Will says, and he means it. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone actually passionate about archaeology outside of, like, Indiana Jones.”

Nico snorts. “Indiana Jones was a terrible archaeologist.”

“Oh, for sure,” Will says quickly. “But you get what I mean. You’re into this stuff. Like, really into it.”

Nico shrugs again, but there’s a small flicker of something pleased in his expression. “I guess.”

Will grins, something warm settling in his chest. He doesn’t know why it surprises him so much—of course Nico is passionate about his major—but for some reason, seeing him like this, engaged and actually willing to talk, makes Will want to keep asking questions.

So, he does.

And as Nico talks, his voice more certain, more alive , Will thinks—maybe this is what the rumors never got right.

Will is just about to ask Nico more about his classes—because, honestly, he wants to hear more—when the kitchen door flies open with all the subtlety of an explosion.

Jason and Percy barrel in, looking way too intense for two guys at a college party. Jason is gripping Percy’s arm like he’s trying to physically restrain him, while Percy is wild-eyed and panting slightly, like he just sprinted across the apartment.

Nico sighs. “Oh, gods. What now?”

“We have to go,” Jason says urgently. “ Now .”

“Like, right now ,” Percy adds, pointing dramatically toward the door. “Time is of the essence.”

Will blinks. What the hell is happening?

Nico, however, just looks bored . “Why?”

Jason and Percy exchange a look . The kind of look that very clearly says we can’t talk about this in front of civilians .

Jason lowers his voice. “We’ve been compromised.”

Percy nods gravely. “They made us.”

Will has no idea what that means. And based on the way his entire body is vibrating with curiosity, he’s pretty sure this is exactly how every ridiculous rumor about these guys gets started.

Nico pinches the bridge of his nose. “Can you two speak like normal people for once?”

Jason sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. “We may have, um… accidentally caused a situation.”

“Is this an actual problem,” Nico asks dryly, “or are you two just being dramatic again?”

Jason and Percy exchange another look.

“Uh,” Percy says. “Depends on how you define problem .’”

Jason sighs. “Let’s just say we should leave before people start asking questions .”

“And definitely before they realize we were involved,” Percy adds.

Will is trying so hard to keep up. “Wait, who ? What people?”

Will blinks. Nico, however, just sighs and swirls his gin and tonic like this happens all the time.

“Why?” he asks, unimpressed.

Jason and Percy exchange a look . A very serious look. The kind of look that says classified information .

Jason lowers his voice. “ It’s Leo .”

Nico groans. “Oh, again ?”

Percy nods solemnly. “He pulled a Leo.”

“I assumed that.”

Jason leans against the counter, rubbing his temples. “It’s bad, man.”

“ How bad?”

Percy hesitates. “Hypothetically speaking…” He pauses, clearly trying to phrase this in a way that won’t make Nico immediately walk out of the room.

Jason cuts in. “—if a certain someone —”

“—let’s call him L. V. —” Percy says.

“— somehow reprogrammed the automated locks in the engineering building —”

“—because, and I quote , ‘it was funny’—”

Will chokes. “Wait, what ?”

Jason exhales through his nose. “And, let’s say he may or may not have done this before the party —”

“—but it wasn’t discovered until, oh, ten minutes ago —” Percy says.

Jason nods grimly. “So now half the engineering department is trapped in their own classrooms .”

Percy throws up his hands. “And somehow , campus security knows he was with us before the party , so they’re looking for us .”

Will nearly drops the bottle of vodka in his hand. “That’s not a hypothetical! That’s just a crime !”

Percy waves him off. “We’ll fix it.”

“After we run ,” Jason corrects.

Will is stunned into silence.

This. This is exactly why the rumors about the Seven get more insane every day. This entire conversation is being held like they’re fugitives evading the feds . Nico, for his part, looks deeply unimpressed.

“You absolute idiots ,” he mutters, taking another sip of his drink.

Percy claps a hand to his chest. “We didn’t know Leo was gonna do it!”

Jason sighs. “Are you coming or not?”

“What the fuck is going on?” Will wonders aloud.

Percy slaps a hand on Will’s shoulder, looking at him way too seriously. “It’s better if you don’t know, man.”

Jason nods solemnly. “ For your own safety .”

Will gapes at them. For his own safety ??

Nico just drains the rest of his gin and tonic like he’s regretting every life choice that led him here. Then he sets his glass down, pushes off the counter, and levels Jason and Percy with an unimpressed look.

“You owe me for this,” he says.

Jason clasps a hand to his chest. “Wouldn’t dream of leaving you hanging, man.”

Percy grins. “I’ll buy you breakfast tomorrow.”

“I don’t eat breakfast.”

Percy shrugs. “Guess I’ll eat for you, then.”

Nico sighs again, like he’s genuinely debating letting them get murdered just to be free of their nonsense. But, eventually, he turns back to Will, his expression unreadable.

“Thanks for the drink,” he says.

Jason slaps a hand on Will’s shoulder as they pass. “Forget we were ever here.”

And just like that, he’s gone, swept away in whatever cryptic disaster Jason and Percy just dragged him into.

Will stands there, stunned , watching the three of them disappear through the apartment.

“…What the fuck just happened?” he mutters.

Lou Ellen suddenly appears at his side, sipping her own drink with an amused expression. “Well,” she says, “ that’s certainly some fresh material for us to speculate over later.”

 

 

 

 

Notes:

Thanks for reading! Hope u guys enjoyed it, pls let me know any thoughts or feedback u guys have!

Chapter 3: I Vomit Between Customer Transactions Like a Professional

The next morning is hell .

Will wakes up with a skull-splitting hangover, the taste of cheap vodka clinging to his tongue like a personal insult. He barely has time to suffer in bed before he remembers— shit , he has work.

Which is how he ends up at his job in the bookstore, bleary-eyed and miserable, clutching a water bottle like it’s a lifeline. The lights are way too bright, and every time someone so much as touches a book, it feels like an earthquake inside his skull.

The bookstore is the kind of place Will has no business being in—let alone working at.

It’s all dark wood floors, floor-to-ceiling shelves with rolling ladders, and light that filters in through cathedral-style windows like it’s been blessed by Apollo himself. The air always smells like old paper, expensive leather, and artisan coffee—none of which Will can afford on his best day. Even the employees have to buy their own drinks at the café in the corner, where espresso costs as much as Will’s weekly MetroCard. He makes minimum wage, and he’s pretty sure the potted plants make more than he does.

The place has a vibe . A prestigious university vibe. Like it’s not just a bookstore—it’s a Statement . The kind of place where professors bring first editions to read quietly in the corner and trust fund kids lounge on leather armchairs, pretending they’re at Oxford.Which, of course, makes it exactly the kind of place the Seven would frequent.

And they do.

Annabeth’s there at least twice a week, leaving with stacks of architecture books that Will has to scan in while pretending not to look impressed. Hazel likes the rare art books—limited runs that Will would need to sell a kidney to afford. Jason stops in for legal theory texts, always in a pressed button-down that makes Will feel underdressed by default.

He’s in the middle of forcing himself to restock a shelf—each movement a slow, careful attempt to avoid making himself any more nauseous—when the bell above the door chimes .

And in walks Nico di Angelo .

Will freezes.

The first thing he notices is that Nico looks unfairly good for someone who was definitely drinking last night. Where Will looks like a corpse , Nico looks like the hot, immortal version of one.

All black, of course—fitted slacks, sleek turtleneck, long wool coat, polished boots. He’s wearing dark sunglasses despite the fact that they’re inside , which is usually the behavior of either a massive douchebag or a celebrity avoiding paparazzi. He looks effortlessly expensive, like he just stepped out of some underground, members-only club where they serve cocktails in crystal goblets and discuss art theft.

Which, honestly, isn’t that far from what people say about him.

Will should find it ridiculous. He wants to find it ridiculous.

Instead, he thinks— Oh, fuck. He looks like a vampire. A really, really hot vampire.

A hungover vampire, if Will had to guess. There’s something about the way he moves, slower than usual, the slight stiffness in his shoulders. But unlike Will—who currently looks like a disaster—Nico is pulling it off with that effortless, chic quality that makes it seem intentional. Like he could be walking the streets of Paris after an all-night bender and still end up on the cover of some high-fashion magazine.

Will watches from behind the shelf as Nico drifts through the store, browsing with casual disinterest, like he just wandered in to kill time.

And Will— who absolutely should not be staring —keeps staring .

Will can’t help but spiral.

What is Nico di Angelo doing here? He’s not carrying a laptop like Annabeth always does. He’s not pretending to browse while actually casing the place for architectural flaws like Jason (Will is convinced he’s done it at least twice). He’s not even sipping a $15 coffee like Hazel, who makes Will feel underpaid just by association.

Nico’s walking with a kind of purposeful detachment, like he’s not actually looking for a book.

Which begs the question: Is he looking for someone?

Will’s stomach does a weird, swooping thing he immediately regrets. No. Absolutely not.
Nico di Angelo is not here looking for him. He’s probably here because... what?

He needs a new leather-bound edition of The Art of War?

He wants to buy an ancient grimoire because the first one caught fire?

He’s scouting for his next victim? (Okay, Will, chill.)

He’s probably just here because it’s the bookstore to be seen in.
Rich people love that. They love showing up in exclusive places just to prove they can. Right?

But then Nico stops at the classics section. His fingers trace the spines with practiced ease, and Will feels his brain short-circuit. Because, oh no. This is Nico di Angelo doing normal things. Looking for books. Existing like a person. Not as a rumor or a cryptid or a vampire—but as someone who reads.

Which is infinitely worse, because now Will has to face the fact that Nico might be... normal. Or at least, a version of normal that comes with silk shirts and generational wealth.

And Will is so not ready for that. But maybe Will should stop looking at him before he gets caught .

But he doesn’t .

Because in the harsh, cruel light of day, Will is remembering everything from last night. The spilled drink. The embarrassing attempt at flirting. Nico’s absurdly expensive silk shirt.

And now, with a pounding headache and the creeping horror of social anxiety settling in, Will realizes—

He is never going to live that down.

Will is still staring when Nico suddenly turns his head— right at him .

Oh, shit .

Even through Nico’s sunglasses he feels their eyes meet for a fraction of a second, and Will’s brain immediately short-circuits. His first instinct is to move , to do something , to not be standing there like an idiot , so naturally, he panics and—

Dives behind the bookshelf.

It is, in hindsight, not his best decision.

Because in his haste to remove himself from Nico’s line of sight, Will completely underestimates how low the bookshelf actually is. He doesn’t dive so much as crash , smacking his elbow against the edge and nearly knocking over an entire stack of overpriced philosophy textbooks.

It’s loud. Very loud.

Will freezes, heart pounding, and then—

A voice. Amused. Close. Too close.

“Are you okay?”

Will squeezes his eyes shut. Kill me. Just kill me now.

Slowly, painfully , he peeks over the top of the shelf. And—of course—Nico is standing right there , looking down at him with a very faint, deeply unimpressed expression.

For a moment, Will considers pretending he didn’t hear him. Maybe if he stays really still, Nico will just walk away .

But then Nico lifts his sunglasses onto his head, and—

Oh.

Oh, he looks like shit.

Not in a bad way, obviously. Because that would imply Nico is capable of looking bad, and Will is pretty sure he isn’t .

But gone is the usual sharp, unapproachable glare—his dark eyes are slightly bloodshot, the skin underneath them bruised with exhaustion. He looks tired , like someone who spent all night suffering and then willed himself into looking presentable out of sheer spite.

It’s such a sharp contrast to the rumors Will has heard about him.

Because according to campus legend, Nico di Angelo doesn’t get drunk .

He is above such things. He exists in some untouchable realm of cool detachment, immune to things like hangovers and bad decisions.

But here he is, standing in front of Will, looking distinctly human.

And, maybe even worse—he’s waiting for an answer .

Will clears his throat, scrambles to his feet, and tries to play it cool. “Yeah. Totally fine. Just, uh… dropped something.”

Nico glances down at the completely empty floor, then back at Will, clearly not buying it. But instead of calling him out, he just hums and leans against the shelf, rubbing his temple like he has a headache.

“So,” he says, voice still a little hoarse, “are you working, or are you just lurking behind bookshelves for fun?”

Will wants to die.

Will straightens up, desperate to regain some dignity. He forces his best bright, easygoing grin—his default setting when faced with deep humiliation.

“Oh, you know. A little bit of both,” he says, waving a hand like it’s no big deal that he was just hiding behind a bookshelf like a deranged cryptid . “I am technically working, but also—uh—currently dying.”

Nico raises a single eyebrow. “Dying?”

“Yep,” Will chirps, determined to seem normal. “As in, I am so hungover that I have lost all connection to the mortal plane. I am transcending . I am becoming one with the afterlife.”

Nico just blinks. Slowly. Like he’s trying to decide whether to dignify that with a response.

Will takes this as encouragement to keep talking , because, clearly, that’s a great idea.

“I have thrown up four times today,” he continues, holding up four fingers, because that’s necessary, apparently. “And it’s only—” He glances at his watch, and immediately regrets it. “Oh, gods. It’s 10:30 a.m. ”

Nico snorts—quiet, almost imperceptible, but Will hears it .

That’s a win , he decides.

Unfortunately, his mouth is still moving.

“Anyway, yeah,” he says, leaning against the bookshelf, which—oops—isn’t actually a wall, and nearly sends a row of books tumbling down. “I was trying to restock the front display, but every ten minutes I have to run to the back room and violently rethink my life choices.”

Nico watches him, unreadable, then crosses his arms. “So you’re saying,” he says slowly, “that if I stay here long enough, I’ll get to witness you sprinting to throw up in real time?”

Will groans, dragging a hand down his face. “Unfortunately, yeah.” Then he pauses. Narrows his eyes. “Wait. Are you enjoying this?”

Nico lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug. “A little.”

That—

That is so unfair.

Because the thing is, Nico shouldn’t be funny. He’s all sharp angles, dark clothes, and a perpetual aura of dangerous rich kid who might have actually murdered someone . His reputation is terrifying . He’s supposed to be untouchable, unreadable, unapproachable.

But here he is, making fun of Will with the same dry, unbothered tone of someone commenting on the weather .

And, even worse—

Will finds himself kind of enjoying it .

Will swears he’s usually much smoother than this. Or at least functional . But right now, his brain is soup , and it’s all because of Nico di Angelo standing there, looking infuriatingly composed while Will is one sharp movement away from keeling over.

It’s unfair.

So,” he says, trying to recover some dignity, “what brings you to this fine establishment?”

Nico lifts an eyebrow, glancing around the bookstore like it’s obvious. “Books.”

“Oh. Right.” Will immediately wants to walk into traffic.

Nico exhales through his nose— almost a laugh—but he doesn’t push Will’s obvious stupidity.

Will squints at Nico, trying to gauge just how hungover he is. If he weren’t currently battling his own internal war with last night’s alcohol consumption, he’d be a lot more persistent.

“So,” Will starts, leaning against the bookshelf for support rather than casual nonchalance , “what exactly happened with Leo last night?”

Nico glances at him, unimpressed. “What do you mean?”

Will gestures vaguely. “Percy and Jason stormed into the kitchen like they were about to flee the country. Something about a situation ?”

Nico shrugs. Shrugs . Like they hadn’t been talking in cryptic, code-language at a level that would make the CIA jealous. “It was handled.”

Will stares. “That’s it?”

Nico doesn’t blink. “Yes.”

Will groans. “You have to give me something .”

Nico hums, and for a second, Will thinks he might actually answer.

Instead, he takes an infuriating deep breath and says, “Leo made a mistake.”

Will’s eye twitches. “What kind of mistake?”

Nico looks at him, completely unreadable. “The kind that required immediate attention.”

Will lets out a slow breath. “You enjoy this, don’t you?”

Nico raises a single eyebrow. “Enjoy what ?”

“This whole mysterious and vaguely menacing act,” Will accuses. “You’re doing it on purpose.”

Nico shrugs, expression neutral. “Maybe.”

Will groans, dragging a hand down his face. “Fine. Keep your secrets.”

Nico’s mouth twitches, almost amused. “I intend to.”

Will straightens up so fast he nearly topples over. Over Nico’s shoulder, he spots his manager, Malcom, watching him like a hawk from behind the counter.

Shit.

He’s supposed to be working. Not loitering in the aisle talking to a guy who looks like a Vogue model at a funeral.

Malcom narrows his eyes and starts making his way over, reshelving books with a little too much enthusiasm as he gets closer. He’s definitely eavesdropping.

Will panics.

"So!" he says, much too loudly. He gives Nico a pleading look that hopefully communicates please, for the love of all things holy, pretend I am a good employee right now . “Are you, uh, looking for something specific today?”

Nico blinks, glances over his shoulder at Malcom—who is now two feet away, fixing books on the adjacent shelf with the focus of someone who is definitely not listening in—then looks back at Will.

"...Yes?"

Will resists the urge to drop his head into his hands. Instead, he clasps his hands in front of him like a model employee. “Great! A book. You’re here to buy a book. That’s what we sell. Books. Any particular kind of book?”

Nico stares at him, clearly unimpressed with this performance. “A good one.”

Will nearly groans. This is not helping.

Malcom, still absolutely listening, clears his throat pointedly.

Will nods so aggressively his head might fall off. “Right, of course! A good book! Fantastic choice! Let me—uh—recommend something.”

He whirls around, grabs the first book his hand lands on, and shoves it into Nico’s hands without looking.

Nico looks down at it. Then back at Will. Then back at the book.

“...The Essential Guide to Birdwatching?”

Malcom pauses his reshelving. Will grins, a little manic. “It’s a classic.”

Nico raises an eyebrow but, mercifully, does not call him out. “Right.”

Malcom hums, giving them both a lingering look before turning back to the shelf. Will exhales. Crisis temporarily averted.

Nico flips open the book at random and skims a page. “Tell me, Will,” he says, voice dry, “how does this relate to classics and archaeology ?”

Will glares. “You’re really not helping me here, man.”

Nico smirks, just a little. “I know.”

Malcom lingers. Will can feel his presence like a storm cloud waiting to burst. He forces himself to stand up straighter, to look like an employee who is absolutely not hungover and absolutely not using his shift to flirt with a guy who makes expensive silk shirts look like casual wear.

Nico, however, seems to enjoy watching him squirm. He flips idly through The Essential Guide to Birdwatching , expression unreadable, before leaning in slightly—just enough that his breath grazes Will’s ear.

“You really think this suits me?” he murmurs, voice low and teasing.

Will shivers. A slow, involuntary warmth blooms at the base of his spine and unfurls through his limbs like ink in water.

His body betrays him.

It’s stupid —Nico isn’t even touching him, but the proximity alone makes Will feel like he’s stepped into a heatwave, like he’s simultaneously burning up and freezing under the weight of it. His pulse trips over itself.

And the worst part? Nico knows it .

Will clears his throat, struggling to regain control of himself. Be normal. Act like a normal, functioning human being. He reaches out, plucks the birdwatching book from Nico’s hands, and shoves it unceremoniously back onto the shelf.

“Okay,” he says, voice only slightly strained. “What book are you actually looking for?”

Nico’s smirk lingers for half a second before he shrugs. “ Il Deserto dei Tartari ,” he says simply.

Will blinks. Italian. Of course. The Mafia plot thickens.

“Uh, you’re gonna have to help me out here, man.”

Nico tilts his head. “ The Tartar Steppe . By Dino Buzzati.”

Malcom shifts behind them, clearly still listening. Will racks his hazy brain, trying to place the title.

“It’s about a soldier,” Nico continues, voice quieter now. “He’s sent to a distant fortress in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a war that never comes. He spends his whole life waiting for something meaningful to happen, but when it finally does, it’s too late.”

Will blinks again. That’s… a lot .

“Wow,” he says. “Cheerful.”

Nico huffs a quiet laugh. “It’s good.”

Will searches his face, wondering why that particular book, why today. There’s something wistful in the way Nico says it—like he’s not just talking about a novel, but something else , something he won’t explain.

Malcom makes a pointed hmm sound.

Will forces himself back to the present. “Right! Let’s get you that book. That’s my job. ” He turns too fast, dizziness creeping in at the edges of his vision, but he powers through. “Follow me.”

Nico hums, amused. “If you insist.”

Will leads the way through the bookstore, praying to every god he doesn’t believe in that he doesn’t pass out or throw up on the floor.

His body is at war with itself—half of him still reeling from the literal whisper of Nico’s voice, the other half barely holding off the nausea rolling through his stomach. The two sensations mix unpleasantly, and Will genuinely doesn’t know if he’s about to faint or throw himself at Nico di Angelo like a complete idiot.

Get it together, Solace.

They weave through the shelves, the overhead lights feeling much too bright. Will reaches the fiction section, scanning for the right spine, when Nico exhales sharply.

“You okay there?” he asks, dry as ever.

Will is not okay, but he plasters on a grin anyway. “Obviously.”

Nico doesn’t look convinced, but he lets it go.

Will finally finds the book and pulls it from the shelf with a triumphant little flourish. Found it! Look at me, doing my job like a competent human!

He hands it to Nico with a smug little nod, only for Nico to glance at the cover and immediately scoff.

“This is the English translation.”

Will stares. “…Yeah?”

Nico looks up at him, unimpressed. “I want it in Italian.”

Will blinks. The words take a second to register. And then—

Oh.

Oh.

The rumors are true .

Nico di Angelo isn’t just a little Italian. He’s fully , fluently Italian.

Will has never cared about this kind of thing before, but suddenly, it’s the hottest thing anyone has ever said to him. His brain completely short-circuits.

“Oh,” Will says, sounding incredibly intelligent.

Nico quirks a brow. “Problem?”

“Nope.” Will clears his throat, gripping the bookshelf behind him like it’ll keep him upright. His stomach swoops again—though whether it’s from nausea or the fact that Nico’s accent is now even hotter in context, he has no idea.

He needs to stop .

He is at work .

“Right,” he says quickly. “Italian copy. Lemme, uh… check.”

He turns too fast, stumbles, and knocks over an entire stack of books.

Will drops into a crouch, already cursing himself, fumbling to gather the scattered books. He is a disaster. A walking, talking, hungover disaster .

But then—something unexpected.

Nico di Angelo also crouches down.

Will barely has time to process this before they reach for the same book at the same time.

Their fingers brush.

Will freezes.

It’s so stupidly cliché. The kind of thing that would happen in a cheesy romcom where the girl drops her books in the hallway, and the dreamy love interest kneels down, all slow-motion and soft lighting, and then—BAM—eye contact. Music swells. The world stops.

Except Will is definitely not a girl in a romcom. He is a hungover mess who might actually die in the self-help section of this bookstore if his heart keeps slamming against his ribs like this.

Nico’s fingers are cold against his. Of course they are. Will has heard all the rumors—Nico is a vampire, Nico is a ghost, Nico doesn’t have a pulse. It’s probably just bad circulation or something, but the chill sends a shiver up Will’s spine anyway.

Nico doesn’t pull away immediately. His dark eyes meet Will’s, and for a split second, Will swears the world really does stop .

Then Nico blinks, expression unreadable, and plucks the book effortlessly from beneath Will’s hand.

“I got it,” he says, cool and unaffected, like that whole moment didn’t just happen.

Will swallows, scrambling to pick up the rest of the books. “Yeah. Okay. Cool. Great.”

He is not great.

He is spiraling .

And Nico just sits back on his heels, watching him with that faintly amused look, like he knows exactly what’s going on in Will’s head.

Nico rises smoothly, brushing nonexistent dust from his sleeve, and heads toward the register with that effortless, catlike grace of his. Will, still kneeling on the floor like an idiot, watches him go—dumbfounded, heartsick, and way too hungover for this.

Just as Nico reaches the counter, he glances back over his shoulder, dark eyes flicking toward Will like he knows he’s still staring. “See you around, Solace.”

His voice is low and almost mocking, like he’s in on some joke Will hasn’t figured out yet. Then he’s gone, slipping out of the bookstore like a shadow, and Will is left feeling like he’s just been hit by a very expensive, very beautiful train.

He exhales sharply and drags a hand down his face, willing his brain to start functioning normally again.

Then—

“ BOO! ”

Will yelps and nearly knocks over an entire shelf as Kayla Knowles jumps out from behind it, grinning like a gremlin.

“Oh my god , Kayla—”

“I knew it!” she crows, pointing at him. “I knew something was going on with you and Mr. Vampire Chic.”

Will groans. “Kayla, I swear to the Gods —”

“No, no, don’t even try to deny it. I saw everything , Solace.” She crosses her arms, eyes gleaming. “You’ve got it so bad.”

Will opens his mouth to protest, but she steamrolls over him.

“I mean, I get it. He’s hot in that tragic, ‘I only wear black because I have deep emotional wounds’ way. Very sexy gothic prince vibes. But you ? You looked like a golden retriever who just got drop-kicked .”

Will groans again, dropping his head into his hands. “Kayla, please.”

Kayla ignores him, practically vibrating with excitement. “I knew I’d seen him in here before! All of them, actually. The Seven, or whatever people call them at your fancy school. But he’s the most interesting one. You know there are rumors about him, right?”

Will peeks at her between his fingers. “What kind of rumors?”

Kayla leans in, dramatic. “That he never actually buys books. He just shows up, reads them cover to cover , and then leaves.”

Will blinks. “That’s… not illegal?”

Kayla huffs. “Okay, fine, but also that he’s, like, absurdly rich but no one knows where his money actually comes from.”

Will groans. “Oh my god, Kayla, he literally just paid for a book .”

Kayla shrugs. “Hey, I’m just reporting the facts. You’re the one who’s got a massive crush on a cryptid.”

“I do not —”

“Uh-huh.” She pats his shoulder, like he’s a sad, love-struck puppy. “Keep telling yourself that, golden boy .”

Kayla, still grinning, wanders off to restock some shelves, leaving Will standing in the middle of the aisle with a sinking feeling in his stomach. Well, multiple sinking feelings, actually—one of them being the acute nausea that’s starting to creep up on him again.

With a sigh, Will mumbles to himself, “I really can’t handle this right now…”

But his body disagrees. He barely makes it to the bathroom before the world spins and he’s throwing up everything he drank last night—half-digested vodka and some questionable pizza, all while the entire universe mocks him. His own body feels like a cruel trick, a reminder that he’s both desperately hungover and incredibly emotionally wrecked over a guy he barely knows.

Once he’s done, Will stumbles to the sink and splashes some cold water on his face. He stares at himself in the mirror, glaring at the reflection that looks like it just got run over by a truck.

" I need a nap. "

He pulls out his phone and opens the group chat with Cecil and Lou Ellen, which is appropriately titled Three Idiots in a Trench Coat. 

Med-School Martyr: Guys. You are NOT going to believe this.

Future Convicted Felon: Please tell me you didn’t make a fool of yourself in front of Nico. Please tell me you didn’t make a fool of yourself in front of Nico.

Med-School Martyr: …Okay, I might’ve done that, but that’s not the point.

Theatre Kid Cult Leader: Wait, did you actually TALK to him? What happened? Did you kiss him???

Med-School Martyr: OH MY GOD NO. I threw up in front of him.

Future Convicted Felon:Please tell me you did NOT throw up on Nico.

Med-School Martyr:No, but I was this close to it.

Theatre Kid Cult Leader: Oh my gods, are you okay?

Med-School Martyr:Yeah, I think. But it gets better.

Future Convicted Felon: Wait, it gets worse???

Med-School Martyr:Nico came into the store this morning looking like a goth angel—

Theatre Kid Cult Leader: He does that.

Med-School Martyr:I think he’s even hotter in person. And guess what?

Future Convicted Felon:What?

Med-School Martyr:He actually speaks Italian.

Theatre Kid Cult Leader: WAIT WHAT.

Future Convicted Felon: I KNEW IT.

Med-School Martyr: I handed him the English translation of some book, and he looked at it like I handed him a banana peel.

Theatre Kid Cult Leader:I CAN’T. This is why I love him.

Future Convicted Felon:Well, that’s one step closer to the inevitable heart attack.

Med-School Martyr:But wait, it gets better. I totally embarrassed myself, but he wasn’t mean about it! He’s not the cold, scary guy everyone says he is. He’s actually kind of… I don’t know, normal? Like, he’s weird, but not in a bad way.

Future Convicted Felon: Did you just call him ‘normal’?

Theatre Kid Cult Leader:Will’s in love.

Med-School Martyr:I’m not in love! I’m just… admitting I’m in danger.

Future Convicted Felon:But seriously, I need deets. Did he smile? Was he actually nice to you?

Med-School Martyr:I mean, I guess. He was kinda snarky, but also not in a “leave me alone” way. He was like… cool, I guess?

Theatre Kid Cult Leader:You’re in denial. You’re in love.

Future Convicted Felon: You’re definitely in love.

Med-School Martyr:I am not in love. Please don’t spread that rumor.

Future Convicted Felon: Too late.

Theatre Kid Cult Leader: I’m already planning your wedding.

Will groans and puts his phone face down, letting it buzz uselessly against the counter. He presses his palms to his eyes, trying to will away the hangover headache still pounding at his skull.

It doesn’t help.

Because no matter how many times he tells himself this is all harmless—that his crush is under control, that Nico di Angelo is just another student with expensive taste and a better-than-average jawline—he can’t shake the feeling.

Nico di Angelo is dangerous. And Will Solace is in trouble.

Big trouble.

Chapter 4: The Seven Tip Well. I Still Think It’s a Bribe.

It’s hours after his encounter with Nico at the bookstore, and Will still feels like death.

Which, in his experience, isn’t ideal when working a shift at a busy restaurant. And definitely not ideal when he’s already halfway through his second shift of the day, his two jobs are the only reason he can make rent, but they’re trying to kill him. Or maybe it’s still the vodka. 

The dinner rush is starting to pick up, and Will is balancing a tray of drinks while trying not to vomit on the tile floor, because he doubts that that would impress their clientele. The restaurant is packed, buzzing with soft jazz and louder conversation. It’s one of those trendy, bougie places that pretends it’s casual with exposed brick and Edison bulbs but charges $26 for a plate of artisanal truffle fries. It’s the kind of place where the food comes in geometrically arranged stacks, garnished with flowers, and tastes incredible, if you can afford it. There’s abstract art on the walls and mood lighting that makes the hand-blown glass water bottles sparkle on every table. 

Will keeps having to strain his eyes in the dim lighting, which does his pounding head no favours; every clatter of a fork on china feels like a hammer blow directly behind his eyes. His limbs feel like they’ve been filled with sand, and to top it all off, Austin is practically bouncing beside him, way too energetic for Will’s current state of existence.

Austin’s voice cuts through the ambient noise, sharper than the saxophone on the speakers. Will doesn’t have the energy to brace for it.

“So,” Austin says, grinning he abandons his tables in pursuit of gossip, “how was the party?”

Austin Lake, sophomore, music major, and Will’s coworker-slash-personal-problem, is leaning against the host stand with the casual grace of someone who has not worked two jobs all day. His button-up is slightly rumpled in the aesthetic way that screams artsy on purpose, and his curly brown hair is pulled back with a pencil. 

Austin knows everything about everyone at their college, and he’s practically foaming at the mouth for gossip about the upperclassman, especially anything that concerns Nico and the Seven. 

Will groans and presses his forehead to the polished marble countertop. “Austin, I swear on my last two brain cells, not now.”

“Oh, something happened.” Austin waggles his eyebrows. “Come on, upperclassman parties are supposed to be insane, especially when it’s the Stoll brothers. Did something insane happen? Did you see anyone, like, fighting? Or hooking up in the hallway? Or—”

Will sighs dramatically. “No, Austin, I did not witness any epic fights or scandalous hallway hookups.”

Austin narrows his eyes, unimpressed. “Lame.”

Will rubs his temples. “Sorry I didn’t personally witness a soap opera for your entertainment.”

Austin smirks. “But something happened, right? Because you look wrecked , dude. Like, more than usual.”

“I’m hungover, obviously .”

Austin waves a hand. “Yeah, yeah, but you’re, like, emotionally hungover too. Did you embarrass yourself? Say something dumb?”

Will glares at him. “Why do you assume I embarrassed myself?”

Austin stares at him.

Will sighs. “Okay, fine , I might have made a fool of myself.”

Austin beams. “Knew it.”

Will leans against the counter, eyeing Austin warily. “You’re way too invested in this.”

“Duh. I have no social life, so I live vicariously through yours.”

“Tragic.”

“Deeply,” Austin agrees. Then he brightens. “But you do have a social life, which means I get to hear all about it.” He pauses, then squints at Will. “Does this have anything to do with your long-standing, poorly hidden crush on Nico di Angelo?”

Will freezes.

Austin smirks.

“I—what,” Will says, and it comes out strangled. He gropes blindly for the tray, like it might shield him from the accusation.

Accurate accusation.

Austin crosses his arms, preening. “Dude. I’ve worked with you for over a year. I know your crush face.”

“I do not have a crush face.”

Austin tilts his head, mock-thoughtful. “You do. It’s like a kicked puppy, but with more existential dread.”

Will groans and slumps against the counter. “I hate you.”

“Love you too. Now talk.”

He gestures impatiently, and Will seriously debates whether it’s worth bolting for the kitchen. But he’s too tired, and Austin will definitely follow. Will debates lying, but Austin is relentless, and Will is too hungover to come up with anything convincing. He exhales, defeated, but decides to omit the spilling-his-drink-on-Nico’s-silk-shirt incident.

 “He came into the bookstore this morning actually.”

Austin gasps. “Did you talk to him?”

“Yeah.”

Austin grabs his arm. “WILL.”

Will makes a strangled noise. “ Dude , let me breathe —”

“Was he mean ?”

“No, actually.”

Austin blinks. “Wait, seriously?”

Will hesitates. “I mean, he was Nico , so he was kind of… I don’t know. Cold? But not in a bad way. He was just… himself.”

Austin hums. “Interesting.”

Will shifts uncomfortably. “What’s interesting?”

Austin grins. “Just that the great and terrifying Nico di Angelo wasn’t as scary as everyone says.”

Will huffs. “He’s not that terrifying.”

Austin snorts. “Dude. The rumors about him are insane . People literally think he’s, like, in the mafia.”

Will stiffens, remembering Jason and Percy’s cryptic departure last night. “Uh. Yeah. Crazy.”

Austin leans in. “So? Did anything happen ? Did he, like, look at you all intense and mysterious? Did he—”

Will groans. “Austin. I was hungover. I threw up during my shift. That is not the setup for some great romantic moment.”

Austin considers. “Yeah, that’s pretty disgusting.” Then he perks up. “ But ! That means you have a second chance! You have another shift here tonight, right?”

Will narrows his eyes. “…Yeah?”

Austin grins. “Perfect. Maybe he’ll walk in again .”

“Why would Nico di Angelo ever come here?” Will scoffs, pressing his fingers hard against his temple in a futile attempt to push the headache out through his skull. “The rest of the Seven, sure, I’ll give you that—they’re here pretty regularly. But Nico?” He shakes his head. “Never seen him eat here. Not once.”

Austin shrugs, leaning casually against the polished marble bar like he’s posing for a photoshoot he’s too cool to acknowledge. His apron is tied in a lazy knot, his sleeves rolled to his elbows in a way that looks accidental but definitely isn’t. “He came with them once,” Austin says, smirking. “You weren’t working. Sat there all of five minutes, took a phone call, and ghosted before I could even bring their water. Real mafia boss energy.”

Will levels him with a flat look. “Seriously?”

Austin’s grin widens. “Swear on my bass guitar. But hey, maybe tonight’s the night. Maybe the universe is finally on your side.”

Will highly doubts that.

But still.

The thought lingers.

Which is, of course, when it happens.

Will blinks, and then stares.

Austin follows his gaze, then hisses through his teeth. “Dude. Dude.”

Will barely reacts. He’s too busy processing the fact that—like some kind of cosmic joke delivered with impeccable comedic timing—the Seven have just walked into the restaurant.

They sweep in with the kind of casual confidence that screams old money and zero self-awareness. Annabeth leads the charge, chin lifted, blonde curls gleaming like she’s about to buy the place outright. Percy trails beside her, hands shoved into his pockets like he’d rather be literally anywhere else, but he’s smiling faintly as she leans in to whisper something. Jason and Piper stroll in behind them, laughing about something that makes Piper’s entire face light up. Frank and Hazel follow close, her hand curled through Frank’s elbow, both of them looking like they’ve stepped out of an art history textbook. Leo’s at the back, grinning like he’s plotting an arson.

Will’s stomach twists. He scans the group quickly, heart hammering.

No Nico.

For some reason, that makes it worse.

“They’re sitting in your section,” Austin says.

Because of course they are.

Will exhales slowly. “It’s not that big a deal.”

Austin side-eyes him. “It’s the biggest deal. This is like—this is the social event of the semester. For me.” He slaps Will’s shoulder, not gently. “Get out there, man. Before they realize you’re standing here staring at them like you’re witnessing a solar eclipse.”

Will groans, straightens his apron, and forces his feet to move.

As he approaches the table, seven pairs of eyes turn toward him in unison.

It’s deeply unsettling.

Like being caught in the middle of a security camera and a searchlight at the same time.

“Hi there,” Will says, slapping on his best customer-service voice. His mouth feels weirdly dry. “Welcome in. Can I get you guys started with some drinks?”

Annabeth’s sharp grey eyes flick over him like she’s running an algorithm in her head. Jason squints, like he knows Will from somewhere and can’t quite pin it down. Piper, however, offers a sudden, bright grin.

“Oh,” she says. “You’re Will.”

Will blinks. “Uh… yeah?”

She leans forward a little, elbows on the table, expression open and friendly. “I thought so. You live with Lou Ellen and Cecil, right? We have Multimedia Content Creation together, they sit behind me,” she explains to the others. 

Will stiffens.

“Yeah,” he answers slowly. “I do.”

Piper exchanges a look with Annabeth that Will can’t decipher. “Small world,” she says.

Percy glances up from the menu, offering a crooked grin. “Cecil’s the fake ID guy, right? Leo mentioned him.”

Will feels his soul evacuate his body. “I—uh—I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Hazel gives him a smile so kind it’s almost painful. “Cecil’s very… entrepreneurial.”

“Visionary,” Leo agrees, waggling his eyebrows. “You should’ve seen the last one he made for me. I’m officially a thirty-year-old yacht broker from Delaware.”

Will has no idea how to respond to that. “That’s… impressive?”

“Eh,” Leo shrugs. “Got me into a high-roller poker game when I was a freshman, so I’m not complaining. I don’t need a fake anymore, but I’m always happy to send eager customers his way—I respect the hustle and the lack of respect for the law.”

Will stares for a second too long before snapping his pen to attention. “Right. Drinks.”

Annabeth orders a kombucha, predictably. Piper asks for iced tea, Hazel requests a matcha, and Frank settles on a black coffee that makes Annabeth glance at him like she’s personally disappointed. Leo demands something off-menu that Will’s going to have to beg the bartender to make. Jason—blessedly simple—asks for iced water.

Percy orders soda. Annabeth frowns at him.

“You’re already dehydrated,” she says.

“I’m fine,” Percy insists, waving her off.

“You almost passed out twice today,” Annabeth counters, not missing a beat.

Percy shrugs. “Barely.”

Will writes it all down, trying to focus on his handwriting instead of the words.

What does “almost passed out twice today” mean?

And why does everyone act like this is normal?

Jason catches Will watching the exchange and offers a small, apologetic smile. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s been a long week.”

“Yeah,” Will says faintly, jotting down “normal” next to Jason’s name because apparently, he’s the only one who seems to notice how weird they all are.

Leo leans forward on his elbows, grinning. “So. Lou Ellen. She’s, like, a theatre major, right?”

Will nods. “Yeah.”

“She’s got range,” Leo says, nodding sagely. “I saw her doing Hamlet in the quad once. It was intense.”

“Opening night,” Piper confirms with a grin. “There was a fog machine.”

“It exploded,” Leo adds proudly.

Jason snorts. “You made it explode.”

Will clears his throat. “I’ll be right back with your drinks.”

He turns, already regretting every life decision that led him to this moment, and almost trips over his own feet when Leo mutters, just loud enough to hear,

“Well, Death Boy wasn't exaggerating — he is cute.”

Will’s ears burn.

He refuses to look back, but the flush creeping up his neck doesn’t care.

Gods. He needs a drink.

Or a getaway car.

When Will returns to the table, expertly balancing the tray of drinks, he hears something that makes him nearly drop the whole thing.

"—I’m just saying, if Cecil’s gonna run a whole fake ID business , he should at least give me a discount on his…other merchandise," Leo is saying, stirring his energy drink with a straw. "I mean, I recruited half of his clients."

Will's stomach plummets .

He knew Cecil’s little side hustle was risky, but hearing Leo casually discuss it in the middle of a crowded restaurant is actively shaving years off Will’s life .

"Leo," Jason says, rubbing his temples. "Stop talking about this in public."

Leo scoffs. " Relax , I didn’t say what kind of business it is."

" You literally just did, " Piper points out.

Will clears his throat loudly, desperate to steer the conversation away from the illegal activities of his idiot best friend. "Alright, here you go—kombucha for Annabeth, iced water for Jason, soda for Percy—"

Percy takes his drink with a grin. "You’re a lifesaver, dude."

"Yeah, that’s why they pay me the big bucks," Will mutters, setting the rest of the drinks down.

Just as he’s about to leave, Percy suddenly frowns as though he’s just realising something. "Wait, where’s Nico?"

Will pauses .

Hazel, sitting across from Percy, tenses almost imperceptibly before saying, "He’s sick."

The table falls silent .

Will lingers . He tells himself it’s just because he doesn’t want to deal with any more tables yet, not because he’s deeply intrigued by Nico’s absence.

Jason crosses his arms over his chest, expression flat. “He isn’t sick,” he says firmly. “Tired? Yeah. But not dying. And definitely not hungover. He never is.”

That catches Will’s attention like a hook snagged in his ribs.

Because Will had been so sure Nico was hungover. He’d looked it—pale (well, paler), hollow-eyed, a little disheveled. His sunglasses hadn’t quite hidden the way he winced at the bookstore’s stream of warm, natural lighting. Classic symptoms. Or so Will had thought. But if Jason—Nico’s actual roommate, the person who would know best—said he wasn’t?

Then why had he looked like that?

Will’s stomach twists. His brain, which has clearly decided to betray him today, conjures up an image of Nico tangled in sheets, skin flushed, hair mussed, dark eyes heavy-lidded in the aftermath of—

Will cuts the thought off before it can finish forming.

Sleep deprivation. Nico probably hadn’t slept. That was all. Will never slept soundly after a night of binge drinking like there was no tomorrow, which is not the kind of behaviour he should be partaking in as a pre-med student, but it’s sort of mandatory at a Stoll party. Maybe Nico had had a restless night thanks to his stream of gin and tonics, and whatever had happened after he left with Jason and Percy. That was it, that was why he had looked so tired, definitely not… anything else, nothing that would make Will’s stomach burn with jealousy as he thinks about somebody else keeping Nico awake all night. 

The thought sours in his gut faster than the cheap wine Cecil had dared him to drink at their last pregame.

And maybe it’s because his brain is short-circuiting, or because his mouth is running on autopilot without consulting him first, but before Will can stop himself, he blurts:

“Wait, seriously? He looked—”

And immediately wishes for death.

The entire table swivels toward him like a pack of hunting dogs catching a scent.

Jason raises an eyebrow, sharp and curious. “He looked…?”

Shit.

Piper perks up, almost gleeful. “Wait, when did you see him?”

Annabeth’s eyes narrow with military precision. “Will.”

Will’s pulse thunders in his ears. He scrubs a hand over the back of his neck, painfully aware of how hot his face feels. “Uh—this morning. At the bookstore. Where I work.” His voice breaks halfway through, and he wants the floor to open up and swallow him.

Hazel goes tense across from him. The kind of tense Will’s seen in stray cats seconds before they bolt.

Interesting.

Percy leans forward, elbows on the table. “You saw him?” His tone is casual, but his sea-green eyes are anything but.

“Uh.” Will clears his throat. “Yeah.”

Annabeth tilts her head in that terrifying way of hers, like she’s analyzing data points and piecing together a conspiracy. “And how did he look?”

Will opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.

You’re a med student, he tells himself. You ace practicals. You perform under pressure. You can handle this.

“He… seemed sick, I guess,” Will says eventually. It sounds painfully unconvincing, even to his own ears.

Piper’s eyes gleam. “You guess? Aren’t you pre-med?”

“ Really sick!” Will says too quickly. “Totally coughing and sneezing everywhere, like all over the books—totally gross. Like an abnormal amount of sneezing, I was actually late for my shift here because my manager at the bookstore made me stay late to disinfect the place.”

Jason is giving him a look now. The kind of look that says: Dude, you’re not fooling anyone.

Will resists the urge to bury his face in his hands. Barely.

Annabeth, not missing a beat, turns her attention to Hazel. “Hazel.”

Hazel doesn’t even flinch. “I told you,” she says, sipping her matcha with forced calm. “He’s sick.”

“Why don’t I believe you?” Percy presses, his voice light but probing.

Hazel hesitates.

And the table leans in.

Will watches, fascinated. This is better than half the dramas Lou Ellen makes them binge on rainy weekends.

Hazel finally sighs. “He just didn’t feel like coming.”

Leo lets out a bark of laughter. “That definitely means something happened.”

“Nothing happened,” Hazel snaps, but it’s less convincing than Will’s earlier disaster of a lie.

Percy glances at Jason. “Did he say anything this morning?”

Jason shakes his head. “No—but to be fair, he barely says two words to me before noon on a good day. Nico isn’t a morning person,” Jason explains in an aside to Will. 

Hazel groans and rubs her temples. “You guys are so dramatic.”

Piper cackles. “We’re dramatic? You’re the one doing damage control like this is a shady Senate hearing.”

“It’s not shady!” Hazel insists.

“That’s exactly what someone covering for a shady person would say,” Leo points out helpfully.

Hazel shoots him a murderous glare. Will doesn’t blame her.

And still—Hazel wavers. Like she’s debating what to reveal, what to hold back. She taps her fingers against her glass for a beat before muttering, “He was in a bad mood, alright?”

Jason blinks. “Nico? In a bad mood? Shocking, someone call CBS.”

Hazel scowls. “You live with him.”

Jason shrugs. “Yeah. And he’s still somehow the least dramatic person in this group. Moody, yes—withdrawn at the slightest inconvenience, double yes. Something happened, you know about it, and you’re refusing to tell us.”

That draws an unexpected snort out of Will. He immediately regrets it when seven pairs of eyes swing back in his direction.

Annabeth stares him down like he’s a suspect under interrogation. “You’re sure he was sick this morning?” she asks, sharp and deliberate.

Will’s mouth is dry. “I… I don’t know,” he hedges, unsure as to why he is digging himself further into this hole in the name of backing up Nico di Angelo and his obvious lie. “I mean, I assumed? He looked like… tired. He had sunglasses on inside. Plus the coughing. And the sneezing. He threw up too, I think. Though that could’ve have been me—I’m really hungover. So anything I say should be taken with a pinch of salt, I’m not in my right mind.” 

Annabeth makes a noncommittal hum like she’s jotting down mental notes Will is sure will be used against him later.

Jason leans back in his chair, watching Will with a strangely curious expression.

Hazel is avoiding his gaze entirely.

Leo pops a grape into his mouth. “Or,” he says around it, “maybe he was out all night brooding on a rooftop somewhere. You know how he gets.”

Piper snickers. “Trench coat flapping in the wind. Very noir detective of him.”

Will’s brain short-circuits for a second, imagining exactly that.

Which is… not helpful.

Jason sighs. “You’re all idiots.”

Will kind of agrees.

And yet, he’s never wanted to know what the hell was going on more than he does right now. But Will cannot— cannot —afford to open his dumb mouth again. Not here. Not now. Not in front of them. So he gives Annabeth a painfully enthusiastic thumbs-up, a grin that feels more like a grimace plastered across his face, and begins to walk away like his life depends on it.

He’s barely made it three steps before Hazel’s next words freeze him in place.

“It was Persephone,” she says, her voice all casual finality. Like that explains everything.

The reaction from the table is immediate.

There’s a collective groan, like this is the obvious answer to some complex equation.

“Oh,” Jason mutters, shaking his head. “That makes sense.”

“Brutal,” Piper says with a wince, as if she personally feels the secondhand pain.

Percy whistles low under his breath, the words “Damn. Rest in peace.” drifting just loud enough for Will to catch.

Will stops pretending he’s wiping an already clean table. His brain scrambles. Persephone? What—?

He turns, his curiosity outweighing his sense of self-preservation. “Wait… who’s Persephone?”

The table stares at him.

For a moment, nobody says anything. Just a wall of judgmental silence pressing in on him. Then Jason blinks, visibly confused. “Uh. His stepmom?”

Will’s brain blue-screens.

His stomach does this awful swooping thing, like he’s missed the last step on a flight of stairs. Stepmom. Persephone is his stepmom. Not an ex. Not a girlfriend. Not some secret mafia contact. A stepmom.

“Oh,” Will says, faintly. “Right. Obviously.”

He can feel his face heating up, mortification creeping up his neck like a bad rash.

Obviously.

Gods. He wants to yeet himself directly into the sun.

Percy eyes him, chin propped on his hand. “Who did you think we were talking about?”

“No one,” Will says way too fast. “I just didn’t know he had a stepmom.”

Hazel tilts her head, brow furrowed. “Really? I thought that was common knowledge.”

Will wants to melt through the floor. Of course it’s common knowledge. They’re all treating it like it’s as obvious as the sky being blue. And him? He’s been too busy obsessing over Nico’s jawline and thinking about his hands to learn literally anything else about him. 

Good job, Solace.

It’s not really his fault, despite the constant flow of rumour and gossip, he’s never heard any stories about Nico having a step-mom. Maybe he does need to work on his research skills, he’ll have Cecil dig through the online forums again when he gets home from work. 

Leo, predictably, snickers. “Dude. What, did you think he had a secret girlfriend?”

Will chokes on his own spit. “I—no—I just—”

Jason raises an eyebrow. “Do you think Nico has a secret girlfriend?”

“No!” Will practically shouts, horrified.

Percy’s brow furrows deeper. “Wait… do you think Nico’s straight?”

“NO!” Will blurts. Too loud. Too desperate. His voice cracks like a fourteen-year-old boy.

Piper raises both hands, mock-sympathetic. “Wow,” she says. “You really don’t know anything about him, huh?”

Will honestly wants to die. Right now. This second.

He doesn’t even say goodbye—just pivots and speed-walks back through the swinging doors of the kitchen like he’s escaping a crime scene.

Austin, stationed at the bar cutting lemons with the kind of intensity reserved for serial killers, glances up. “That bad, huh?”

Will drops his head against the cool stainless steel counter with a thunk. “Shut up.”

Austin doesn’t even flinch. “Oh, gods,” he drawls, setting his knife down with a clink. “You embarrassed yourself again in front of your little crush?”

Will groans into the counter. “Nico’s not even here.”

“So you embarrassed yourself for free?” Austin whistles, shaking his head. “Tragic.”

Before Will can snap something back, Rachel strides in from the back office like a general surveying the troops. Her auburn curls are piled up in a bun that somehow screams authority, and her eyes lock onto Will like a hawk that’s spotted a wounded rabbit.

“Solace,” she says, brisk and efficient. “You’re on the VIP table. Take good care of them.”

For a moment, Will’s hungover brain forgets about the Seven and their elite status. 

Will groans without lifting his head. “Which VIPs?”

Rachel doesn’t blink. “The Seven.”

Will drags his face off the counter to gape at her. “They’re college students,” he protests feebly. “They’re not, like, royalty.”

Except at least one of them probably is, if the rumours are anything to go by. Word on the street is that it’s Piper, but Will has his suspicions about Frank. 

Rachel fixes him with a look. “They’re rich,” she says. “And very connected. And their tips are ridiculous, you should know all of this already, it’s not like they’ve never been here before. So make sure they’re happy.”

She’s already turning on her heel, leaving no room for argument.

Will watches Rachel stride away, her heels clicking sharply on the polished tile, each step sounding more final than the last. He stands frozen for a beat too long, pen still clutched tightly in his hand, his fingers cramped and sore from a double shift that doesn’t even begin to cover rent. His whole body thrums with exhaustion, but it’s the kind that burrows in under your skin, sharp and restless. He exhales slowly, through his nose, jaw clenched so hard it aches.

Of course the Seven get special treatment. Of course they do.

He knows it shouldn’t bother him—they’re just people, he reminds himself, flesh and blood beneath all that shine. But it’s hard to remember that when you’re standing in a restaurant where the cheapest glass of wine costs more than your phone bill, and your manager is telling you to “take good care” of the same people you’ve spent hours joking about like they’re characters in some critically acclaimed HBO drama.

Will’s not stupid. He knows they aren’t gods. But sometimes it feels that way.

They’re important customers. VIPs. Will hears Rachel’s words echoing back in his head, grating against something raw. The Seven, with their glossy lives and endless money and curated group photos that make them look like an ad for cologne or a dystopian ruling class—they are important.

And Will? He’s just the guy bringing them their drinks.

He scrubs a hand over his face, as if that will wipe away the feeling of being lesser, of being small. His fingers catch on the curl behind his ear, the one that always springs loose no matter what Lou Ellen does to try and tame it. He tugs at it, hard, grounding himself.

It’s not like he resents them. Not exactly. Will wastes just as much time as anyone else speculating about the Seven. Half his nights end with Cecil and Lou Ellen curled up on their sagging couch, cackling over the latest rumors on the campus forums. Nico di Angelo, enigmatic and cold, and maybe secretly a vampire. Jason Grace, government plant or cult leader? Percy Jackson, heir to an empire so sprawling and ocean-focused that his father’s business has moved past buying land and is now allegedly claiming swaths of open sea. They laugh about it. Will laughs about it.

But there are moments like this. Moments when the distance between their lives feels like a chasm, yawning wide and sharp-edged.

Moments when Will is forced to remember that they exist in a world he’ll probably never set foot in.

He shoves his notepad into his apron pocket with more force than necessary and adjusts his apron like it might hold him together. He squares his shoulders, lifts his chin. Takes a breath that feels a little too shaky.

Because this is his job. Because rent is due next week. Because he doesn’t have the luxury of brooding about how unfair it all is.

Austin nudges him with his elbow. “Hey,” he says cheerfully, “at least you’ll make bank.”

Will scowls at him. “I better.”

“You should get back out there and get their order in,” Austin says, grinning like he’s enjoying every second of Will’s slow descent into madness. “Wouldn’t want to keep their royal highnesses waiting.”

Will exhales a long-suffering sigh, the kind that feels like it’s scraped from the very bottom of his soul. He straightens his apron with a flick of his wrist, grabs his notepad and pen, and heads back out to the dining area with the grim determination of a man walking to his own execution.

The restaurant is all exposed brick and mood lighting, the kind of place where the furniture costs more than his monthly rent and everything is designed to look effortlessly curated—like it woke up expensive. Which is why it makes perfect sense that the Seven treat it like their personal dining room. Will can’t decide if it’s deeply impressive or deeply annoying.

He approaches their table, twirling the pen between his fingers, already bracing himself for whatever cryptic nonsense is about to get lobbed his way this time.

And sure enough, as soon as he’s within earshot, Percy’s voice cuts through the low hum of conversation. “—he just needs time, okay? It’s not like this is new.”

Annabeth sighs, leaning back in her chair, fingers tapping an impatient rhythm against her glass . “I know. I just don’t get why it’s worse this time.”

Jason crosses his arms, expression grim. “This is Persephone we’re talking about. You really think she called him for a casual catch-up? It must have something to do with his—”

“Yeah,” Hazel cuts in, frowning as she pokes absently at the condensation ring on her glass. “Persephone secretly loves her role as the family war council negotiator.”

Piper wrinkles her nose. “I still think we should check on him.”

Jason’s jaw tightens. “If he wants space, we should give him space. Forcing it will just make him shut down more. Trust me.”

And then Leo leans forward, like he’s been waiting for the right moment to unleash chaos. “Or—and hear me out—what if I show up with a dramatic gesture and force him out of his whole brooding-in-the-dark thing?”

Frank immediately looks horrified. “Please don’t do that.”

“What? He likes dramatic gestures,” Leo argues. “He’s just too emotionally repressed to admit it.”

Percy scoffs. “You mean you like dramatic gestures.”

Leo shrugs, unabashed. “And who’s to say those two things aren’t the same?”

Will has been standing there long enough that it’s weird now. He clears his throat.

Seven heads swivel toward him with near-military precision.

Will forces his face into something that resembles polite customer service instead of his I-definitely-just-overheard-everything expression. “Uh… you guys ready to order?”

There’s a beat—a fraction too long—where they all seem to weigh whether they should say anything else in front of him. But then Annabeth, ever the professional, slides seamlessly into polite mode. She gives him her order with the kind of efficiency that makes Will feel like he’s being graded on how fast he writes it down.

The others follow her lead, slipping back into casual, practiced smiles as if they aren’t campus royalty conducting a covert strategy session on how to handle their mysterious, possibly mafia-adjacent friend.

Will scribbles down their orders, though his brain is still ten pages back in their conversation. Nico is having a hard time. Why? What was going on with his family dynamic? What family needs a war council negotiator? What kind of life does Nico have?

Will tells himself it’s not his business. That it’s none of his concern.

But that doesn’t stop him from wanting to know.

“Got it,” he says, forcing a smile as he tucks the notepad back into his apron. “I’ll get those in for you.”

And with that, he spins on his heel and strides away, pointedly not thinking about Nico di Angelo.

(Except he’s absolutely thinking about Nico di Angelo.)

He’s halfway to the kitchen when he remembers he still has three other tables in his section. And they are all needy. For the next fifteen minutes, he’s trapped in an endless cycle of refilling drinks, apologizing for delays, and explaining that no, they do not serve ranch dressing because this is not that kind of establishment.

By the time he delivers a forgotten dish of carrot hummus to table four, he’s ready to walk into traffic.

When he makes his way back toward the Seven’s table, he’s steeling himself for whatever fresh hell awaits. He’s just close enough to hear Piper loudly whisper, “Okay, but if you had to choose, who would you sacrifice first?”

Jason groans. “Pipes—”

“Just answer the question!”

“I’m not sacrificing anyone!”

“Boring,” Piper mutters.

Will wisely pretends he hears nothing and starts setting down their plates.

But before he can even announce what belongs to who, Percy—somehow now in possession of Frank’s fork—slams it onto the table like a gavel.

“Okay, new rule,” he declares. “No more betting real money on Leo’s schemes.”

Frank crosses his arms. “I told you it was a bad idea.”

Jason sighs. “Yeah, well, I thought he’d at least try to win.”

Leo shrugs. “I did try.”

Hazel raises a brow. “You got banned in under ten minutes.”

“In my defense,” Leo says, holding up a finger, “I didn’t know you couldn’t bribe the security guy.”

Annabeth pinches the bridge of her nose with all the exhaustion of a woman twice her age. “How do you keep getting us into these situations?”

“I have a gift,” Leo replies smugly.

“You have a problem,” Jason mutters.

Percy claps his hands. “Fine. New new rule—if Leo even mentions a plan, we all just say no immediately.”

Will, still holding two plates and trying not to look like he’s wondering if he’s trapped in a fever dream, cautiously asks, “Should I… be concerned?”

Jason waves him off like Will’s question is adorable. “Nah. Just another one of Leo’s disasters.”

Piper smirks and elbows Leo. “Speaking of which—did you fix the thing yet?”

Leo suddenly finds his napkin fascinating. “Define ‘fixed.’”

Hazel groans. “Leo.”

“I started fixing it?”

Annabeth gives him a look that’s equal parts exhausted and murderous. “You better be finished by Monday or I swear—”

Jason cuts in. “What exactly did you do?”

Leo shrugs. “Nothing bad.”

Piper snorts. “That’s not convincing.”

“I’m serious! No property damage, no illegal activity, no fire—”

Percy raises an eyebrow. “No fire?”

Leo pauses. “…Not recently.”

Annabeth throws her napkin at him.

Will exhales through his nose, setting down the last plate. His palms are red from the heat of the dishes, and he briefly wonders if it would be easier to save his  fingerprints or just let his skin sear off entirely. At least then he could disappear into witness protection.

Jason, noticing him again, blinks. “Oh, uh—sorry, man. What were you saying?”

Will sighs. “Your burgers.”

Jason lights up. “Nice.”

Leo practically vibrates with excitement. “Wait, do I have fries?”

Will hands him the plate of fries.

Leo accepts them with reverence. “You are a hero.”

Will mutters, “You have no idea,” and walks away, already mourning his sanity.

Will finally escapes to the kitchen again, slamming through the swinging doors like they’ve personally wronged him. Austin is there, wiping down a counter and humming some indie folk song that’s just pretentious enough to be believable for a sophomore music major. He glances up as Will storms past.

“Did you survive?” Austin asks, far too chipper for someone clocking minimum wage.

“Barely,” Will mutters, ripping off his apron with more force than necessary. His head is still pounding. His hangover is like a living thing at this point—mean and clinging and determined to ruin his life.

Austin follows him, towel slung over his shoulder. “You look like someone just told you your favorite indie band went mainstream.”

Will glares. “They might as well have.”

“Ah.” Austin leans casually against the counter. “So this is about the Seven.”

“No,” Will lies.

Austin grins like a shark. “It’s about Nico.”

Will drops his head onto the counter with a thunk. “I’m begging you.”

“I’m just saying,” Austin continues, utterly unsympathetic, “you’re very sweaty for someone who’s not in love.”

“I’m very sweaty because I’m hungover,” Will snaps. “And also stressed. And also you’re annoying.”

Austin pats his shoulder like he’s proud. “But you’re not denying it.”

Will groans into the counter.

There’s a muffled voice from the front of house—Rachel calling his name. He drags himself upright and trudges back into the dining room, feeling like an old man in a teen drama. Or a tragic figure in a Shakespeare play, if the play had featured overpriced truffle fries and him being the main character in a public humiliation fantasy.

The Seven are gone by the time Will makes it back to their table.

It’s spotless, of course. Their plates stacked neatly, napkins folded into intricate shapes that Will’s too tired to appreciate. He stares at them for a second, dead-eyed, trying to summon the will to live.

And then he sees the check presenter.

Lying innocently in the middle of the table like it hasn’t been plotting to ruin his night.

Will sighs and picks it up, already mentally calculating the tip. The Seven are big tippers, he knows that much, and Jason is, if nothing else, weirdly polite about customer service. It’ll probably be decent.

He flips it open.

And blinks.

Then blinks again.

“Austin,” Will says, his voice very calm in the way that means it’s not calm at all.

Austin, who’s wiping down the table behind him, glances over. “Yeah?”

“Come here.”

Austin ambles over and leans in. He takes one look at the wad of hundreds tucked inside the billfold and lets out a low whistle. “Holy shit,” he says, delighted. “They tipped you your rent.”

Will stares. “It’s… too much.”

Austin snorts. “Too much? It’s perfect. Dude, they left you five hundred bucks. I don’t even make that in a week.”

Will closes the billfold like it might explode. “Exactly. That’s insane.”

“It’s not insane. It’s the Seven.” Austin shrugs, leaning a hip against the table. “They’re, like, morally obligated to throw stupid amounts of money around. It’s probably pocket change to them.”

Will shifts uncomfortably. “Still.”

Austin nudges him. “What? You think they felt sorry for you?”

Will glances at the table, remembering Leo casually talking about Cecil’s entire side business like they weren’t in a room full of people with ears. He remembers Piper loudly suggesting sacrificial rituals. He remembers Frank sighing like a man who’s survived war. And Percy… well, Percy had almost stabbed Jason with a fork during an argument about breadsticks. “I think they felt sorry for me and guilty,” he mutters. “For having to deal with them.”

Austin grins. “Hey, I would’ve charged them extra for hazard pay. You’re just getting compensated for the trauma.”

Will gives him a flat look. “I can’t take this.”

“You can,” Austin insists. “And you should. You guys need a new showerhead, right? And the stove only works when you bang on it twice and swear in Latin—”

“It’s Ancient Greek ,” Will corrects automatically.

Austin points. “Even worse. And you’re still living with it. Take the money.”

Will hesitates, the same pride that’s been a weight around his neck since freshman year digging its claws in again. He hates feeling like a charity case. But he also knows how much Lou and Cecil are going to appreciate not having to boil water in the kettle just to shower.

He slides the money into his apron pocket with a sigh. “Fine.”

Austin claps him on the back. “That’s the spirit.”

Will gives him a look. “You’re insufferable.”

“You love me.”

“No.”

“Your life would be empty without me.”

“Also no.”

They finish closing up in mostly companionable silence, and by the time Will’s locking the front door, the weight of the money in his pocket feels a little less like shame and a little more like relief.

It’s not lost on him that Nico wasn’t there. That he didn’t see Will at his worst—again. And Will can’t help but wonder if that made it easier to breathe tonight, or harder.

Either way, the tip’s going to fix the stove.

Chapter 5: Banquo’s Ghost Is a Sock Puppet, Nico di Angelo Has Hands, and I Need Therapy

Notes:

prepare for an unhinged reimagining of macbeth and lots of pining :)

The theatre is in an old, half-collapsed church that looks like it’s one strong breeze away from becoming a pile of trendy rubble. It's tucked at the edge of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood—far enough from the oat milk cafés and yoga studios to still smell like danger, but close enough that the local hipsters insist on calling it “ gritty ” and “ authentic .” The kind of place that makes you wonder if the vibe is intentional or if you’ve just made a very bad life choices.

The outside is covered in layers of graffiti, ranging from intricate murals to hastily sprayed tags that just say “ RATS ” in all caps. The entrance isn’t through the grand, once-majestic front doors—those are chained shut, obviously—but through a side door, half hidden behind a dumpster and illuminated by a single flickering bulb. It gives the impression that the show inside might either be a transcendent piece of avant-garde theatre… or a cult initiation.

Inside, the space is dim and smells like a combination of incense, candle wax, and something vaguely burnt that Will really doesn’t want to identify. The pews are long gone, replaced by folding chairs and milk crates. A haze of smoke—or maybe fog machine residue—hangs in the air, catching in the beams of light from the few working stage bulbs. There’s no clear stage, just a raised platform in the middle of the room surrounded by chairs on all sides. It’s very “ the actors could come at you from anywhere” energy, which does absolutely nothing to settle Will’s nerves.

“I feel like I’m about to be sacrificed ,” Will mutters, looking around the dimly lit space.

Cecil, trailing behind him with his hands jammed in his coat pockets, glances around. His gaze lands on an actual, honest-to-gods taxidermied goat head mounted above the entrance to what might generously be called a concession stand. “Yeah,” Cecil agrees. “I feel like if we say the wrong thing, we’ll get hexed.”

“ Hexed ?” Will repeats.

Cecil gestures broadly to the décor. There are creepy abstract paintings splattered with what Will sincerely hopes is just red paint, an arrangement of mismatched candles forming a slightly lopsided circle in the center of the room, and several people dressed in aggressively avant-garde outfits that seem to involve an alarming number of layers and scarves.

Will considers this and nods. “Okay. That’s fair.”

They inch forward, weaving through a crowd that’s an eclectic mix of NYU theatre kids, local weirdos, and people who look like they write poetry about moss and insist their sourdough starter has a soul. Every single person seems far too excited about whatever weirdness is about to unfold. They spot Lou Ellen near the stage, dressed in a dramatic all-black outfit with smudged eyeliner and a very intense energy about her. When she sees them, she immediately rushes over.

“You came !” she exclaims.

“Yeah, because you forced us to,” Cecil grumbles quietly enough that Lou Ellen doesn’t hear. 

Will nods. “Of course we came, we’re your best friends, we’re here to support you,” he says, glaring at Cecil who rolls his eyes.

Cecil raises his hands in surrender. “Yeah. Support,” he deadpans.

Lou Ellen’s eyes glisten. “Don’t make me ruin my makeup,” she scolds gently and then she claps her hands together, practically vibrating with excitement. “Okay, okay, listen—you have to keep an open mind about the show.”

Cecil narrows his eyes. “Why? What happens in the show?”

Lou Ellen pauses.

Will groans. “ Lou Ellen —”

“I told you, it’s Macbeth but, like… reinvented .”

“Reinvented how ?”

Lou Ellen bites her lip. “You’ll see.”

Lou,” Will says slowly, “if this ends with us holding hands in a pentagram, I swear to all the gods—”

Cecil sighs. “You’re the worst .”

Lou Ellen grins and pats him on the shoulder. “Love you too.”

With that, she disappears backstage, leaving Will and Cecil standing in the very unsettling venue, surrounded by an audience that seems far too eager for whatever weird and unsettling thing is about to happen.

Will sighs, rubbing a hand down his face. “We are never living this down.”

Cecil nods. “Yeah, this is definitely going to traumatize us.”

“I feel like we’ve just been lured into a trap,” Will mutters, scanning the venue, which somehow manages to be both dilapidated and pretentious. The whole place smells vaguely of incense and regret.

Cecil eyes a group of people in long, flowing black cloaks muttering in a circle. “I feel like if we leave before the second act, we’ll be cursed .”

Will sighs, glancing down at his phone. “Where are we even sitting?”

Cecil scrolls through his messages. “Uh… front row .”

Will stares at him, horrified. “You’re kidding .”

“I wish I was.”

With all the enthusiasm of someone heading to their own execution, Will and Cecil trudge toward the front row. They step over an aggressively large tote bag with “Eat the Rich” printed on the side and try not to make eye contact with someone who is either meditating or passed out on the floor. They shuffle to their seats, dodging a person in a floor-length cloak carrying an ominous metal bowl and someone else muttering fervently in what sounds like Latin. The chairs themselves are mismatched—one is a beat-up theatre seat, another is definitely a lawn chair, and the third is just a crate with a cushion on top.

But when they reach their row, Will comes to a dead stop .

Jason, Piper, and Nico are already sitting there.

Will blinks.

He blinks again .

“Okay,” he whispers to Cecil. “Did we just hallucinate that? Or are Jason, Piper, and Nico actually at this cursed experimental theatre production?”

Cecil is just as baffled. “I feel like we’ve walked into a glitch in the matrix .”

Piper notices them first, flashing a grin. “Hey, you made it!” she says, as though this was some predetermined arrangement. 

Cecil crosses his arms. “Yeah. Against our better judgment .”

Jason gestures at the seats beside them. “Take a seat. Show’s about to start.”

Will, still not fully convinced this isn’t an elaborate hallucination brought on by exhaustion and Lou Ellen’s terrible cooking, carefully drops into the seat beside Nico. His heart does something horrible in his chest when Nico glances at him, offering a small, almost reluctant nod of acknowledgement before turning back to the stage.

After a long moment of contemplation, he finally asks, “Not to sound ungrateful for this delightful surprise, but what the hell are you three doing here ?”

Piper opens her mouth to respond, but before she can get a word out, Nico cuts in, “Piper wanted to see it.”

There’s a beat of stunned silence.

Slowly—painfully slowly—Piper turns her head toward Nico, her expression the kind you’d expect from someone who’s just been accused of a felony in public.

“I what ?” she says, voice flat, as if reconciling with the betrayal in real time.

Nico doesn’t even blink . “You said you thought it looked interesting.”

Piper stares at him. Then at Will. Then back at Nico. Her eyes narrow, calculating. She opens her mouth to argue. Closes it again. Sighs, deeply, like a woman who’s decided that the fight isn’t worth the emotional labor.

“You owe me for this,” she mutters, pointing at Nico with the bone-deep resignation of someone who’s clearly going to collect later.

Jason, meanwhile, is visibly struggling not to laugh. His whole face is scrunched up in the effort, shoulders shaking with suppressed hilarity.

Will squints at Nico, suspicion blooming like mold in a basement.

“You’re telling me,” he says slowly, “that Piper—the same Piper who once flew back from Cabo early because, and I quote, ‘the vibe was off’ —voluntarily chose to spend her evening watching an experimental theatre adaptation of Macbeth. In an abandoned church. That smells like wet incense and disappointment.”

Jason completely loses it. His laugh bursts out like a dam breaking, loud and obnoxious and utterly delighted. Piper elbows him hard in the ribs, but it only makes him wheeze harder.

Will throws a glance at Cecil, who is sitting back in his chair like he’s watching his favorite soap opera unfold in real time. He’s got that infuriatingly smug look that says, “This is better than I could’ve hoped for.”

Then Will turns back to Nico. “Okay,” he says, folding his arms. “And you? If Piper was supposedly so desperate to see it… why are you here?”

Nico exhales sharply through his nose, as if he’s annoyed to even be asked.
“I was just… curious,” he mutters, like the word tastes bad.

Will raises a slow eyebrow.

Nico shifts in his seat. “It’s not a crime,” he adds, a little too defensively.

Jason leans in like he’s physically incapable of letting the moment pass. “You did mention seeing the posters on campus,” he says helpfully.

Piper doesn’t even try to hide her smirk. “And you did say Lou Ellen is Will’s friend, so maybe he’d be here.”

There’s a horrible, deafening pause.
The kind that makes Will’s brain short-circuit.

Slowly, stiffly, Will turns his head toward Nico, his heart thudding in his chest like it’s trying to punch its way out. Nico doesn’t look at him. Nico is very pointedly staring at the stage with an expression that could curdle milk.

Jason is dying at this point, shoulders shaking as he buries his face in his hands. Piper lets out a dramatic sigh, like she’s tired of babysitting two idiots in love.

“God,” she mutters, “you’re so stupid about this.”

Before Will can process whether she’s talking about him or Nico or both, the lights abruptly cut out, plunging the room into darkness.

There’s a loud electrical buzz, and then a single spotlight flickers to life.
A man in a deer skull mask crawls onto the stage on all fours, movements jerky and insect-like, before letting out an inhuman screech that reverberates through the old church rafters.

Will flinches so hard his seat creaks.

Jason mutters, “What the fuck,” sounding genuinely impressed.

Piper leans forward in her seat, grinning like she’s about to watch the world burn.

Nico, still glaring straight ahead, grits out, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

Somehow, it gets weirder. 

The witches are played by three people in full-body morph suits who move in eerie, disjointed choreography. There’s a bagpipe remix of Toxic by Britney Spears playing ominously in the background. At one point, an actor in a plague doctor mask lunges toward the audience, causing Will to yelp and grab Cecil’s arm on instinct.

Cecil, delighted by Will’s suffering, whispers, “This is the best night of my life .”

Will glares at him.

Then it gets worse.

A performer dressed as Lady Macbeth crawls down the aisle on all fours, pausing to stare directly at Will before letting out a low, guttural growl.

Will physically flinches .

Jason snorts, loud enough that a few heads in the row ahead of them turn. Piper leans over Nico, her grin bright and wicked, and stage-whispers, “You sure know how to pick ’em.”

Nico doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even flinch. Which is a shame, really, because Will is about half a second away from spontaneously combusting, and it feels deeply unfair to be the only one suffering.

But then Will’s brain short-circuits, because suddenly he notices—

 

Nico’s hand.  

On the armrest between them.  

Close enough that if Will shifted his pinky just slightly, they’d be touching.

And it’s stupid. It’s so stupid, because it’s just a hand. But it isn’t. It’s Nico’s hand.  Long, elegant fingers, pale in a way that suggests he’s either severely allergic to sunlight or haunting a very tasteful crypt. His nails are cut neatly, short and clean, and his wrist, where his sleeve has slid back slightly, is delicate-looking, almost fragile. Like a porcelain doll. Or a weapon designed to look harmless.

Will stares, and for a second, it’s passive observation.  Then his brain pipes up with: Wow, he has really nice hands.  And after that, it’s a mess: You could totally just hold it. Just… lace your fingers through his. See what it feels like.  And then, immediately: What the hell is wrong with you?

He blinks hard and looks away, a flush creeping up the back of his neck. His fingers twitch uselessly in his lap, where they’re pressed flat against his thighs as if pinning himself to the seat will keep him from doing something unforgivably stupid.

It’s fine.  It’s just a hand.  A hand belonging to Nico di Angelo, who dresses like a vampire and has whispered things in Will’s ear that still make his pulse spike when he thinks about them too long. Nico di Angelo, who may or may not have dragged his friends here on the off chance Will would be attending. Nico di Angelo, who—

Will cuts the thought off like he’s slamming a door on his own brain.

He forces himself to focus on the stage. Banquo’s ghost is standing center stage now, arms outstretched in a rigid T-pose while Macbeth circles him dramatically. A theremin keens from the corner of the room, adding an eerie soundtrack to what is, objectively, the most absurd thing Will has ever seen.  

It doesn’t help.  

None of this helps.

He sneaks a glance at Nico, who is sitting perfectly still, his expression carved from marble. Unreadable. He could be deeply invested in this train wreck of a production, or he could be miles away in his own head.  For all Will knows, Nico is thinking about something entirely unrelated.  For all Will knows, Nico isn’t thinking about him at all. The thought makes Will’s stomach twist in a way that has nothing to do with hangovers or greasy diner food.  It’s something else.  Something he doesn’t have a name for yet.

He shifts in his seat, squeezing his palms against his jeans, grounding himself in the roughness of the fabric. Because if he doesn’t, he’s worried he’ll move. He’s worried he’ll do something reckless and irreversible.  Like reach out and cover Nico’s hand with his own.  Like hold it, just to see what it feels like.

The hand is still there.  And Will is still not touching it.  But it’s a very close thing.

And when Nico shifts slightly, their pinkies almost brushing, Will has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep himself from breathing out too hard.

He’s not fine.  But he can fake it for now. Probably.

The show goes on, it is unhinged. 

At this point, the witches have launched into their second musical number—because apparently, in this adaptation, all of their dialogue is delivered through slam poetry and punctuated by interpretive dance.  

Lou Ellen stands front and center on the dimly lit stage, swaying in a tattered wedding dress that’s stained with what Will hopes is just paint. Her headpiece looks like someone glued together an assortment of twigs and small animal bones, and the whole ensemble gives her the unsettling vibe of an ancient forest deity who is not on speaking terms with mercy.  Her voice is deep and guttural as she chants her lines, an eerie rasp that makes Will shiver.  

He should be focused on that.  

He should be focused on anything except Nico di Angelo.

But Will’s brain is an instrument of chaos and sabotage.  

And it keeps dragging his gaze sideways.

Nico sits beside him, an immovable shadow of calm amid the sensory onslaught of Lou Ellen’s possessed woodland creature act.  He looks like he’s stepped straight out of a black-and-white photo shoot in Milan—effortlessly chic, expensive in a way Will can’t quite comprehend. His black button-down is crisp, the sleeves rolled just so, and it fits his frame like it was tailored to his exact measurements by a very serious old man in Rome. His dark jeans are the kind of understated that only comes with a ridiculous price tag. Even the heavy silver watch on his wrist—sleek, minimalistic, no unnecessary flash—manages to hum with quiet opulence.  

And his hair.  Gods, his hair .  

Tousled in a way that suggests he either spent hours in front of a mirror perfecting it or woke up like that because life just works out for people like Nico di Angelo. Will, on the other hand, is wearing secondhand jeans with a hole in the knee he’s been meaning to patch for months and a button-up he picked up for four dollars at a thrift store. He’s ninety percent sure there’s a faint ring of milk foam crusted into the hem from his shift earlier at the restaurant. His hair is too long, curling out over his ears in an untamable way that screams I have not had a haircut since last semester because groceries come first.

And yet. Here they are.  

Sitting side by side in the same surreal fever dream of a night, watching Lou Ellen channel whatever eldritch god gave her permission to perform this madness. Will sneaks another glance at Nico.  

Very subtly.  

(Not subtly at all.)

Nico’s profile is all clean angles and sharp focus. His dark lashes fan over his cheeks as he watches the stage, expression blank in a way that makes Will wonder if he’s silently judging everything or genuinely absorbing it. He looks… cool. Collected. Untouchable.

Will lets out a slow breath, trying to calm the fluttering mess in his chest. He is not, absolutely not, going to fall harder for a boy in the middle of experimental theatre chaos. He has self-control. He has dignity.

And then Nico turns.

Slowly, smoothly, like he’s been aware of Will’s blatant staring this entire time and just took pity on him. His dark gaze catches Will’s with precision, and Will feels the equivalent of a bucket of cold water poured over his entire soul.

Their eyes lock.  

For one eternal, awful second.  

And Will panics.

He jerks his head back toward the stage so fast he almost gives himself whiplash.  

Just in time for Lou Ellen to let out a bloodcurdling scream and swan-dive off the balcony in what might be the single most dramatic stage death Will has ever witnessed.

Cecil snorts beside him, not even trying to be quiet. Jason bursts into delighted, genuine cackling from somewhere down the row.  

But Will doesn’t hear them. Not really.  

He’s too busy dying inside.

Nico di Angelo just caught him staring.  

Not once. Not twice. Repeatedly.  

And now Will has to sit here, stone-faced, pretending he wasn’t just admiring the sharp cut of Nico’s jawline or daydreaming about tracing the veins on the back of his stupidly perfect hand.  

He folds his own hands tightly in his lap like that’s going to help. He has never wanted to melt into the floorboards more than he does right now. And he’s been to Lou Ellen’s interpretive dance recitals, that is saying something.

The play has finally—mercifully—ended. Will still isn’t sure whether he’s witnessed a groundbreaking work of avant-garde theatre or just survived a two-hour-long group psychosis. Either way, he and Cecil are now hunched over drinks in the grimy bar next door, trying to reclaim their grip on reality.

The place is dimly lit, probably to hide the peeling wallpaper and the collection of suspicious stains on the ceiling. It smells like craft beer, spilt regret, and someone’s aggressively artisanal vape cloud. Theatre kids crowd the space, celebrating their t ranscendent artistic journey while Will tries not to relive the moment a cast member yeeted an entire bucket of fake blood across his lap during the interpretive dance battle between Macbeth and Banquo’s ghost. He’s still damp. He’s still confused.

Cecil nudges him sharply in the ribs, nodding toward the door.  

Lou Ellen strides in like the goth cryptid queen of avant-garde theatre, still in partial costume. There’s a smear of stage makeup across her cheek, and her hair, still wild from whatever had happened in the last act (Will had blacked out mentally around the time they brought out the sock puppets), looks like she lost a fight with a wind tunnel and a bottle of black glitter glue. She collapses into the seat across from them, practically vibrating with anticipation.

“Well?” she demands, eyes shining with manic glee. “What did you think?”

Will shoots Cecil a look that definitely says help me lie convincingly or perish.

Cecil raises his glass to stall for time, taking a casual sip of his drink like he hasn’t just witnessed their mutual friend crawl across a stage in a head-to-toe burlap sack while chanting blood will have blood backwards.

“It was… certainly something,” Will manages, voice thin as he nurses his beer like it’s a lifeline.

“Incredible commitment from the cast,” Cecil adds, his expression so wide-eyed it might qualify as a cry for help.

Lou Ellen narrows her gaze like a predator. “What was your favorite part?”

Will pretends to cough into his sleeve, stalling, while Cecil—traitor that he is—goes straight for it.  

“Oh, easy,” Cecil says. “The… uh… five-minute monologue that was performed entirely through interpretive dance and screaming into a bucket. Bold choice. Stunning.”

Will nods like a bobblehead. “Yeah, and the, uh, bit where the three witches turned into tax evasion auditors? Didn’t see that coming. But honestly? Timely. Topical.”

Cecil snaps his fingers. “Oh! And when Macbeth screamed into a cracked mirror for, like, a full minute? Very The Shining meets performance anxiety . Haunting.”

Lou Ellen beams like they’ve just told her she’s won an Oscar. “Right? That was my idea.”

Will forces a grin, though his soul is gently leaving his body. Cecil grabs his drink and chugs half of it, probably to keep from laughing out loud.

Lou Ellen leans forward, suddenly deadly serious. “So… what did you think of my performance?”

Will and Cecil don’t even hesitate—this part they could be honest about.

“Phenomenal,” Will says, setting his glass down with a thud. “You absolutely were ‘Floating Dagger Number Two.’”

 

“Best floating dagger I’ve ever seen,” Cecil agrees solemnly. “Terrifying. Mesmerizing. I completely believed you were a sentient murder weapon fueled by existential dread.”

Lou Ellen nods thoughtfully. “That’s exactly what I was going for. I really wanted to capture the essence of a cursed object witnessing humanity’s inevitable spiral into chaos.”

Cecil coughs into his sleeve. Will bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood.

And then Lou Ellen’s expression shifts.  

She leans in, sly as a fox.  

“So… did you notice who else was in the audience tonight?”

Will’s stomach plummets.  

He grabs his drink and takes a long gulp to avoid answering, knowing exactly where this is going.  

Cecil, the absolute snake, grins.

“Oh, you mean Nico di Angelo?” he drawls. “The brooding prince of luxury fashion and quiet existential despair? Yeah, we noticed.”

Lou Ellen smirks. It’s a look Will knows too well. It spells disaster.

“And did you also notice,” she says slowly, drawing out every word like she’s narrating his doom, “that he kept looking at you, Will?”

Will chokes violently on his drink.  

Cecil thumps him hard on the back while barely containing a snicker.  

“You good, buddy?”

“Fine,” Will wheezes. “Just—uh—dying.”

Lou Ellen sits back, folding her arms, looking disgustingly smug.  

“Interesting,” she hums.

Will glares at both of them in turn. “You two are nightmares.”

“You love us,” Cecil replies cheerfully.

“I need new friends,” Will mutters, dragging his hands down his face.  

The moment Nico, Piper, and Jason step into the bar, Will feels it in his soul.

It’s not like one of those movie moments where the music cuts out and everyone turns to stare—no. No one else in this grimy, half-lit bar seems to recognize them. The damp air smells like spilled beer, something vaguely metallic, and old regrets. This is a far cry from the kind of places the Seven usually haunt—those exclusive rooftop bars where the cocktails cost more than Will’s entire weekly paycheck and the bathrooms smell like eucalyptus, not impending doom.

But Will, Cecil, and Lou Ellen? Oh, they know exactly who just walked in.

“Okay, what the hell,” Cecil mutters, ducking slightly behind Will like they’re being hunted. “Why are they here? Who let them in? Did someone accidentally tell them about the existence of normal-people bars?”

Lou Ellen hums, arms crossed as she surveys the entrance. “Maybe they took a wrong turn on the way to their secret, members-only speakeasy where the drinks are served in actual gold goblets.”

“Maybe they’re slumming it,” Cecil offers. “See how the other half lives.”

Will sighs into his watered-down vodka soda. “Yeah. I’m sure this is an authentic cultural experience for them.”

They watch as Jason, Piper, and Nico make their way toward the bar, looking completely out of place under the flickering neon beer signs and next to the cracked vinyl stools. Piper leans over the counter, already laughing at something the bartender says, while Jason stands like a bodyguard doing security detail on a royal. Nico trails behind them, dressed in his usual black—head to toe—like he’s mourning the death of his own patience. His outfit probably costs more than Will’s rent, and that’s not even accounting for his boots, which are suspiciously clean considering the sticky floors.

And, of course, he looks good. Disgustingly good. He doesn’t have his sunglasses on tonight, which means Will gets a full, unfiltered view of his dark, tired eyes and the sharp line of his jaw. It’s rude, really.

Lou Ellen elbows him sharply. “Look at you, checking out your little bookstore boyfriend.”

“He’s not—” Will starts, but Cecil cuts him off with a lazy grin.

“He’s totally your mysterious, broody, billionaire boyfriend.”

Will scowls, flicking his straw at them. “If he was my billionaire boyfriend, I wouldn’t be working two jobs and drinking whatever the hell this is.” He gestures at his sad excuse for a drink.

Cecil just smirks. “Deflecting.”

“I hate you both.”

At the bar, Jason lifts his glass, frowns at it like he’s just realized the ice is not made from imported glacier water from the Swiss Alps, and cautiously takes a sip. Piper’s still talking, probably making fun of him. Nico, silent as ever, stirs his drink absently with a straw, his gaze flicking lazily over the room—until it lands on Will.

Will nearly knocks over his drink.

Lou Ellen catches it, saving him from disaster. “Oh my gods,” she hisses. “He looked at you. He totally looked at you.”

“Shut up,” Will mutters, but his face is already heating up.

Cecil laughs. “Admit it. You’re in love.”

Will groans, dropping his head into his hands. “This is going to be a long night.”

And then Piper appears at their table with the kind of casual confidence that can only be cultivated through years of being told “yes” by the entire universe. She’s holding her drink like it’s an accessory and grins at them like they’re old friends.

“Hey!” she says brightly. “Mind if we join you?”

Will, Lou Ellen, and Cecil stare at her, stunned into silence.

“Um,” Will says, because he’s nothing if not eloquent under pressure.

“Awesome! Thanks!” Piper drops into the seat next to Lou Ellen before they can object. Jason follows without hesitation, dropping into the chair beside her. Nico lingers for a moment, looking vaguely tortured, like he’s regretting the decisions that led him to this point. But after an unsubtle look from Jason, he sits. Right next to Will.

Will is going to die.

“So,” Piper says, swirling her suspicious drink. “That was wild, huh?”

Lou Ellen lights up immediately. “Right?! You guys liked it?”

Jason flashes an easy grin. “Definitely the most unhinged Macbeth I’ve ever seen.”

Piper nods enthusiastically. “I loved the part where Banquo’s ghost was played by a sock puppet.”

“And the way Lady Macbeth literally started levitating during her monologue?” Jason says. “Insane.”

Lou Ellen looks like she might actually cry from happiness. “Yes! That’s exactly what we were going for!”

Cecil leans in and mutters to Will, “That’s what she was going for?”

Will shrugs helplessly.

Meanwhile, Nico hasn’t said a word. He sits stiff, arms crossed, staring down at his drink like it personally offended him. Just as Will assumes he’ll stay silent the whole night, Nico speaks.

“It was an interesting interpretation,” he says flatly, but not unkindly. “The decision to make the witches a Greek chorus was effective. It heightened the dramatic irony. And having Macbeth deliver his soliloquies directly to audience members added an unsettling intimacy. The use of multimedia elements, like the flickering TV screens and distorted audio, was… disorienting, but it worked. And the lighting design was impressive. Whoever did it made the most of limited resources.” He pauses. “Though the sock puppet was a bit much.”

The entire table stares at him.

Lou Ellen looks like he’s just proposed marriage.

“You—you actually paid attention,” she whispers, stunned.

Nico frowns. “Yeah? I was watching the play. That’s what you do at a play.”

Lou Ellen clutches her chest. “I think I love you.”

Will chokes on his drink.

Cecil solemnly pats Lou Ellen’s shoulder. “You’ve finally been seen.”

“I have,” she sniffs.

Nico sips his drink, entirely unaffected.

Will, meanwhile, tries very hard not to find him even more attractive.

He fails. Spectacularly.

Piper and Jason settle in easily, as if they’ve been sitting at this table for years. Their casual confidence is ridiculous, honestly. They blend in seamlessly, like the fact they’re social royalty on campus doesn’t matter, like they’re not the people everyone else whispers about in hallways and on gossip forums. Jason lounges back in his chair, broad shoulders relaxed, while Piper leans forward with an easy grin, swirling her drink around like she’s done this a million times before.

They pass around drinks and snacks pilfered from the bar—most of which are highly questionable in terms of food safety—but none of them seem concerned. Their casualness seems to break the tension a little, and soon enough, it feels almost normal. Like they’re just college students hanging out. Like the Seven aren’t The Seven.

“So, Lou Ellen,” Piper says, resting her chin in her hand, “what’s it like being a theatre major? Do you get to wear fabulous costumes every day, or is that just propaganda?”

Lou Ellen flashes a grin, a little wild around the edges. “Fabulous, yes. But mostly tights and corsets that slowly suffocate you. Last semester, I spent six weeks in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest wearing a top hat that gave me neck strain.”

Jason chuckles, raising his glass. “A noble sacrifice for the arts.”

“You say that,” Lou Ellen shoots back, “but you’re pre-law. You’re voluntarily reading case law.”

“I’m preparing for the future,” Jason says, his grin lazy. “Leo’s going to need someone to get him out of jail.”

“I thought that was Piper’s job,” Will says before he can stop himself.

Piper shrugs, unbothered. “I handle the PR spin. ‘Promising young innovator wrongly accused of grand larceny. ’ That sort of thing.”

Cecil whistles low under his breath. “If Leo’s a menace, I’m his distant cousin. I feel like I should be worried.”

“You’re already a menace,” Lou Ellen says sweetly. “A convicted felon in the making.”

Cecil salutes her with his drink. “I prefer morally flexible entrepreneur.”

Will groans and tips his head back against his chair. “You’re selling fake IDs, not building the future.”

“Allegedly,” Cecil corrects. “And my programming final was on cybersecurity, so technically, I’m building systems that will one day catch people like me.”

“I can’t decide if that’s impressive or concerning,” Jason says.

“Why not both?” Piper grins.

Will fights a smile, taking a long sip of his drink to avoid saying something dumb. Which he will. He knows himself.

“So,” Piper turns her attention to Will, eyes bright. “What about you, golden boy? Pre-med, right? That’s got to be hell.”

Will shrugs, rolling the condensation on his glass between his palms. “It’s a lot,” he admits. “Labs, lectures, more labs. Between that and work…there’s not really time for anything else.”

“And yet,” Cecil says, nudging him with his elbow, “he still finds time to yell at me about the ethics of my business ventures.”

Will huffs. “That’s because you’re always one bad decision away from dragging me into an FBI investigation.”

Jason laughs. “You’d make a great lawyer.”

“No offense,” Will says, “but I’m not morally bankrupt enough for that.”

Piper whistles. “Ouch.”

Jason raises his glass in salute. “Fair.”

But Will’s distracted now, because Nico’s watching him. He’s been quiet all night, practically silent, but there’s something sharp and assessing about his gaze now. It makes Will’s pulse jump, just slightly.

“You want to be a doctor,” Nico says, not really a question.

Will nods. “Yeah. Since high school.”

There’s a pause, and Will watches Nico’s expression shift, something thoughtful lurking behind his usual blank mask. It’s not exactly warm, but it’s not cold either.

“Huh,” Nico says softly, like he’s filing it away for later. He swirls his drink idly, but Will’s attention snags on the way his fingers move—long and pale, the sort of elegant that should be pretentious but just… isn’t.

Jason stretches in his seat. “Pre-med,” he says. “I don’t envy you.”

Will shrugs. “It’s fine. I don’t envy pre-law, so I guess we’re even.”

Piper grins. “You’re both masochists. I respect it.”

Lou Ellen leans in conspiratorially. “You know, I once played a nurse in Romeo and Juliet. That’s practically the same thing.”

Will chuckles. “Sure. Totally.”

For a moment, it’s easy. Too easy.

Will risks a glance at Nico. He’s quiet again, but there’s something… softer about his silence now. Or maybe Will’s imagining it. Either way, he’s looking at Will like he’s seeing something different. Something interesting. And Will feels his pulse kick up.

Nico’s lips twitch as if he’s fighting a smile, but Will is too flustered to catch it. Instead, he focuses on the absurdity of being asked about his studies while surrounded by people who have no idea just how much of a disaster his life sometimes feels like.

But as the night goes on, with more laughter and absurd conversation, Will can’t shake the feeling that Nico’s curiosity isn’t just a passing moment. There’s something there, hidden behind his walls. And despite how strange everything feels—how much he wishes to understand Nico’s inscrutable nature—he can’t help but be a little drawn into it's orbit.

Notes:

as always, thank you guys so much for reading, and for the kudos and comments, i love hearing what people are thinking about my writing!

Chapter 6: My Roommate’s Running a Drug Ring, My Crush Might Be A Greek Tragedy, and I Can’t Tell If I’m in Love or in Danger

By 9 A.M the library is packed. Not in a comforting, studious kind of way, but in a desperation-fueled, every-man-for-himself kind of way. The air hums with quiet panic: muted whispers, frantic typing, the occasional muffled curse from someone who just realized they have an entire paper due by midnight. Will’s pretty sure he can smell stress in the air, like some weird academic pheromone.

He sits slumped at a corner table near the back, where the lights flicker intermittently and there’s a faint, suspicious smell of old carpet. His laptop is open, a half-finished anatomy worksheet blinking back at him. It’s been blinking for about thirty minutes. Across from him, Lou Ellen flips through a play script, chewing on the cap of her pen like she’s in a serious, committed relationship with it. Cecil, meanwhile, has his feet up on an empty chair and is scrolling through something on his phone with the single-minded focus of a man clearly up to no good.

“This is going to be my best one yet,” Cecil announces, grinning like the cat who’s about to eat the canary and sell its organs for cash.

Will doesn’t even look up. “If you’re talking about the fake IDs again, I’m ignoring you.”

“It’s not fake IDs,” Cecil says innocently, which means it’s 100% still about fake IDs. “It’s… diversification.”

Will finally glances at him, suspicious. “Diversification,” he repeats slowly.

“Yeah. New themes,” Cecil explains, spinning his phone between his fingers. “I’m thinking vintage. Maybe retro-style licenses. Pirate aesthetics are big right now. Who doesn’t want to be ‘Captain Jack’ on a night out?”

Lou Ellen snorts without looking up. “I can think of a few people.”

Will sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Cecil.”

Cecil flashes a bright, unapologetic grin. “What? You’ve got to stay on trend.”

“This is not a fashion line,” Will says flatly.

“It could be,” Cecil muses. “I could start offering package deals. Fake ID, matching outfit. Maybe even some fake social media accounts to back it up. Create a whole persona. You want to be a retired supermodel from Milan? Done. You want to be an ex-Olympic archer turned lifestyle coach? I got you.”

Lou Ellen hums thoughtfully. “I’d be interested in the supermodel one.”

Will stares at them both, dead-eyed. “You’re both insane.”

“Entrepreneurial,” Cecil corrects, looking very pleased with himself.

Will gives him a long look. “You’re a computer science major. I thought you were supposed to be coding apps or… I don’t know, hacking into government servers.”

Cecil winks. “Well, if you want to talk about the time I may or may not have hacked into the CIA server to find out the truth about Princess Diana’s death, then we’ll be here all day.”

“You have issues,” Will mutters, rubbing his temple.

Lou Ellen finally looks up, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “You’re going to give yourself a stress ulcer.”

“I’m pre-med, I’ll decide when I get an ulcer,” Will says, then flips a page in his textbook a little more aggressively than necessary.

They lapse into silence for a moment. A blessed, blissful silence. Will thinks he might finally get some actual studying done.

Then Cecil says, “You know, I was thinking of adding a punch card system.”

Will groans, slamming his pen down. “What does that even mean?”

“Buy five fake IDs, get your sixth free,” Cecil says brightly. “It’s called customer loyalty, Will.”

“You’re going to get arrested,” Will says, not for the first time.

“Yeah,” Lou Ellen adds, “but he’ll have a really great case study for my courtroom drama final.”

Will exhales slowly, because this is his life. Somehow, despite all of his best efforts, this is his life.

“Why can’t you just sell something normal?” he asks, glancing at Cecil. “Like… I don’t know. Handmade jewelry.”

Cecil shrugs. “Because there’s no adrenaline rush in beads, Will.”

Lou Ellen snorts. “You don’t know that. My bead loom project last semester was cutthroat.”

“I’m not kidding,” Will says. “If campus security shows up at our door because you sold an ID to someone named ‘Bartholomew Skullcrusher from Atlantis ,’ I’m not bailing you out.”

“That was one time,” Cecil says, clearly lying.

Will sinks back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling like he’s begging the gods for strength.

“You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” Cecil says cheerfully.

“I’ll visit you in prison,” Will shoots back. “Once. For the story. I’ll need an account of all the details for my lawyer. Or therapist.”

Lou Ellen gives Will a commiserating look. “You know,” she says, “if you just relaxed and embraced the chaos, you might actually have fun.”

“I don’t have time for fun,” Will replies. “I have two jobs, a twelve-credit course load, and I’m probably going to end up with a felony conviction through association.”

Cecil points his pen at him. “See? This is why you need me. One of us has to fund your caffeine addiction and impulse control.”

Will picks up his anatomy notes and starts packing them away. “I’m leaving.”

“No you aren’t,” Cecil says, kicking his feet up again. “You can’t escape the empire. Besides, you didn’t object this much when you were using the fake ID I made you to get into bars before you turned twenty-one.”

Will mutters something unrepeatable under his breath, but slumps back into his seat anyways. He leans back in his chair with a long, exasperated sigh, but he doesn’t leave. He’s too tired. And maybe—just maybe—a tiny, illogical part of him enjoys this, despite the fact that Cecil is a walking felony and Lou Ellen encourages him like she’s getting commission.

“Okay, fair point” Will says, rubbing his eyes, “but seriously, how did we never get arrested? We definitely came close a few times.”

Cecil shrugs like it’s obvious. “Confidence.”

Will stares at him. “Confidence.”

“Yep.” Cecil smirks, kicking his feet up onto an empty chair. “You walk up to the bouncer like you own the place, flash them a laminated piece of plastic that says your name is ‘ Moose McKinley,’ and you own it. They don’t question you.”

“I’m still mad about ‘ Moose McKinley,’ by the way,” Will mutters, flipping a page in his textbook, though he’s not absorbing a single word. “You knew I didn’t want anything ridiculous.”

“Will,” Lou Ellen says, finally looking up from her notebook, “the other option was ‘ Thor Baggins ’. You should be grateful.”

Will snorts despite himself. “Yeah, and what was yours again? Something equally absurd?”

Lou Ellen grins proudly. “ Gwendolyn J. Price .”

Cecil leans in, nodding seriously. “The J stood for ‘ Justice .’”

“It was giving ‘Victorian widow who poisons her husbands, ’” Will says. “And yet you got into more bars with that name than I did.”

“I have an aura,” Lou Ellen says, as if it’s a proven fact.

Will shakes his head, biting back a grin. “And what was yours again, Cecil?”

Cecil places a hand over his heart like he’s about to deliver a eulogy. “ Bartleby D. Wellington. ”

Lou Ellen cackles. “You wanted to sound like a Monopoly tycoon.”

“I wanted to sound trustworthy,” Cecil says, grinning. “And I did! Remember that time we used those IDs to get into that casino night at the student union? I left with two hundred dollars and a date.”

“That date ghosted you,” Will reminds him.

Cecil shrugs. “Still counts.”

Will lets out a low laugh, shaking his head. “I seriously can’t believe we got away with that for as long as we did.”

Lou Ellen takes a slow sip from her coffee, eyeing Will over the rim. “It’s because we were geniuses.”

“It’s because you two are menaces,” Will corrects, but there’s no heat in it. “I’m still not convinced we’re not on some kind of watch list.”

Cecil leans forward conspiratorially. “We probably are. If not us, at least my laptop.”

Will groans, dropping his head into his hands. “Why am I friends with you?”

Lou Ellen pats him on the shoulder. “Because without us, your life would be tragically boring.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Cecil laughs, tipping his chair dangerously far back. “Come on, you love it.”

Will lets out a long-suffering sigh, but his mouth quirks at the corner. “I need new friends.”

“You’re stuck with us,” Lou Ellen says cheerfully, kicking his foot under the table.

And it’s true. Will is stuck with them. Two human disasters, equal parts brilliant and borderline illegal, and somehow the best people he knows. He wouldn’t trade them for anything—though he might consider renting them out to the FBI.

 

They’ve just begun to settle into what might actually become a productive study session—Cecil hasn’t mentioned cryptocurrency scams in at least four minutes—when a shadow falls across the table.

Two shadows, actually.

Will glances up, expecting some rando asking to borrow a pen. Instead, it’s Percy Jackson and Leo Valdez. Standing over them like they’ve just descended from the heavens or, more accurately, materialized from whatever secret lair the Seven operate out of.

“Hey,” Percy says, like they haven’t just appeared out of nowhere. His hands are stuffed in the pockets of his hoodie, and his expression is somewhere between casual and calculating.

Leo, standing just behind him, offers a twitchy little wave. “Sup.”

Will freezes. Lou Ellen’s pencil stops moving mid-sentence. Cecil, of course, smiles.

Will blinks slowly. “Uh. Hi?”

Percy nods, rocking back on his heels. “Cool. So...”

There’s a long pause. Uncomfortably long. Percy looks at Leo. Leo raises his eyebrows as if to say, well, you do it . Percy looks back at the trio.

“So,” Percy repeats, with absolutely zero elaboration.

Will stares at them, his mind scrambling. What do they want? Are they here to start a fight? Collect on a debt? Recruit them for a secret society that involves blood oaths? He wouldn’t put it past them. His brain flashes to those rumors Cecil loves bringing up—something about the Seven being part of an underground cult that sacrifices goats on the full moon—and suddenly this is feeling way too plausible. Are they being cursed? Did he offend some divine force by mocking the Seven’s restaurant orders? Lou Ellen once said Percy was a sea cult prince. Was that a joke? Was that prophecy?

“We were wondering,” Percy starts again, drawing out the words like he’s about to suggest something deeply illegal, “if you guys… had something .”

“Something,” Will repeats flatly.

Percy glances over his shoulder, like he’s worried they’re being watched. Leo, still hovering behind him, scratches the back of his neck and mutters, “You know. Stuff .”

Will shares a panicked glance with Lou Ellen. Lou Ellen, to her credit, looks thrilled. Cecil, however, leans forward like he’s settling in for his favorite TV show.

“I’m going to need you to be more specific,” Will says slowly. “Because right now, it sounds like you’re about to ask us to participate in a human sacrifice.”

Percy’s eyes widen. “What? No! Gods, no. Definitely not that.”

Leo shrugs. “I mean… unless you’re offering.”

Will’s stomach drops. “I’m leaving,” he says automatically, reaching for his bag.

“Wait, wait, no,” Percy says quickly, holding up his hands in surrender. “Not a sacrifice. Definitely not a sacrifice. It’s just… we heard you might have something.”

“Something,” Will echoes again.

Leo leans in. “You know. The good stuff.”

Will stares. Lou Ellen clutches her coffee like it’s popcorn. Cecil’s grin widens.

“You guys are so bad at this,” Cecil says, almost admiringly.

Percy sighs like this is personally painful for him. “Look, can you just—do you have any weed or not?”

Will blinks. Lou Ellen cackles, loud enough that someone a few tables over shushes her.

“Ohhh,” Will says, the realization hitting. “Oh. That makes so much more sense.”

Cecil crosses his arms behind his head. “I might,” he says casually, like they’re negotiating terms for a major business deal. “Depends.”

Leo’s eyes narrow, suddenly all business. “On what?”

Cecil shrugs. “Who’s asking?”

Percy groans. “Dude. It’s us.”

“And yet,” Cecil says, “we barely know each other.”

Will watches this all unfold with a kind of detached horror. He is way too sober for this.

“Cecil,” he hisses. “Please don’t mess with them.”

“Oh, come on,” Lou Ellen says, still laughing. “Let him have this.”

Percy runs a hand through his hair and exhales hard through his nose, clearly regretting every decision that led him to this moment. “Look, everyone says you are the guy to talk to.”

Will chokes. “Everyone? How many people know about the fucking cartel you’re running out of our kitchen, Cecil?”

Leo snorts. “Yeah. Everyone says you have the best supply on campus.”

Cecil waves Will off and puffs up with pride. “Well. They’re not wrong.”

Will covers his face with both hands. “I need new friends.”

Lou Ellen pats him on the back. “We’re an acquired taste.”

“Human sacrifice,” he mutters under his breath. “I really thought they were going to ask us to help them dispose of a body.”

Lou Ellen takes a sip of her coffee, looking thoughtful. “Honestly? I still wouldn’t rule it out,” she whispers back.

Percy and Leo settle into the empty chairs at the trio’s table like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Percy props his elbows on the wood, looking entirely too relaxed for someone who was just being wildly cryptic, while Leo lounges back like he owns the place—grinning, foot bouncing, already eyeing Cecil’s backpack like it’s made of pure gold.

Will watches them warily, like they’re raccoons who’ve figured out how to open doors. “I have questions.”

Percy lifts an eyebrow. “Shoot.”

“Okay,” Will says slowly, trying to pick his words carefully but failing spectacularly. “Why are you —” he gestures at Percy vaguely, “—asking for weed? Aren’t you, like, a student athlete?”

Percy shrugs. “Yeah?”

Will blinks. “Isn’t that… not allowed?”

Leo snorts. “Dude, do you really think the swim team’s testing for that? They can barely get funding for new kickboards.”

Percy makes a vague hand motion. “Plus, I don’t smoke. This isn’t for me.”

Will frowns. “Okay… but if it’s not for you, and it’s not for Leo—” He pauses, narrowing his eyes. “You guys probably have a ton of connections. I mean… don’t you know people who… you know…” He falters when he realizes what he’s about to say.

“Deal drugs?” Percy supplies, utterly unbothered.

“No!” Will blurts, his voice a little too high-pitched. “I mean. Maybe. I don’t know. You’re—you’re you. You probably have an entire—” He stops himself just in time. “—an entire network of… uh… connections.”

Under the table, Lou Ellen kicks him. Hard.

Cecil kicks him, too, from the other side. 

Subtle, this group is not.

Percy’s eyes narrow just slightly. “A network?” he repeats slowly.

Leo leans forward, grinning. “Dude, do you think we’re in the mafia or something?”

Will opens his mouth. Then closes it. Because yes, that’s exactly what he was thinking. And he’s not sure if he should deny it outright or pretend he never said anything. His brain scrambles wildly between play it cool and run away and maybe jump out the window.

Cecil clears his throat, saving him. “Will’s just, you know, really into… urban legends.”

“Super into them,” Lou Ellen agrees smoothly. “Loves a good conspiracy theory.”

Percy looks amused. “Huh.” Then he shrugs. “Nah. We just know Nico.”

“Who absolutely would be in the mafia,” Leo adds helpfully.

Will makes a strangled noise, somewhere between a laugh and a dying animal. His mouth opens like he wants to argue, but no sound comes out. He just stares at them, slack-jawed, like they’ve confirmed every conspiracy theory he’s ever heard in the worst possible way.

But Percy waves him off, entirely unfazed, like this kind of conversation is normal. “Anyway. It’s not for us.”

Will’s eyebrows shoot up. He already knows he’s going to regret asking, but the question escapes before he can stop himself. “Then who?”

Leo exchanges a look with Percy, the kind that’s so weighty it might as well come with ominous organ music. It’s a wordless exchange, but Will gets the sense that there’s a history there—something chaotic and possibly illegal.

“Nico,” Leo says casually, like he’s announcing the weather.

Will’s stomach drops so fast it’s a miracle he stays upright. “What?”

Percy sighs, long-suffering, as he leans back in his chair like this is the fiftieth time he’s had to explain this. “Yeah. We’re trying to get him to loosen up.”

Will just blinks at them. “By… getting him high?”

Leo shrugs, as if it’s the most obvious solution in the world. “He needs to chill. The dude’s wound tighter than Annabeth during finals week.”

Will stares at them, horrified. He gestures vaguely, as if trying to scoop the air into something that can express his disbelief. “That’s… that’s your plan?” His voice is cracking now. “That’s—no. No! That’s a terrible plan!”

Percy tilts his head, wearing a look that says Are you okay? but also You’re the only one not vibing here. “We’ve tried other stuff.”

“Yeah,” Leo jumps in, like he’s proud of what he’s about to say. “I took him to karaoke night last week. Didn’t help.”

“He didn’t sing?” Lou Ellen asks, perked up, eyes alight with morbid curiosity.

Leo shakes his head, mournful like he’s delivering news of a fallen comrade. “Wouldn’t even look at the mic.”

“So you thought weed was the next logical step?” Will demands. He’s starting to sound a little unhinged now. “That’s the escalation path you went with?”

Percy shrugs again. The shrug of a man who has never had a real plan and has always landed on his feet anyway. “He’s stressed. We’re helping.”

“You’re going to kill him,” Will mutters. His hands come up to rub furiously at his temples. “Or give him a panic attack. Or both.”

Leo gives him a side-eye, unimpressed. “You say that like you’ve never smoked with us before.”

“I haven’t!” Will practically yelps, sitting bolt upright, scandalized like he’s just been accused of murder in public.

“Not yet,” Leo says ominously, eyebrows raised like he’s issuing a threat and a promise all at once.

Cecil, who has been enjoying this like it’s the season finale of his favorite drama, is practically vibrating in his seat. “Oh, this is gonna be fun.”

“Fun?” Will hisses, turning to him like a man betrayed. “They’re going to break Nico!”

Percy snorts. “Please. He’s tougher than he looks.”

Will glances at Lou Ellen for backup, but she’s just sipping her drink, wearing the exact expression of someone witnessing a beautiful disaster unfold in real time. Like she’s rooting for the avalanche.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Will mumbles, more to himself than anyone else. “I can’t believe you’re seriously going to try and get Nico di Angelo high.”

Leo grins, utterly delighted. “If it makes you feel better, we’ll be supervising. Jason’s bringing snacks.”

“Not really,” Will mutters, exhaling like he’s aged ten years in the last ten minutes. “But thanks.”

Percy claps him on the shoulder, his grin somehow both comforting and terrifying. “You worry too much, Solace.”

Will stares at him, then turns his eyes to Leo—still grinning like he’s already invented the next disaster—and then back to Percy again. He genuinely doesn’t know whether to start laughing hysterically or crawl under the table and disappear forever. Possibly both.

Then Cecil, clearly sensing the perfect moment to stir the pot, leans in with a smile sharp enough to cut diamonds. “So I, uh… I guess we could come to an understanding.”

Percy raises an eyebrow. “Do we get a punch card?”

Leo claps his hands. “One free ounce after ten visits!”

Will groans and drops his forehead onto the table with a thud. “I need better friends.”

“You love us,” Lou Ellen says, serenely sipping her iced coffee like this is just another normal Wednesday.

Cecil pats him on the back with the enthusiasm of someone sealing a devil’s pact. “And you’re never getting out.”

Will lifts his head just enough to level Percy and Leo with a stare that’s more exhausted than suspicious now. “Okay, but… why does Nico need help loosening up?”

​​The question hangs there, heavier than Will expects. It lingers in the air like cigarette smoke, curling into the silence, and suddenly the table doesn’t feel like the same place it was two seconds ago.

Percy’s easygoing slouch vanishes. One second he’s leaning back, borderline lounging, and the next he’s sitting upright, back stiff, jaw tight. Leo, who had been halfway through sketching something that definitely shouldn’t exist on the corner of Cecil’s notebook—a drawing involving tentacles and possibly a duck—freezes mid-stroke, pen hovering just above the page.

The shift is immediate and jarring. It’s like someone flipped a switch and drained all the warmth out of the space. The lights haven’t changed, the library hasn’t quieted—but the vibe has. It’s as though Will has just asked the one question they were all desperately hoping he wouldn’t.

And he knows it.

Will swallows. Regret hits him like a sucker punch to the gut. He shouldn’t have said anything. He should’ve laughed off the mafia jokes and left it at that. But it’s too late now—the words are out there, and Percy and Leo are both looking at him like he just stepped over some invisible line.

Percy clears his throat, a brittle sound in the sudden stillness. He glances sideways at Leo, the way someone might when silently begging for backup. Leo shrugs in response, just the barest shift of his shoulders, but the meaning is clear: your problem . Percy shoots him a half-hearted glare, the kind that says you are the worst , but it doesn’t help.

Finally, Percy runs a hand through his already-messy hair—an automatic, nervous gesture—and tries to pull off a casual tone. It fools exactly no one.

“You know,” Percy says, too brightly, “he’s just… Nico. He’s always been… wound a little tight.”

Will narrows his eyes. He’s not letting them squirm out of this that easily. “You already said that.”

“Right,” Percy nods quickly. Too quickly. “It’s… it’s a personality thing.”

Leo jumps in, voice just a little too loud and eager. “Yeah! Like, that’s just… who he is.”

Lou Ellen, unfazed by the palpable tension and apparently immune to secondhand awkwardness, lifts an eyebrow and says dryly, “You mean a brooding, mysterious loner?”

She sounds more amused than accusatory, but Will barely registers it. His focus is laser-locked on the two boys across from him, whose body language is screaming abort mission.

Percy flinches like she hit a nerve. “I wouldn’t call him that,” he says quietly, almost defensively.

Will frowns. “That’s literally what everyone calls him.”

“We don’t!” Leo blurts out, looking personally offended. “We call him… Nico. Most of the time.”

A pause follows. A long, stretching beat of silence. Lou Ellen sips her iced coffee with an exaggerated slurp. Cecil’s grin has sharpened into something predatory—he looks like a shark circling blood.

Will leans in slightly, elbows on the table, squinting at Percy and Leo like he’s trying to crack a riddle carved into stone. “But seriously. If he’s so tightly wound, why now? Why does he suddenly need to be… loosened?”

Percy’s lips press into a flat line. He shifts in his seat, eyes darting toward the window like he’s contemplating a sudden escape route. Leo’s fingers twitch against the tabletop, his knee bouncing under the table. For once, he doesn’t say anything.

“It’s been a… rough time lately,” Percy finally says, his voice lower now. “You know. Stuff with his family.”

Will’s eyebrows shoot up, his mind suddenly remembering the conversation he overheard at the restaurant a few weeks ago. “What kind of stuff?”

There’s a beat of silence where Will can see Percy trying to calculate exactly how much to share. His fingers drum against his the desk— tap tap tap , uneven and uncertain.

Percy opens his mouth, then closes it again. Nothing comes out.

Leo leaps into the gap, tone light but jittery, like he’s hoping speed will make up for substance. “Personal stuff.”

Under the table, Cecil kicks Will’s shin. It’s not subtle, but it’s also not meant to be. It’s a very specific kick—the kind that says shut up now before you accidentally uncover the plot to a crime drama .

Will doesn’t shut up.

“Like… family drama?” he asks, still pressing, still chasing that thread, even though everything in the atmosphere is screaming at him to stop pulling.

Percy’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t answer right away. He looks tired in a way Will hadn’t noticed before, like there’s a weight on his shoulders he’s been carrying for a while. Leo, for his part, shoots Percy a wild-eyed look, like he’s about to physically throw himself in front of this conversation to stop it.

“Yeah. Sure,” Percy says eventually, but his voice sounds hollow.

Will blinks. He can practically hear the cogs turning in his own head, gears locking into place as his imagination takes off like it’s been lit on fire.

“Like dangerous family drama?” he asks before he can stop himself.

That gets him a look.

Percy stares at him. Leo stares at Percy. Percy stares at Leo. It’s a silent war of wills that ends with Leo glancing toward the door like he’s mentally calculating how fast he can bolt.

“Depends on your definition of dangerous,” Percy mutters.

Will’s brain takes that and runs. Full speed. No brakes.

Depends on your definition of dangerous. What does that even mean? Is there a scale? Like, fun, dangerous , or international crime syndicate dangerous? Because from where Will is sitting, it sounds like the kind of dangerous thing that involves burner phones and dramatic inheritance feuds.

He’s spiralling. Hard.

His thoughts jump from one rumour to the next in rapid succession: that Nico is the estranged heir to a European crime empire. That his father owns half of Italy and is working on annexing the other half with financial leverage and deeply unsettling vibes. That his uncle is some kind of shadowy puppetmaster, playing out a family chess match that started in the 1930s and is still ongoing. That Nico was supposed to take over some ancient family business, but refused, and now there are people watching him.

Will’s heart is thudding in his chest. His breath catches in his throat.

And worst of all—worst of all —is that none of it seems impossible. Not with the way Percy and Leo are looking at each other. Not with the way the air has gone thick with secrets.

Will’s hand curls around his coffee like it’s an anchor. He stares at Percy and Leo and wonders, what the hell have I just stepped into?

And then he thinks, what does this mean for Nico?

“So,” Will says slowly, eyes narrowing like he’s trying to defuse a bomb, “when you say ‘family drama’…”

Leo jumps in before Percy can even open his mouth. “It’s fine. Totally normal. Very… European .”

“European?” Will echoes, his brain stuttering to a halt mid-thought.

“You know,” Leo says, waving his hand vaguely through the air like he’s conducting an invisible orchestra of clichés. “Big families. Lots of opinions. Dramatic hand gestures. That kind of thing.”

Percy makes a strangled sound that could be either a cough or a laugh, it’s hard to tell. But he doesn’t correct him, and that’s maybe the most suspicious part of all.

Will blinks slowly. “European,” he repeats, because his brain has decided that’s the only word it’s capable of processing right now. 

He already knew Nico was Itaalian, his brain struggles to remind him, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he’s cataloguing everything he knows about Italian culture (which is mostly pasta and the Godfather films) and everything he knows about Nico di Angelo (which is, admittedly, only slightly more robust and almost entirely sourced from gossip, late-night speculation with Lou Ellen and Cecil, and the occasional stolen glance across the quad).

He’s still spiraling, and he knows it, because now his brain is running a full-blown heritage analysis like he’s the host of a genealogy documentary.

Lou Ellen, seated to his right, is frozen mid-page in her notebook, her eyes locked on him in a silent plea. She’s on the verge of losing it, he can tell—trapped in the purgatory between don’t push this and please, I need to see how far you’ll go . Her expression flickers somewhere between delighted anticipation and secondhand dread.

Cecil, naturally, is no help whatsoever. He leans closer, voice low and conspiratorial. “We are so sleeping with the fishes when Nico finds out about this.”

Will ignores them. His brain is still catching up, still trying to fit the pieces together.

“Nico is Italian, right?” he asks, tone somewhere between faint curiosity and open thirst.

“Half,” Percy says quickly, seizing the opportunity to redirect. “On his mom’s side.”

“And the other half?” Will asks before he can stop himself.

Percy and Leo exchange another look—one of those silent, oh gods, we’re still doing this? looks—but then Percy sighs, resigned. “Greek. His dad’s Greek.”

And there it is. Will doesn’t know why this is the thing that tips the scale, but suddenly he’s even more intrigued. It feels unfair, almost—to already be head-over-heels obsessed with Nico’s jawline and scowl and mysterious aura, and now the universe has decided to throw Mediterranean heritage into the mix?

Of course he’s half Italian, Will thinks, vaguely enraged by how hot that is. And of course he’s also Greek, because why wouldn’t the universe double down on aesthetic drama and tragic backstory? Suddenly Nico’s cheekbones make even more sense. The way he carries himself, too—all ancient-bloodline gloom and aristocratic menace.

Will is so distracted by the visual of Nico brooding in a crumbling villa somewhere on the cliffs of southern Italy, overlooking a dark, stormy sea, that he almost misses Percy clapping his hands.

“Yep!” Percy says, far too loudly for a library. “So, we’re just gonna get him to chill out for a night. No big deal.”

“No big deal,” Will echoes hollowly, though it feels like a very big deal. Like the kind of big deal that ends with someone sobbing in a candlelit confession booth or swearing eternal loyalty to a bloodline older than democracy.

Leo grins and shoots finger guns at them both. “Glad we cleared that up.”

Will just stares. For a long moment, his brain is still running background checks on Nico’s entire ancestry, trying to decide whether being attracted to someone who might be the heir to an international crime empire is technically a red flag or just his type.

And then, just as he’s starting to convince himself that maybe things are winding down—maybe Percy and Leo will finally leave and stop upending his already chaotic life—there’s a shift in the air.

A familiar chill, a pause, like the moment before a storm breaks.

And then, out of nowhere, Nico appears.

Will doesn’t know how long he’s been standing there—seconds? minutes? Was he always here? Is this a stealth skill? A curse? One second, there’s empty space behind Percy’s chair. The next, there’s Nico di Angelo, standing there, black-clad and shadow-silent, hands tucked into the pockets of his coat, hair slightly tousled like he just stepped out of a poem written by someone dying of yearning.

Cecil makes a strangled sound like he’s trying not to laugh.

Lou Ellen covers her mouth with her hand, eyes wide with delighted horror.

And Will—well, Will is pretty sure he just stopped breathing.

Because Nico is standing right there. 

And he is half Italian. And half Greek. And probably 100% going to ruin Will Solace’s life.

Will’s only coherent thought is: I am so incredibly fucked.

“Oh gods,” Will blurts, heart leaping violently into his throat, one hand clutching at his chest like he’s just gone into cardiac arrest. “Where the hell did you come from?”

Because Nico di Angelo has materialized out of thin air like a vengeful spirit, and Will is going to need a defibrillator. Or a therapist. Possibly both.

Nico doesn’t look at him. He doesn’t even acknowledge him. His dark eyes are locked on Percy and Leo, his expression cool and unreadable—except for the simmering suspicion that radiates off him like cold fog rolling in from some haunted sea. His all-black outfit, his sharp cheekbones, the way his hair curls slightly behind his ear—Will might scream. Or cry. Or throw himself into a river.

“What are you two doing?” Nico asks, voice smooth as glass, but with a deadly edge that makes Will sit up straighter in his seat like he’s just been called to the principal’s office.

Percy jumps hard enough to jostle the table, nearly knocking over Cecil’s coffee. “Nothing!”

Leo pops up from his seat like a panicked meerkat. “Studying!”

Will’s eyebrows shoot up so far he nearly pulls a muscle. This is it , he thinks. This is the moment they implode. And I will have a front-row seat to the explosion. I might actually die from secondhand embarrassment, and honestly? Worth it.

“Studying what?” Nico’s voice is lower now, lethal in that calm, unimpressed way. He narrows his eyes, arms crossed, jaw tight. There’s a beat of silence so loud Will thinks he can hear his own heart thudding.

No one speaks. No one even breathes.

Lou Ellen, to Will’s left, takes a slow, calculated sip of her iced coffee like she’s watching a live performance of The Idiot Games: Weed Edition and has no plans to interfere.

“Economics!” Percy blurts out.

“Of ancient Rome,” Leo adds with unearned confidence, nodding so hard it looks like his head might detach from his body. “Fascinating stuff.”

Will is literally biting the inside of his cheek to stay silent. His entire body feels like it’s clenching inwards, folding into itself with secondhand dread.

Nico stares at them, expression blank and terrifying. A death god incarnate in skinny jeans.

“We’re writing a paper,” Percy lies, very badly. He nods too fast, too desperate, like if he says it enough times it’ll become true. “It’s… uh… about the correlation between…”

“…grain prices,” Leo throws in, seizing the baton mid-relay, “and… gladiatorial entertainment!”

He looks thrilled. Like he just invented electricity. Will, meanwhile, wants to crawl under the table and stay there until graduation.

Nico doesn’t blink. “Gladiatorial entertainment.”

“Yeah,” Percy says, visibly sweating. “You know, like—uh—how cheap bread makes people more likely to attend… violent sporting events.”

Will covers his mouth with one hand. He can’t tell if he’s trying not to laugh or trying to muffle a scream.

Leo, ever the chaos goblin, points at Nico like he’s just remembered they’re all in an educational institution. “Panem et circenses!”

“That’s Latin,” Percy whispers helpfully to no one.

Lou Ellen leans closer, her voice gleeful and low. “They’re going to die,” she murmurs. “We are going to watch them die.”

Will nods mutely, still covering his face. His shoulders shake with laughter he can’t release, and also, potentially, with the force of his enduring crush on Nico di Angelo, who continues to look absolutely, infuriatingly good even as he stares them down like he’s weighing their souls.

Nico crosses his arms tighter. “You two don’t take any history classes.”

Silence. Will can actually hear Leo’s brain buffering.

“Extra credit?” Percy offers weakly.

Will wheezes.

He is not okay.

Leo elbows Percy like that’s going to help, except Percy jolts with a yelp and slams his knee into the table leg. Cecil’s notebook stack wobbles ominously. Will braces himself for impact.

“You’re buying weed,” Nico says flatly, his tone the kind of deadpan that could probably kill a man.

Leo’s face freezes mid-grin. “What? Noooo.”

Percy makes a sound like a dying cat. “Us? Never.”

Nico’s gaze shifts. Sharp. Lethal.

And lands on Will.

Will dies.

Or maybe he just ascends briefly to another plane of existence. Because Nico di Angelo is staring directly at him—eyes narrowed, expression unreadable—and Will, who is already halfway in love with him, finds his soul departing his body.

“Are they buying weed?” Nico asks.

Will opens his mouth. No sound comes out. Then Lou Ellen’s foot slams into his shin under the table.

“ No! ” Will blurts, voice about two octaves too high. “They’re researching… ancient… grain.”

He feels like he’s being possessed by an idiot.

“Ancient grain,” Nico repeats, flat as a grave.

“Like quinoa,” Lou Ellen says, without missing a beat, her tone grave. “Very important stuff.”

Will swears she’s enjoying this too much.

There’s a long pause.

A heavy, terrible, horrible pause.

Will feels like he’s sitting on a ticking bomb. Nico is just staring, his eyes flicking across each of them like he’s updating their gravestones in his head.

Then—finally—he exhales through his nose.

“Fine,” Nico says, though he sounds unconvinced. “Just—don’t be idiots.”

Percy visibly deflates. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Leo salutes. “Sir, yes, sir.”

Nico closes his eyes. Just briefly. It’s the kind of pained expression Will recognizes from group project meetings and major family holidays.

“I hate both of you,” Nico mutters.

“You love us,” Percy chirps.

Nico says nothing. Just turns, smooth and silent as smoke, and vanishes into the stacks again—like a bat into the night. Will doesn’t even hear his footsteps.

They all stare after him, caught in a stunned, reverent silence—like they’ve just survived a brush with death. Or, worse, with Nico di Angelo mildly disappointed in them.

Cecil exhales long and slow, collapsing back into his chair like he’s just finished a marathon. “I’m genuinely impressed he hasn’t murdered you.”

Percy shrugs, totally unfazed. “Give it time.”

Will slumps forward dramatically, arms folded on the table, forehead pressed against the cool wood like it might absorb his regret. “I cannot believe you guys are getting him high.”

Leo beams like a proud kindergartener who just ate glue and called it a snack. “Oh, we’re definitely getting him high.”

“And,” Cecil adds, looking far too smug, “we’re absolutely charging you extra for the drama you just caused.”

“Worth it,” Percy says without missing a beat.

Will groans, voice muffled against the table. “I need a vacation.”

“Well,” Percy says, flashing them a sheepish grin that somehow manages to be both charming and entirely unrepentant, “thanks for… you know… not throwing us under the bus.”

Leo nods, still bouncing with chaotic energy, as if almost being murdered by Nico has only made him stronger. “Yeah, appreciate you guys covering. Seriously.”

Will slowly lifts his head, looking at them like they’ve grown second heads and sprouted matching “hello, I ruin lives” name tags. “We didn’t cover for you. We just—panicked. That was panic.”

“Semantics,” Leo shrugs, completely unbothered. “Anyway, we’ll swing by later?”

Cecil, ever the entrepreneur, leans back like he’s conducting high-level negotiations. “My office hours are strictly informal, but sure. After six?”

“Perfect,” Percy says, stretching like he’s just had a nice jog through a minefield.

Leo grins, shooting a finger-gun. “We’ll bring snacks.”

Will groans like the weight of Olympus has landed on his back. “Oh, great. Now they’re coming to our apartment.”

“They’re bringing snacks,” Lou Ellen points out, sipping her coffee with the air of a smug oracle. “That’s basically a peace offering.”

“Or a bribe,” Will mutters, but it’s too late. Percy claps him on the back with so much force Will nearly faceplants into the table again.

“See you guys later,” Percy chirps, already striding off like nothing happened. Leo follows, still humming like a cartoon villain. They vanish into the shelves, trailing mayhem in their wake.

Will watches them go, dead-eyed, then slumps even harder in his chair. He stares up at the ceiling like it holds divine answers. Maybe if he stares long enough, a god will descend and smite him out of this hell.

“I feel like we’re about to get roped into something we can’t get out of,” he mumbles.

“Oh, one hundred percent,” Lou Ellen agrees, far too brightly.

Cecil leans forward, eyes gleaming with conspiracy. “Okay, but hear me out: what if this is how they recruit new people into their secret society?”

Will shoots him a skeptical look. “You’re basing that on what exactly?”

Cecil starts counting on his fingers. “One, they’re way too casual about showing up out of nowhere. Two, they always speak in code. Three, Jason probably runs some kind of initiation ceremony.”

Will rubs his temples. “Jason runs a book club.”

“A cover book club,” Cecil corrects, clearly insulted. “They probably make you recite ancient oaths over first edition hardbacks.”

Lou Ellen nods solemnly. “And sacrifice a goat.”

Will chokes. “We are not sacrificing anything.”

“Yet,” Cecil says ominously, waggling his eyebrows.

Will groans, tilting his head back with a long, dramatic exhale. “I cannot believe they’re coming to our apartment.”

Lou Ellen raises an eyebrow. “You’re just mad because Nico might show up.”

“I am not—” Will starts, voice cracking.

“You are absolutely mad about that,” Cecil cuts in gleefully. “He might show up, see your very lived-in apartment, and realize you’re not the mysterious enigma he thinks you are.”

“He doesn’t think anything about me,” Will insists, but the traitorous blush blooming across his cheeks says otherwise.

Lou Ellen grins like a shark. “You keep telling yourself that.”

They lapse into a brief, dangerous silence, like the calm before a particularly stupid storm. Then Cecil snaps his fingers.

“Okay, but what if they’re trying to distract us?” he says. “While Percy and Leo are at our place, they create some kind of diversion that gets us into the stairwell, while Jason’s probably breaking into our rooms to look for classified documents.”

Lou Ellen snorts. “Right. Jason’s got nothing better to do than rifle through your sock drawer.”

“Hey,” Cecil says, offended. “You don’t know what secrets I keep in there.”

Will groans again, covering his face. “I can’t do this today.”

“You can ,” Lou Ellen says, patting his arm like a coach before a doomed match. “Because we have to clean the apartment now.”

Will freezes. Horror dawns in his eyes. “Oh gods. We can’t let them see the apartment like it is. I really can’t do this, I have the lunch shift at the restaurant today.”

“It’s a disaster zone,” Cecil says, cheerfully unbothered.

“It’s an authentic disaster zone,” Lou Ellen amends, as though already planning which pile of laundry can be passed off as ‘boho-chic clutter.’

“Leo might actually try to fix something,” Cecil says. “Which would definitely make it worse.”

Will stares at them, wild-eyed. “Well, don’t jinx it.”

“We can’t help it,” Lou Ellen and Cecil sing in perfect unison.

“Jinx,” Will offers weakly, before he drops his forehead back onto the table with a thunk . “Why does Nico have to be so— Nico ?”

Cecil doesn’t even blink. “Because the universe loves to torment you.”

“And honestly?” Lou Ellen says, sipping the last of her coffee. “We’re here for it.”

And just like that, they’re brainstorming cleaning strategies and debating whether throwing a blanket over a mess counts as tidying. All the while, they continue speculating whether Percy and Leo are inducting them into a cult, a CIA black-ops program, or the world’s most aggressively exclusive brunch club.

Spoiler alert: Will is not convinced it isn’t all three. And unfortunately, Nico might be part of it. Which is somehow worse. And also... kind of thrilling. Gods help him.

Notes:

thanks so much for reading guys! this is so out of the realm of what i usually write, trying to channel the funny-chaotic-without-it-being-cringey energy is definitely a challenge, but i hope u guys like it anyways

Chapter 7: How to Watch Your Friends Weaponize a Joint to Expose Your Sexuality and Then Immediately Plot Your Love Life Like It's the B-Plot of a Stoner Rom-Com

By the time Will finally gets to lean against the counter, the late afternoon sun has dipped low enough to slant through the tall windows, painting long, gold-drenched stripes across the empty restaurant floor. It’s the quiet lull between the lunch shift and the impending dinner rush—the kind of rare peace that only exists in a place like this for about twenty minutes.

Will’s feet ache in that special, deep-bone kind of way, and he can already feel the beginnings of a tension headache settling behind his eyes. His apron is smeared with the ghosts of a dozen latte spills and tomato-based disasters, and his notepad is bulging with the desperate scrawls of the overcaffeinated and under-tipped.

It’s not glamorous. But it’s quiet.

Until Austin arrives.

“Hey,” Austin says, sidling up beside him like a fox in a henhouse, grinning like he knows a secret Will absolutely does not want him to know. “So. How’s the hangover?”

Will exhales slowly, like he’s trying to release a demon. “That was two weeks ago.”

“Yeah,” Austin says, leaning on the counter with the sort of lazy, practiced ease that screams music major with no regard for physical pain or emotional consequences . “And you look like you’re still recovering from it. So.” He raises a meaningful eyebrow. “Are we going to talk about them , or do I have to start listing names until you break?”

Will doesn’t dignify that with a response.

Austin clicks his tongue. “Rude. I’ll take that as a yes.”

Will groans and tilts his head back against the cool marble of the bar, eyes closed. “Can we not do this today?”

“That sounds like a yes to me,” Austin says, cheerful as ever. “Which is good, because I’m already doing it. So. The Seven were here yesterday. Again.”

Will cracks one eye open. “I know. I was there.”

Austin widens his eyes like he’s witnessing a miracle. “Exactly. And you were sweating.”

Will sighs. “It was warm.”

“It was aggressively air-conditioned,” Austin counters immediately. “The only heat in that room was radiating off your crush-induced panic attack.”

Will presses his rag to his face and mutters something that might be a prayer for strength. “Austin.”

“I mean it, dude. You were like two seconds from fainting. And that was before Nico didn’t show up. Again.”

Will bristles despite himself. “He’s allowed to not come to dinner.”

“Ah, so you were sweating because Nico di Angelo wasn’t there.” Austin smirks. “You are in love with him.”

Will glares, but it’s half-hearted. “He’s not even—”

“Don’t even finish that sentence. We’ve been over this.”

He has the gall to look smug. Will, in response, scrubs at a non-existent stain on the counter with excessive force and mutters something deeply unflattering under his breath.

Austin leans his chin in his hand. “So what’s it like? Serving them, I mean. Is it terrifying? Or just surreal?”

Will hesitates, weighing how much trouble he’ll be in with himself if he answers honestly. But Austin is patient in the worst way—he waits like a cat watching a wounded bird—and eventually, Will caves.

“They’re not what I expected,” he says slowly, scrubbing harder at the counter.

Austin perks up. “Go on.”

“Percy and Annabeth are basically what you'd imagine if a Greek power couple got locked in a Starbucks for too long. She’s got knives in her eyes. He’s… like if golden retrievers were six feet tall and deeply, deeply chaotic.”

Austin nods solemnly. “Checks out.”

“Jason and Piper are like two cool RA’s you’d trust with your life but also suspect of starting underground fight clubs.”

“Terrifying.”

“Hazel’s like… if a Victorian ghost girl got really into geology. Polite, though.”

“And Frank?”

Will shrugs. “Suspiciously wholesome.”

Austin presses a hand to his heart. “Those are always the deadliest.”

Will can’t help a faint smile. “And Leo… Leo is banned from the grill section of the kitchen. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Austin raises his eyebrows. “And what about our favorite cryptid?”

Will blinks. “Nico?”

Austin leans in further, waggling his brows. “Yes. Mr. Eternal Enigma himself.”

Will’s voice comes out a little too neutral. “He’s… complicated.”

“Complicated how?”

Will pretends to clean a perfectly clean counter. “He’s just… not like the others. He’s just never here with them, which is fine, I’m not like hung up about it or disappointed or anything.”

Austin’s grin falters, just slightly. “Yeah, kind of weird right? They come here all the time. Big table, big tips, big personalities. But Nico’s been here exactly once, the time I told you about, when he left exactly two minutes after they sat down.”

Will’s shoulder slump. “I mean they don’t have to do everything together.”

“Yeah but,” Austin continues. “Him not showing up? That’s intentional. Avoidant. Suspicious. ”

Will doesn't respond. His silence is answer enough.

Austin eyes him, curious. “Or he’s just mysterious like that. Adds to the allure. Speaking of which, I have gossip— have you heard the latest?”

Will raises an eyebrow. “Define ‘latest.’”

Austin leans closer like he’s about to tell Will who killed JFK. “Okay. First of all—confirmed sighting of Annabeth entering a building that definitely houses hedge fund lawyers.”

“Sounds fake.”

“She was holding blueprints.”

“Okay, sounds less fake.”

“And Jason? Supposedly interned for a senator last summer and vanished off the roster two weeks in. They say it was a cover job. Witness protection style.”

Will raises both eyebrows. “That one’s true.”

Austin gasps. “No way!”

Will nods solemnly. “Sworn to secrecy.”

Austin clutches his chest. “You’re a vault of forbidden knowledge.”

“And yet,” Will says dryly, “you never stop knocking.”

“Because one day you’ll break,” Austin declares. “Anyway, tell me your favorite.”

Will leans in with mock seriousness. “There’s this one about Nico. Supposedly he disappeared for three months last year. People swear he got into a black car with tinted windows after his last final and wasn’t seen again until September.”

Austin’s mouth falls open. “ Kidnapped ?”

Will shrugs. “Depends on who you ask. Some people say he was dragged back to Italy to take over the family business.”

Austin gasps. “The mafia ?”

Will nods solemnly. “Or a vampire coven.”

Austin clutches the counter like it might steady him. “That’s it. I’m starting a podcast.”

Will just laughs and shakes his head. “You and everyone else.”

He doesn’t mean to think about him. Not really. But Nico lives in his mind like he lives in the corners of a library—quiet, deliberate, and always somewhere just out of reach. A whisper between pages. A shadow between shelves. It’s ridiculous, how often Will’s thoughts return to him. It’s worse than a crush. It’s some incurable affliction of the soul.

And tonight—he’s thinking about summer.

About how Nico had stiffened ever so slightly at the party when Will had, without thinking, asked what he’d done over the break. It hadn’t seemed like a particularly intrusive question at the time, just idle curiosity, the kind of thing you ask when trying to bridge the vast ocean of silence between two people who do not know each other well. But Nico had frozen. Not in the overt, theatrical way someone might when hiding something—but subtly, like a creature sensing danger, like he was resisting the instinct to vanish into the floorboards.

And then there had been Leo and Percy.

They’d spoken in vague circles, like two men who knew the truth but were unwilling to name it. There was a weight to the way they said family drama , like the phrase itself had jagged edges. And then Hazel—sweet, strange Hazel—had dropped the word Persephone like a stone into water, and the ripple of discomfort that followed had told Will more than he was meant to know.

Will wonders, sometimes, what Nico’s summer must have looked like. What kind of house he returned to. What kind of silence met him at the door. What kind of father summoned him back across the ocean like a chess piece rather than a son.

He knows now that Nico is half-Italian on his mother’s side, half-Greek on his father’s. A strange and beautiful duality that fits him perfectly—one foot in Rome, one in Athens, and yet belonging fully to neither. The kind of boy who could stand at the crumbling edge of two empires and still not be home.

And maybe that’s what Will finds so inexplicably magnetic about him. That constant tension. That ache of rootlessness. That way he carries himself like a storm trapped in a glass bottle—dangerous only if shaken.

It’s stupid, Will tells himself. He barely knows him. A few shared conversations, a hungover meet cute in the bookstore, a spilled drink at an ill-fated party. Nico is a mystery, tightly wound and locked behind a thousand iron gates. And Will—Will, who has spent his entire life trying to heal people, to fix what’s broken in everyone else—is deluding himself if he thinks Nico would ever want help. Let alone from him.

But still. He wants to. Gods, he wants to.

There is something in Will Solace that cannot rest when someone is in pain. A thread wound through his ribs, tugged taut by suffering, even when that suffering is unspoken. Especially then. His mother used to say he had a heart like a battlefield medic—rushing headlong into places he shouldn’t go, always bleeding for someone else. She’d meant it as a compliment. Will’s not sure it wasn’t a curse.

Because Nico di Angelo is not someone who will be bandaged. He is not a broken thing waiting to be mended. He is more like glass: sharp and perfect and likely to cut anyone who dares to touch. And Will, foolish as ever, wants to touch anyway.

It reminds him—strangely, absurdly—of Pride and Prejudice . Of Mr. Darcy, distant and unreadable, and Elizabeth Bennet, all fire and pride and veiled vulnerability. Only Will doesn’t know which one he is. Maybe both. Maybe neither.

Maybe they are both so convinced that the other could never feel what they feel, that they are walking in parallel lines, too afraid to reach across the space between them.

He wishes he could say something. Do something. Something more helpful than Leo’s well-meaning chaos or Percy’s “ let’s get him high ” campaign. He wants to offer comfort, or safety, or just a quiet moment where Nico doesn’t have to be anything other than himself.

But instead, he polishes wine glasses and replays the memory of Nico’s eyes—dark, unreadable, ancient in a way Will can’t explain—and tells himself not to think too hard about it. Not to care.

Because caring for someone like Nico di Angelo is like loving a thunderstorm.

Beautiful. Distant.

And very likely to leave you in the wreckage.

The kitchen bell dings, announcing his last table’s order, and Will straightens with a groan. He grabs the plates and starts toward the dining room.

Austin calls after him, loud enough for the whole back of house to hear: “Just admit it! You’re in love with him!”

Will doesn’t respond.

But his ears are pink.

And maybe—just maybe—he is. Oh, who is he kidding? He totally is. 

Will’s halfway back to the counter, balancing a tray of empty glasses like a precarious sculpture, when he spots a flash of red hair slicing through the dining room. Rachel Elizabeth Dare, his manager, is moving like a heat-seeking missile in combat boots. Her tailored blazer—fraying a little at the cuffs but still sharp—swings around her legs as she beelines for him.

“Oh no,” he mutters under his breath. She has that look on her face. The one that says: Hey, I know your shift technically ended ten minutes ago, but I value your soul less than an efficient floor plan.

Austin catches on immediately, popping up from behind the counter like a meerkat. His eyes widen in alarm. “Abort,” he whispers, ducking behind the espresso machine like he’s dodging live fire. “She’s coming. You’re on your own.”

Will curses softly under his breath. He’d already pulled an extra hour yesterday when Rachel had “accidentally” double-booked herself for a gallery show and a vendor meeting. And he needs to leave now—tonight is high-risk at the apartment. He has a moral obligation to prevent Cecil from lighting incense in the toaster again, which, according to Cecil, “ enhances the vibes .” Last time, it enhanced the fire department’s response time.

Rachel reaches him just as he’s unloading the tray behind the bar, arms crossed like a judgmental Renaissance statue. Her eyeliner is slightly smudged, her hair pinned back with a pencil she definitely borrowed from the reservation desk two weeks ago and never returned.

“Hey, Will—any chance you can stick around another hour? Janie called out, and the dinner rush—”

“Ah,” Will cuts in, spinning around with a hand pressed dramatically to his chest, “I would love to, Rachel. Really. But I can’t.”

She squints at him, one perfectly sculpted brow arching with suspicion. “Why?”

Will scrambles. The lie comes out like an impulse, ridiculous and wild but somehow delivered with Oscar-worthy gravity. “I have… a family emergency.”

Rachel narrows her eyes. She knows this game. Once upon a time, she ran in upper-crust New York social circles, where emergencies involved designer mishaps and wine cellars flooding. But that was before she walked out on all of it—before she told her controlling, obscenely wealthy father that she wasn’t going to some finishing school in Switzerland to marry a hedge fund. Instead, she took her sketchbook, fled to the city, and ended up here, managing a chaotic fusion restaurant-slash-art-galley  after he cut her off completely. The blazer is secondhand. The pearl earrings are her grandmother’s. The jawline is all Dare.

“Really?” she asks flatly.

“Yes,” Will says, nodding with comical solemnity. “My cousin’s hamster—no, guinea pig —needs emergency surgery. It swallowed a—um—a diamond earring. Very tragic. Very delicate.”

Behind him, Austin makes a sound like he’s choking on a laugh, ducking farther behind the espresso machine. Will pretends not to hear it.

“We’re all rushing to the vet,” he continues, gesturing vaguely like he’s painting the scene with words. “Because it’s one of those high-stakes situations, you know? Life or death. Tiny ventilator and everything.”

Rachel just stares. She’s heard it all before—she’s been lied to by better actors, but there’s something about Will’s earnestness that softens her expression just slightly. He means well. She’s seen him stumble in after double shifts, eyes half-closed, still asking if she wants help restocking the dessert case. She’s seen him at her last gallery showing, too, awkwardly standing near a minimalist painting of a woman screaming into a briefcase, sipping cheap boxed wine and pretending to understand the symbolism. He and Austin had guilt-tripped her into giving them matching Saturday shifts the next week, which was possibly her greatest managerial weakness: affection.

Will clears his throat. “And if I’m not there, the guinea pig—uh, Jeffrey—might not pull through. He’s got attachment issues.”

Still nothing. Rachel’s face is unreadable.

Will folds his arms, standing up straighter in a feeble attempt at dignity. “This family’s been through enough.”

A long, pointed pause. Then, finally, Rachel presses her lips together in a thin line and gives him a slow, skeptical nod. “Wow.”

“Right?” Will says, seizing the moment. “It’s devastating.”

She sighs, long and theatrical. “Fine. Go save Jeffrey.”

Will nearly sags with relief. “Thank you, Rachel. You’re a good person. The best, really.”

He turns to head for the staff room, victory just within reach, when her voice cuts through the air behind him like a whip. “You’re working a double on Sunday.”

Will groans, dragging a hand down his face. “Jeffrey might relapse.”

Rachel snorts. “I’ll send flowers.”

As he’s grabbing his bag from the cubbies, Austin pops back up like a prairie dog. “Nice save, Dr. Solace.”

“Shut up,” Will mutters, but he’s grinning as he clocks out, slinging his apron over the hook like he’s throwing off shackles. His shift was over, his manager hadn’t murdered him, and Jeffrey the guinea pig had tragically survived another day.

He’s halfway to the front door when Rachel calls out again from behind the host stand, not even looking up as she flips through reservation slips. “Give Jeffrey my best!”

Will throws a thumbs-up over his shoulder. “I’ll tell him you said that.”

And then he’s gone, slipping out the front door into the chilled air of early evening, racing home to whatever madness awaited him. If he was lucky, the apartment would still be standing, and Lou Ellen hadn’t let Leo Valdez convince them to set up an actual fog machine for ambiance. If he wasn’t lucky… well, he hoped they’d at least remembered to unplug it.

 

Will bursts through the apartment door, keys jangling in his hand as he fumbles with the lock, shoulders tense, bracing for the familiar symphony of chaos: music blaring at mismatched volumes from three separate devices, someone shouting about spilled glitter, and the inevitable scent of something either burning or just beginning to rot.

Instead, he’s met with… silence.

Stillness.

And an apartment that looks less like a college rental and more like it’s been professionally staged for a luxury open house.

Will stops dead in the doorway. His brain, wired for emergencies and clutter, needs a full five seconds to recalibrate. The living room is immaculate. The scuffed hardwood floors—usually obscured beneath layers of laundry, textbooks, and abandoned coffee cups—have been vacuumed to a clinical sheen. The sagging couch, their beloved upholstered eyesore, has been scrubbed into a state of unnerving newness. It smells like lemon-scented disinfectant and… restraint.

The kitchen counter gleams with the sterile, menacing gleam of an operating table. Gone are the envelopes with half-peeled address labels, the army of mugs, and whatever half-finished Rube Goldberg machine Cecil had been engineering out of spoons and duct tape. Even the posters on the walls—mostly ironic art school rejects and vintage space prints—have been perfectly leveled, their edges aligned like surgical incisions.

There’s a single candle flickering on the coffee table.

Vanilla.

Will blinks once, twice. He sets his bag down carefully, as if any sudden motion might shatter the illusion. Or trigger a trap.

“This is…” he says aloud, slowly stepping farther inside, “...unnerving.”

He can’t remember the last time the apartment looked like this. Possibly because it never has. Not once. Ever. A creeping dread slinks up his spine, a subtle rush of adrenaline blooming just under his ribs, tightening his chest.

Something is wrong.

It’s too quiet. And not the peaceful, meditative quiet—no, this is surgical theater quiet. Pre-op quiet. The kind of quiet that precedes a scalpel slipping into skin.

“Cecil?” he calls, voice cracking slightly. “Lou?”

Nothing. Not a scuffle. Not a snort of laughter. Not a single overturned chair.

His stomach lurches. Oh gods. Oh no.

It hits him like a blow to the chest—hard and fast and irrationally vivid. His breath catches as he imagines the scene: Percy, smiling that too-easy, too-charming grin, beckoning them into conversation while Leo distracts them with a firecracker or a philosophical debate about toaster mechanics. One syringe full of succinylcholine, one expertly delivered carotid injection, and they’d be out cold in seconds. Nico, naturally, orchestrating the whole thing from the shadows, cold and precise.

Gone. Taken. Vanished beneath the too-clean surface of this pristine apartment like a body hidden under hospital linens.

He spins on the spot, eyes wide, heart jackhammering in his chest.

“Cecil?! Lou Ellen?!”

Still nothing.

Will’s lungs tighten, the early signs of hyperventilation he knows too well from his training pressing at the edge of his ribs. His brain conjures up more possibilities—lethal doses, ligature marks, blood scrubbed away with bleach, and the faint scent of vanilla to mask the iron tang of murder.

Then he spots it. A scrap of paper affixed to the fridge with a yellow smiley-face magnet.

A note.

All-caps. Slanted. Chaotic. Cecil.

“ON THE ROOF. BRING YOURSELF. ALSO BRING SNACKS IF YOU HAVE THEM. -C”

Will stares at it, still heaving slightly, and pinches the bridge of his nose. His heart rate is still hovering somewhere in the tachycardic range, and he can feel the beginnings of a stress headache blooming behind his eyes.

“On the roof,” he mutters. “Of course.”

He grabs the nearest bag of chips from the counter—salt and vinegar, obviously Cecil’s—and storms toward the stairs, muttering as he goes.

“They could’ve been kidnapped. I could’ve walked into a crime scene. A trap. A shrine. But nooo, they’re on the roof. Because that’s normal. That’s fine.”

He’s still not entirely convinced he’s not walking into a psychological horror movie.

Still, he climbs—each step cutting through his lingering anxiety like the slow descent of a scalpel. His breath levels. His heart slows. But his grip on the chip bag tightens.

As he reaches the last flight, Will rehearses the speech he’s going to give them. Something stern. Professional. Do not fake your own kidnapping via cleanliness, you absolute gremlins.

He shoves open the heavy door, ready to launch into his monologue, prepared for anything.

Anything except the sight waiting for him on the roof.

And there they are.

The heavy rooftop door groans behind Will as he steps into the open air—and into what looks, at first glance, like the beginning of a very stylish crime scene. The sky is dipped in hues of late dusk, bleeding gold into violet, and the last of the sun paints the edges of the rooftop in fire. But it's not the sky that stops him in his tracks.

It's the scene unfolding in front of him.

Cecil and Lou Ellen are perched like smug gargoyles on the battered couch they manhandled up here freshman year, back when they still thought “ rooftop chill zone ” was a feasible dream and not a fire code violation. The couch looks ready to collapse under the weight of its sins—but tonight, it’s regal. Lou Ellen has on oversized sunglasses that catch the dying light, absurdly dramatic considering the sun is nearly gone. Cecil, of course, has his ever-present lighter in hand, flicking it open and closed with the rhythmic confidence of someone who could set a building ablaze just for the aesthetic.

And they are far too pleased with themselves.

A loose circle has formed in the middle of the rooftop, a gathering that should not— cannot —exist in Will’s realm of logic. It’s like stepping into a fever dream conjured by some freshman art major high off resin fumes and conspiracy theories.

Leo Valdez is sitting cross-legged on the concrete like he was born there, mid-story, gesturing wildly with a joint pinched between two nimble fingers. There’s smoke curling lazily from his mouth as he talks, and it dances through the air like it’s part of the show.

Piper lounges next to him, half-tucked into the neck of her hoodie, laughing with her eyes squinted shut. She takes a slow drag from what Will is almost certain is Cecil’s sacred, “ do not touch unless you want to be hexed ” personal stash. The joint passes between them with the practiced ease of people who’ve set many things on fire and survived them all.

And then—

Percy Jackson.

Golden boy. Campus legend. Swim team captain that can hold his breath underwater for so long that he is Poseidon’s chosen child, if the rumors are to be believed. He’s sitting on the low brick wall like it’s a throne, legs dangling off the edge, swinging back and forth like he’s got nowhere to be and no responsibilities weighing him down. He’s not smoking—he doesn’t need to—but there’s a bottle of something expensive-looking in his hand. Something dark and smooth and absolutely not sold on campus.

He spots Will instantly and lifts the bottle in a loose salute, like he’s greeting an old friend in a speakeasy. “Hey, Solace,” he calls, grinning like they’d been expecting him all along. “Took you long enough.”

Will freezes.

Stares.

Then stares harder.

He blinks, hoping the hallucination will shatter, but no—it remains. Unfazed. Solid. Half the Seven are on his apartment roof , getting high and talking like they’re not the most gossiped-about figures on campus. Like they’re not literal mythologies walking around in leather jackets and designer boots. Like they didn’t just hijack his entire reality.

Cecil grins at him, all teeth and zero shame. “We saved you a seat,” he says, patting the cracked lawn chair beside him. “And a hit.”

Will points at him, stunned. “You told me you were cleaning.”

“We did,” Lou Ellen says, lifting her sunglasses just enough to wink. “And we cleaned. The apartment is spotless.”

“Cleaner than the day we moved in,” Cecil adds proudly, gesturing as if he’d performed divine labor rather than vacuumed under the couch for the first time in two years.

Will makes a strangled noise and drags a hand down his face. “This is not what I expected.”

Leo cackles, tipping his head back with reckless delight. “No one ever expects us.”

“Clearly,” Will mutters, but his feet are already moving, pulled by gravity or peer pressure or sheer disbelief. He drops into the lawn chair with the weary grace of a man surrendering to fate. His hand comes up instinctively to pinch the bridge of his nose, as if that will somehow bring order to the scene in front of him.

Cecil nudges him with his knee. “You need to relax, Will.”

“I am relaxed,” Will lies, every muscle in his body locked with tension.

Piper exhales smoke in a delicate silver ribbon and gives him a lazy grin. “Sure you are.”

“You’ve been working too hard,” Cecil says, like he’s reading Will’s soul. “Double shifts. Study marathons. I’m starting to think you’re more type-A than Annabeth.”

“Don’t let her hear you say that,” Percy warns from his brick-wall perch. “She’ll kill you.”

“Statistically, that tracks,” Lou Ellen murmurs, adjusting her sunglasses like a mob boss.

Will accepts the joint Cecil passes him, holding it like it’s cursed. Like it might explode. “I have a shift tomorrow.”

Cecil shrugs with all the gravitas of a man who has never had a morning class. “Then it’s your duty to relax now.”

Piper tilts her head, her braid catching the light as it slips over her shoulder. “Maybe you’re more like Nico than we realized.”

Will’s head jerks up like he’s been shocked. “What?”

“You know,” she says, flicking ash off the tip of the joint. “All wound up. Refusing to chill. Not that it’s a bad thing.” Her crooked smile lingers. “But I’m just saying.”

Will blinks, and something twists in his chest—not quite pain, but close. Not quite longing, but something adjacent. He doesn’t have a word for it, and that’s what makes it worse.

“Hey,” Leo cuts in, ever the chaos agent, “Nico is less intense than he was when we were fourteen.”

Percy gives him a sideways look. “That’s debatable.”

“He stopped stabbing people on sight,” Leo offers. Will prays to every known deity that he’s exaggerating.

“ Progress, ” Piper agrees, and it’s somehow worse that she says it like she means it.

Will exhales slowly, the tension still clinging to the back of his throat like smoke. He’s definitely lost control of his life. He might have lost it weeks ago and is just now realizing it.

But then Cecil’s bumping his shoulder again, and Lou Ellen’s got that smirk that promises nothing good, and Percy Jackson is still smiling at him like this is normal. Like Will belongs here. Among them.

And Will thinks— what the hell.

He takes a hit.

It burns. Sharp, acrid, clinging to his lungs like guilt—but the laughter, the neon buzz of it, makes it easier to let go of the coil in his chest. For the first time in what feels like weeks, he’s not thinking about deadlines or bills or whether Nico di Angelo is secretly a vampire with access to Jason Grace’s credit card.

For once, he’s just here. On the roof. With his friends. And half the Seven.

Will exhales smoke, lets it dissolve into the twilight, and tilts his head toward the stars.

This, he thinks, is probably how cult indoctrinations start.

And maybe—just maybe—he’s okay with that.

The evening drifts into that hazy, syrupy kind of calm where everything feels dreamlike and vaguely suspicious—like the calm in a horror movie right before the basement door creaks open. The weed definitely helps, but Will still can’t wrap his head around the fact that Percy Jackson is on his roof. Or that Leo Valdez is treating one of their half-collapsed lawn chairs like a throne, boots propped on the old cooler that’s mostly used to hold extra bags of rice and maybe one cursed bottle of off-brand vodka. Piper, gorgeous and chaotic as always, is curled up like a cat on a threadbare fleece blanket that Will is certain has been through at least one house fire and two regrettable dorm hookups.

They’re all laughing—loudly, messily—at something Cecil just said. Will’s pretty sure it was illegal. Probably involved fireworks. Possibly a priest.

The smoke floats around them like a lazy veil. Someone—Cecil—has put on a playlist that swings between obscure indie and chaotic early 2000s pop. It's disorienting. Will lets himself lean back into the moment, lulled by the warm buzz of too many highs at once, and forgets, just for five blissful seconds, how many shifts he has to pick up this week.

Then Piper tilts her head toward Leo with the grace of a panther preparing to pounce. “So. Who’s everyone dating?”

It’s so casual, so light, that Will almost doesn’t notice it land like a grenade in the middle of their circle.

Leo makes a sound like a dying bird. “Wow. Way to make things awkward, Pipes.”

“You’re one to talk,” she fires back, smiling with all her teeth. It’s the kind of smile that has probably ended careers and definitely ended Leo’s last situationship. “You have, like, seventeen girlfriends.”

“That’s defamatory,” Leo says at once. “It was twelve. And that was years ago.”

“Who counted?” Will mutters, not even trying to mask his skepticism.

“I did,” Piper answers sweetly, without looking away from Leo.

Leo puffs out his chest. “They all had glowing Yelp reviews, thank you very much.”

“Gross,” Will says automatically, rolling his eyes—but then Piper’s gaze snaps to him , and he feels it hit like a searchlight.

“And what about you, Will?” she asks, voice all sugar and subtle menace. “Anyone special?”

Cecil, traitor that he is, immediately loses it. He nearly chokes on his drink, pounding his fist on the arm of the chair like he’s watching the best sitcom unfold live.

“ Special ? Oh, honey,” Cecil gasps. “Will’s roster is like the subway system.”

Will shoots him a murderous look. “I hate you.”

Lou Ellen’s eyes glitter behind her sunglasses. “We should make a map. Color-coded by train line.”

“I am going to murder you both,” Will groans.

Cecil grins and bumps his knee against Will’s. “Don’t act like we don’t know exactly how many guys have trailed out of this apartment at 3 a.m.”

Will buries his face in his hands. “They’re not trailed. They leave! Of their own volition!”

“Some of them have left you snacks, ” Lou Ellen says helpfully. “One guy reorganized our spice rack before sneaking out. I liked him.”

Will groans louder, muffled behind his hands.

In truth, yes—Will’s had his fair share of one-night stands. It’s easier that way. Quick, clean, uncomplicated. They come in, they leave, they don’t ask about his grades or his backstory or why he stares at Nico di Angelo like he’s a sunset Will knows he’s not allowed to touch. And Cecil and Lou Ellen… well, their love lives are equal parts high drama and low standards. Lou Ellen’s last three situationships included a fire juggler, a barista who swore he was descended from Hemingway, and someone she only ever referred to as “The Venetian.”

Cecil once dated someone for two weeks without realizing they were in the same philosophy class. When he found out, he broke up with them for “ academic boundary reasons .” They still wave at each other across campus like co-stars in a reality show neither of them asked to join.

So, yeah. Chaos.

And yet.

Will doesn’t miss the way Percy chokes slightly on his front. The way Piper’s eyebrows arch with interest. And Leo— Leo , the man who once licked battery acid on a dare—goes very, very still.

It happens in a blink. A flicker. But Will’s not imagining it.

Their eyes shift to each other like they’re receiving coded transmissions from some secret spy network.

Oh no.

Their eyes dart to each other. A look. Quick. Loaded.

And Will freezes.

It hits him in the chest, sharp and cold.

He knows that look.

For one terrible second, it’s like time folds in on itself, and he’s seventeen again, standing behind the school gym at one of Austin Texas’ weirder charter schools, listening to a guy he thought was into him say, “You’re cool, man, just don’t like, try anything.”

That creeping, nauseating feeling—of being too much , or maybe not enough —threads through his ribs.

Will’s heart kicks up, a sudden rush of heat prickling under his skin despite the breeze. He swallows hard, and his pulse rings in his ears. It’s stupid. They’re the Seven. They’re cool. They’re not —they wouldn’t be—

Would they?

A part of him steels, waiting for the blow. He’s not a kid anymore. He’s survived worse. He has his degree almost in hand, two jobs, a found family that loves him, and a body count of one-night stands that rivals Cecil's caffeine addiction. But still—

Still.

It doesn’t stop the old reflex from rising: the quiet bracing. The instinct to shrink, to reframe himself before anyone else can.

“They didn’t know?” Lou Ellen asks, her voice far too innocent. “You’re slipping, Will.”

Cecil whistles low. “Wow. That was almost a dramatic coming out.”

Will straightens, heart thudding—half from paranoia, half from indignation. “I didn’t think it was relevant ,” he mutters.

It comes out more defensive than he means it to.

And then there’s this pause. A weird, too-long pause. His brain starts doing damage control. What if they think he’s been lying? What if this is a problem?

It’s ridiculous, and he knows that, but it doesn’t stop the thought from spiraling. Not when the question he doesn’t want to ask rises to the surface, dark and slippery.

Would my dad care?

He doesn’t even know the guy—never has. Just a name that Naomi Solace never says and a handful of vague references to a “ summer romance ” that ended before Will could walk. His mother raised him alone, in the kind of free-spirited chaos that meant he was just as likely to grow up around bluegrass singers as burlesque performers. She’d been supportive, almost suspiciously enthusiastic, when he came out. Threw a " Bisexual Cowboy Brunch " that involved rainbow boots, homemade pancakes, and a playlist called Brokeback Beats .

But the rest of her family? The ones who still called it a “ phase ” even after his third boyfriend? The ones who said things like “just don’t be too obvious with it, honey” ?

They hadn’t been so thrilled.

And his dad— his dad. Would he have hated him for it? Called him a slur? Or just never spoken to him again?

Which is funny, because it’s not like he was speaking to Will in the first place.

It doesn’t matter. Shouldn’t matter.

And yet—sometimes it does. It lingers. Like a bruise that doesn’t fade, just sits under the skin and aches when touched.

Will feels his jaw lock. The stars above blur a little. He blinks, breath caught somewhere behind his teeth—

For a breath, no one speaks.

Percy’s face has gone unnervingly neutral. Piper’s calculating look is almost surgical, eyes narrowing like she’s putting puzzle pieces together. Leo’s grin spreads across his face like a wildfire—and somehow, that makes Will feel worse.

“I mean,” Leo says finally, far too casual. “Cool. That’s cool.”

“Very cool,” Piper echoes, a little too quickly.

“Super cool,” Percy chimes in, voice a shade too even.

Will squints at them. “Okay…?”

They exchange another one of those loaded looks, the kind that usually precedes either a murder or a makeover montage. And then— another look. A different kind. One he definitely doesn’t trust. It’s full of anticipation, like they’ve just unlocked an achievement in a dating sim.

Cecil raises an eyebrow. “What’s going on with you guys? Did we just unlock a secret level or something?”

“I knew we were part of an initiation,” Lou Ellen says, stage-whisper loud. “I felt the vibes.”

“No initiation,” Percy says quickly. Too quickly.

“Just… noting,” Piper adds smoothly.

“Noting what ?” Will demands, now genuinely unsettled.

Leo, the picture of innocence, wiggles his eyebrows like a cartoon villain. “Nothing. Definitely not reporting back to anyone.”

Will’s stomach does a backflip. “Reporting back to who ?”

“Who says we’re reporting back to anyone?” Percy says.

“You just said you weren’t,” Will snaps.

“Exactly,” Leo grins.

Will turns to Cecil, frantic. “Am I high or is this a thing?”

“It’s a thing,” Cecil says gravely. “Big thing energy.”

Lou Ellen takes a long sip of her drink and shrugs. “This is definitely a fact-finding mission.”

Will slumps back in his chair, staring at the stars in pure cosmic resignation. He can already picture his gravestone: Here lies Will Solace. Overworked. Underpaid. Outmaneuvered by cryptic matchmakers.

“I’m going to die on this roof,” he mutters.

Piper pats his leg gently. “At least you’ll die in excellent company.”

Cecil nods solemnly. “And we’ll get a great Yelp review.”

“ Gross, ” Will groans again, burying his face in his hands.

And somewhere, distantly, he hears Leo whisper, “We’re so gonna tell Nico.”

The panic has ebbed, replaced with something more bewildered than afraid. Whatever that moment had been, it wasn’t homophobia. Not exactly. It was something worse.

It was matchmaking. Was it?

Will watches Percy lean in and whisper something to Piper, who snorts and elbows him in the ribs. Leo’s already pulling out his phone and typing something furiously, probably compiling data for a Nico x Will Compatibility Matrix.

And he doesn’t know if that thought terrifies him—or thrills him more.

Will’s head is still spinning from the weirdness of the last twenty minutes—Percy’s suspicious enthusiasm, Leo’s cryptic comments, Piper’s tactical smirks—and maybe it’s the weed, or the cheap rooftop wine, or the way Percy and Leo keep exchanging glances like they’re members of an underground spy network, but Will makes the mistake of speaking.

“Okay,” he blurts out, “but what about your love lives?”

The words hang in the smoky air like a flare he can’t take back.

Immediately, he regrets it.

Percy lights up like a Christmas tree. “Oh! Annabeth and I have been dating since we were sixteen,” he announces, scooting forward on the ledge with the gleeful intensity of a man who definitely has a prepared speech. “She’s literally the smartest person alive. Like, genius level. She redesigned her family’s entire house when she was thirteen. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t know that. She’s amazing. Did I mention she’s amazing?”

“Yes,” Leo mutters behind his hand, pretending to gag. “At least seventeen times.”

“Every time,” Piper sighs, flopping dramatically onto her back like this is the thirtieth time she’s heard this speech (because it probably is).

Percy doesn’t even blink. “And she’s going to be an architect. She wants to redesign entire cities one day. Probably will . Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if she takes over New York by thirty. She already made a scale model of our apartment. It’s incredible. I nearly cried.”

“You did cry,” Leo confirms, deadpan.

“It was beautiful,” Percy says, glassy-eyed with sincerity. “Open-concept. Great light.”

Will blinks at him. “I was not ready for that level of... enthusiasm.”

“None of us are,” Piper says flatly.

“You should hear him after two drinks,” Leo adds. “He gets emotional about her use of natural materials.”

Percy shrugs, entirely unapologetic. “Sustainability matters.”

Will physically shakes his head like he’s trying to reboot his system. “Right. Okay. Uh…” He gestures between Leo and Piper. “What about you two?”

Piper stretches out on the blanket like she’s on a movie poster, all effortless cool despite the chaotic backdrop of mismatched chairs and a pizza box flapping in the wind. “It’s complicated,” she says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “Dating in the spotlight is messy.”

Percy hums like he knows more than he should. “Yeah, well, you and Jason always had a flair the dramatic.”

Will perks up at that, catching the deliberate way Percy says you and Jason. Piper, however, doesn’t flinch—just offers a smile so sly it might qualify as a misdemeanor.

“Define drama, ” she says lightly, picking at a loose thread on her sleeve.

Leo snorts. “That’s not denial, but it’s definitely not confirmation either.”

Will watches Leo a little more closely after that. It’s subtle—just the faintest tightening around his eyes, a twitch of his fingers against the rim of his soda can—but it’s there. That strange, slightly-too-sharp energy. He masks it well with a grin and a puffed-up voice.

“Anyway, who needs drama when you’re a certified ladies’ man like me?” Leo announces. “I’m emotionally unavailable and chronically irresistible.”

“No one’s resisting,” Piper mutters.

Will doesn’t laugh.

Because yeah, Leo’s joke lands—but it lands like a distraction, not a punchline. And Will knows that look. He’s seen it in mirrors. In friends. In his own damn reflection at three in the morning after someone who doesn’t matter has just left his bed. It’s the look of someone pretending not to want what’s just out of reach.

Will narrows his eyes, gaze flicking from Leo to Piper, then back. There’s something there. A twist of something unspoken. Not quite heartbreak, but definitely... longing.

Gay pining, Will thinks, with the confidence of a man who’s earned a PhD in it.

He leans back, smug.

He knows that look.

And for once, it’s not coming from him.

But then Leo’s eyes flick toward Percy—just briefly—and land, for half a second too long, Jason , who’s not even here. His name hasn’t been mentioned again, but it’s like Leo’s waiting for it to be.

Will narrows his eyes, intrigued.

Interesting.

There’d been whispers, of course—about Nico and Jason, some vague, simmering thing between the quiet death boy and the golden son—but Will had never quite bought it. Too platonic. Too... brotherly. But Leo and Jason?

That, Will thinks, watching Leo hide behind another joke, has energy.

And honestly? He’d much prefer a Valgrace situation anyway.

Let the gays have their tragic electric mechanic/wholesome Roman golden retriever romance. Will has other priorities.

Like not imploding every time Nico di Angelo makes eye contact with him.

There’s a lull. Someone—probably Lou Ellen—is trying to balance a half-eaten bag of chips on Cecil’s head while he’s not paying attention. The playlist has transitioned into some deep cut indie ballad that sounds vaguely haunted.

And then Will, trying to shift the topic away from whatever that just was, says, “And Hazel? I always see her with Nico.”

The silence that follows is immediate and terrifying .

Percy lets out a choked sound that’s somewhere between a snort and a laugh. Leo physically wheezes on his drink. Piper slaps a hand over her face like she can’t believe what she just heard.

“What?” Will says, looking between them, heart sinking. “What’d I say?”

Percy’s trying not to lose it. “Oh, gods. You thought—?”

“I didn’t think—I just—” Will flounders. “They’re always together! They’re close! ”

“They’re siblings,” Piper says through laughter, her voice muffled by her sleeve. “Half-siblings. Technically.”

Will blinks, completely thrown. “What?”

“They have the same dad,” Percy explains, wiping tears from his eyes. “Hades. You know. Like the God of the Underworld. It would be funny if I wasn’t so ironic.”

Will stares at him. “But—that’s just a nickname , right?”

There’s a pause. And then the look . The same one they’ve been passing around all night. The one that makes him feel like he’s the only person in the room who didn’t read the group chat.

“You could say that,” Leo shrugs.

Will’s brain fully reboots.

“So you thought Nico and Hazel were…?” Piper prompts, still clearly amused.

“I didn’t think anything,” Will insists, voice going up half an octave. “I just… noticed they’re always together.”

“Because they’re family, ” Percy grins.

Leo pats Will’s back like he’s a wounded bird. “Dude. You need better sources.”

Will slumps in his chair, face burning. “I’m an idiot.”

“Told you,” Lou Ellen chirps.

“You really thought Hazel and Nico were having a secret affair?” Cecil asks, smirking.

“I did not— ” Will buries his face in his hands. “Oh gods.”

Piper leans over and offers him a slice of pizza, all sympathy and chaos. “Welcome to the club.”

Will peeks out. “What club?”

Leo grins. “The Nico di Angelo Confuses the Hell Out of Me club. Meetings are every Tuesday.”

“Snacks provided,” Percy adds with a wink.

Will groans as he takes the pizza. “I hate all of you.”

“You love us,” Lou Ellen says, smug.

And the worst part is—he kind of does.

Will glances at her, tilting his head, and gives The Look™ —subtle desperation masquerading as casual curiosity. The one that says, I need answers, but I need you to ask for me or I’ll die of embarrassment on this roof tonight.

Lou Ellen rolls her eyes like she’s suffering. She sighs loudly, for the drama, but there’s a gleam in her eye that says she’s very pleased with herself.

She leans forward, elbow resting on her knee. “Okay,” she says, too casually. “I have to ask… is Nico single?”

Chaos ensues.

Percy’s eyebrows leap into his hairline. Piper makes a hmm! sound like a gossip columnist receiving live intel. Leo actually snorts soda up his nose and nearly falls backward off his crate.

Will flinches. Tries not to. Fails.

“Ohhhh,” Leo says, grinning wide. “Is that what this is about? You’re into him!”

Lou Ellen recoils. “ Gods, no. ”

“No judgment,” Piper says, smirking.

Percy tilts his head thoughtfully. “He’s not bad looking.”

“I mean, objectively,” Leo says. “If you’re into the whole I sleep in a sarcophagus and probably talk to ghosts thing.”

Lou Ellen shudders. “Absolutely not. No offense.”

Will lets out a slow, shaky breath.

“He’s single,” Piper says, too composed. “But it’s complicated.”

Percy nods. “ Very complicated.”

Leo leans in. “He’s picky. ”

“Very picky,” Piper echoes.

Lou Ellen glances at Will. “But he’s not… unavailable ?”

Leo snorts. “Depends on who you ask.”

“He’s not seeing anyone,” Percy confirms, a little more serious now. “Not in a relationship.”

Piper’s expression softens into something knowing. “And he definitely doesn’t swing my way.”

Will’s brain stalls.

He barely hears Leo add, “Which is to say—he’s not into girls.”

And just like that, Will’s chest sparks. Oh.

It’s ridiculous how hard that one fact hits him. He’s known Nico for years — knew he was gay. Of course he did. He’s had doubts but he had heard that, knew the stories, registered it in that detached way you do when you’re protecting yourself from hoping for anything real. But now? Hearing it here, confirmed casually by the people closest to him?

It’s like someone lit a firecracker in his ribcage.

He tries not to smile. Fails. His lips twitch helplessly.

Lou Ellen side-eyes him like she knows. Of course she knows. She’s knows everything.

“Oh,” she says smoothly. “Well. That’s good to know.”

“Yeah,” Will croaks. His voice cracks like a teenager in a school play. He clears his throat. “I mean. Yeah. Good to know. ”

Leo smirks like the cat that caught the chaos.

Piper winks. “ Very good to know.”

Will buries his face in his hands again. “I hate this. I hate all of this. ”

Lou Ellen pats his shoulder, smug and victorious. “You’re welcome.”

And even though his dignity has just spontaneously combusted, and he’s sure Percy and Piper are now mentally drafting wedding invitations, and Leo will absolutely use this as blackmail—

Will lets himself feel it.

That tiny, golden ember of hope sparking inside his chest.

Maybe I have a chance.

If he can just stop tripping over his own feet every time Nico so much as breathes in his direction.

Notes:

thanks for reading guys! kudos and comments always appreciated :) sorry there's no nico in this chapter, but i wanted to set the scene a little more and give some more context for will (and rachel's) backstory, and give will some hope moving forward with nico, who is definitely in the next chapter so more chaotic will/nico interactions coming your way soon

Chapter 8: Percy Jackson Loses His Shirt, Jason Grace Gains a Cowboy Hat, and I Lose My Mind

Notes:

Sorry guys this chapter is super long, the words just kept coming out :/

It starts Monday.

Will’s at the campus café, half-asleep, nursing a lukewarm cup of coffee and counting the minutes until his bagel materializes. The air smells like burnt espresso and impending deadlines. His phone is slipping slowly from his hand as he scrolls aimlessly through a thread of memes Lou Ellen sent him at 2 a.m., eyes barely tracking the screen.

Then something shifts.

The temperature doesn’t drop, but it feels like it does—like someone just opened a door to another world.

Will glances up.

And there’s Nico di Angelo.

Dark clothes, dark hair, black coffee in hand. He looks like he stepped out of a European art film and got lost somewhere between the philosophy department and the underworld. All sharp lines and deliberate stillness. His hoodie’s oversized and his jeans are criminally well-fitted, like he doesn’t even try and still looks like a Vogue spread. He could be a Victorian ghost haunting a university quad. A very attractive, slightly judgmental ghost.

Will’s brain short-circuits.

He drops his phone.

It hits the tile with a clatter loud enough to draw looks. Will scrambles to pick it up, knocking into the table so hard his elbow ricochets off the edge. A bolt of pain shoots up his arm. He sees stars. Possibly God.

“Smooth,” Nico says, entirely unfazed.

Will makes a sound that could be a laugh. Or a cry for help. “Yeah, I—uh—I do this all the time.”

Nico’s mouth quirks. Just barely. But it’s there—a flicker of amusement like a secret being shared.

“I believe it,” he says, and then, just like that, he’s gone—gliding toward the door like he didn’t just throw Will’s nervous system into full meltdown mode with a single look.

Will is still recovering three hours later. His bagel goes uneaten.

Tuesday is worse.

Will’s shelving books at the store, moving with the slow, mechanical rhythm of a sleep-deprived barista who’s lived too many lives before lunch. His head throbs. His stomach’s empty. He’s halfway through alphabetizing the classics section when he hears it—that soft, precise footfall that makes the hairs on his neck stand up like they’ve been summoned.

He turns.

And there’s Nico. Again. Wearing sunglasses indoors like he’s either very famous or very emotionally unavailable.

Will forgets the alphabet.

“You have Il Gattopardo in Italian?” Nico asks, voice like ink in water—quiet, smooth, spreading under Will’s skin.

Will stares blankly for a beat too long. “We… uh… might.”

Nico just watches him, unreadable behind the lenses. Will fumbles for the inventory scanner like it’s a life raft.

“I can check. Or we could—uh—look. Together.”

He regrets the words immediately. They sound like the start of a date. Or a nervous breakdown.

But Nico just nods. “Sure.”

They move through the stacks in silence. Will’s heart is thudding like he’s on a treadmill made of anxiety. He’s hyperaware of every step Nico takes behind him, of the gravity that seems to bend toward him like he’s made of a denser kind of matter.

When Will finally finds the copy, he grabs it too fast—knocking two other books off the shelf. One of them lands squarely on his foot.

The pain is immediate and offensive.

He makes a noise like a goat being mildly electrocuted.

“You okay?” Nico asks, head tilting slightly.

“Yep,” Will wheezes. “Totally fine. Healthy. Normal.”

Nico’s expression is unreadable, but something about the curve of his mouth says liar. Still, he takes the book from Will’s hands—fingers brushing, brief but enough to short Will’s entire nervous system.

He walks to the counter, pays in cash, and leaves with a nod.

Will sits down in the history section and reconsiders the meaning of life.

Wednesday, he nearly dies.

Okay— technically , he doesn’t. But it feels close.

He’s biking across campus, earbuds in, half-distracted, when Nico steps out from behind a hedge like a morally ambiguous NPC. Will swerves to avoid him and ends up flying sideways into the bush with a crunch.

It’s humiliating.

Leaves in his mouth. Dirt in his dignity. Twigs in his hair. 

Nico stares down at him, all dark jeans and deadpan concern. “You okay?”

Will lifts a shaky thumb from the foliage. “All good.”

“You sure?”

“Never been better,” Will replies from inside the shrub, entirely betrayed by gravity and pride.

Nico’s mouth twitches. It’s almost a smile. “Careful,” he says. “You’re starting to make a habit of this.”

And then he’s strolling off like he didn’t just drop a casual flirtation grenade into Will’s entire week.

On Thursday, Will tries to avoid Nico by ducking behind a vending machine—only to make direct eye contact through the glass while unwrapping a granola bar with his teeth like a feral raccoon.

Will’s in the student union, clutching a paper cup of burnt coffee and a granola bar he definitely paid too much for. He’s sleep-deprived, running on four hours and vibes, wearing scrubs under his hoodie because he had a clinical skills lab that morning and absolutely no time to change. His bag is sliding off his shoulder. His hair looks like it lost a fight. His dignity? Unknown.

He’s halfway through trying to unwrap the granola bar with his teeth when he looks up—and sees Nico.

Of course.

Standing coolly in line for coffee, dressed like he just stepped out of a Berlin street fashion blog: black jacket, dark jeans, rings glinting in the light, hair tousled in a way that clearly took no effort and yet looks like it was styled by the gods.

Will panics. He panics so hard that he tries to hide behind the nearby vending machine. Unfortunately, the vending machine is made of glass. And lit from inside.

Nico sees him immediately.

Will freezes like a deer in a fluorescent-lit display of shame and off-brand trail mix.

Nico blinks once. “What are you doing?”

Will, still chewing plastic wrapper, replies with a muffled, “Nothing.”

Nico raises an eyebrow. “You’re crouching behind snacks.”

Will straightens up too fast and smacks his head on the vending machine door.

“Cool,” he says weakly, blinking stars out of his vision. “I’m great. Totally normal.”

Nico says nothing, but there’s a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

Will dies a little inside. Again.

By Friday, Will has accepted his fate.

He’s in the library, surrounded by a sea of textbooks, pretending to study while actually cycling through increasingly dramatic thoughts about Nico’s hands. The library is cool and quiet and full of doom.

Someone clears their throat.

Will looks up. Too fast.

And slams his head into the corner of the shelf.

Stars. Again. Possibly Jesus.

Nico stands there, a binder under one arm and his sunglasses perched on top of his head like a crown he didn’t mean to wear. “You okay?”

Will gives a weak thumbs-up from the floor. “Fine.”

Nico slides into the chair across from him, movements smooth and casual, like this is just something he does—haunt libraries, sit across from golden boys, ruin their ability to function.

“You’re always here,” Nico observes.

Will swallows. “You’re here too.”

“I’m always here,” Nico says, flipping open his binder.

Will doesn’t believe him. Nico only seems to appear when Will is alone, vulnerable, and borderline feral from exhaustion.

He watches Nico’s hands. Long fingers, silver rings, callouses catching the light. His handwriting is neat, controlled. Of course it is. Everything about him is refined and sharp and impossibly calm.

Will, by contrast, is a human fire alarm.

He tears his gaze away before Nico can catch him staring again, but it’s too late. Nico glances up, eyes narrowing slightly.

Will panics. “Do you want some gum?” he blurts.

Nico blinks.

There’s a beat of silence. Then: “What kind?”

Will fumbles in his bag and pulls out a crushed pack. “Uh… spearmint. It’s not cursed. Probably.”

Nico’s mouth lifts slightly at the corner. He reaches out and takes a piece. “Thanks.”

Will blinks. “You chew gum?”

“Sometimes,” Nico says, sliding it into his pocket instead of chewing it. “When I feel like it.”

Will feels like he just got handed a key to another universe.

They lapse into silence again, but it’s charged now—tension buzzing low and warm like static between them. Will forces himself to look back at his textbook. He’s not sure what he just did, but it feels like it meant something.

He doesn’t get a word of reading done.

By Saturday morning, Will is fully convinced he’s doomed.

Every time he runs into Nico di Angelo, it’s like the universe throws back its head and laughs directly into his face. There’s no peace. No dignity. Only humiliation. A week of catastrophic awkwardness has left him teetering on the edge of psychological collapse.

Nico never mentions the restaurant—which Will is grateful for—but that only makes it worse. Will didn’t mind working. He wasn’t above it—he never had been. He liked the structure of it, the rhythm. The way clocking in and out made time feel manageable, like you could slice your problems into neat shifts and tip out of them at the end of the day. But sometimes—when he was exhausted and his feet ached and he still had hours of studying to do—he hated how necessary it was.

Most people worked. That was just life. Cecil picked up shifts at the campus bar when he wasn’t selling fake IDs to overconfident freshmen with bad fake mustaches and worse excuses. Lou Ellen did ushering gigs at the local theater and ran a Saturday morning acting class for the kids of rich, over-invested parents who thought “ Broadway Prep ” for their eight-year-old was a personality trait. They all worked. They all scraped by. It was normal.

And yet.

When it came to him —to Will—it always felt different. Worse. Like no matter how much he tried to convince himself otherwise, the need for two jobs meant something about him was lacking.

The bookstore job didn’t bother him. That one felt romantic, almost. Quaint. He could pretend it was about aesthetics—dust motes in sunlight, first editions with cracked spines, quiet music playing behind the counter. It was acceptable, even charming. People liked the idea of the tired med student hiding behind stacks of medical textbooks, casually flipping through the occasional novel while sipping black coffee.

But the restaurant?

That was harder to justify. It was sweaty aprons and late nights and sore wrists from carrying trays. It was rude customers and under-tipping and pretending to be okay when he wasn’t. It was scraping together rent with dignity held together by the thinnest string of pride.

And Nico di Angelo had never been there.

Which was something Will was increasingly, desperately thankful for.

The others had come—Hazel, Jason, Percy, Leo, all of them in their shiny, effortless cool—but never Nico. He didn’t know if that was coincidence or intention, but Will clung to it like a lifeline. Because Nico didn’t know. Not for sure. And Will wanted to keep it that way.

He hated how Nico made him feel about it. It wasn’t even Nico’s fault. He wasn’t condescending. He never looked at people like they were beneath him. But he had that aura—of quiet wealth and old money and family power that was too ingrained to even be intentional. Nico wore black jeans and designer jackets like armor, but there was something in the way he moved, in the way he carried himself, that made Will feel like a kid pretending to belong in a world that would never quite be his.

And so Will said nothing. He never brought up the second job. He never mentioned the aching muscles or the double shifts or the four hours of sleep. And gods, he hoped none of the Seven had told Nico about it. Because if Nico knew… Will wasn’t sure what he’d do. Maybe Nico wouldn’t care. Maybe he’d even be kind about it. But the thought still made Will’s stomach twist.

He just wanted something—anything—that Nico didn’t have a front-row seat to. Something that was his, that Nico couldn’t see through with those sharp, dark eyes.

For now, that thing was the restaurant.

And Will planned to keep it that way as long as he possibly could.

He groans from deep in his soul, flopping back against the couch like gravity has finally defeated him. One arm thrown dramatically over his face. His body language says tragic gay Victorian heroine fainting on a chaise lounge. His internal monologue says set me on fire, I deserve nothing but ash.

Cecil strolls past, mug of tea in one hand and his laptop tucked under the other arm. He pauses mid-step. “You okay, lover boy?”

Will groans louder, muffled against his sleeve. “I can’t talk to him without humiliating myself.”

“Yeah,” Cecil says brightly. “It’s fun to watch.”

“I’m doomed.”

“Probably,” Cecil agrees, sipping his tea like a therapist who’s stopped pretending to be helpful. “But on the bright side, he keeps showing up.”

Will peeks out between two fingers, hair flattened against his forehead. “Do you think he’s doing it on purpose?”

Cecil raises a brow, like the answer should be obvious. “Do you think Nico di Angelo does anything by accident?”

Will doesn’t have an answer for that. But there’s hope blooming in his chest anyway—wild, dangerous hope, the kind that shouldn’t be fed after midnight or allowed near fire.

The kind that looks like black leather jackets and eyes like thunderstorms.

The kind that’s going to get him killed.

By Saturday night, Will has evolved from dramatic couch pose to full melodramatic collapse.

He’s sprawled across the cushions like a man auditioning for Gay Hamlet, one arm tossed over his eyes like the world is too cruel to be perceived. The apartment is dim and buzzing with anticipation; music is already vibrating faintly through the walls from the party next door.

His current plan: remain horizontal. Avoid all human contact. Possibly combust on the spot.

Lou Ellen is crouched by the kitchen sink, digging through the plastic crate they call a liquor cabinet, muttering about “ emergency tequila reserves .” Cecil is upside down in the armchair again—legs flung over the armrest, phone above his head as he types with the speed and precision of someone tweeting something chaotic.

“You’re coming,” Lou Ellen announces, emerging victoriously with a half-bottle of tequila and an eyebrow raised like a challenge.

“I’m not,” Will mumbles into his sweatshirt. “I’m staying here. Where it’s safe.”

“Safe is boring,” Cecil says without looking up. “And you’re extra boring when you don’t come out.”

“I’ll embarrass myself,” Will moans. “ Again. It’s been an entire week of me making an idiot of myself in front of Nico di Angelo. I can’t do another night. I won’t survive it.”

“Statistically,” Lou Ellen says, pouring tequila into mismatched mugs with the solemnity of a potion master, “you’re due for a win.”

“Statistically,” Will deadpans, peeking out from under his arm, “I’m due for spontaneous combustion. ”

Cecil hums. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“I’m not going,” Will insists, sitting up just enough to accept the tequila mug Lou Ellen hands him. “You can’t make me. I’m a free man. I have rights.”

Cecil finally lowers his phone. His grin is slow and dangerous. “What if I told you… that the Seven are definitely coming to the party?”

Will freezes.

“You don’t know that.”

“Oh, but I do, ” Cecil purrs, smug as sin. “Leo and I have gotten… friendly. ”

Will squints. “Define friendly.”

“We bonded over weed, robotics, and a shared love of chaos,” Cecil says proudly. “He told me they’re coming.”

Lou Ellen takes a long sip of her drink. “This is definitely not going to be a disaster.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” Will mutters, deadpan.

Cecil leans forward with gleeful menace. “Nico’s probably going to be there.”

Will lets out a sound like a dying whale. “Stop. Just—stop. Please.”

“Percy and Annabeth are coming too,” Lou Ellen adds. “You like Percy, right? He’s like your emotional support extrovert.”

“I don’t need an emotional support extrovert,” Will snaps, but it’s a lie and they all know it. The man once had to leave a group project because the guy he liked said good morning and Will forgot how to speak.

Cecil’s smile goes shark-like. “You want to see Nico.”

Will narrows his eyes, clutching the mug like it contains the will to live. “I want to not humiliate myself .”

Lou Ellen shrugs. “Tomato, tomahto.”

Will stares at the ceiling like maybe the paint will peel away and reveal the meaning of life.

“Fine,” he sighs. “I’ll come. But if I end up in another hedge, I’m blaming both of you.”

Cecil raises his mug. “To public embarrassment and poor life choices.”

Lou Ellen clinks her mug against his. “And to love.”

Will groans again, louder this time, and downs the tequila in one gulp.

Because if Nico di Angelo is going to be there, then Will is already doomed.

Might as well show up in style.

As the mugs clink and the laughter dies down, Will’s shoulders slump. Just a little. The adrenaline fades, and the dread creeps back in.

“I just…” He trails off. “I don’t want to keep being the guy who trips over his own feet every time someone hot walks by.”

Lou Ellen softens, leaning her head on his shoulder. “Hey. You’re not.”

“You’re only that guy when it’s Nico, ” Cecil adds helpfully, but his voice is gentler now.

Will laughs weakly. “That makes me feel so much better.”

Cecil nudges him with his foot. “You’re a disaster, Solace. But you’re our disaster.”

“And for what it’s worth,” Lou Ellen says, squeezing his arm, “you are kind of weirdly charming when you panic.”

Will gives them both a look. “You people are unhinged. ”

“Absolutely,” Cecil agrees. “But we love you.”

Will goes quiet for a beat, blinking at his empty mug. Then, softly: “Thanks.”

“Now get dressed,” Lou Ellen says, popping up from the couch. “We’ve got eyeliner, crop tops, and fate to confront.”

Will groans as they drag him upright, but his smile sticks.

Because yeah—he might combust tonight.

But at least he won’t do it alone.

By the time they finally make it to the party, it’s almost midnight. Will had dug his heels in the entire time Lou Ellen and Cecil were getting ready, insisting he wasn’t going, that it was a bad idea, that he’d rather flay his skin off with a dull butter knife—and yet, here he is.

The Stolls’ apartment is packed. Music thuds through the floors, and the air is thick with a cocktail of sweat, spilled drinks, and the unmistakable haze of questionable decisions. Will weaves his way through clusters of people, immediately clocking the Seven scattered across the room like they own the place.

Annabeth and Piper are perched on the worn-out couch, deep in conversation that looks entirely too strategic for a party. Leo is halfway to the ceiling, climbing a set of exposed pipes for reasons Will doesn’t even want to begin to understand. Frank and Hazel are dancing—Frank dancing, which Will files away to unpack later. But there’s no sign of Nico.

Will tries not to be disappointed.

“I need a drink,” he mutters to himself, peeling away from Cecil and Lou Ellen before they can get any ideas about matchmaking. Again.

He makes his way to the kitchen. Or at least he tries to. When he finally squeezes past a group of people in blackout sunglasses doing shots of something neon blue, he finds Percy and Jason. In the middle of the kitchen. Blocking the entire counter.

And of course, they’re causing chaos.

Percy is shirtless. Not in a sexy, purposeful way, but in a how did this happen, where is your shirt? way. Jason is wearing a cowboy hat that looks suspiciously like something from a dollar store Halloween aisle. There’s a jug of jungle juice between them, but rather than pouring drinks like normal people, they’re holding an impromptu chugging contest.

“Faster, Grace!” Percy yells, banging on the counter like he’s at the Kentucky Derby.

Jason slams the plastic jug back down, coughing but triumphant. “Beat that, Jackson.”

Percy grabs the jug without hesitation and takes a long, theatrical swig, some of it spilling down his chin. “Amateur,” he says when he finally comes up for air.

Will stares. “What are you two doing?”

They both turn toward him, blinking like he’s just reminded them they’re in public.

“Bro!” Jason grins. “You made it!”

Will looks at Percy. “Where’s your shirt?”

Percy glances down at himself like he’s only just noticed he’s missing half his outfit. “Oh. Huh.” He shrugs. “It was itchy.”

“Itchy?” Will repeats.

Jason nods. “Yeah, man. Sometimes you just gotta be free.”

Percy slings an arm around Jason’s shoulders, holding up the jug like he’s found religion. “Free, bro.”

Will pinches the bridge of his nose. “I just came in here for a drink.”

“Take the jug!” Percy declares, thrusting it toward him like an offering. “We made it ourselves.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” Will says.

Jason pushes his cowboy hat up on his forehead, looking thoughtful. “It’s mostly vodka.”

“And Gatorade,” Percy adds proudly.

Jason holds up two fingers. “And tequila.”

Will edges toward the fridge. “I’m good, thanks.”

Percy leans in conspiratorially. “We’re thinking about adding Red Bull next round.”

Will opens the fridge. It’s empty except for one sad bottle of Budweiser and… a single celery stick. “Why?”

Jason shrugs. “Energy.”

Will grabs the Budweiser. “You guys terrify me.”

“Love you too,” Percy grins.

Jason claps him on the back—hard. “Stick with us, Solace! We’ll make a party god out of you yet!”

“I’m literally begging you not to,” Will mutters.

And that’s when he sees it. Out of the corner of his eye. Across the room, in the doorway—Nico. Wearing black, of course. His hands in his pockets. He’s looking around, eyes sharp but disinterested, like he’s just doing a casual sweep of the perimeter before committing to being here.

Will’s heart skips a beat. Then two.

Percy follows his line of sight, clocking Nico instantly. “Ohhhh,” he says, dragging the word out in that knowing way Will hates. “Look who showed up.”

Jason elbows Percy in the ribs. “Don’t spook him.”

Will nearly chokes on his beer. “Don’t spook me.”

Jason winks at him. “Relax, Solace. Just play it cool.”

Percy hands Will a cowboy hat from somewhere (Will doesn’t even ask) and slaps it on his head. “Be casual.”

Will is not casual. Not even a little.

And Nico di Angelo is heading straight for the kitchen.

Will watches as Nico makes his way toward the kitchen, cutting through the crowd like some sleek, shadowy ship gliding through a sea of sweaty, overly enthusiastic undergrads. He’s wearing all black again—of course—and his expression is somewhere between don’t talk to me and don’t even look at me. Will is definitely looking at him.

Nico steps into the kitchen and Percy immediately perks up like someone just rang a bell. “Hey, Death Boy!” he calls, grinning wide and crooked. “You made it!”

Will flinches. Death Boy? He’s not sure whether to laugh or call HR.

Nico lifts his gaze slowly, dark eyes flickering toward Percy with a distinct I will end you energy. “Don’t call me that,” he says, voice flat.

Percy shrugs, unbothered. “C’mon, join us! We’re about to add Red Bull to the jungle juice. You’ll love it.”

Will’s mouth opens. No one will love that.

Nico’s look intensifies. It’s not just a death stare. It’s an I can and will resurrect you just to kill you again stare.

“I’ll pass,” Nico says.

There’s something about the way he says it—tight, clipped. Will catches the faintest trace of discomfort, though Nico masks it well. Too well.

Percy doesn’t notice, because Percy never seems to notice when he’s about to cross a line with Nico. “Aw, come on,” he says, stepping closer. “You never have fun.”

Will holds his breath. He feels like he’s witnessing something he shouldn’t.

But then Jason appears like a tall, blond wall of protection, sliding into place beside Nico as if summoned by sheer willpower. “He doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to,” Jason says smoothly. His tone is light, but there’s an underlying edge to it.

Percy freezes. Then raises both hands in surrender. “Alright, alright. No pressure.”

Nico shifts slightly closer to Jason, and for a split second—barely—Will sees the tension in his jaw ease.

Will forces himself to look away before he gets caught staring. Again. His heart is pounding in his chest, but for completely different reasons now. Nico doesn’t exactly scream awkward crush energy, but there’s something there. Something Will can’t figure out.

He watches as Jason says something low to Nico, too quiet for anyone else to hear. Nico gives a faint nod. Jason claps him on the shoulder in a way that’s both casual and grounding.

Percy, to his credit, steps back and distracts himself by refilling his drink. “Suit yourself,” he says, half-grinning. “But when Jason starts breakdancing later, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I don’t breakdance,” Jason mutters.

Percy winks. “You do when you’re drunk enough.”

Jason glares at him, and Nico, to Will’s shock, almost— almost —smiles.

And then Nico’s gaze shifts. Right to Will.

Their eyes lock for half a second, and it’s like the rest of the party blurs out of focus. Will’s heart does something deeply stupid, and his brain throws up a white flag.

Nico’s face is unreadable, but his eyes are dark and sharp, like he’s trying to figure Will out—and Will has absolutely no idea what he wants him to be.

He’s just glad the cowboy hat is hiding most of his panic.

Jason elbows Percy gently. “C’mon,” he says, jerking his head toward the door. “We’ll find Piper.”

Will watches Jason and Percy disappear through the crowd like it’s some kind of retreat signal. Percy raises his drink to him in a silent toast before getting yanked into a chaotic dance circle by Leo. Jason throws Will a look that’s probably meant to be reassuring, but ends up feeling more like good luck.

And just like that, it’s just him and Nico in the kitchen.
Alone.

The silence stretches between them like an over-tuned guitar string—tense, humming, on the verge of snapping. Will can feel it thrumming in his chest, in his wrists, in the back of his throat where all his carefully rehearsed words have vanished. He stares down into his half-empty beer bottle, trying to steady his breathing, trying not to look directly at Nico like he’s the sun.

Nico shifts his weight, hands sliding into the pockets of his black jeans with that same easy cool that always manages to knock the air right out of Will’s lungs. He glances toward the sliding glass door that leads to the balcony, the movement fluid and casual, but Will’s eyes catch on the curve of his jaw, the gleam of his rings, the way the light glints off his collarbone like it’s trying to ruin him.

Will swallows hard and wills himself— begs himself—not to do anything stupid.

Not again.

Not tonight.

Not when Nico is this close and the air between them is strung taut with something unspeakable—electric, precarious, as if the very molecules might ignite under the weight of everything Will isn’t saying.

Nico’s presence is magnetic, dark gravity pulling Will into his orbit without trying. His voice cuts through the tension, low and deliberately indifferent:
“I’m going out for a smoke.”

Will’s chest constricts, ribcage tightening like a vice. There it is, he thinks, the exit, the vanishing act—Nico dissolving into the night like a shadow, like smoke himself, and leaving Will behind with a plastic cowboy hat askew on his head and a heart that beats too fast for its own good.

But then Nico exhales sharply, like the words he’s about to say cost him something. “That was an invitation to join me.”

Will blinks, stunned. “Oh.”

Nico arches a brow, already turning toward the door, jacket shifting over lean shoulders like a whisper of defiance.
“Don’t make me regret it.”

Will abandons his beer without hesitation, nerves and wonder tangling in his chest, and follows—drawn as if by some invisible thread pulled taut between them.

 

Chapter 9: Addicted to Nico(tine): I Lecture My Crush About Lung Cancer, and Somehow It’s Flirting

The moment he steps onto the balcony, the cool air sweeps around him like a balm. It smells like autumn and asphalt and possibility. The warmth of the party fades behind him, dulled by the sliding glass door, and in its place: stillness. The city stretches out before them, a sprawling constellation of streetlights and noise, buzzing with life yet impossibly far away. Will grips the railing, grounding himself in the cold metal and the wild pace of his own heartbeat.

And then there’s Nico.

He leans against the brick wall like he was carved there—one boot tucked behind the other, black denim and sharp angles, pulling a cigarette from a crumpled pack with practiced ease. The lighter sparks in his hand, and for one brief moment the flame catches his face in a halo of firelight. Shadows cling to the hollows of his cheeks, his lashes sweeping low as he takes a drag, smoke curling up around him like silk, like spellwork.

Will is transfixed.

It’s not just the aesthetic of it—the dangerous poetry of the moment, the way Nico looks like a boy sculpted from smoke and ash and marble. It’s the stillness in him. The quiet gravity. The way he takes up space without demanding it.

Will tells himself he’s observing. Not pining. Not cataloguing the line of Nico’s throat, the flash of silver rings, the way his fingers cradle the cigarette like something delicate.

Nico exhales, slow and languid. Smoke spills from his mouth like a secret.

“You don’t smoke,” he says. Not a question. A statement. A dare. A test.

Will swallows. The weight of that gaze is searing.

“No,” he replies. “Bad lungs. Med school guilt.”

Nico hums, a small sound of agreement, flicking ash over the edge of the railing. “Smart.”

Will feels like he’s failed anyway—like he’s missed some invisible mark in a game he doesn’t know the rules to.

They fall into silence, the kind that hums with potential. It clings to Will’s skin like mist, settling in the hollows of his chest, curling in his gut like nervous electricity. It’s not an easy silence. It’s charged—like something’s about to happen, like the air is waiting to be broken.

He clears his throat. A desperate bid for steadiness.

“Nice view.”

Nico turns his head slowly, gaze drifting from the skyline to Will’s face. “Yeah,” he says, quiet. Measured. “Not bad.”

And Will—

Will is doomed.

Because he knows, without knowing, that Nico might be talking about the city.

Or he might not.

And that single possibility sparks in his chest like a match.

He tries not to hope.

He fails spectacularly.

Will tries. He really tries. He tells himself don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t ruin this moment, just be cool for once in your life, but he’s pre-med, and if there’s one thing his entire existence has conditioned him to do, it’s lecture people on how they’re going to die.

So, naturally, after about thirty seconds of silence, he blurts out, “You know that’s going to kill you, right?”

Nico glances at him, smoke curling lazily from his lips. His expression doesn’t change, but there’s something in his dark eyes that’s more curious than annoyed. “That so?”

Will groans at himself and presses a hand over his face for a second. “Sorry. Sorry. I wasn’t gonna say anything. I told myself I wouldn’t. I had a whole plan. But, yeah, it is so.”

Nico takes another drag, slow and deliberate, watching Will from beneath his lashes. “And how’s it gonna kill me?”

Will sighs. “Oh, you want the full breakdown? Because I can do the full breakdown.”

Nico shrugs. “I’ve got time.”

Will gestures vaguely toward the cigarette, leaning back against the railing like he’s about to give a lecture. “Okay. So first, your lungs? Absolutely trashed. I’m talking scar tissue, inflammation, bronchitis that never really goes away. You’ll sound like you’ve been gargling gravel by the time you’re thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five,” Nico repeats, taking another drag. “Optimistic.”

Will narrows his eyes but continues. “Then there’s the fun part—carcinogens. Over seventy of them. Long story short, you’re practically inviting cancer to move in and redecorate. Lung cancer, throat cancer, mouth cancer if you’re really unlucky.”

Nico exhales smoke in a perfect little ring, like he’s showing off. “Go on.”

“And then,” Will says, warming to his subject now, “if you somehow dodge all that? Congratulations. You’ve still got a decent chance of heart disease. That cigarette’s like, ‘Hey, let’s make your arteries as narrow as possible and see how long it takes before you keel over in the middle of a coffee shop.’

Nico actually smiles at that. “Dramatic.”

Will throws his hands up. “I am dramatic! But it’s all true.”

Nico studies him for a moment, head tilted like he’s trying to figure Will out—or maybe like he already has. “You care a lot about things that aren’t your business.”

Will flushes, pushing his hair back. “It is my business. I’m going to be a doctor.”

Nico flicks ash over the railing again, his gaze back on the skyline. “Not my doctor.”

Will huffs. “Yet.”

That makes Nico glance at him again, one brow raised.

Will’s brain catches up to his mouth two seconds too late. “I mean, statistically, you might—look, just… never mind.”

There’s a long pause, and Will’s positive Nico’s about to tell him to shut up or leave or something equally devastating. Instead, Nico takes another drag, exhales slowly, and says, “You’re not wrong.”

Will blinks. “About…?”

“The cancer,” Nico says, deadpan.

Will stares. “That’s the part you’re agreeing with?”

Nico shrugs. “You make a compelling argument.”

Will watches him flick the cigarette into the ashtray with a casualness that’s almost irritating. “Are you going to quit?”

Nico glances at him sideways, eyes dark and unreadable, but his mouth quirks ever so slightly. “Maybe.”

Will exhales. “I’ll take it.”

Nico hums. “You’re relentless.”

Will shrugs. “It’s in the job description.”

For a moment, Nico says nothing. He just watches Will like he’s an equation that doesn’t quite add up. And then he says, almost thoughtfully, “You’re not what I expected.”

Will blinks. “Good unexpected or bad unexpected?”

Nico doesn’t answer, but there’s a faint flicker of amusement in his expression. He turns his gaze back to the lights of the city and says, “You talk too much.”

Will grins. “Get used to it.”

Nico exhales through his nose, but he doesn’t look annoyed. If anything… he looks like he might.

Maybe.

Be getting used to it already.

Will’s still leaning against the railing, the cool metal biting into his elbows as he watches Nico flick cigarette ash into the tray. The smoke lingers between them for a moment before dissolving into the night air.

For reasons he can’t quite explain—probably because he’s an idiot—Will says, “So… did Percy and Leo ever get you high?”

He tries to sound casual. Like it’s a passing curiosity. Like he hasn’t been turning the question over in his head for days, especially after whatever cryptic nonsense the pair of them had whispered about in the library. And okay, maybe he’s wondered if Nico high would be less intimidating or somehow, impossibly, more.

Nico’s head tilts just slightly. “No.”

Will squints at him. “Liar.”

Nico doesn’t even flinch at the accusation. His expression doesn’t shift—still unreadable, still cool—but there’s a flicker of something in his eyes. Not annoyance. Amusement, maybe. Challenge. “Maybe.”

Will grins. “I knew it.”

“You don’t know anything,” Nico replies, but there’s a spark beneath the words now. Something almost playful. Or maybe dangerous. Or maybe both.

Will, naturally, does not take the hint to stop. “Come on. What happened?”

Nico exhales slowly, watching the distant headlights move like veins of light through the city below. For a moment, Will’s sure he’s not going to answer. And then—

“It was my idea,” Nico says quietly. “They didn’t push me.”

Will blinks, caught off guard by the sudden seriousness of the tone.

Nico keeps his gaze on the skyline. “Percy and Leo… they’re chaotic, sure. But they’re not idiots. They know me. They would’ve backed off in a second if I’d said no.”

Will nod, the tightness in his chest easing. “Okay. That’s… good.”

Nico shrugs, casual again. “I didn’t believe your ridiculous ancient grain and the economics of ancient Rome cover story for a second, I knew they were trying to buy weed from Cecil. And then we were on the balcony at Percy and Annabeth’s place, and Leo had just made some ridiculous joke about me needing to ‘loosen up before I turned to dust,’ and I said, ‘ Fine. Hand it over. ’”

Will’s eyebrows lift. “Just like that?”

Nico finally looks at him. There’s a sharp edge of defiance in his expression. “Just like that. I don’t need to be dared into anything.”

Will snorts. “Gods, I believe that.”

Nico’s mouth twitches— almost a smile. “It wasn’t terrible.”

Will cocks his head. “So you… liked it?”

“I tolerated it,” Nico says, deadpan. “Leo kept trying to get me to talk about my feelings. Percy put on an eight-hour long indie playlist titled ‘For Sad Boys with Tragic Backstories.’ ”

Will chokes. “That sounds about right.”

“I think I made it twenty minutes before pretending to fall asleep just so they’d shut up.”

Will’s still laughing, warm and startled and fond in a way he can’t hide. “So no repeat sessions?”

Nico exhales through his nose, gaze flicking to the glowing ember of his cigarette. “I think I prefer this.”

Will hums. “Because it makes you look cool and mysterious?”

Nico gives him a look. “Because I know what to expect.”

It’s quiet for a moment. The weight of that answer settles in Will’s chest, low and heavy and real. He gets it. Maybe more than he wants to admit.It’s honest, in a way Will didn’t expect. He studies Nico for a beat longer, the sharp line of his jaw, the way his dark hair falls slightly over his eyes in the breeze. Nico’s got the kind of face that makes people spin stories—dangerous, secretive, out of reach. He looks carved from night, from old stone, from pages Will’s read and read and still never understood.

But standing here, like this, Will thinks he’s starting to see something else.

Nico catches him staring. “What?”

Will blinks, trying not to look too caught. “Nothing.”

“It’s just…,” Will says softly, “you don’t seem like the type.”

“To what?” Nico replies, not looking at him.

“To get high,” Will says. “You seem… too in control.”

“I am,” Nico answers simply. “Most of the time.”

Will swallows. “So… what was it like?”

Nico’s quiet for a beat too long. “Maybe I’ll tell you next time.”

The silence after Nico’s “Maybe I’ll tell you next time” should be calm. Reflective. Serene, even.

But Will is not calm. Nor reflective. Nor even remotely serene.

His brain is a minefield of thoughts detonating at once: Why did he say next time? What does he mean by that? Did he mean there will be a next time? Was that an invitation? A threat? A cosmic joke?

Will chokes on air. “Next time?”

Nico shrugs, “we keep running into each other. I’m sure there will be a next time. But now, you have to tell me—Piper, Leo, and Percy told me they got high with you guys, yet here you are telling me you don’t smoke,” Nico says, which is not quite a question and not quite an accusation.

Will flushes. “I don’t! I mean—I don’t smoke smoke. Cigarettes. I don’t like the taste. Or the long-term pulmonary impact. But, um…”

Nico just raises an eyebrow. Waiting.

Will stammers. “I—I do occasionally use weed. Rarely. Like… when I’m stressed.”

Nico’s lips twitch. “So you won’t smoke my carcinogenic death stick, but you’ll light up after a hard shift in the library?”

“There’s a difference! ” Will insists, standing up straighter like he's on trial. “Cannabis has recognized medicinal benefits! Anti-inflammatory, anti-anxiety, pain relief—it’s not the same thing.”

Nico gives him a look that’s equal parts skeptical and entertained. “Are you quoting a study at me right now?”

Will’s ears are definitely red. “Several, actually.”

He doesn’t mention that the first time he ever smoked was after his first biology lab in freshman year—when his hands wouldn’t stop shaking and he couldn’t stop seeing blood in his peripheral vision. He doesn’t say that sometimes the pressure in his chest gets so tight, so loud, it feels like he’s dying by inches—and that Cecil, in his infinite chaotic wisdom, handed him a joint and said, “Breathe. You’re allowed.”

Instead, Will clears his throat and shrugs, staring out over the city. “It helps. That’s all.”

For a moment, Nico doesn’t say anything. The silence sharpens again, but not painfully—just focused. Attentive.

Then, softly: “First time?”

Will blinks. “What?”

Nico glances at him, curious now. “First time you got high.”

“Oh.” Will hesitates. “Uh. I was nineteen. Cecil dragged us up to the roof of our apartment building. I was convinced I was going to die. Told them I was having a heart attack. Lou Ellen filmed it.”

Nico snorts. Actually snorts . “Please tell me there’s footage.”

“There was footage. I deleted it. I think.” Will narrows his eyes. “Unless she’s saving it for my wedding toast.”

“Smart,” Nico murmurs.

Nico shifts, takes another drag from his cigarette, and leans back against the railing like a shadow that’s made itself comfortable. Will forces himself to look away, because staring at Nico is dangerous. Like looking at an eclipse with no eye protection. It’s just asking for permanent damage.

Then Nico says, far too casually, “Leo told me about your little rooftop confession.”

Will chokes on air.

“I—my what?” he croaks.

Nico doesn’t look at him. He’s staring back out at the skyline, face unreadable, voice maddeningly mild. “You know. The one where you were ambushed and emotionally interrogated in exchange for snacks?”

Will is going to die. Right here. Right now. He’s going to hurl himself off the balcony and pray someone includes “died of vibes-related heart failure” in the campus newspaper.

“Oh gods,” he groans, dragging a hand down his face. “What did they tell you?”

Nico finally glances at him, and there’s something just barely smug in the tilt of his mouth. “Enough.”

“Enough?” Will squawks. “Enough what? I said so many things. I—I don’t even remember all the things I said. There was tequila. And weed. So much weed. I was not in my right mind.”

Nico shrugs. “Leo said you were… very forthcoming.”

Will considers throwing himself over the railing.

“I don’t even—what does that mean? What did he say ?”

Nico does not blink. “Mm.”

Will is going to throw up. 

Nico tilts his head. “Something about your sexuality.”

Will makes a sound that might be a scream.

“Oh my gods,” he whispers, covering his face with both hands. “They didn’t. ”

He’s going to kill them. He’s going to go home and set a legally binding trap made of glitter and mousetraps and bad poetry. He’s going to fake his own death and enroll in a school in a different hemisphere.

“I swear, it wasn’t—it wasn’t even a thing, ” Will stammers. “They just—Piper asked—and then there was this whole vibe shift—and I didn’t know if they were being weird or homophobic, and then suddenly Leo was grinning and Percy said ‘very cool’ seventeen times and I didn’t know if I was being outed or adopted. ”

He realizes, belatedly, that he is now pacing.

Nico watches him with the expression of someone who’s just discovered a new, entertaining species and doesn’t want to startle it.

“I mean, it’s not like it’s a secret ,” Will continues, still spiraling. “It’s just—I didn’t announce it. You don’t walk into college shouting ‘hi I’m bisexual and full of anxiety !’”

Nico’s lips twitch. “You kind of do.”

Will whips around. “I do not— okay, I might, but that is beside the point—”

“Relax,” Nico says, holding up one hand like he’s calming a wild animal. “They didn’t say anything… bad.”

Will stares at him, suspicious. “So… you’re not weird about it?”

Nico gives him a look. Flat. Even. Just the tiniest edge of something too quiet to name. “Why would I be?”

Will doesn’t say anything, but something shifts in him—soft and seismic.

He already knew. Leo had said it outright. Piper had confirmed it with a look and a shrug and a sip of her drink. There had been whispers, knowing glances, the collective smirk of people who thought they were being subtle but absolutely weren’t.

But this— this was different.

Nico didn’t say the words. He probably never would, not in the way Will had, fumbling and loud and hoping someone would catch him. Nico’s truths came laced in smoke and silence, delivered with the kind of careful precision only someone who’s spent years hiding could manage.

But Will heard it anyway. “Why would I be?” Nico had said, and that was the clearest he’d ever been. That was him saying, I’m gay.

And somehow, even though Will had already known— really known—it still felt like something sacred.

Something just for him.

Will opens his mouth. Shuts it again. Realizes he has no idea how to function under this level of scrutiny.

“Oh,” he says, very intelligently.

Then: “Cool.”

Then, because his brain is basically soup now: “I mean. Not like cool, cool. I mean—well it is cool, but—not in like a tokenized way—just a—supportive—but not like overbearing, just—ugh.”

He slaps a hand over his mouth. “I’m gonna shut up now.”

Nico hums. “I was starting to enjoy it.”

Will makes a strangled sound that is probably illegal in most states.

Will has no answer to that. He waves a hand vaguely. “I don’t know, people are weird about . Sometimes. You never know how someone’s gonna react. I mean, Piper was fine—Piper was great, but for a second there I thought I was about to be banished from the balcony. Or shoved into a Very Special Episode .”

Nico’s mouth twitches. “ A Very Special Episode ?”

“You know,” Will mutters, “the one where everyone claps because the sad gay boy learns how to accept himself.”

“You’re the sad gay boy?”

Will throws up his hands. “I mean—I’m bi, but that doesn’t sound as poetic.”

Nico huffs a soft breath—maybe a laugh. It’s hard to tell.

Will keeps talking, because of course he does. “I didn’t really plan on telling anyone, I just… they asked. And I said it. And then everyone was very chill in that way that made me deeply suspicious. Like they were taking notes for some secret matchmaking spreadsheet.”

“They were,” Nico says flatly.

Will blinks. “Wait, really?”

Nico doesn’t answer. Which means yes.

Will buries his face in his hands. “I’m never leaving my apartment again.”

Nico watches him, silent. Patient. And then, softly, “You don’t have to be embarrassed. They were glad you said it. I was, too.”

Will’s hands drop. He squints at Nico, heartbeat stuttering.

“You were?”

Nico nods once. No smile. No teasing. Just honesty, like a dropped coin in a fountain.

But then—then—Nico does something unspeakably cruel.

He smiles.

Not a full grin. Not a smirk. Just the barest curve of his mouth, like he’s trying not to let it show. Like he doesn’t want Will to know how deeply this chaos delights him.

And somehow, that’s worse.

Because now Will is standing there, heart hammering, mouth dry, half in love with a boy who smiles like that and knows it.

He’s doomed.

Absolutely, irreversibly, cosmically doomed.

Nico shifts his weight, lets the silence stretch just long enough to be smug about it, then flicks the last of his cigarette toward the ashtray with a practiced flick of his fingers. It lands with a soft hiss—final, precise, theatrical. Like a curtain closing.

He steps back from the railing, casual as anything, sliding his hands into his pockets. And then, just as he turns toward the balcony door, he says—soft, almost like he’s giving Will one last riddle to solve—

“See you around, Will Solace.”

And gods, the way he says it—low and smooth, with just enough sarcasm to be infuriating but just enough warmth to ruin Will’s entire night—it hits like a punch and a kiss all at once.

Then he’s walking away, shoulders relaxed, stride confident and maddeningly unbothered.

Will stares after him like he’s witnessing the last five minutes of a tragic indie film.

“Cool,” he says to no one. “Great. Sure. Just casually unravel me on a balcony and leave like a cursed gay James Bond.”

He should go inside. He knows this. He has vital organs to protect.

Instead, his eyes betray him. They drop —involuntarily, traitorously—to Nico’s ass as he disappears back into the party. And of course, it’s perfect. Stupidly perfect. Like it knows what it’s doing.

Will presses the heels of his hands to his eyes and groans.

“I’m going to die on this balcony,” he mutters. “And it’s going to be his fault. And I’m going to thank him for it.”

Because of course Nico di Angelo just lit his heart on fire and walked away with smoke in his wake and a parting shot that will echo in Will’s brain for the rest of the night.

And probably the rest of his life.

Will stares after him, half annoyed and half hopelessly intrigued. He’s already planning when he’s going to manufacture the next time Nico has promised. A week from now? Tomorrow? Maybe he should get into cigarettes. Or balcony haunting.

He waits a minute before returning inside—not because he needs to, but because he absolutely refuses to look like he’s chasing after Nico like a lovesick golden retriever. He can still hear Nico’s voice in his head, that See you around, Will Solace , delivered with the smug elegance of a boy who absolutely knew what he was doing.

Will’s head is still spinning—not from the party, not from the bass thumping through the drywall, not from the suspiciously strong jungle juice—but from Nico. Nico di Angelo, who had just casually invited him onto a balcony, let him ramble about lung cancer, confirmed he’s gay without ever saying it, and then vanished back into the night like some tragic, brooding ex-boyfriend in a coming-of-age novel.

It takes him a few minutes to relocate Lou Ellen and Cecil. They’ve staked out a less-crowded corner of the living room, camped out like gremlins in their throne: Lou Ellen curled on a suspiciously stained beanbag chair with a neon drink in hand, and Cecil lounging dramatically in an armchair that may or may not be giving off the faint scent of expired Axe body spray.

The moment they spot Will, Lou Ellen sits up with predator-level focus. Her grin practically glows.

“There he is,” she calls, pointing like Will is a defendant walking into a courtroom. “Look who finally reemerged from the void.”

Cecil leans forward, eyes gleaming over the rim of his Solo cup. “You’ve been gone for a while, Solace. We were this close to filing a missing person’s report.”

Will slumps into the nearest seat—a cracked milk crate that squeaks in protest—and exhales the breath he’s apparently been holding since Nico walked away. “I had an… eventful fifteen minutes.”

“Oh?” Cecil draws the word out like a threat. “Do tell.”

Will knows, intellectually, that he should downplay it. Say it was fine. Shrug it off. Let them guess and spiral.

Instead, he throws his hands up and launches straight into the chaos. “Okay, so first, I found Percy and Jason in the kitchen. Jason was wearing a cowboy hat—don’t ask, I have no idea why—and they were chugging jungle juice like frat boys on spring break. Percy was shirtless, I didn’t know anyone could have that many abs.’”

Cecil nods sagely. “Classic Jercy behavior.”

“And then,” Will continues, voice pitching higher despite himself, “Nico showed up.”

Lou Ellen perks up like she’s just smelled blood. “ Go on. ”

“Percy tried to drag him into the chaos, obviously,” Will says, “and Nico gave him this look —you know, the one where it feels like your soul is about to be judged by a Victorian vampire.”

Cecil makes a sound of deep appreciation. “God-tier brooding.”

“And Jason,” Will adds, “ backed him up. Like, full ‘he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to ’ moment. I’m telling you, the tension in that room was thick enough to spread on toast.”

Lou Ellen hums. “Protective best friend energy. I love it.”

“So then they leave,” Will says, gesturing wildly now, “and I think, cool, that’s it, he’s vanished into the void. But then, Nico turns around and says—casually, like he’s not about to murder me with a smile— ‘I’m going out for a smoke .’”

Lou Ellen gasps. “ No. ”

Will nod, almost wild-eyed. “And then! He says—and I quote— ‘That was an invitation to join me .’”

Cecil spits out a sip of his drink. “You’re joking.”

“I wish. ”

Lou Ellen fans herself with a plastic plate. “Romance isn’t dead.”

Will groans. “He said it like he already regretted it and was reconsidering letting me live.”

“Sounds hot,” Cecil says. “Tell us everything. ”

Will runs a hand through his curls, practically glowing with disbelief. “Okay, so we’re out on the balcony, right? It’s just the two of us. He lights a cigarette and immediately becomes some kind of noir film protagonist. And of course, immediately lecture him about lung cancer like a complete idiot. ”

Lou Ellen groans into her drink. “Of course you did.”

“I tried not to!” Will insists. “I really did! But I blacked out and next thing I know I’m talking about scar tissue and carcinogens and early-onset bronchitis—”

“Sexy,” Cecil says solemnly.

“ He didn’t hate it! ” Will exclaims. “He was… kind of amused? I think? He didn’t throw me off the balcony, so that feels like a win.”

“Low bar,” Lou Ellen says.

“And then,” Will says, clearly running out of breath, “he tells me— tells me —that Leo and Percy didn’t pressure him into trying weed, that it was his choice. And then he just casually tells me he is gay in the most cryptic Nico di Angelo way you can imagine.”

There’s a beat of stunned silence.

Then—

Cecil screams into the cushion.

Lou Ellen launches herself off the beanbag and grabs Will’s shoulders. “You had a gay meet-cute on the balcony, oh this is giving me so many ideas for the reimaging of Romeo and Juliet my theatre club are planning!”

Will is cackling now, half-hysterical. “And then— then —he says ‘See you around, Will Solace’ and just walks away! Like he didn’t just ruin my entire existence!”

“Tell me you stared at his ass,” Cecil begs.

Will doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.

Lou Ellen claps. “You did! ”

“I’m only human!” Will groans.

“You’re in love, ” Cecil says dramatically. “And horny.”

Will slumps back against the wall, palms over his face. “I’m gonna die.”

Lou Ellen leans in with mock seriousness. “At least you’ll die beautiful and bisexual.”

“I’m gonna die alone. ”

Cecil pats his leg. “Not if Nico ruins your life first.”

Will sighs like he’s being lowered into a coffin. “He already has.”

They all fall into helpless laughter, Will somewhere between delirium and delight.

Because yeah, he’s doomed.

But also?

He’s hopeful.

And that’s so much worse.

Notes:

so im kind of just firing all these chapters off into the void, because i already wrote them all and then was like wow i am the least funny person in the world, i should stick to writing angst, and also because writing for a new fandom is scary, and kept all these chapters locked away in my google docs for months - but here we are and I'm just going to keep firing these chapters out and hopefully its not annoying? anyways, thanks for reading and all the love so far <3

Chapter 10: Dinner Party Invite or Cult Initiation Ritual? We Buy One Bottle of Wine and Sacrifice Three Paychecks

Notes:

hi, so this is the first chapter in the dinner party arc - honestly did not intend for it to end up being so long but somehow it sprawled five chapters that i've just dumped on you guys and now I'm going to bed, hope you enjoy!

It’s one of those rare golden moments on campus: the trio has claimed the holy grail of outdoor lunch seating—a shady table under a sprawling oak that filters the sunlight like a divine spotlight, just far enough from the chaos of the quad to be peaceful, but close enough to eavesdrop on three different conversations at once.

Will’s hunched over his anatomy textbook, highlighter uncapped but motionless in his hand, pretending to study while his brain replays Nico’s voice like a cursed voicemail. Lou Ellen is picking croutons out of her salad like a surgeon mid-operation. Cecil is leaning back in his chair, phone out, selling someone a fake ID with the same casual efficiency as ordering coffee.

And yet—somehow—they still find time to bring up Nico di Angelo every five minutes, like it’s a contractual obligation.

Typical Thursday.

“Can we not talk about Nico di Angelo for one meal?” Will says, trying for stern but landing squarely in exhausted gay.

Lou Ellen doesn’t even look up. She pops a crouton into her mouth, smirks, and says, “Can you not think about Nico di Angelo for one meal?”

Will opens his mouth to retort—probably something unconvincing and self-damning—but a sudden shadow falls across the table before he can.

A tray drops down with enough force to make the water cups jump.

“Look who it is,” Clarisse La Rue announces, arms crossed like she’s issuing a challenge. “The Cryptid Chasers.”

Will nearly spills his drink.

Cecil doesn’t flinch. “Hi, Clarisse.”

Clarisse is built like she could suplex a vending machine—and probably has; she’s majoring in Kinesiology, which basically means she gets to be aggressive for academic credit. She doesn’t usually acknowledge them outside of class. Or inside class. She’s too busy winning intramural wrestling championships or grumbling about how yoga electives are for cowards.

Sliding in beside her, graceful as a cat and beaming like she’s the host of a brunch-themed talk show, is Silena Beauregard. Silena’s majoring in Fashion Design with a psych minor, which is code for she knows what you're feeling before you do, and she will style you accordingly. Her entire aesthetic is “ effortlessly intimidating .” Her lip gloss matches her perfectly curated lecture notes.

The two of them together shouldn’t work. Silena is all floaty pastels and sugar-coated threats; Clarisse is combat boots and controlled fury. But somehow, it does work. Clarisse softens—just slightly—when Silena touches her arm. Silena sharpens—just a little—when someone looks at Clarisse the wrong way.

Will doesn’t pretend to understand how they balance each other out, but as he watches Clarisse grumble and Silena beam like she’s filming a skincare commercial, he can’t help the tiny pang that tugs at his chest.

He thinks about Nico. About sharp edges and soft glances. About contradictions that don’t cancel each other out—they just fit.

And gods help him, he wonders if maybe that could work for him too..

“Hi, guys!” she chirps, dropping her designer tote onto the bench like it deserves its own chair. “Hope we’re not interrupting.”

“You are,” Lou Ellen says, without missing a beat. “But we respect it.”

Will’s still trying to figure out how Clarisse got here without setting off the angry jock sirens. She never sits with them. She doesn’t sit with anyone, really—unless it’s at the gym, on your chest, pinning you during a spar.

Clarisse leans in, elbows on the table, her usual scowl now softened into something dangerously close to curiosity. “So. What’s the deal?”

Will blinks. “What deal?”

Silena peels the wrapper off her straw with the grace of a ballet dancer and says, “Oh, come on. Everyone’s talking about it.”

Cecil raises an eyebrow. “Talking about…?”

“You guys,” she says, tilting her head. “And the Seven.”

Clarisse scoffs, stabbing a fork into her sandwich like it owes her money. “Specifically, how you’re consorting with them.”

“Consorting?” Will echoes.

Lou Ellen raises a brow. “Big word for you.”

Clarisse flips her off one-handed, like she’s multitasking. “I hate them,” she adds, like it’s just another fact in the syllabus. “Always have.”

Silena sips her smoothie. “I don’t hate them. I think they’re fascinating. All that mysterious wealth and emotional repression? It’s like a CW reboot of The Secret History. ”

“They’re arrogant,” Clarisse mutters. “And weird. And they dress like they know they’re better than you.”

Silena shrugs. “They do dress really well.”

Cecil grins. “So you admit it.”

Will rubs his temples. “Is there a point to this conversation or are we just casually dragging the people we may or may not now be friendly acquaintances with?”

Clarisse eyes him like a coach evaluating a slightly underperforming linebacker. “Yeah. What are you guys doing with them?”

“Define ‘doing ,’” Cecil says, grinning wickedly.

Clarisse groans. “Not like that.”

Silena leans in, chin resting in her hand, eyes twinkling. “Unless…?”

Lou Ellen snorts. “See? This is why you’re invited to things.”

Clarisse looks personally betrayed. “I’m serious. People are saying you’re in deep. Some say you’re working for them.”

“Working with them,” Silena corrects with a sly smile. “It’s all very mysterious. ”

Cecil spreads his arms dramatically. “Maybe we’ve been recruited into their secret society.”

“Maybe Will’s dating Nico,” Lou Ellen adds, deadpan.

Will nearly chokes on his water. “I am not!”

Silena gasps. “Wait, really?”

Clarisse recoils like she’s just stepped on a LEGO. “What?!”

Will is turning red fast. “No! I’m not dating him! I barely even—we’re not—it’s not—he smokes too much!”

“That sounds like a personal problem,” Cecil adds helpfully.

Silena just grins wider. “But you like him.”

Will drops his head onto the table. “I hate everyone at this table.”

Clarisse leans back, arms crossed, studying him. “Huh.”

“Huh?” Will peeks out from the crook of his arm.

She shrugs. “Could be worse. At least it’s not Percy.”

Silena pats her hand. “You love Percy.”

Clarisse glares. “I love punching Percy.”

“Same thing,” Silena says sweetly.

Will sits up just enough to glance helplessly at Cecil, who wiggles his eyebrows like he’s waiting for wedding invitations. Lou Ellen’s grinning like the cat that’s about to push something off a shelf.

“So,” Silena says brightly, “when’s the first date?”

“There’s no date,” Will groans.

“Yet,” Cecil says, practically glowing.

Clarisse shakes her head. “You people are ridiculous.”

“You’re here,” Lou Ellen points out.

Clarisse huffs like she’s just realized she has, in fact, committed a social crime. But she doesn’t leave.

Silena, meanwhile, beams at them like they’re the cast of her favorite soap opera. “You know this is going to be all over campus by dinner.”

Will lets his head thump back onto the table with a groan of pure despair.

Clarisse eventually rises, shouldering her backpack like it personally insulted her posture. Silena stands more gracefully, offering them all a finger wave and a wink.

“See you in your next scandal,” she calls cheerfully as they stroll off—Clarisse muttering under her breath, Silena floating beside her like the chaos she leaves behind isn’t her problem anymore.

The trio watches them go in silence, watching the back of Clarisse’s stormy stride and Silena’s picture-perfect wave vanish into the crowd like the final shot of a slow-burn indie film. For a moment, all is still.

Then Cecil breaks the spell.

“We just got live-reviewed by fashion and violence.”

Lou Ellen toasts with her last crouton. “Ten out of ten. Would suffer again.”

Will just groans. Because gods help him, they’re not wrong.

“That was…” Lou Ellen starts.

“Weird,” Cecil finishes. “Weirdly intimate.”

Will lets his head thunk against the table with a defeated thud . “They think I’m dating Nico.”

“You wish you were dating Nico,” Cecil says, smirking into his drink.

Will kicks him under the table. “Not the point.”

Lou Ellen’s grinning now, the kind of grin that means she’s already scheming. “I mean, it’s kinda funny, right? People gossiping about us. We’re finally part of the campus rumor mill.”

Cecil leans back in his chair like he’s on a throne, legs crossed, already soaking in the drama. “Next thing you know, people are gonna be whispering that we’re secretly royalty. Or that I’m running an underground casino.”

Will shoots him a withering look. “You’re already running an underground fake ID operation.”

Cecil shrugs. “Exactly. It’s all about branding.”

Lou Ellen snorts. “I bet there’s a rumor that you’re actually a spy.”

“I am a spy,” Cecil deadpans.

Will shakes his head. “You’re a computer science major who sells weed and fake IDs to fund your Red Bull addiction.”

“Details,” Cecil says with a dismissive flick of his wrist.

But before they can descend further into nonsense, something shifts.

It’s subtle at first—background noise dampening like someone hit mute on the world. The laughter nearby dims. The rustle of notebooks and snack wrappers slows. The breeze dies down.

And then Will notices it.

Eyes.

People are looking at them.

Not in that casual, bored, between-classes way—but with purpose. With interest. Students at surrounding tables have straightened in their seats, angled themselves toward them. A few are leaning in, whispering. Not laughing. Not smiling. Just… watching.

Something cold coils low in Will’s gut.

“Uh,” he says, voice low, “is it just me, or are people… staring?”

Lou Ellen stops mid-crouton. She lowers it slowly, like she’s handling a weapon. “Nope. Not just you.”

Cecil glances up. His usual smirk fades by a few degrees. “Oh. Cool. This is fine.”

“This is not fine,” Will hisses, eyes flicking from face to face. “Why are they—what did Clarisse and Silena do?”

Cecil shrugs, eyes tracking a student across the quad who’s openly filming them with their phone. “Exist. In the same space as us.”

Lou Ellen tilts her head, her tone almost impressed. “Maybe we are cool now.”

Will glares. “We can’t be cool! Cecil, you can’t be cool!”

Cecil raises an eyebrow. “Rude.”

“You sell illegal things,” Will hisses through clenched teeth. “And now we have an audience. You really think that’s a good look?”

Cecil’s smirk wobbles. “Okay, fair point.”

Lou Ellen taps her chin, eyes scanning the crowd like she’s calculating odds. “I mean… the whole mysterious criminal vibe might work for you.”

“I am not becoming the Nico di Angelo of this group,” Cecil mutters. “Will might fall in love with me.”

“In your dreams,” Will mutters, scrubbing his hands down his face. “This isn’t good. If people are watching us, it’s only a matter of time before campus security starts watching.”

“Campus security already watches me,” Cecil says, not even offended. “I’m a person of interest.”

Lou Ellen kicks him lightly under the table. “You’re a person of chaos.”

Will groans again, his voice muffled in his hands. “This is a nightmare.”

Lou Ellen pats his back like he’s a rescue dog that just got neutered. “Don’t worry, Will. Maybe Nico likes the infamous type.”

Cecil grins. “Yeah. Maybe he’s into dangerous.”

Will lifts his head just enough to glare at them both. “You’re both fired.”

“You don’t pay us,” Lou Ellen sings.

“Still fired,” Will mutters, but there’s no real bite to it.

And then, like the universe was just waiting for the punchline— click.

Someone takes a photo. With flash.

Will jumps, blinking spots out of his vision.

Cecil stands abruptly, slinging his bag over one shoulder. “Yeah, no. We should move before we become the next urban legend.”

Lou Ellen grabs her half-eaten salad like it’s evidence at a crime scene. “Agreed. My life is not for public consumption.”

Will scrambles to shove his textbook into his bag, muttering about "the fall of anonymity" and "campus surveillance states."

As they start to pack up, the stares don’t stop. In fact, they seem to ripple outward, like the epicenter of an earthquake. People pretending to check their phones while glancing sideways. Someone near the fountain is definitely sketching them. Sketching them.

Will's skin crawls.

This must be what Nico feels like all the time, he thinks. He’s starting to realize it sucks.

They’re halfway through gathering their things when Cecil freezes mid-motion, his hand on his water bottle, his posture going stiff.

Will notices instantly. “What?”

Cecil’s eyes are locked on something—or someone—just over Will’s shoulder. His easygoing expression has drained to something unreadable, something tight.

Will turns, slowly, unease blooming in his chest like ink in water.

“What?” Will asks warily, shifting in his seat like someone who just got told the killer is behind him.

Cecil doesn’t answer right away. He just grins—that feral, delighted grin that usually means something terrible is about to happen to Will personally.

Lou Ellen squints past him, her expression shifting from lazy curiosity to open awe. She makes a low, impressed sound, like she’s watching a solar eclipse and can’t look away. “Well. That’s new.”

Will turns, dread crawling up the back of his neck like cold fingers.

And there they are.

Four of them, strolling across the quad like a divine pantheon descending from Mount Olympus for lunch hour: Frank Zhang, Hazel Levesque, Percy Jackson, and Annabeth Chase. It’s like watching a slow-motion fashion editorial, except instead of clothes, they’re wearing casual power.

They’re coming toward the table.

And Will hates how hard he stares—how hard everyone is staring.

Annabeth walks like the world is something she’s already solved and redesigned twice for efficiency. Her long blonde curls are pulled into a high ponytail that somehow looks both no-nonsense and runway-ready. She’s in jeans and a button-down, crisp and effortless, with a satchel bag that probably contains three architectural models, an apocalypse plan, and at least one weapon. The way she holds her iced coffee says she’s busy, and the way she commands attention without trying says she’s dangerous.

Percy is lounging beside her in a navy hoodie, cargo pants, and sea-worn sneakers, looking every bit the golden retriever who accidentally joined a mafia. His dark hair is wind-mussed, his smile a little crooked, and he somehow manages to look like he just emerged from the ocean despite being nowhere near water. He has the kind of beauty that’s infuriatingly casual—like he doesn’t know he’s hot, which only makes it worse. His eyes are sea-glass sharp and storm-deep, and when he grins, it’s over.

Frank trails behind them like the world’s most terrifyingly polite bodyguard; he looks like he was carved from granite and kindness—tall, broad-shouldered, and solid in a way that makes buildings jealous. His dark hair is buzzed neat at the sides, and his jawline is not shy—it’s sharp enough to make Will self-conscious. He wears an old university track hoodie and joggers, looking like he could bench press the sun and still say “excuse me” when he passes you.

And Hazel?

Hazel is ethereal. Unfairly so. Her curls are glossy and cascading like she walked out of a dream sequence, and her eyes—gold-flecked and unreadable—hold the quiet power of someone who could kill you and be sweet about it. Her vintage-style sundress moves like water when she walks, and her leather satchel is probably full of cursed objects or ancient relics she just happens to carry around. Her smile is soft, a little eerie, like she knows something the rest of the world doesn’t.

They look like they were curated for a Vogue spread titled Mythic Royalty You’d Let Ruin Your Life.

And they are walking—no, gliding —straight toward their table.

Will barely has time to process before they arrive.

“Mind if we sit?” Annabeth asks, her voice smooth and unbothered. She’s already pulling out a chair before anyone can answer.

“Sure,” Lou Ellen says brightly. “We were just discussing whether or not Cecil is a danger to society.”

“Definitely,” Percy says as he drops into the seat beside her with the kind of ease that comes from always being welcome. “What’s the verdict?”

“Unanimous,” Cecil says without missing a beat. “I’m a menace.”

Hazel sits beside Lou Ellen like she belongs there. Frank follows, awkward but polite, nodding like this is standard procedure and not completely upending the social hierarchy of the universe. Will’s brain fills with static. There’s no room for thoughts—just white noise and the dull thump of his heartbeat as Percy Jackson invades his personal bubble.

He shoots Lou Ellen a look that says help me , but she just shrugs like you’re on your own, bro . Cecil leans in and mutters, “Relax. Pretend we’re famous.”

Will’s voice comes out strangled. “We’re going to die.”

Percy leans forward, all earnest blue eyes and way-too-casual chaos. “So, where’s Nico? He said he was going to meet us.”

Will chokes. Loudly. Like a man whose lungs just gave up the will to live.

Frank raises a brow. “Why do you sound like you’re being strangled?”

“I—nothing,” Will blurts. “Fine! Normal.”

Hazel’s smile is all soft amusement, her eyes far too observant. “Nico’s in class. Jason dragged him.”

Annabeth smirks without looking up from her phone. “Probably for his own sanity.”

“And ours,” Percy adds with a grin.

Cecil raises his cup. “To Jason, doing the lord’s work.”

And that’s when Will starts noticing it again. The tingling behind his ears. The too-quiet hush just past their table’s edge. The not-so-subtle clicking of phones.

He turns his head slightly—and sees them.

Eyes. Phones. People watching from across the lawn, from benches, from the windows of the student center. Some pretend they aren’t staring. Others don’t bother pretending at all. It’s like they’re on a stage and no one told them they’d entered the show.

Will leans in. “I think we’re being watched,” he mutters under his breath.

Cecil sips his drink, eyes half-lidded. “Of course we are. They’re probably drafting conspiracy theories about you as we speak.”

“I’m going to end up on a campus gossip page,” Will whispers, sinking lower in his seat.

Lou Ellen pats his arm with a faux-comforting smile. “Maybe they’ll Photoshop a crown on you.”

“You could be the People’s Prince,” Cecil adds brightly.

Percy, somehow catching that, tilts his head. “That’s a great nickname for Will.”

Will groans. “I hate this.”

Frank frowns. “It can be a lot .”

Hazel gives Will a knowing glance. “Especially if you’re not used to being in the spotlight.”

Annabeth hums, flicking through something on her screen. “He better get used to it.”

“Why?” Will asks, panic bleeding into his voice.

Percy shrugs like it’s obvious. “You’re one of us now, aren’t you?”

Will freezes. Absolutely short-circuits. Somewhere in his brain, a faint internal scream is looping on a 10-second delay.

Cecil claps him on the back, almost knocking the soul out of him. Lou Ellen beams like this is the happiest day of her life.

And Will wonders, sincerely, if it’s too late to flee to a rural Idaho goat farm and change his name to Chad.

He tries to look calm, resting his chin in one hand like he isn’t coming apart at the seams. Casual, he tells himself. Chill. Chill people ask about their crush’s academic interests, right?

“So,” he says, aiming for calm and missing wildly, “how’s everyone’s semester going?”

Annabeth dives in immediately, talking about her latest architecture project—sustainable skyscrapers and vertical ecosystems and materials that Will is certain aren’t real words. Percy keeps interrupting to add things like, “Tell them about the prototype!” and “No, no, you forgot the rooftop fish farm! ”

Meanwhile, he’s pilfering fries from Frank’s plate with the grace of a raccoon. Frank says nothing, but his betrayed expression speaks volumes, and Will senses that this will not be forgotten anytime soon. 

Hazel chimes in next, sharing details about her geology research with quiet pride—rare minerals, ancient riverbeds, volcanic deposits. Lou Ellen looks genuinely intrigued. Cecil is either impressed or too deep in his own fantasy about finding cursed jewels.

Will’s listening— he swears —but he’s also waiting. For his name to slip into the conversation. For Nico.

And Hazel hands it to him on a silver platter.

“Nico’s been busy with his thesis,” she says casually, sipping her lemonade.

“Oh?” Will says. His voice cracks like a glowstick.

Cecil kicks him under the table. Not subtly.

Hazel doesn’t blink. “He’s double majoring in Classics and Archaeology, did you know? He’s doing his thesis on funerary practices in ancient Rome and Greece. He’s looking at how concepts of death and the afterlife changed depending on region, time period, and social status.”

Will stares, slack-jawed. “That’s… kind of incredible.”

Hazel nods, like yeah, she knows. “He’s been working on it for over a year. He got special permission for independent study, so he’s translating primary sources. Some of them don’t even exist in English.”

Will leans back in stunned silence. This boy is translating the afterlife. For fun. Meanwhile, Will almost failed biochem because he forgot about a lab report until the night before.

“He’s a nerd,” Percy says fondly, stealing another fry. “Total bookworm.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Frank mutters.

“He’ll make you regret it,” Hazel adds.

Percy waves them off. “I’m not afraid of him.”

Hazel raises an eyebrow. “You should be.”

Will laughs, but it’s a helpless sound. Because Nico—dark, sharp, cigarette-smoking, emotionally withholding Nico—is fluent in dead languages and writes academic papers on ghosts.

“Wait,” Will says suddenly, a memory clicking into place. “So that’s why he was looking for Il Gattopardo the other week? He mentioned a project…”

Hazel’s eyes light up. “Oh, yeah. That’s one of his favorites. He says it’s essential reading for understanding the fall of aristocratic systems and the illusion of legacy.”

Will’s heart does something horrible and fluttery in his chest. Something unforgivable.

That’s it, he thinks. That’s the final straw.

Cecil was right.

He is so down bad.

Lou Ellen leans over, her voice low and gleeful. “You’ve got that look on your face again.”

Will doesn’t even glance at her. “What look?” he hisses through a too-tight smile.

Cecil doesn’t miss a beat. “The ‘I’m imagining our wedding and his thesis defense is the reception speech’ look,” he says, loudly enough to earn a few startled glances from the next table over.

Hazel chuckles behind her lemonade. Annabeth smirks knowingly over her coffee cup. Percy looks ecstatic , like he’s just been gifted front-row seats to the best drama in town.

Will groans and drops his face into the table which is cool against his forehead. Maybe if he stays here long enough, he’ll sink into the earth.

He’s never getting out of this.

He’s still recovering—mentally filing every detail Hazel just dropped about Nico into a labeled folder called Too Hot, Too Smart, Too Much —when there’s a sharp clap on the table, jarring enough to make Will jolt in his seat. He jerks upwards so fast he gives himself whiplash. 

“So!” Percy grins like a man with a dangerous plan. “We were talking, and we figured it’s probably time we hang out. You know, properly.”

Will blinks, immediately suspicious. “What do you mean, properly ?”

Annabeth exhales through her nose and gives Percy a look like she’s silently rerouting an entire train. “What he means is: we’d like to invite you to dinner. Tonight. At our apartment.”

The world stops.

No, freezes . Time goes slow-motion. Will’s heartbeat slows to a crawl as his brain immediately fills the silence with worst-case scenarios. Dinner? With the Seven? That’s not a meal—that’s a rite of passage. That’s a test. That’s where they sit you down and explain the rules of their secret society while Leo pulls a flamethrower out of the microwave.

Will’s mouth opens, and what comes out is instinctual self-preservation.

“Oh. Um. I can’t. I have to work,” he lies.

Cecil doesn’t even glance up from his phone before launching a punishing kick directly into Will’s shin.

Will chokes. “Ow!—”

“We’d love to,” Lou Ellen says, brightly and with terrifying poise, like they’ve rehearsed this in advance. “What time should we come by?”

Will turns to her, scandalized. Her smile is the picture of innocence, but her eyes say shut up and say thank you.

Percy beams. “Sevenish? Wear something chill. You don’t have to dress up or anything.”

Cecil nods solemnly, like he’s mentally shelving his tuxedo. “Cool. Super chill. We love chill.”

Will clutches his leg and mutters to Lou Ellen, “You sold us out. ”

She shrugs, unrepentant. “You were about to bail.”

“I’m not ready for this!”

“You’ll live,” Cecil says under his breath, already texting like he’s confirming an alibi. “And if you don’t, I’m keeping your plants.”

Will glares at him. “They’re succulents. You’ll kill them.”

Hazel smiles serenely like she’s watching a tragic play unfold. Frank gives a polite nod of solidarity. Annabeth taps her phone, probably adding “ doomsday dinner with trio ” to her calendar. Percy lifts his cup of iced tea with the victorious grin of someone who’s very proud of himself.

“It’s settled!” Percy says, like it’s that simple. Like they didn’t just change the entire trajectory of Will’s week.

Will can feel his pulse in his throat. This is happening. This is really happening . Dinner. With the Seven.

And probably Nico .

He swears under his breath.

Lou Ellen pats his back like he’s a toddler about to cry. “You’re fine.”

“I’m not fine.”

Cecil leans over with a smirk that should be illegal. “You’re in love.”

Will lets out a strangled groan and collapses forward again.

“This is the beginning of the end,” he mutters into the table.

Percy raises his drink, completely unfazed. “To new friendships!”

Will stares at him. At all of them. Perfect, terrifying, powerful people.

Or new cult members, he thinks grimly.

But he clinks his water bottle against Percy’s anyway.

It’s later that afternoon, and somehow—against all better judgment—the trio has migrated to a fancy deli downtown. Not just any deli. The kind with exposed brick, minimalist lighting, and violin covers of indie songs floating through the air like everyone inside paid for the privilege of breathing. It smells like money and rosemary. Will already regrets being here.

He shuffles a little closer to Lou Ellen, his sneakers squeaking against the polished floor like they’re personally apologizing for existing. His jacket definitely has an old coffee stain on the collar, and the sleeves are slightly frayed. He feels like a raccoon in a Gucci boutique.

“This is insane,” Will mutters, glancing down at a wedge of cheese with a price tag that looks like a phone number. “This cheese costs more than our electricity bill.”

Lou Ellen hums, unbothered, squinting at a display of artisan crackers like she’s evaluating fine weaponry. “Well, if we’re going to dine with the bougie elite, we have to at least look like we belong.”

Cecil—already deep in his role as high-end grocery connoisseur—snags a wire basket with flourish and holds up a bottle of wine, examining the label like he knows what any of the words mean. “This one’s fifty bucks.”

Will nearly chokes. “Absolutely not.”

Cecil shrugs and swaps it out. “This one’s thirty-five.”

Will groans. “Do we have to bring wine?”

Lou Ellen gives him a look that could kill a man. “It’s a dinner party. With Annabeth and Percy. At their apartment. Of course we have to bring wine.”

“And flowers,” Cecil adds, pointing dramatically toward a rustic bouquet under a literal spotlight . It looks like it was plucked from a meadow that only exists in fairy tales and overpriced Pinterest boards.

Will pinches the bridge of his nose. “We can’t afford this.”

“We can’t afford to show up empty-handed,” Lou Ellen says grimly, already holding up a bouquet that looks like it belongs in a Martha Stewart magazine shoot. “This is the social event of the semester.”

Cecil tilts his head, holding up two wine bottles side by side like he's solving a moral dilemma. “Or, at the very least, our only shot at becoming regulars in the Elite Cryptid Circle.”

Lou Ellen hums. “We bring weak offerings, they’ll smell blood in the water.”

Will glares. “They’re college students. Not sharks.”

“College students with designer shoes and leather-bound notebooks,” Cecil counters. “Annabeth owns actual blueprints of her future penthouse. You think she won’t remember if we bring gas station wine?”

Will groans. “This is all so stupidly intimidating.”

Lou Ellen raises a brow. “You’re trying to impress your maybe-crush in the presence of his terrifyingly impressive friends. This is survival, Solace. Look alive.”

He glances around, hyper-aware of how everyone else in the deli looks like they walked off the set of a Scandinavian fashion commercial. Perfect hair. Designer boots. Confidence. They reek of generational wealth and oat milk.

Will tugs on his sleeve. “You ever get the feeling people are staring at you?”

Cecil glances up from comparing Merlot and Pinot Noir. “You mean because you’re a lovesick disaster in a place that only serves trust-fund babies?”

Will glares. “I mean besides the obvious.”

Lou Ellen elbows him. “Relax. They’re probably wondering if we’re famous. Or starving artists.”

“They’re wondering why we’re here and arguing over $15 crackers,” Will mutters.

“Because we’re committed to the bit,” Cecil says solemnly.

Will exhales slowly. “Okay. Wine. Flowers. What else? Do we bring food? I can make brownies.”

Lou Ellen gives him a long, measured look. “You don’t bake.”

“I can bake,” Will says, deeply offended. “I just… don’t.”

Cecil pats his shoulder like he’s being gently put down. “Buddy. We’re not bringing boxed brownie mix to dinner with Annabeth Chase. That’s how wars start.”

Will slumps in defeat.

Eventually, they settle on a modest but aesthetic bottle of red (Will can’t pronounce the vineyard but it looks expensive), a bouquet that radiates rustic elegance and costs enough to make his debit card cry, and a glossy little box of dark chocolates that Will insists they split three ways—financial dignity be damned.

At checkout, Will catches his reflection in the deli window: rumpled jacket, messy hair, dark circles from too many night shifts and not enough sleep. He looks like a walking before picture in a self-care commercial. But still—he straightens his spine.

He can do this.

They can do this.

They’re going to dinner with the Seven.

And if Will’s heart does a kamikaze dive at the thought of seeing Nico again?

Well.

He’ll blame it on the wine.

On their way back to Harlem the subway car jerks forward like it’s trying to shake them off, the fluorescent lights flickering with just enough chaos to match Will’s internal state. He sits on the hard plastic seat, knees bouncing, watching the tunnels blur past like he’s trying to find a window into another life.

Across from him, Lou Ellen is scrolling with the intensity of someone reviewing a classified dossier, while Cecil is hunched over a notebook, sketching what looks suspiciously like a battle plan. With seating positions.

“You’re making a plan,” Will says flatly.

Cecil doesn’t look up. “Correction. We’re making The Plan. Capital letters. It’s important.”

Lou Ellen smirks, flicking to another tab. “We’re not leaving your love life to fate. That’s how sitcoms start.”

“I swear to gods,” Will warns, sitting up straighter, “if you two do anything tonight—”

“Define anything, ” Cecil says innocently.

“Anything that involves locking me and Nico in a broom closet. Or pretending the rest of you suddenly got food poisoning. Or setting the fire alarm and leaving us alone in the apartment while mood music plays—”

“I’m not saying those are bad ideas,” Lou Ellen interrupts.

Will groans. “I will murder you. Slowly. And dramatically.”

Cecil taps his pen against the page. “You’re going to have to get a lot less homicidal if you want to be a doctor, Will.”

Lou Ellen kicks his foot lazily. “We’re just giving fate a gentle push.”

“I don’t need a push. I need tranquilizers .”

Lou Ellen raises a brow. “Just because you nearly passed out the last time Nico made direct eye contact with you doesn’t mean it will happen tonight.”

Cecil nods sagely. “And if it does, well—we’ve already prepped our ‘he just has low blood sugar ’ speech.”

Will groans, pressing his palms into his eyes. “I hate you both.”

“You don’t, ” Lou Ellen says sweetly.

Will lowers his hands to glare. “No seriously. If you try anything—”

“Sure,” Cecil says, unbothered. “But hypothetically , if Nico drags you onto the fire escape to smoke and confesses he’s been in love with you since stood on his foot in freshman orientation…”

“We’re taking full credit,” Lou Ellen finishes.

“He’s not going to confess anything,” Will snaps.

“Not with that attitude,” Lou Ellen says.

Will stares at the ceiling, wondering if it’s too late to fake appendicitis.

The subway rattles on, the station names flying by too fast. Cecil adjusts his seat chart like he’s planning a royal banquet. Lou Ellen pulls up directions with the focus of someone programming a heist. And Will—Will takes a deep breath and tries to believe that he can handle this.

It’s just dinner. With the Seven. And Nico di Angelo. And his two best friends, who have weaponized matchmaking into a competitive sport.

No big deal.

Right?

But with flickering light buzzing overhead so intently it’s on the verge of triggering a migraine, Will can’t stop the gnawing pit in his stomach. The truth is, part of him still feels like a visitor in a world that isn’t built for him. A kid with secondhand shoes and two jobs walking into a dinner party hosted by people who probably use “ exposed brick ” as a lifestyle choice. Annabeth probably has real linen napkins. Percy probably owns wine glasses that aren’t repurposed mason jars. And Nico—

Gods. Nico.

Will has spent an entire week embarrassing himself in increasingly creative ways in front of a boy who moves like shadows and speaks like a riddle and looks like he’s been carved from marble and moonlight. And now they’re going to be in the same room again. Possibly across a candlelit table. Possibly making small talk. Possibly within reach.

Will presses his palm flat against the knee of his jeans, trying to ground himself.

It’s fine. He’s fine.

Maybe he’ll even manage a coherent sentence tonight. Maybe he’ll stop acting like a complete disaster every time Nico looks at him. Maybe—gods willing—he’ll make it through dinner without falling into any furniture, hedges, or existential spirals.

And if he doesn’t?

At least he’ll go down swinging, with a thirty-five dollar bottle of wine and a borrowed button-up.

The train slows with a mechanical screech as they pull into the station.

Cecil snaps his notebook shut with the finality of someone concluding an evil masterplan. Lou Ellen claps Will on the shoulder—half encouragement, half threat—and rises with the grace of someone already rehearsing their speech for Best Supporting Meddler .

Will stands, heart thudding hard enough to rattle his ribs. They’ve got a few hours left before dinner with the Seven—just enough time to go home, pull themselves together, and attempt to pass for people who weren’t raised in a Dionysian frat house. Will still has to wrestle his curls into submission, find an outfit that doesn’t scream “free clinic intern, ” and, most importantly, prevent Lou Ellen and Cecil from turning the evening into a staged Will-Nico proposal between the main course and dessert.

Hope flickers low in his chest.

Terror sits right beside it.

And somewhere between them, love is probably sharpening a carving knife.

Chapter 11: So You’ve Been Invited to Dinner with the Elite: Will Solace’s Guide to Bisexual Panic, Pomegranate Salad, and Unresolved Family Trauma

They’re running late.

Not truly late, not insult-your-hosts-and-curse-your-lineage late, but late enough that Will is sweating through the button-down he’s definitely overthought and his phone keeps lighting up every ten steps with a reminder of the time, just in case his heartbeat wasn’t already screaming it in Morse code.

They’re halfway up the block when Will slows, taking in the looming Upper West Side brownstone ahead of them. The kind of building that looks like it has marble countertops, original crown molding, and a doorman trained by Interpol . The stairs are wide and intimidating. There’s a brass plaque by the door. Will doesn’t read it—he’s too busy trying not to hyperventilate.

Lou Ellen strides beside him, smoothing down the front of her black blazer like she’s heading into a gallery opening. She’s wearing slim plaid pants, a crisp white blouse, and statement earrings shaped like abstract moons. Her eyeliner is winged like a dagger and she walks like she owns the place.

Cecil, on the other hand, is doing his best impression of a hedge fund dropout turned lifestyle podcast host. His blazer might be corduroy. His tie is suspiciously shiny and loosely knotted—probably from Lou Ellen’s stolen theatre costume bin. His pants are technically tailored, but they look like they’ve been to more parties than classes.

“You think we look okay?” Lou Ellen asks, eyeing the building like it’s about to reject them based on vibe alone. “We don’t look like criminals, right?”

“Speak for yourself,” Cecil replies, adjusting his tie with mock gravity. “I look like I sell real estate in the Hamptons. Or maybe flip haunted houses for tax evasion.”

Will fidgets with his collar, trying not to look like someone cosplaying confidence. He’s wearing his nicest button-down—blue, with sleeves rolled to the elbows in a way Lou Ellen assured him was “ subtly sexy ”—tucked into his only pair of slacks that aren’t also work pants. No hoodie. No Star Wars tee. And definitely no cargo shorts with flip-flops.

“I look like I’m about to take someone’s blood pressure,” he mutters.

“You look hot,” Lou Ellen assures him. “In an earnest, ‘I’m only here for the wine and the intellectual debate’ kind of way.”

Cecil snorts. “Which is hilarious because you don’t drink wine unless the liquor cabinet is empty, and you couldn’t win a debate with someone who thinks horoscopes are science.”

Will glares. “I so could.”

Lou Ellen smirks. “Will. Last week you lost an argument with a vending machine.”

“It ate my dollar! ” Will says, scandalized.

“Exactly my point,” Cecil sings, unhelpfully.

They reach the bottom of the stone stoop and freeze like trespassers about to break into a museum. Will shifts the bottle of wine in his grip, wiping his clammy palm on his slacks, and glances up at the stately door like it might speak Latin and request a password.

“Okay,” Lou Ellen exhales, eyes locked on the door. “We need a plan.”

“We have a plan,” Cecil replies, nodding toward the corner of his notebook peeking from his back pocket. “We talk about cool, classy things. No mention of illegal activity. No jokes about arson. No conspiracy theories about the Seven being spies or mafia princes.”

Lou Ellen raises a hand. “What can we talk about?”

Cecil hums thoughtfully. “Art. Politics. Film festivals. Pretentious stuff.”

Will makes a face. “I don’t know anything about any of that.”

“Sure you do,” Cecil says, flinging an arm around Will’s shoulders. “You’re pre-med. Just say the phrase The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks twice and everyone will think you’re a genius.”

Lou Ellen nods. “Throw in a line about the Hippocratic Oath and sprinkle in some guilt about pharmaceutical ethics. Boom. Instant dinner party credibility.”

Will grimaces. “We’re going to die.”

Cecil nods solemnly. “But we’ll die respectably. ”

They ascend the stairs slowly, each step feeling less like progress and more like an offering to whatever gods govern social hierarchies. The door looms closer. Will’s heart is thudding so loudly he’s sure someone inside will hear it.

“Okay,” Lou Ellen says, her voice suddenly focused, like a mission commander. “And no yearning for Nico across the dinner table unless he initiates the pining stares.”

“I make no promises,” Will mutters, cheeks warm.

Cecil grins. “Just don’t ask him about his tragic backstory, Will. It’s not polite on the first date.”

“This isn’t a date,” Will hisses, but his voice is too strangled to be convincing.

“Sure it isn’t,” Lou Ellen says sweetly—already pressing the buzzer.

Will tightens his grip on the wine bottle like it’s a lifeline.

He’s going to survive this. Maybe. If he doesn’t embarrass himself. Or knock over a decorative vase. Or ask Nico di Angelo about funeral rites mid-risotto.

Gods. He’s so doomed.

A smooth, vaguely amused voice comes through the speaker. “Come on up.”

Annabeth.

The door unlocks with a soft, high-tech click that sounds far too elegant for this group of broke college kids, and Cecil pushes it open with the confidence of someone about to inherit a trust fund.

“Showtime,” he says, voice too cheerful for Will’s current heart rate.

Will sucks in a breath and adjusts his grip on the wine bottle. “We can do this.”

“You can do this,” Lou Ellen corrects, her hand brushing his arm in a pat that’s both reassuring and ominous. “We’re just here for the free food and accidental drama.”

They climb the stairs in sync, shoes a little too clean, collars a little too stiff, their best outfits trying (and mostly failing) to disguise the fact that they are three broke disasters held together by caffeine, sarcasm, and emotional repression.

But for tonight?

They’re going to fake it.

Probably.

The door swings open before they can even knock, and standing there—barefoot, grinning like a labrador in human form—is Percy Jackson. He’s wearing faded jeans and an aggressively orange summer camp t-shirt so ancient the logo has dissolved into soft cotton ghosts.

“Hey!” he says brightly, like they’ve just arrived for movie night and not the most intimidating evening of Will’s life. “Come in!”

They step inside, and Will's first coherent thought is: This isn’t an apartment. This is a lifestyle.

The place is enormous. Open floor plan. High ceilings. Windows that probably predate the Civil War. Exposed brick that looks more expensive than the entire contents of Will’s bedroom. There’s a massive sectional couch positioned like the throne of Olympus, flanked by shelves lined with leather-bound books and strange, coastal knick-knacks—coral fragments, glass bottles filled with sea glass, driftwood that looks suspiciously art-directed.

And then there’s the fish tank.

No— aquarium. A wall of glass, glowing blue in the soft lighting. Dozens of fish flit behind the glass—striped, translucent, feathery-finned and far too intelligent-looking. Will half-expects one to press up to the glass and whisper, So, you’re into Nico too, huh?

“Whoa,” Cecil breathes, eyes darting around like he’s casing the joint. “Okay. This is officially the nicest place I’ve ever been in. By a mile.”

Lou Ellen makes a low, impressed sound, arms crossed. “It’s aggressively tasteful. I kind of hate it.”

Will can’t stop staring at the fish. “Do they have… personalities?”

Percy lights up, bouncing slightly on his heels. “Oh, totally. That’s Crackers,” he points to a shimmering lionfish with long, elegant fins, “and that one’s Bubbles. They have different feeding schedules. Bubbles only eats brine shrimp, and Crackers will literally fight you for a mussel.”

Will makes a sound somewhere between fascination and terror.

“There’s a feeding chart,” Percy continues with completely un-ironic enthusiasm. “And a light cycle, and I do water changes every third day, and—”

“Percy,” a voice interrupts from the kitchen.

Annabeth stands framed in the doorway, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and an apron that somehow makes her look like she’s running a five-star restaurant. She’s got a wooden spoon in one hand and sheer command in the other.

“Come help me,” she says.

Percy throws them a sheepish grin. “Be right back,” he says, then vanishes like a golden retriever being summoned with a treat.

Will exhales shakily. “Okay. We survived the first boss level.”

“Fish are not a boss level,” Lou Ellen mutters, already casing the apartment layout like she’s planning a museum heist. “They’re a side quest.”

Cecil elbows Will and tilts his head toward the kitchen— gifts time . Will jolts, remembering the bouquet in Lou Ellen’s arms, the box of overpriced chocolates in Cecil’s hands, and the bottle of red he’s clutching like a peace offering.

They file into the kitchen, the scent of rosemary and butter floating through the air. Annabeth meets them with a nod of acknowledgment, efficient and composed.

“You didn’t have to bring anything,” she says, taking the wine with a practiced smile. She sets it down beside two already-open bottles of something that looks like it came with a pronunciation guide.

Lou Ellen offers the flowers, her expression pleasant but cautious. “We thought they might brighten the place up.”

Annabeth glances around at the golden lighting and magazine-spread ambiance. “Thanks,” she says, placing them in a tall glass vase with mechanical grace.

Cecil slides the box of truffles onto the marble counter like he’s diffusing a bomb. “For dessert,” he says. “We figured we’d keep it classy.”

Annabeth nods, her smile turning more genuine. “Very thoughtful.”

Will tries to swallow around the lump in his throat. He knows this is normal, expected, polite—but standing here, in this carefully curated apartment with its ambient lighting and custom cabinetry, all he can think about is how much that bouquet cost. How much he’s not going to eat this week. How much this room screams money while his entire life feels held together by frayed stitching and grocery store coupons.

He’s still in the middle of recalculating his entire net worth when Lou Ellen subtly bumps his shoulder.

“We good?” she murmurs, voice low and steady.

Will pastes on a smile like it’s part of his outfit. “Yeah. Totally good.”

Cecil leans in like he’s sharing a secret. “Relax, Solace. If this were an offering, the gods would already be showering us with blessings.”

Will mutters back, “If the gods shower me with anything, it’s going to be debt collectors.”

Cecil grins. “Same thing.”

Annabeth, blissfully unaware of Will’s spiraling finances and emotional chaos, gestures toward the living room. “Everyone’s out there. Make yourselves comfortable. We’ll start in a minute.”

Lou Ellen salutes with two fingers. “Roger that, Commander.”

They retreat to the living room, stepping lightly on the polished hardwood floors. As Will passes the aquarium again, one of the fish—probably Crackers, who looks deeply judgmental—glides by and seems to pause.

Will stares back.

The fish stares harder.

He sighs. “Same, buddy,” he mutters. “Same.”

The living room is already buzzing with conversation when the trio ventures in, polite smiles in place like they’ve practiced this a hundred times (they haven’t). Half of the Seven are already there—Piper lounging on the couch like she owns the place, Jason perched next to her scrolling through his phone, and Leo sitting cross-legged on the floor, sketching something that Will’s fairly certain isn’t legal.

Hazel, Nico, and Frank are noticeably absent, but Will forces himself not to think about it. Not to wonder if Nico’s skipping tonight. Or if he’s hiding somewhere, quietly judging him from the shadows.

Percy reappears like he’s summoned, carrying three wine glasses with a grin so wide it should be illegal. “Welcome to the grown-up table,” he announces, handing each of them a glass.

Will sniffs his. It smells expensive. Not in the fruity box wine way he’s used to from college parties, but in a this was bottled by monks on a private island kind of way.

“You guys have a wine collection,” Lou Ellen says, suspicious. “That’s excessive.”

Percy shrugs, glancing toward the kitchen where Annabeth is already watching him like she’s timing his every move. “Blame Annabeth. She likes to keep our entertaining standards high.”

“Entertaining standards,” Lou Ellen echoes. “Sounds ominous.”

Before Percy can respond with one of his signature chaotic affirmations, Annabeth’s voice cuts through the apartment like a laser-guided missile.

“ Percy! Kitchen. Now. ”

It’s not a request. It’s a command. The room collectively flinches.

Percy winces like a puppy caught chewing on a shoe. “Coming!”

He flashes them a quick, sheepish grin that somehow manages to be both apologetic and completely unbothered. Then he scrambles to his feet and scurries toward the kitchen like a man heading into battle—except with more enthusiasm and significantly less armor.

Will watches him go with something between awe and horror. “They’re… terrifying.”

Jason doesn’t even look up from his phone. “You get used to it.”

Cecil leans forward, intrigued. “Do you?”

Jason glances up just long enough to make eye contact. “No.” Then he goes right back to scrolling like he didn’t just drop a truth bomb with the weight of lived trauma.

With Percy safely out of sight and Annabeth hopefully not throwing knives in the kitchen, the rest of them move to claim furniture like a round of musical chairs. Lou Ellen immediately beelines for the armchair like it owes her rent. Cecil flops onto the edge of the massive sectional and immediately sprawls out like he’s claiming land in the name of Chaos. Will wedges himself into the corner beside him, trying to maintain some semblance of dignity even as his knees awkwardly bump a throw pillow shaped like a seashell.

Before Will can overthink his seating position or whether this is a power play by Percy to make guests feel both welcome and judged, Leo tosses his sketchpad onto the coffee table with a dramatic flair.

“Okay,” Leo announces, clapping once like he’s starting a TED Talk. “Here’s the question of the hour: how illegal is it to hook up a mini jet propulsion system to a bicycle?”

There’s a moment of stunned silence.

Then Cecil’s entire face lights up like a cartoon villain who’s just been handed the blueprints to mayhem. “You’re talking about bike rockets.”

Leo points at him with the enthusiasm of someone discovering a soulmate on Craigslist. “ Exactly! Finally, someone who understands me.”

Jason, still scrolling, doesn’t even blink. “Don’t encourage him.”

Cecil waves a dismissive hand. “It’s not illegal if you don’t get caught. What’s your propulsion source?”

“Compressed CO2 tanks,” Leo says proudly, like this is a completely reasonable thing to say at a dinner party. “But I’m thinking of upgrading to something a little more… intense. ”

Cecil’s eyes sparkle. He leans forward like he’s about to propose. “We should talk after dinner.”

Will stares at them both, horrified. “No. No talking. No collaborating. Absolutely not.”

“Oh, come on,” Lou Ellen chimes in, sipping her drink with a smirk. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Will whips around to glare at her. “The last time you said that, we had to talk our way out of a misunderstanding with campus security.”

Lou Ellen shrugs, completely unrepentant. “One time.”

Jason finally looks up, intrigued. “What misunderstanding?”

Will doesn’t even want to relive it, but his soul forces him to speak. “Cecil’s drone went rogue. It tried to deliver ‘party favors ’ to the dean’s office.”

Cecil holds up a finger. “ Allegedly. Nothing was proven in a court of law.”

Leo is grinning so hard he might split his face. “You guys are way cooler than I thought.”

Will slumps back against the couch and pinches the bridge of his nose like it might contain the rising tide of panic and secondhand shame. “Please don’t say that. I’m still clinging to the illusion that we’re responsible adults.”

Piper, who has been observing the entire exchange from her corner of the couch like a judging panelist on a talent show for chaos, leans over and lightly taps Will’s glass with hers.

“Welcome to our world,” she says, and it somehow sounds like both a warning and a dare.

Will knocks his glass against hers with the tired resignation of a man who knows he’s already in too deep.

Gods help him—this is only the beginning.

And just as Will’s thinking it can’t get any weirder, the door opens again.

Frank steps in first, balancing the weight of what appears to be a floral arrangement fit for a royal wedding. His arms are stacked—overflowing, really—with an ornate bouquet bursting with lilies, roses, and some delicate, star-shaped flower that looks like it belongs in a fairytale forest. He’s also juggling a gift box wrapped with absurd precision and a bottle of wine nestled under one arm that radiates the kind of wealth Will can only associate with silent auctions and hedge funds.

Hazel follows him in, her expression calm and amused, and then—

Then Nico walks through the door.

And Will’s entire world tilts.

He doesn’t mean to stare. Really. He wants to be normal. Wants to be calm and cool and unbothered. But Nico strides in like a specter conjured from a fever dream—sharp angles and dark edges, wrapped in black-on-black that fits like it was tailored in the underworld. His jacket falls open just enough to reveal a sliver of silver glinting at his throat, and his hair—dark, slightly tousled, like he’s run a frustrated hand through it on the way over—only adds to the impression that he’s either about to duel someone or haunt an opera house.

And the scowl. Gods, the scowl. He’s wearing it like armor, jaw tight, brows drawn in a way that makes him look like he’s already lost patience with the night and is contemplating necromantic vengeance.

Will’s breath catches somewhere behind his ribs.

“Oh,” Lou Ellen murmurs beside him, her voice low and reverent. “They brought offerings.”

Will just stares. Their own bouquet—the delicate but modest arrangement they’d agonized over for twenty minutes—and the $35 wine are probably withered from shame in the kitchen.

He’s about two seconds away from faking a nosebleed or sudden-onset appendicitis when Nico moves further into the room, the light catching in the sharp cut of his cheekbones, the silver chain at his throat, the storm brewing in his expression.

“I need a drink,” Nico mutters, brushing past Frank and not sparing anyone a glance.

Will’s heart lurches. Or seizes. Or explodes. Something internal and dramatic happens that should probably be studied in a cardiology seminar.

Nico’s voice is lower than usual. Rougher. It scrapes against Will’s nerves in a way that shouldn’t be legal. And even though he says it to the room in general, his eyes—dark, heavy-lidded, shadowed like he hasn’t slept in days—flick briefly in Will’s direction.

And soften.

Just a little. A flicker. A subtle shift from thundercloud to something quieter, less guarded.

But then his phone buzzes. Nico pulls it from his pocket, glances down, and his jaw tightens again. He swipes a thumb across the screen with more force than necessary, the muscle in his cheek twitching like he's biting back words he can’t—or won’t—say aloud.

The storm rolls back in. Beautiful and bitter.

Will doesn’t know what that message said, but he wants to burn the sender’s entire phone plan to the ground.

Frank, ever the human golden retriever, turns and smiles at the trio. “Hey, guys,” he says warmly, setting down the ridiculously extravagant gifts like they’re nothing. “Nice to see some fresh faces here.”

Will blinks, trying to reboot. “Fresh faces?”

Jason, still lounging like this is all deeply beneath him, snorts softly. “It’s our monthly dinner party.”

Will nearly inhales his wine. “Monthly?”

Piper tilts her head, amused. “What, you thought this was a one-off?”

Lou Ellen beams. “You guys do this every month?”

“Sometimes more,” Hazel replies as she drifts toward the kitchen, already helping Annabeth unpack the dessert boxes. She says it like it’s perfectly normal. Like their lives are just Pinterest boards with secret handshakes.

Will’s grip on his wine glass tightens. He feels the world tilting again.

Traditions. This is a tradition. He’s been invited into something long-established and deeply ingrained. A circle. A cult. A curated lifestyle of monthly parties and perfect wine pairings and the kind of people who own real bookshelves and not just piles of paperbacks on milk crates.

And he’s standing in the middle of it wearing shoes that are at least five years old and trying not to melt every time Nico exists in his general vicinity.

Cecil leans in, voice low and conspiratorial. “I think we’ve been recruited.”

Will grits his teeth. “Shut up.”

But then Nico settles into the armchair directly across from him, legs elegantly crossed, jacket draped just so, his wine glass handed off by Jason like some kind of silent ritual. He doesn’t look up right away. He swirls the wine once, then takes a slow sip, his fingers ringed in silver, his posture effortless and regal and devastatingly beautiful.

When he does look up, their eyes meet—and for a heartbeat, everything stills. The tension sharpens like a violin string pulled too tight. Will doesn’t breathe. He doesn’t move.

Nico doesn’t smile. But he doesn’t look away, either.

And Will—

Well, Will is toast.

Maybe he doesn’t want to leave after all. Maybe he wants to stay in this haunted mansion of a social circle forever, if it means getting to sit across from Nico di Angelo as the storm rages behind his eyes and something unspoken stretches between them, taut and waiting.

Annabeth appears at the entrance to the living room with the kind of commanding presence that makes Will instinctively sit up straighter. She doesn’t even raise her voice, but somehow everyone falls silent when she says, “Dinner’s ready.”

There’s a shuffle, chairs scraping wood floors and half-finished conversations tapering off. Will follows Lou Ellen and Cecil through the wide doorway, trying not to trip over his own suddenly too-long legs. His hands are clammy again, his heartbeat thudding somewhere up in his throat. He braces himself for more velvet-draped chaos, but when they enter the dining room—

Oh gods.

It’s beautiful.

It looks like someone broke into a museum of ancient Greek design, stole the most elegant pieces, and reassembled them here with precision and love. The long marble table is sleek and gleaming under the warm pendant lights overhead, scattered with tiny candles that flicker softly like stardust. The chairs are carved wood, ornate but inviting, and the wall art is stunning—tapestries and painted panels in mythological motifs, woven with color and history. There’s even a tall amphora in the corner, as though the apartment couldn’t resist being that on-theme.

Will stares for a moment, momentarily forgetting how to function.

“This is…” Lou Ellen breathes. “A set.”

“Yup,” Cecil says. “Definitely in a cult.”

Will wants to laugh, but he’s too distracted by the warm, rich smells rising from the table. Garlic and lemon and something herbaceous—savory, comforting. His stomach growls, loud and undignified, as his gaze sweeps over the spread. Roasted lamb with rosemary. Dolmades glistening with olive oil. Piled plates of olives and cheeses. Bowls of salads bright with jewel-toned pomegranate seeds. Glorious golden phyllo pastries crisped to perfection.

Will blinks slowly, overwhelmed.

This is… dinner. For them. The broke trio with secondhand blazers and unmatched mugs for wine glasses. This is a feast fit for the gods.

He slides into the seat between Lou Ellen and Jason like he’s afraid he might break something. Across from him, Leo collapses into his own chair with a contented sigh, tossing his sketchpad aside like it’s just another accessory and murmurs, “Man, this is fancy. We usually just order pizza.”

Before Will can process that statement, Nico elbows Leo in the ribs. Not hard, but with enough force to make Leo grunt. Nico doesn’t even look up from his plate.

Will, who is apparently unable to keep his mouth shut around Nico, blurts, “Wait, what do you mean ‘usually’ ?”

Percy, already piling food onto his plate like he’s preparing for battle, glances up. “We don’t normally go all out like this,” he says easily. “Usually it’s pizza. Sometimes Thai.”

Annabeth cuts Percy a look that’s both fond and exasperated. “But since it’s your first dinner with us, we wanted to do something nice.”

Frank nods from further down the table. “Yeah. Percy and Annabeth spent hours cooking.”

Annabeth shrugs. “It was fun.”

He looks around.

At Percy, who is now insisting the pomegranate seeds in the salad are symbolic and therefore he deserves extra. At Annabeth, who pretends not to be listening but reaches over and slides him the bowl with barely concealed affection. At Frank, carefully portioning out food like he wants everyone to eat exactly enough. At Hazel, who’s watching Lou Ellen with quiet amusement. At Leo, who is clearly delighted to have found someone as unhinged as himself in Cecil.

And then there’s Nico.

Sitting across the table, black-clad and brooding like always, but there. Present. Letting himself be surrounded by this noise and light and ridiculousness. Even if he’s swirling his wine with vaguely murderous intensity, he’s here. He’s stayed.

And suddenly, Will realizes: this isn’t performative.

This isn’t about impressing them or intimidating them. It’s not a test. It’s not some secret trial or cult ritual (probably). It’s just…

Kindness.

They cooked. They cleaned. They set the table like it’s a sacred rite. They’re feeding them the kind of food Will only ever sees on his Pinterest board or at work. And they’re letting them in. Just a little.

They’re trying.

The Seven—who everyone thinks are too elite, too strange, too exclusive to care—have pulled out all the stops for three broke, chaotic idiots who showed up with half-melted truffles and wine below their usual standards.

Will feels something twist in his chest. Shame, a little. For thinking they were cold. Distant. Mafia-adjacent.

And something else, too.

Gratitude.

Will realizes something in that moment:

They’re trying, too. This isn’t just an obligation for them. They’re not tolerating the trio. They’re… putting in effort.

Lou Ellen catches his eye across the flicker of candlelight and raises her brows, like she’s been waiting for him to get it. Cecil nudges his knee under the table, lips quirking into a smug little smile that says See? Not so scary, huh?

Will breathes in.

Lets the warmth bloom slow in his chest. The wine helps, but it’s not just the wine. It’s the food. The welcome. The softness hiding under all the polish and old money and chaotic fire hazard energy.

He picks up a piece of bread from the basket and tears it in half.

“This all looks amazing,” he says, his voice gentler now. He aims it toward Annabeth and Percy—but his gaze flicks, almost involuntarily, to Nico.

Nico, who’s already watching him.

Nico, who doesn’t smile, exactly, but lets the corner of his mouth curl in the faintest ghost of amusement. Who looks away only when his glass is half-empty again.

And Will…

Will forgets about cults and rumors and bank account balances.

Because for one moment, for one dinner, it feels like he’s exactly where he’s meant to be.

And that’s terrifying. And kind of wonderful. And probably, definitely, dangerous.

Dinner turns out to be less of an initiation ritual and more of a chaotic family meal, which is both comforting and mildly terrifying.

Will stabs his fork into the pomegranate salad, letting a few of the ruby seeds tumble to the side of his plate. They shine like little blood drops under the warm lighting—sweet, tart, mythologically loaded Pomegranate seeds. At this dinner. In this apartment. With Nico , whose dad is literally named Hades and whose stepmom is—Will cannot believe this is real— Persephone .

He stares at the salad like it’s personally mocking him.

Because how is this his life? How is he sitting across from the son of Hades, eating pomegranate salad at a marble table, while Nico glowers into a glass of wine like he’s auditioning for a brooding renaissance portrait?

Will has read The Myth of Persephone . He’s pre-med, not a classics major, but still—he knows what the pomegranate means. He knows what it costs to swallow it down.

Nico probably grew up with that story like it was a family anecdote.

Will picks up a single seed on the edge of his fork and watches the juice glisten in the candlelight.

It’s not lost on him that in the myth, Persephone only becomes Queen of the Underworld after she eats the seeds. That it’s the surrender—or maybe the choice—that seals her fate.

Will brings the pomegranate seed to his lips.

He doesn’t just eat it—he savors it. Lets the juice burst on his tongue, sharp and sweet, like a promise he’s choosing to keep.

Because maybe that’s what this is.

Not just dinner. Not just a moment.

But a decision.

A quiet, ridiculous, myth-soaked decision to stop pretending he isn’t already caught in Nico di Angelo’s orbit.

And maybe—just maybe—he doesn’t want to leave.

Chapter 12: Percy Tries To Burn Down The Kitchen While Nico Performs a One-Man Tragedy With His Phone and Hazel Is Absolutely Not Okay

Conversation hums around the table like static electricity—bright, warm, and just a little too much. Jason and Percy are already arguing, Leo’s drawing something that might qualify as a felony, and Annabeth has started rearranging the serving platters with ruthless efficiency. The food is absurdly good, the lighting makes everyone look golden and soft, and Will should be relaxed.

But he isn’t.

Not really.

Not when Nico is sitting just across the table, a dark figure in black with silver glinting faintly at his collar. He’s barely touched his plate, swirling his wine with a kind of restless grace, and every time Will looks at him, it’s like watching the edge of a storm gather behind his eyes.

The first time the phone buzzes, it’s quiet. Barely noticeable over the sound of Percy dramatically recounting the time he got knocked off a jetski. Will might not have even looked—except Nico’s jaw tightens. Not subtly. Not slightly. It’s the kind of tension that radiates across his whole body. His fingers grip the phone like it’s something volatile. Dangerous. Then, without a word, he hits decline—his thumb pressing the screen with such cold precision it makes Will flinch.

He thinks that’s the end of it.

It’s not.

The second buzz comes when Annabeth and Lou Ellen are mid-discussion about urban design infrastructure, and Will is doing his best to follow despite the fact that he’s still not sure what a cantilever is. The sound slices through the moment. Again. Nico’s nostrils flare. He exhales, not dramatically, but sharply. Controlled. Irritated.

Decline.

This time, he flips the phone face-down beside his plate like he’s slapping down a card in a game he’s trying not to lose.

Will feels the hairs on his arms rise.

Nico hasn’t said a word about it. No eye roll. No sigh. Just quiet, simmering anger that seems to crackle beneath his skin like static. He hasn’t even touched his food. His wine is nearly gone.

By the third buzz, Will is basically craning his neck to see the screen. It’s instinct, curiosity, and worry all tangled together.

Nico catches him.

Of course he does.

Will freezes as their eyes lock. Nico raises an eyebrow—cool and unreadable, a single tilt of his head that says: Really?

Will panics. His hand jerks back like he’s been caught stealing, and he focuses very intently on scooping roasted potatoes onto his plate like they are the most interesting thing he’s ever encountered.

Across the table, Percy is gesturing wildly with his wine glass. “I’m just saying, lightning’s fast. One second, bam, you’re crispy. That’s it.”

“Better than drowning,” Jason insists.

“I don’t drown, ” Percy scoffs.

Jason snorts. “You did that one time.”

“That was a technicality!”

Annabeth doesn’t even look up. “If you two don’t shut up and pass the olives, I’m going to drown both of you.”

Frank slides the olives down the table with a small smile. Piper high-fives Jason without context. Leo mutters something to Hazel about structural integrity and scrawls another sketch on a napkin.

The world is bustling, laughing, alive.

But Will can’t stop watching Nico, who is completely silent. Still. Carved from shadow and tension, his wineglass untouched now. The phone buzzes again. That subtle, traitorous hum.

Nico doesn’t even flinch this time. He just hits decline without looking, his thumb graceful, final. Then he picks up his fork and resumes pushing food around his plate like nothing happened.

Will’s heart beats unevenly in his chest.

He doesn’t want to ask. He shouldn’t ask.

But he’s been watching Nico all week, and every time he’s looked close enough—he’s seen it. The sharp edges. The restraint. The ache behind the scowl.

He keeps his voice low, quiet enough that the others won’t hear over the sound of Percy loudly defending his dignity. “Everything okay?”

He’s buttering his bread, trying to seem casual, but his eyes flick to Nico’s face, searching.

Nico doesn’t answer at first. He takes a long sip of wine, the motion fluid and carefully slow, like he’s buying himself time. His lashes lower slightly. Then he shrugs, like the weight on his shoulders is something he can brush off.

“Fine,” he says.

Will’s gaze drops to the phone, now lying sullen and silent beside Nico’s plate. “That’s the third call.”

Nico’s lips twitch—just barely. Not a smile, but something less severe. “Fourth, actually.”

Will’s brow furrows. “Persistent.”

“Family,” Nico mutters, and this time, there’s a note of bitterness underneath the word. Like it tastes worse than the wine.

The word settles over Will like a stone. He doesn’t press. He knows enough not to push where it hurts. Especially here. Especially now.

Still, he can’t stop the quiet, earnest offer that slips out. “You can take it. If you need to.”

For a second, he’s sure Nico won’t respond. That he’ll brush it off or ignore him altogether. But then Nico turns, just slightly, dark eyes fixed on Will. His expression is impossible to read—tired, guarded, and something else buried deep beneath the surface.

“I don’t,” he says simply.

And there’s something in his voice—not defiance, but choice.

Will nods. Doesn’t say anything else. He wants to do more. Say more. Reach across the table and take his hand and tell him he’s not alone, not anymore. But that would be too much. Too soon.

So instead, he reaches for the breadbasket and nudges it toward Nico without a word.

Nico glances down at it, then at Will, and something flickers across his face—softer than a smile. Almost a thank you.

Will doesn’t need the words.

For now, this is enough.

And then the phone buzzes again.

Nico silences it, slow and deliberate, before slipping it into his jacket pocket and refocusing on his plate like he’s sealing a door shut behind him.

Will exhales quietly, warmth blooming beneath his ribs.

Somehow—somehow—this feels like progress.

The conversation winds down as plates are scraped clean and the initial frenzy of passing dishes and dodging elbows gives way to the lull of full stomachs and warm buzzed contentment. Forks rest lazily against plates. Elbows prop up heads. Someone’s wine glass gets topped off by a mystery hand with vague “ do you want more ?” eye contact. Percy is mid-rant about how he once accidentally inhaled seaweed while surfing, while Jason counters with a story about lightning melting the soles of his sneakers. The room hums with the easy energy of people who’ve done this before—who know there’s more food coming and aren’t in a hurry. 

Annabeth sets down her fork with precision and rises smoothly from her seat. “Dessert in ten,” she announces, wiping her hands on her linen napkin. Then, with a sharp glance at Percy, she adds, “Come help.” 

Percy groans theatrically. “But I’m digesting.” 

“You’re breathing,” Annabeth snaps back, grabbing his wrist and hauling him to his feet like he weighs nothing. “That’s all you need.” 

As they disappear into the kitchen, Percy muttering something about domestic tyranny, Will lets out a slow breath and leans back in his chair. He’s not sure if he’s relieved or worried about dessert. Annabeth’s cooking is amazing, but he’s still trying to figure out what that one dish with the figs and goat cheese was. Will leans back in his chair, finally starting to feel like maybe—just maybe—he belongs here.

And then the phone buzzes again. 

That familiar, sharp hum against marble. Will doesn’t even have to look to know it’s Nico’s. The sound cuts straight through the comfortable haze like a scalpel.

Nico glances at it, just for a second, his face hardening into something colder than stone. Without breaking eye contact with the screen, he hits decline.

Deliberate. Final.

He sets the phone back down. Face-up this time. Daring it to buzz again.

Will watches out of the corner of his eye. Nico’s expression is carved from marble now, beautiful in the way ancient statues are—distant, unknowable, fragile only if you know where to look.

It buzzes again.

Nico doesn’t flinch.

He picks it up, hits decline for the second time in a minute, and sets it back down with a bit more force than necessary. The screen goes black, a blank mirror reflecting the chandelier overhead.

Will opens his mouth, then shuts it again. He doesn’t know what to say. How to ask. He doesn’t even know if he’s allowed to ask.

Hazel’s phone lights up.

She’s mid-laugh at something Frank just whispered in her ear, but it dies immediately as her eyes catch the name on her screen. Her smile slips, delicate and barely noticeable—but Will sees it. He sees everything now.

Her gaze flickers to Nico. Then back to the phone. She hesitates, thumb hovering.

“Don’t answer,” Nico says. His voice is quiet but cuts through the air like ice through silk.

Hazel stiffens. “I have to,” she replies, and though her voice is calm, something trembles beneath it. “What if something’s wrong?”

Nico’s hand tightens around his wine glass, knuckles pale.

“I don’t care.”

The words hang there, sharp and brutal. Lou Ellen freezes mid-sip. Cecil slowly lowers his fork like he’s worried any sudden movement might set Nico off.

Will feels like he’s watching something sacred unravel in front of him.

Hazel stares down at her phone, fingers curling slightly, shoulders drawing in. She doesn’t argue. Doesn’t fight. Just stands quietly, her chair scraping softly against the floor.

“I’ll be quick,” she says, more to the room than to Nico. And then she disappears down the hallway, phone to her ear, her other hand clutched tightly at her side.

Frank watches her go, his expression unreadable. He doesn’t move to follow, but his eyes stay fixed in her direction long after she’s out of sight.

Will turns back to Nico. He hasn’t moved. He hasn’t said anything. He just raises his glass to his lips and drains it—slow and deliberate, like the act itself is a distraction. Or maybe a punishment.

He looks exhausted. Not physically. Emotionally. Like he’s fighting off the edge of something too vast to put into words. The kind of storm that starts in the bones and never really leaves.

Will’s chest aches.

He wants to say something. To reach out. But what could he possibly say?

I see you.

You don’t have to carry this alone.

You’re not as alone as you think you are.

Instead, he says nothing. He grips his water glass tight enough to leave marks and watches Nico, who watches nothing at all.

A moment later, Hazel returns, soft-footed and quiet. She slips into her seat like she was never gone, but the light in her face is dimmed, her shoulders hunched.

She doesn’t look at Nico.

Not at first.

Then she does.

And says, gently, but with the force of someone who’s been down this road too many times already. “You should call Dad.”

The air goes still.

Will’s mind races.

Dad.

That word hangs heavy in the space between them. It doesn’t sound casual. It sounds ancient. Powerful. Dangerous. Something old and cracked and full of sharp edges.

Nico doesn’t move.

Will barely breathes.

And then Nico exhales through his nose. A sound more bitter than tired.

“No.”

Flat. Unflinching. A closed door with no keyhole.

Hazel looks like she’s been hit. Her brows draw together, and for a second, she looks like she’s about to say something else. But Frank shifts in his seat, just slightly, brushing his knee against hers under the table—a wordless reminder that she’s not alone either.

Hazel swallows her next words.

“Nico,” she tries again, quieter.

“I said no,” Nico snaps, a flash of something raw breaking through the surface.

He drums his fingers against the side of his empty glass once—twice—then stands abruptly. The legs of the chair scrape loud against the polished floor, making several people flinch.

“I’m going for a smoke.”

It’s not a request. It’s not even an announcement. It’s a declaration of retreat.

He grabs his jacket, shrugging it on like armor and with elegance that feel practiced, and strides across the room toward the balcony doors. For one agonizing second, he passes behind Will, close enough that Will catches a whiff of his cologne—smoke and leather and something ancient and clean—and then he’s gone.

Will’s eyes follow him helplessly, watching him leave like he’s watching the sun disappear behind a storm cloud.

Frank reaches across the table and gently takes Hazel’s hand.

She doesn’t say anything. But she grips it like it’s the only thing keeping her upright.

And Will…

Will stares at the balcony door.

Something inside him is unraveling. Something tight and guarded, the same kind of thing Nico always keeps behind his eyes.

And gods help him, he wants to follow.

Hazel closes her eyes and breathes in slowly, like she's physically bracing against something no one else can see. Her fingers tremble faintly on the edge of her wine glass. Frank is already moving before anyone else can react—his hand finds the small of her back with the kind of practiced ease that speaks of a thousand moments like this before. He leans in close, murmuring something low, barely audible over the hush that’s fallen over the table.

Hazel doesn’t answer, not immediately. Her throat works like she’s swallowing down everything she wants to say. Then, at last, she gives a tiny nod—reluctant, wounded—and leans into Frank’s shoulder. Not for show. For survival. She’s the kind of person who’s been strong so long, she doesn’t know how to be anything else. But just now, she lets herself lean. Just a little.

The silence that follows is like a held breath. Fragile. Uncomfortable.

Then Leo clears his throat, too loud, too fast. “So! Anyone want to see the diagram for my jet bike?”

Jason jumps on it instantly, like they’ve practiced this kind of emotional triage before. “Did you tell them about the solar panels yet?”

“No,” Leo says brightly, already fishing out his phone. “But I will.”

Piper flashes a blinding grin at the trio, every inch the well-trained distraction. She looks like she should be on a billboard for chaos control. “Jason and I were arguing earlier about whether or not Leo’s invention is technically street legal. What do you guys think?”

Will blinks, his brain still stuck in the echo of Nico’s voice— I don’t care. He looks at Piper, trying to shift gears and not succeeding.

“Uh…”

Lou Ellen, ever the battlefield tactician, charges in. “If Cecil’s driving it, absolutely not.”

Cecil nods solemnly, like this is a matter of professional pride. “I only drive things I can crash in under five minutes.”

Leo beams. “You’re hired.”

The table bursts back into life—buzzing again with wild invention theories and one-liners and whatever’s being drawn on the back of a napkin. It’s effective, this machine of camaraderie, of curated chaos. But Will isn’t really part of it. Not tonight. Not when half his brain is still on that balcony.

He keeps glancing toward the shut glass door, heart ticking loud in his chest. Nico hasn’t come back. Not even a flicker of movement behind the curtains. Just the cold reflection of the room, sparkling against the glass like a barrier he doesn’t know how to cross.

He wonders if Nico is still angry. If he’s hurting. If he’s cold.

If he needs someone.

If that someone could ever be Will.

Percy chooses that exact moment to reappear, looking like he’s just survived a culinary apocalypse. There’s flour in his hair, powdered sugar on his shirt, and a streak of something burned near his elbow. He’s grinning like a golden retriever who just discovered fire.

“Bad news, team,” Percy announces, slumping into his chair with the weariness of a man who has met dessert and lost. “There’s been a dessert-related disaster.”

Jason groans and lets his head fall against the back of his chair. Leo sits up straighter, practically vibrating with glee. “Oh my gods, what did you do?”

From the kitchen, Annabeth’s voice comes sharp and fast: “It was his fault!”

“I had one job,” Percy says, mournfully.

“What did you do ?” Piper demands, half horrified, half hysterical.

Percy raises both hands like he’s under arrest. “In my defense, flambé sounds way easier than it actually is.”

Lou Ellen leans in, eyebrows raised. “You set something on fire, didn’t you?”

“It was contained! ” Percy insists.

Annabeth, with impeccable timing: “It was in the sink! ”

Will chokes on nothing and coughs into his elbow. Percy only shrugs, then turns to the table with exaggerated grace and deposits a box of chocolates in the center like he’s revealing the Ark of the Covenant. “Luckily, we have these fine offerings from our new favorite dinner guests.”

Will blinks. The chocolates. The ones from the fancy deli. The ones they could barely afford. The ones he bought while sweating under fluorescent lights, wondering if the cashier was judging him.

Now they’re center stage.

“Thank you,” Annabeth calls, this time with reluctant but genuine approval. “You guys are officially invited back.”

Piper is already unwrapping the box, distributing chocolates with casual efficiency. Lou Ellen takes one with a smirk. Cecil picks the darkest one, then makes an obscene groan like he’s just been reborn.

Will tries to smile. He really does.

But something is buzzing beneath his skin. Not panic, exactly. More like awe. Because…

They’re trying .

These people—who feel like myth and legend on campus—are trying. For them.

Someone cooked lamb. Someone found wine glasses that match. Someone lit candles and made pomegranate salad. And yeah, Percy set dessert on fire, but even that feels like part of the ritual. Like a shared inside joke.

Will isn’t on the outside anymore.

And he’s starting to think maybe they don’t want him to be.

He looks around the table—at Piper laughing, at Leo offering Jason a chocolate and immediately stealing it back, at Hazel still tucked into Frank’s side, her fingers gripping his shirt like a lifeline. And he wonders if this is what it feels like to be folded in. Slowly. Carefully.

Welcomed.

Percy clambers to his feet, and then he’s talking, and then there there’s something strange buzzing under Will’s skin.

It’s the role reversal.

Just a few weeks ago, he was standing by their table in his server apron, rattling off drinks orders and desperately trying not to sweat through his shirt under their collective, casual cool.

Now Percy is standing at their table—no apron, but definitely taking their tea and coffee orders like he’s the intern in a law firm.

“Tea? Coffee?” Percy asks, juggling a notepad he clearly stole from Annabeth and a pen that doesn’t work unless he smacks it against his palm. “Hot chocolate? Annabeth’s got the fancy powder.”

“I’m good,” Will says automatically, though his mouth is dry.

Percy tilts his head at him. “You sure? It’s, like, real chocolate. Not that fake instant stuff.”

Cecil, never missing an opportunity, claps Will on the back. “He’s fine. Just emotionally compromised.”

Will gives him a warning look. “I will end you.”

“I’ll take coffee,” Lou Ellen says smoothly, rescuing them both. “Black.”

Percy scribbles it down. “Cool, cool. Jason, you want—?”

“Tea,” Jason says. “Annabeth won’t let me have more caffeine.”

Annabeth calls from the kitchen again, “Because you stopped blinking for two hours!”

Percy winces again and vanishes with the orders, muttering something about ungrateful audiences and culinary genius.

Will exhales slowly, trying to get his brain to stop running in circles. The feeling is back again, and it reminds him that he is a bookstore clerk, a server, a pre-med student that will never pay off his student loans, and he’s just playing the role of wealthy socialite who attends elites dinner parties for the night. It’s not real, none of this is real, the taste of red wine and pomegranate is suddenly sour on his tongue. 

And the glass door is still closed. The balcony still dark.

Will shifts in his seat.

He doesn’t know if he should stay here and bask in this warmth, or follow the chill that’s haunting the edge of the room.

Nico di Angelo is out there somewhere—stormy and unreadable and maybe not okay—and Will…

Gods help him, Will wants to be the one he lets in.

Even if it means stepping out into the cold.

Chapter 13: Funerals and Antiquities (Or Possibly Murders and Executions)

Will pushes back his chair with a sharp scrape that makes him wince. He mutters something about needing air—noncommittal, vague, like he’s hoping to slip out unnoticed.

No such luck.

Jason quirks a brow, watching him with the slow, amused calculation of someone who’s already guessed the ending of a movie you haven’t finished yet. Percy gives him a wink so exaggerated it should be illegal. Even Annabeth, whose hands are full of coffee mugs and her brain full of military-grade social calculus, pauses long enough to track his exit like she’s filing a new footnote under Will Solace: Vulnerability Patterns.

Cecil does not help. “Tell him we say hi,” he calls, just loud enough for the table to hear and for Will’s soul to evacuate his body.

Will glares over his shoulder, but he’s already halfway to the balcony door, shoulders stiff with the effort of pretending he doesn’t care.

And maybe they’re right.

But not entirely.

He is going out there for Nico, but he’s also going because his skin doesn’t fit right in this place. Because the apartment gleams like something out of Better Homes and God Complexes, and every perfectly curated piece of furniture feels like it knows he doesn’t belong here despite the Seven’s best efforts to welcome him into their inner circle. 

Will’s fingers fumble over the balcony handle, then he pushes it open and steps out into air that finally—finally—feels like his own. The cold hits him in the face and he breathes it in like penance. Below them, the city sprawls out in a blur of headlights and noise, distant and almost comforting.

He leans against the railing, forehead pressed to the cold metal, heart thudding. He’s a broke student with coffee stains on his jacket, medical textbooks that smell like ramen broth, and anxiety wound so tight in his chest it’s a wonder he hasn’t combusted yet. He’s two missed shifts away from losing his apartment, and one more accidental conversation about his feelings away from crying in public.

So yeah.

He just needs a second.

And then—

“Didn’t think I’d see you out here.”

Will startles, breath catching in his throat.

That voice. Low and smooth and shadowed, like the first rumble of thunder in a summer storm. Of course it’s Nico.

He’s leaning on the far side of the balcony, half cloaked in shadow, half lit by the faint golden spill of light from inside. Black on black on black. Boots, jacket, jeans. He’s every bit the gothic myth Will’s spent way too long romanticizing—beautiful in a way that feels carved, like something you’re not meant to touch.

The glow of his cigarette flares as he brings it to his lips. Red ember. Marble cheekbones. Darkness wrapped in casual stillness. He looks like sin distilled into smoke and silence.

Will opens his mouth. Then closes it again. His thoughts scatter like leaves in a gust.

Nico watches him with a slow, assessing kind of look. His head tilts, lips twitching like he’s trying very hard not to let his amusement show. “I just needed some air,” Will finally says, voice low and unsteady.

Nico exhales, smoke curling from his mouth like a secret. “Yeah. I get it.”

Will grips the railing tighter, trying not to stare. Trying not to fall apart at the edges.

“Everyone’s looking at me like I followed you,” he mutters, eyes fixed on the skyline.

“They are,” Nico says, deadpan—but his mouth quirks just slightly, the barest flicker of a smile. “But I won’t tell them you didn’t.”

Will huffs a breath that might be a laugh, or a sigh, or the beginning of a cardiac event. With Nico, it’s hard to tell where danger ends and affection begins.

But this silence between them? This one feels different. It hums like something unspoken, something precariously balanced between confessional and collapse.

“You okay?” Nico asks after a moment, voice softer now, like it’s not just small talk.

Will turns his head, caught off guard. “Me? You’re the one whose phone won’t stop ringing.”

Nico snorts, the sound low and bitter. “That’s normal.”

Will wants to ask. He wants to know. But this doesn’t feel like the moment for unpacking ghosts.

“Yeah, well.” He shrugs, half-hearted. “Guess I’m just… overwhelmed.”

And for once, Nico doesn’t scoff or deflect or change the subject. He nods. Quiet. Almost understanding. “Yeah. I get that, too.”

The quiet that follows stretches—not awkward, not exactly—but fragile. Like something sacred. Like a secret they’re both pretending not to notice.

Will breathes easier. Or maybe just closer to Nico.

Then Nico flicks the cigarette off the balcony with practiced indifference and finally turns toward him. That look —the one that always makes Will’s chest seize, the one that says Nico is seeing straight through him—lands like a spark to dry tinder.

Nico doesn’t smile, not really. But his eyes soften just a fraction, and Will thinks maybe this is what a smile looks like in the language Nico hasn’t quite learned how to speak yet.

And just like that, Will knows exactly why he came out here.

Not because he couldn’t breathe inside.

But because Nico’s out here breathing too.

“You’re not going to give me another health lecture, are you?” Nico asks, voice dry and distant, like he’s only half there as he lights another cigarette. Will’s eye twitches. But there’s a flicker of something in his voice—wry amusement, maybe. A thread of softness he doesn’t let most people hear.

Will smirks, weak but honest, leaning against the balcony railing like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. “I’m taking the night off.”

“Good.”

And Nico’s smile—brief, reluctant, real—almost makes the night worth it. It slips across his face like moonlight on water, quick and impossible to catch, but dazzling in its quiet honesty. Will watches it vanish like it never happened, and still, it imprints somewhere permanent inside him.

Nico turns his head, exhaling another slow stream of smoke. The tendrils curl into the air like ghosts escaping his lungs. Will tracks the movement like it’s the most important thing in the world. Maybe it is.

And then—he doesn’t know where it comes from. The wine, maybe. The soft hush of night around them. Or maybe it’s the way Nico’s standing less than two feet away, in profile, beautiful and tired and mythic. A living contradiction in a cigarette haze.

Will blurts, “So… the phone calls.”

Nico doesn’t tense. Doesn’t step away. Just glances at him, eyelids half-lowered like he’s too tired to be offended. Lazy. Unimpressed.

But still here.

Progress.

“Yeah,” Nico says, after a beat. His voice is low and strangely quiet, like the topic has weight he’s still deciding whether to lift. “Family stuff.”

He pauses.

Then, more precise. Sharper.

“Family business, actually.”

And Will’s brain just… short-circuits.

Family business.

Oh no.

No no no.

Will stares at him, eyes wide. He knows what that sounds like. Nico has to know what that sounds like. The expensive black clothes. The vaguely European air. The constant mystery. The unlisted number that keeps calling. The last name di Angelo.

And before he can stop himself—before even a single shred of sense can slam into place—he hears himself say, way too quickly:

“Are you… in the Mafia?”

The words just hang there, awful and echoing and alive with regret.

Will wants to throw himself off the balcony. Or fake a heart attack. Or just rewind time and punch himself in the mouth.

“Forget it,” he says instantly, waving a hand like he can physically swat the sentence away. “That was stupid. I’m—”

But then Nico laughs.

And not the brittle, sarcastic sound Will has heard him make before. This is different. Softer. Real.

He ducks his head, trying to hide it behind the back of his hand, but Will hears it anyway. A quiet, choked-off huff of actual amusement, like Will’s chaos has caught him off-guard.

“You think I’m in the Mafia?” Nico says, lifting his eyes again. They’re dark and gleaming now, and Will can’t look away. “Seriously?”

Will groans. “I said forget it.”

“No,” Nico says—and he’s still smiling. Actually smiling. It’s the kind of smile that could start wars. The kind that makes you forget your own name. And Will? Will forgets how to breathe.

“That’s a new one,” Nico adds, as if he’s still processing it. Like he might start collecting rumors just for fun.

“It’s not,” Will mutters, because apparently his brain’s given up and is letting his mouth free-fall into disaster. “There are actual rumors. About you. All of you.”

Nico hums, unbothered. If anything, he looks entertained. He leans his elbow against the balcony railing, turning slightly toward Will. There’s something playful in his posture now. Teasing. Coy, in a way that makes Will’s pulse spike.

“What else do they say?”

Will hesitates. He’s pretty sure listing conspiracy theories isn’t how you get someone to fall in love with you. But then Nico looks at him like he’s genuinely interested —and what’s Will supposed to do with that?

He shrugs helplessly. “Someone said you’ve got a private island. And a villa. And that you’re a prince.”

Nico snorts. “Which one’s your favorite?”

Will doesn’t even hesitate. “The one where you’ve had people… uh, disappear.”

And immediately regrets it.

“I’m gonna go back inside now—”

But Nico’s hand twitches against the railing, subtle, like he’s about to stop him.

He doesn’t. Not quite.

Instead, Nico shakes his head, still smiling—just softer now. Calmer. The edge dulled into something that makes Will’s chest ache.

Like Nico’s not laughing at him.

But letting him in on the joke.

Like Will said something wrong, but not unforgivable.

Like he came out here for air… and found something he hadn’t realized he was suffocating without.

And gods help him—he’s not sure he wants to go back inside either.

“It’s not that exciting,” Nico says after a pause. He flicks his cigarette into the ashtray nearby with a precision that feels practiced. “My family’s… in funerals and antiquities.”

Will blinks. The words hit his ears like a riddle wrapped in a death certificate. Will blinks again. Funerals and antiquities. That’s not a job description, that’s a murder confession disguised as a business card.

Funerals and antiquities. Will tries not to react, but his brain immediately flashes to American Psycho —that scene where Bateman says “murders and executions,” but the girl hears “mergers and acquisitions.”

It feels like that. Like Nico just told him he moonlights as a mafia prince and part-time assassin, and Will, for some reason, nods along like he understood.

“Oh,” he says. “Like… museums?”

Nico’s mouth twitches. It’s not quite a smile—more like the ghost of one. “Something like that.”

Will’s brain helpfully supplies an image of American Psycho. White business cards. Chrome axes. Plastic tarps. Funerals and antiquities. It’s the kind of vague, suspicious job description someone in a glossy thriller says right before the dismemberment montage. The words echo in Will’s head like a warning label, some deranged merger of Armani suits and mausoleums.

He’s suddenly very aware that Nico hasn’t blinked in a while.

Oh gods, he thinks. I’m going to die on this balcony. He’s going to kill me and make it look like a tragic rooftop accident. “Pre-med student tumbles off posh Upper West Side brownstone.” The obituary will be tasteful. The funeral will be themed. He probably already has the urn picked out.

It explains nothing.

And makes everything worse.

Will opens his mouth to ask what that means , exactly, but Nico pushes off the railing with a quiet exhale, the movement smooth and deliberate, like he’s closing a conversation Will never quite got to understand. His gaze flicks over Will, dark and assessing, with just enough challenge to make Will’s stomach do a slow, traitorous flip.

“You going back inside,” Nico asks, tone unreadable, “or are you going to keep interrogating me?”

Will stares at him, caught like a deer in headlights. Or a waiter who just found out the mysterious, hot regular he’s been crushing on casually dabbles in funerary arts and might be a mob boss. He should say something clever. Or aloof. Or literally anything besides gawping like he’s caught in a trance.

“Yeah,” he manages, barely. “I’m going.”

But he doesn’t.

Not yet.

The quiet stretches between them, not comfortable exactly—but not sharp either. A muted pause in the middle of a whirlwind. The kind of stillness Will thinks maybe Nico lives for. He lingers by the railing again, his hands disappearing into the pockets of his jacket, shoulders slightly hunched like he’s trying to disappear into the night. The quiet between them settles like fog, cool and a little dense, but not suffocating. Not like the air inside. Will exhales slowly, dragging his palms down the front of his pants, trying to act casual despite feeling like his internal organs are attempting to stage a mutiny.

Will doesn’t move, afraid to break whatever strange, delicate atmosphere has settled between them. He’s about to say something—maybe a half-joke about the skyline or how the fish inside might be plotting something—when Nico glances sideways.

“You want one?” Nico asks.

Will blinks. “One… what?”

Nico raises an eyebrow, tilting his head just enough to motion toward the half-empty cigarette pack now balanced between two fingers. The glow from the ashtray catches on the silver ring he wears—just another detail Will probably shouldn’t find stupidly attractive.

“You were staring,” Nico says.

“I wasn’t,” Will says, way too fast.

Nico just gives him a look. That look. One of those Nico di Angelo specials—subtle, unimpressed, just amused enough to make Will feel like a schoolboy trying to impress the class goth with his Pokémon cards.

“Fine,” Will mutters. “Maybe I was.”

Nico doesn’t rub it in. He just slides a cigarette out of the pack, holds it between two fingers, and waits.

Will hesitates.

He shouldn’t. He knows he shouldn’t. He lectured Nico about this weeks ago. He’s a med student. He’s seen what cigarettes do to lung tissue.

But Nico is watching him like he already knows Will is going to say no. Like this is some sort of test—and not the kind Will can study for.

So he takes it.

“Sure,” Will says, and regret sets in instantly. But Nico’s already stepping closer.

He flicks the lighter to life. It’s silver, expensive, a flickering blue flame that casts brief, dramatic shadows over his sharp cheekbones and storm-cloud eyes. He holds it up to Will’s mouth with one hand, and the proximity is dizzying. Will swears he can feel the heat of Nico’s palm, even without it touching him. The flame flares, gold and warm between them. Will’s hand trembles slightly as Nico brings the lighter up, and for a moment he can smell Nico’s jacket—smoke, cedar, something faintly floral. Expensive. Haunting.

And then Will takes a drag. Immediately, his lungs betray him.

It’s not smoke—it’s fire and brimstone and regret. His throat incinerates on contact, his chest convulses, and he doubles over with a cough so violent it feels like his ribs might give out. His eyes water. His dignity dies. The smoke hits Will’s lungs like a curse. There’s no grace in it—just burn. It sears down his throat and instantly goes to war with his body.

He chokes.

Hard.

His knees buckle slightly as he doubles over, coughing like he’s been cursed by Zeus himself. His eyes water. His lungs riot. Somewhere inside him, his med school conscience is screaming you absolute idiot on a loop.

Nico doesn’t move to help. He just watches. Calm. Patient.

Then he huffs a laugh—quiet, but real. The kind of sound Will wants to bottle and keep in his pocket.

“Smooth,” Nico says, plucking the cigarette from Will’s trembling hand and stubbing it out before more damage can be done.

Will straightens slowly, eyes still watering, his entire face burning with mortification. “Shut up,” he rasps, his voice shredded. “I was… I was distracted.”

“By what,” Nico deadpans. “Your impending death?”

Will’s brain short-circuits for the second time that night. Say it. Just say it. You were distracted by how pretty he is, by the way his eyes are darker than the sky right now, by the ridiculous jacket that fits him like it was tailored by heartbreak itself.

“I… I don’t know,” Will manages instead. “The stars?”

Nico snorts, unconvinced.

Will groans and rests his forehead against the cold railing again, the metal biting into his skin in a way that grounds him. “This is why I stick to weed.”

“Smart choice,” Nico murmurs. But his mouth is curved again—soft, crooked, and unmistakably fond. Not in a way that mocks. In a way that sees. Like he’s used to people doing stupid things around him. Like it’s kind of endearing when Will does it. There’s something in his expression—quiet, unreadable, almost gentle—that makes Will’s heart give an unfortunate little flutter.

Like maybe Nico’s not going to kill him.

At least not literally.

Will dares a glance at him, and Nico’s gaze is still on him—steady and dark, but softer than it has any right to be.

For a moment, Will forgets he just choked half to death on a cigarette he never should’ve taken in the first place.

Then Nico flicks the empty lighter closed and slips it into his pocket with an ease that feels practiced. Casual. Cool.

“I won’t tell,” he says.

Will’s heart stutters like it’s trying to be poetic about it.

He huffs a breath that might be a laugh. “You better not. My reputation’s hanging by a thread.”

Nico tilts his head slightly, mouth curving just a little. “What reputation?”

Will grins—or tries to. “Exactly.”

The silence that falls between them isn’t uncomfortable, not exactly. It hums with the same nervous energy Will’s been running on all night. Below, the city moves on without them, a muffled blur of taxis and neon and possibility. Up here, it’s just them. Two boys standing so close their sleeves keep brushing—barely, but enough to make Will feel like he’s being lit on fire and asked to act normal about it.

He’s about to break the moment with some stupid comment about the fish tank or the fancy pomegranate salad when Nico speaks again.

“What about you?” he asks, voice quieter now. More serious.

Will turns his head, caught off guard. “What about me?”

Nico’s eyes are unreadable in the dim light, but his voice is careful. “Your family.”

It hits like a soft bruise. Will blinks and hesitates. His first instinct is to dodge, throw up a wall, make a joke about how it’s complicated and toss it over his shoulder like a grenade.

But Nico isn’t asking to pry.

He’s asking because he knows what it’s like to keep a hand on the door in case someone needs to close it.

Will exhales slowly, pressing his palms against the railing. “My mom’s Naomi Solace.”

Nico raises an eyebrow.

“She’s… sort of an alt-country singer,” Will explains. “Niche audience. Think haunted bar jukebox and lingering whiskey regrets.”

“I can’t say I’m familiar,” Nico says.

Will laughs, but there’s a bitter edge to it. “No one is. That was kind of the problem.”

He doesn’t usually talk about this. But the night is warm, and Nico is watching him like he won’t interrupt, like he won’t judge, and maybe that’s all it takes.

“I grew up in bars,” Will says. “Shitty green room couches. Promises of record deals that never came. Nannies with revolving door schedules. My mom loved me, I know she did. But most of the time, I felt like a prop in someone else’s long shot.”

Nico doesn’t say anything. But he shifts slightly, closer. It’s subtle. Almost nothing. But Will feels it like a weight pressed into his side.

“My dad?” Will shakes his head. “Summer romance. Mom never told me more than that. Said he was ‘sunshine in human form .’” He snorts. “Which is just country song code for ‘don’t ask .’”

Nico hums like he understands. Will thinks he might.

“And now you’re here,” Nico says.

Will glances over. Nico’s expression is unreadable, but intent. Like he’s memorizing Will's words one by one.

“Now I’m here,” Will echoes. “Trying to do something that matters.”

Nico nods slowly. “Yeah. I get that.”

It’s three simple words, but they land heavier than any lecture Will’s heard in med school. Because Nico doesn’t just say it like he understands.

He says it like he feels it too, and it makes Will think maybe he does. Maybe more than anyone else.

The balcony door creaks open behind them, a reminder that the night is still moving. That there are other people, other conversations. Will half-turns to look, his heart still doing something about Nico standing so close.

Jason Grace appears in the doorway like he’s been summoned by chaos itself. Framed by the golden glow of the apartment behind him, he looks like the human embodiment of sunshine and good intentions—albeit slightly ruffled. His tie is loose, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and his hair is mussed just enough to look charmingly unkempt rather than genuinely disheveled. In each hand, he holds a wine glass with the casual nonchalance of someone who has never known true fear and has appointed himself, perhaps arbitrarily, as the “vibes guy” for the evening.

“Hey,” Jason says, all teeth and trouble. “Just making sure you haven’t jumped.”

Nico’s scowl appears instantly, sharp and deeply unimpressed. “Jason.”

“What?” Jason raises one hand like he’s being unjustly accused, his wine swaying dangerously close to the edge. “You’ve threatened before.”

Will nearly chokes on his own breath, caught completely off guard. “I—what?”

Jason shrugs, completely unbothered, like this is normal roommate banter and not something out of a police report. “It’s a joke.”

“Is it?” Will asks, voice climbing an octave as he eyes Nico like he might have missed some important warning signs.

Nico exhales sharply, dragging a hand down his face as if he’s praying for patience. “I wasn’t going to jump. I told you I was going for a smoke.”

Jason steps forward, grinning like a menace, and presses a wine glass into Nico’s reluctant hand anyway. “Sure. But just in case.”

Nico mutters something in Italian that’s sharp enough to make the air feel colder. Will doesn’t know what it means, but he’s pretty sure it wouldn’t pass FCC guidelines. Still, Nico takes the glass.

Jason turns to Will then, still radiating laid-back charm. “So, how’s your night going? Nico insulting your intelligence yet?”

“Not… recently,” Will says slowly, trying not to sound too breathless. “It’s been nice.”

Jason raises a skeptical eyebrow like that’s not computing. “Huh. Must be slipping.”

“Jason,” Nico warns again, voice low and deadly.

Will, despite himself, is grinning. “No, no, I wanna hear more about this.”

Jason lights up like someone just gave him a mic and a stage. “Oh man, where do I even start? Rooming with Nico is an experience. Like, I used to think I was organized, right? Had a system. Then I met this guy.” He jerks a thumb at Nico, who’s already massaging his temples like this is giving him an actual migraine.

Will leans in slightly, drawn forward like Jason’s spilling state secrets. “Go on.”

“Nico color-codes his bookshelves,” Jason says. “By time period and death rate. Which is a little terrifying, honestly.”

“It’s efficient,” Nico mutters into his wine.

“Sure,” Jason agrees, completely unfazed. “And he has, like, six alarm clocks. But not to wake up. Just to remind him to stop working and eat something.”

“I wouldn’t need them if you didn’t keep unplugging my laptop,” Nico deadpans.

Jason sips his wine with all the innocence of a war criminal. “That’s because you need sleep, man. You can’t just keep pulling all-nighters translating Etruscan funerary inscriptions.”

Will blinks, thrown. “Wait. You read Etruscan?”

Nico shrugs, like this is completely normal behavior. Jason groans like a long-suffering roommate who’s seen too much.

“Will,” Jason says, serious now, leaning in like he’s about to share a horrifying truth. “He does it for fun. The other day, he was literally translating a curse tablet because, and I quote, ‘it’s soothing .’”

Will turns to Nico, half in awe and half—okay, entirely in awe. “That’s… actually kind of impressive.”

Nico’s ears go faintly pink. He scowls harder, like he’s trying to banish the warmth rising to his cheeks with sheer force of will.

Jason, meanwhile, is having the time of his life. “Oh, and he listens to the most depressing music. Like, I walk in one day, and it’s just—Gregorian chants. No explanation.”

“It’s calming,” Nico mumbles, eyes fixed on the skyline.

Jason nods solemnly. “For a vampire, maybe.”

Will tries—he really does—but a laugh escapes before he can stop it. It startles out of him, light and full, and Nico turns his head just slightly at the sound. Will catches it. The faint twitch at the corner of Nico’s mouth. Like he’s trying not to let it show that he doesn’t hate the laugh.

“I don’t know,” Will says, recovering. “I kind of get it.”

Jason looks between them, eyes narrowing, and Will suddenly feels like he’s been caught doing something scandalous. Jason’s expression shifts—somewhere between amusement and revelation.

“Ohhh,” Jason says, dragging the syllable out like a villain in a musical. “I see what’s happening here.”

“Jason,” Nico hisses, eyes narrowing with a fury that would send lesser men running.

Will, who absolutely does not see what’s happening here, feels his heart trip over itself. Nico’s shoulder is close. Almost too close. And Will doesn’t move.

Jason smirks into his wine. “Nothing. Just saying.”

Nico glares. Will tries not to pass out.

Jason takes another casual sip like he hasn’t just detonated something volatile and irreversible. “Anyway,” he says breezily, “remind me to tell you about the time he tried to summon the ghost of some Roman emperor for extra credit.”

Nico groans, burying his face in one hand like he’s praying for divine intervention.

Will lights up. “You have to tell me that one.”

And as Jason launches into the next chapter of “ Living with Nico di Angelo: A Tragicomedy ,” Will doesn’t even notice the tension bleeding from his shoulders.

Not completely. But enough.

Because somewhere in the middle of all this madness—this cursed dinner party dressed up in myth and marble, with its pomegranate salads and fish that probably have diplomatic immunity—something anchors itself quietly in Will’s chest.

A longing, precise and startling.

He wants more.

More of this. More of the chaos. More of Nico.

Even if Jason’s going to shout it from rooftops. Even if Will’s own heart is a traitor, stuttering every time Nico so much as breathes in his direction.

Jason, clearly emboldened by wine and the gravitational pull of attention, leans against the railing like he’s hosting some exclusive late-night show called This Week in Nico’s Tragic and Mysterious Life . His grin gleams in the low light. Will can’t look away.

This is data. He’s absorbing it like gospel. Like he’s cramming for a final exam titled Nico di Angelo: Heartbreak, Mystery, and Other Dangerous Subjects.

“You should’ve seen him during finals last semester,” Jason says, his eyes alight. “He made this schedule —down to the minute. Like, sleep from 2:00 a.m. to 6:15 a.m., eat at 7:00 a.m., translate three inscriptions, write two essays, curse my bloodline at noon—”

“I didn’t curse your bloodline,” Nico mutters, hiding half his face behind his hand, but not fast enough to mask the smirk trying to ruin his reputation.

Jason smirks. “Fine. You strongly considered cursing my bloodline.”

Will laughs, more freely than he expects to, and it surprises him how natural it feels. The air out here is cooler, the noise of the city below a distant murmur. Jason’s golden retriever chaos is loud enough to drown out the ache, and Nico—still here, still standing beside him like gravity is keeping them tethered—isn’t running.

That’s got to mean something.

Jason plows on. “Oh, and don’t even get me started on the laundry system.”

Nico groans and covers his face again. “Jason.”

“No, no, Will needs to hear this,” Jason insists with the gleeful urgency of someone about to drop a war crime. “He separates his clothes by shade of black. He’s got charcoal , raven , obsidian , and I’m pretty sure one of them is just called void .”

Will’s laugh slips out—less controlled now, tinged with delight and disbelief. Nico shoots him a look: half threatening, half shy.

Will bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling too hard.

And then—Jason tilts his head.

Something shifts.

“Oh!” he says suddenly, as if remembering an important plot point. “And the parade of hookups.”

It hits like a sucker punch.

Nico stills, wine halfway to his mouth.

Will’s laugh falters. His throat tightens. The word hookups sinks like a stone in his chest, dragging something with it.

Parade.

Like it’s casual.

Like Nico’s heart is a revolving door and Will… Will’s just another ghost waiting his turn.

Jason barrels ahead, oblivious. “I swear to gods, there’s like, a system. They come in at weird hours, barely make eye contact with me, and they’re gone by morning. It’s like clockwork. I keep thinking I should leave mints on their pillows or something.”

Will’s world stutters.

His heart, traitor that it is, clenches tight around the idea of Nico—distant, beautiful, untouchable Nico—folded into someone else’s arms in the dark. Names Will will never know. Moments he’ll never be part of. It shouldn’t matter. He has no claim, no right.

But jealousy doesn’t care about rights. It just burns.

“Oh,” he says softly. Too soft.

Jason finally seems to register the shift. The oxygen gets thinner. The wine tastes like dust in Will’s mouth.

Nico sets his glass on the railing with a precision that feels surgical. Final.

“Jason,” he says, low and sharp.

Jason lifts his hands, backpedaling. “I’m going. I’m going.”

He takes a step toward the door, but not before giving Will a deeply unsubtle thumbs-up behind Nico’s back.

Will blanches.

Jason winks and vanishes inside, taking the noise with him.

Chapter 14: I Get Embarrassingly Horny on a Balcony While Percy Sings “Barbie Girl”, These Two Things Are Connected by Vibes Alone

Silence falls, but not the quiet kind. Not the kind that feels like peace. The air between them is heavy with everything unsaid.

Will doesn’t know what to do with it. He shifts slightly, glancing sidelong, but Nico isn’t looking at him. He’s staring out over the city like it’s the only thing keeping him from disappearing entirely.

And gods, he’s beautiful. 

Storm-lit. Composed like a statue, haunted like a ghost.

Will’s breath catches. He shifts his weight, like he could somehow lighten the gravity of this moment just by moving—like that would keep the air from vibrating between them, thick with tension.

Nico still doesn’t look at him.

He is a painting made of shadows and sharp edges. All black leather and dark hair and the kind of stillness that feels like a warning. His face is unreadable—carved from quiet fury or loneliness or maybe both.

He doesn’t look real. He looks like a storm trapped in a man’s body. Like he was sculpted to ruin someone.

Will wants to reach out. To brush his fingers against Nico’s sleeve. To say something . Anything. Something that isn’t please want me back .

But he just watches him instead, his heart splintering in slow motion beneath his ribs.

“I, uh…” Will hesitates. 

“Sorry about him.” Nico shrugs, but his jaw is tight. “But he’s not wrong.”

Will’s heart stumbles. “You mean…?”

Nico exhales slowly through his nose. “It’s easier. One night. No expectations.”

Will swallows, staring down at his hands. The words land like a blade pressed flat against skin—not quite cutting, but cold enough to sting. He has no idea what to do with that information.

Except… he wants to be the exception.

Gods help him, he wants to be the boy Nico stays for. The one who doesn’t leave with the sunrise.

And that’s terrifying.

“It’s okay,” Will squeaks, even though it is far, far from okay.

“Still,” Nico adds, softer now, like an apology threaded through steel, “he shouldn’t have brought that up.”

Will dares a glance at him.

Nico’s gaze flicks sideways. Just a second. Barely a shift of his eyes. But it’s enough.

That look—dark and searching, guarded but not cruel—grabs something inside Will and twists it. It’s not a look you give someone you don’t care about. 

It makes Will’s heart do something reckless again.

He debates saying it, wondering if it’s too forward, but his impulse control gets the better of him and the words are tumbling out of his mouth before he can stop them. “I’ll bring my own mints.”

Nico huffs a laugh—quiet, reluctant, but real.

And for a second, the world tips sideways. Just a little.

His focus has shifted—completely—off the skyline and onto the shape of Nico beside him. Leaning forward ever so slightly on the railing, black-clad arms resting on iron, dark hair catching faint gold from the windows behind them. His mouth, pale and soft in the city glow, presses into a line of thought or annoyance or something Will can’t name.

And suddenly, Will can’t stop thinking about it.

What Nico looks like with someone else.

With one of those hookups Jason mentioned in his usual blundering way, as if it wasn’t a dagger to the ribs.

Will imagines him in the same clothes—dark, expensive—but rumpled. Imagine him without them. Skin pale as moonlight, a map of shadows and sharpness and something Will knows would undo him. Nico—breathless and flushed, clothes half-on, half-off. Lips pink from kissing. Chest rising and falling in the dark.

He imagines someone else’s hands where he wants to be. Nico’s voice, low and frayed in someone else’s ear. A ghost of a grin against someone else’s neck.

It makes him feel sick.

The jealousy rises quick and hot, bitter at the edges. Pointless. Self-inflicted. But real. Will tries to breathe through it. He tries to stay cool, stay distant. He fails spectacularly.

He wants to be the exception.

Will grips the balcony railing tighter, white-knuckled and trembling, the metal biting into his palms like a prayer. The city lights blur below them, glittering in the periphery, irrelevant. Everything is irrelevant except for the boy beside him  whose name has been on his tongue more times than he can admit. And he feels ridiculous for wanting this much, but he can’t stop. 

He breathes in. And out. And tries not to imagine Nico di Angelo in his bed.

He tells himself to stop. He tells himself this isn’t appropriate, that it’s objectifying Nico in a way that makes his chest ache with guilt. Nico’s here, beside him, trusting him enough to linger in this quiet, and Will is ruining it—ruining himself—with the thoughts swirling hot and sharp in his mind.

Don’t, he tells himself. Don’t look at him like that. Don’t think about him like that.

But he does.

Gods, he does.

Because Nico is standing there like temptation sculpted from smoke and shadow. Jacket unzipped, collar loose, throat exposed to the night air, silver chain glinting in the light, his profile lit in fractured gold spilling from the windows behind them.

His lips, always pressed into severity, are slightly parted now, like he’s mid-breath or mid-confession—like something sacred just left him.

Will’s gaze dips lower again. 

The line of Nico’s throat. The slim, elegant column of his neck. The faint movement as he swallows.

It unravels something in him.

And then Will’s mind betrays him completely.

He imagines Nico on his knees.

Head tilted back, dark lashes heavy against flushed skin.

Mouth open, panting, maybe even begging—not for anything polite. 

Will can’t help but picture those pale, deft hands—usually busy with turning pages and translating ancient curses—digging into his hips, holding tight, leaving bruises because Nico wouldn’t do anything halfway.

And his voice.

Will’s heard it dry, sarcastic, sharp. He’s heard it quiet and careful.

But what would Nico sound like if he let go?

Will imagines Nico falling apart with his name on his lips. Hushed at first. Then louder. Less composed. Guttural. That voice, usually so clipped and cold, cracking open under pleasure until it’s just sound and sin and surrender.

The thought hits him like lightning, and Will’s hips twitch with a need he doesn’t have words for.

His own body betrays him—heat coiling low, hunger pulsing through his veins like wildfire. He’s half hard, and ashamed, and somehow still aching .

He squeezes his eyes shut.

Will swallows thickly, guilt threading through him because this isn’t fair. Not to Nico.

Nico’s not just some collection of fantasies.

He’s a person. Complicated. Wounded. Brilliant.

Next to him, Nico shifts, and Will’s body reacts automatically, attention pulled back by gravity or something worse.

But Nico’s scent—smoke, leather, something green and ancient—drifts closer on the breeze. And Will breathes it in like it’s oxygen, like it’s a drug. He feels himself tip closer to the edge with every second, helpless against it.

He wants to press Nico back against the railing and kiss him until the city fades. He wants to taste him. To touch the parts Nico never lets anyone see. The ones buried beneath years of silence and sharp edges and grief.

He wants to be the one Nico breaks for.

And it’s killing him.

He swallows hard, jaw clenched, dragging air into his lungs like it might save him. The guilt twists sharp in his gut, but it doesn’t go deep enough to stop the want. Nothing could.

He straightens slowly, lets his eyes drift toward the skyline.

He can’t look.

Not right now.

Because if Nico so much as glances at him—if he even senses what Will’s feeling—Will might come undone entirely.

But Nico shifts beside him. And Will feels it like a pull beneath his skin. His blood sings. His body turns before his mind does, magnetic, hopeless.

“You’re thinking about it,” Nico says, like he’s commenting on the weather. Just a casual observation. Nothing serious. Nothing dangerous.

Will, who is in the middle of fantasising about Nico’s mouth and how it might look wrapped around certain parts of him, promptly forgets how to exist.

He chokes on air—actually chokes—his head whipping around to stare at Nico with the expression of a man who has just been caught stealing the crown jewels with both hands in the royal vault.

“About… about what?” he squeaks. Not speaks. Squeaks. His voice jumps an octave like it’s trying to flee the scene before he can.

His hand flies up in what he thinks is a gesture of innocence, but really looks more like he’s surrendering to the gods. Which, honestly? Fair.

Because he is not innocent.

Not even close.

Not after the filthy slideshow that’s been playing in his head for the last five minutes, starring Nico di Angelo and some very inappropriate uses of Will’s imagination.

Nico doesn’t answer right away. Just smirks. Slow. Cat-like. Knowing.

He leans in slightly, head tilted just enough to make his dark hair fall into his eyes—on purpose, Will is sure of it—and he doesn’t move it away.

“Me,” Nico says, voice soft but razor-sharp. “In bed.”

Will stares at him, eyes wide, mouth open, soul rapidly exiting his body.

There is no air. There is nothing left in his lungs. He checks.

For one deranged second, he genuinely wonders if Nico can read minds.

Did he say something out loud? Did he moan something without realising? Is he hallucinating? Has he died and this is some ironic underworld punishment where Nico flirts with him until his heart explodes?

“You’re impossible,” Will manages, which is rich coming from the guy who’s been thinking about Nico naked for the past five minutes. His voice cracks so dramatically it could be submitted to a scientific study on pubescent stress responses.

His hands are flailing. Not gesturing. Flailing. One of them smacks lightly against the balcony railing in some attempt to anchor him to this mortal plane.

“I wasn’t—! I’m not—! That’s not—!”

Nico just takes a sip of his wine. Casually. Like they’re discussing the weather. Like Will didn’t just implode on the balcony over a single sentence.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Nico says, and he has the audacity to look amused. Amused! As if Will isn’t melting beside him like a snowman in July.

“I—” Will tries, but the universe has revoked his ability to speak.

His face is on fire. His spine has become static. He is vibrating with mortification.

Nico leans in just a fraction, enough to make Will’s brain reboot.

“You were looking at me like you wanted to know what I sound like when I’m—”

Will slaps a hand over his own face. Hard. “Please, for the love of—”

“ Moaning ,” Nico says, utterly unbothered. Like he’s reciting a vocabulary word.

And he just lets it sit there .

Will groans into his palm. A full-body groan. He’s shaking his head like he can dislodge the memory of that word said in Nico’s voice.

“I hate you,” he croaks, muffled by his hand.

“No, you don’t,” Nico replies smoothly, confident in a way that should be illegal.

There’s laughter in his voice now—not mocking, not cruel. Just warm. Playful. Like he’s genuinely enjoying Will’s breakdown. Which he probably is.

Will risks peeking through his fingers. Immediately regrets it. Nico is watching him like Will is something interesting. Something worth looking at. Studying.

Will’s hand drops slowly, more a surrender than anything else.

“You’re… you’re the worst.”

“Debatable,” Nico says, tilting his head again with a smile that’s more blade than curve. “I think you like it.”

And Will—poor, sleep-deprived, crush-riddled Will—wants to say yes . Yes, he does. Yes, he wants this—wants him —so badly it feels like it’s devouring him from the inside out.

But he doesn’t get the chance.

Nico steps back, lifts his glass like he’s toasting the death of Will’s dignity, and says, “I’m going inside. Try not to die of embarrassment while I’m gone.”

Just as Nico’s about to turn away—his fingers curled loosely around the stem of his wine glass, jacket falling just right over sharp shoulders—he pauses.

Will stills, breath caught mid-chest.

He braces himself for something flippant. Another dry remark. Maybe a parting jab that will leave him flustered and pink-cheeked for the rest of the night.

But then Nico glances out over the city again, and the sharpness in his expression seems to dull—like a knife being set down after a long day. The smirk fades, the arrogance melts into something quieter. Stripped down.

Something real.

“Thanks,” Nico says, and the word slips out softer than Will’s ever heard him speak it.

Will blinks. His pulse stutters.

“For what?”

Nico doesn’t look at him. His gaze stays fixed on the skyline, the lights of the city dancing across his profile, casting a faint glow along his jawline. He seems smaller now, somehow—not in stature, but in the way a storm seems smaller when it’s passed, leaving only the air heavy and raw in its wake.

“For… distracting me,” he says, the words measured and slow. “From the family stuff.”

Will feels something tighten low in his chest. It’s the sincerity in Nico’s voice—it lingers, hangs in the air like the last note of a song. No armor. No cryptic glances. Just honesty, bare and unguarded.

And it undoes him.

“You’re welcome,” Will says, quietly, and hates how inadequate it sounds. Like it doesn’t hold enough weight for what Nico is giving him.

But Nico nods once, like that’s enough. Like it matters.

Then he clears his throat, dragging his gaze back toward Will. His expression shifts again—more guarded now, but not closed.

“And… sorry,” Nico adds, his mouth quirking, like the words don’t quite fit but he’s trying anyway. “If I made things weird.”

Will stares at him.

Nico di Angelo. Who had just said the word moaning with the casual confidence of someone ordering off a lunch menu. Nico, who had looked at him like he could see every secret thought rattling around in Will’s head and wasn’t even a little sorry about it.

This is what he’s apologizing for?

Will should say something normal. Something neutral.

Instead, his mouth moves before his brain can catch up.

“You didn’t,” Will says, a little too fast—then catches himself, shifts his weight, softens his tone into something lower, more deliberate. “I mean… unless you wanted to make things weird.”

Nico’s eyebrow lifts, the corner of his mouth twitching like he’s trying not to smile.

Will clears his throat and offers a lazy shrug, playing it off like it’s no big deal. “I’m just saying… if that was you making things weird, it wasn’t exactly a bad weird.”

Nico’s eyes flick toward him, sharp and amused and maybe—just maybe—a little pleased.

Will’s pulse stutters.

But he keeps the grin on his face. Barely.

Nico tilts his head, studying him like he’s seeing something new. His smile deepens, slow and dangerous and unbearably attractive. The smile is not the sly, dangerous kind. Not the one that twists Will’s stomach into fire.

This one’s different. It’s softer. Quieter. Still crooked at the edges, but less like a challenge and more like a secret.

Will feels it like a bruise blooming inside his ribs.

“Well,” he says, like he’s filing that response away for later. “Good to know.”

Will is pretty sure he’s going to combust on the spot.

But when Nico turns back toward the door with a quiet, “Come on—let’s see what disaster they’ve managed without us,” there’s a new kind of charge in the air.

Will’s his heart thudding like he’s just passed a test he didn’t know he was taking.

And just like that, Nico slips inside, jacket flaring slightly as the door swings open, then closes behind him.

Will stands there for another second. Just one. Letting the cool air press against the heat still rising in his chest, trying to get his heart rate under control.

He exhales slowly.

And follows.

The second he steps back inside, it’s chaos.

The elegant dining room—once the setting of mythological elegance and candlelit tension—is now an abandoned battlefield of half-eaten dolmades, wine-streaked napkins, and toppled place cards. Somewhere between dessert and disaster, the group has migrated to the living room… where karaoke is happening.

If you could call it that.

Percy is on the mic, absolutely murdering a rendition of “Barbie Girl” by Aqua, and not in a good way. He’s throwing himself into both parts— Barbie and Ken —switching between a breathy falsetto and a voice so deep it sounds like he’s gargling gravel.

Annabeth sits nearby with her head in her hands, peeking through her fingers like she’s watching a train crash she can’t look away from. Every time Percy thrusts the mic forward like he’s performing at Madison Square Garden, she dies a little inside.

Frank is red-faced on the floor, laughing so hard he has to clutch a pillow to his chest, while Hazel tries valiantly to convince him to take the next song. Leo is perched on the back of the couch like some kind of goblin MC, arguing with Piper over what cursed bop to queue next.

The vibe is no longer exclusive dinner party . It’s sleepover hosted by Dionysus himself .

Will halts in the doorway, grinning despite himself.

Nico’s shoulder brushes his—just barely—but enough to feel the warm press of him, grounding Will in the eye of the storm. They stand together like observers of a strange cult ritual, wine glasses in hand, watching the chaos unfold.

Jason spots them first. “Nico! Will! You’re next!”

Will’s head snaps around like someone just shouted fire . “I—what?”

Nico raises an eyebrow, the barest tilt of his head giving him the energy of a cat deciding whether to attack or ignore you entirely. His expression is unreadable, but his silence is loud.

For a second, Will wonders if Nico’s going to murder Jason with his mind.

Instead, Nico leans in—too close, too casual, too calm for someone who just publicly dropped the word moaning —and says, low enough for only Will to hear, “Absolutely not.”

Will blinks. “Oh. Thank gods.”

His knees almost give out with relief.

Nico’s smirk is subtle but sharp. “But I’d pay money to watch you do it.”

Will nearly chokes on his own dignity. “You want me to sing? Now ?”

Nico shrugs, sipping his wine like this isn’t the worst moment of Will’s life. “Why not? You already humiliated yourself on the balcony. What’s a little public karaoke?”

Will sputters. “I was not — I didn’t— That wasn’t—!”

Jason grins from across the room, utterly oblivious to the emotional crisis happening by the doorway. “I’m cueing you up for Teenage Dream! Get ready!”

“Absolutely not,” Will says, voice cracking like a preteen wizard. “No one cue me for anything.”

Nico is still watching him, just the faintest trace of amusement curling at the edge of his mouth.

Will groans and mutters, “I hate this place.”

But he stays. Mostly because Nico does. And if Nico isn’t running for the hills, neither is he. Probably.

At that exact moment, Cecil vaults over the back of the couch like he’s entering an arena, nearly kicking Leo in the process.

“This,” he announces, dramatically pointing to the screen as the next song starts, “is our moment.”

Lou Ellen smirks from her perch on the armrest, swirling someone else’s wine like she owns the place. “You’re not ready.”

“I was born ready,” Cecil fires back, snatching the second mic like he’s been waiting his whole life for this one opportunity.

Will leans a little closer to Nico as if bracing for impact.

Nico, unfazed, sips his wine with the bored detachment of someone watching mortals ruin themselves for sport. “Should we be worried?” he mutters.

Will shrugs. “Always.”

The opening notes blast through the speakers—it’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” , but dramatic karaoke remix version . The instrumental wails like an ‘80s power ballad crossed with a soap opera finale.

Cecil and Lou Ellen go full theatre . Lou Ellen’s voice is hauntingly good—smooth, controlled, almost eerie. Cecil, meanwhile, compensates with the kind of unhinged, chest-thumping delivery that belongs in a Broadway show written by drunk wizards.

Cecil drops to his knees mid-verse, clutching his heart. Lou Ellen throws out her arm like she’s summoning thunder. The living room becomes a stage. The air vibrates with chaotic commitment.

Jason is losing his mind , practically howling from his spot on the couch.

Percy, now sprawled on the floor with Annabeth’s legs thrown across his lap, claps so hard it echoes. “I love this song!” he yells. “Jason, we should do a duet!”

Jason’s eyes go wide. “Bro.”

Percy nods solemnly. “Bro.”

Annabeth lets out the world’s deepest sigh. “Oh gods.”

Piper leans over, grinning. “You gonna let Jason steal your man like that?”

Annabeth doesn’t even blink. “He can have him.”

Jason recoils in horror. “No, no, no—Percy’s all yours! We’re just bros! We’re like—like teammates! Comrades! In arms!”

Percy throws an arm around him. “Jason was my first college roommate. We survived orientation together. That’s trauma bonding.”

Leo, still on the back of the couch, raises his glass like a toast. “To emotional damage and power ballads!”

Nico sighs into his wine. “What have we walked into?”

Will, smiling so hard it hurts, clinks his glass against Nico’s. “Honestly? I don’t even know anymore.”

And for a moment—just a heartbeat in the middle of the mayhem—Nico smiles back.

Not a smirk. Not a sneer. A smile .

And Will thinks, yeah. Maybe I don’t need to know.

Annabeth narrows her eyes in mock suspicion, voice cutting through the music and laughter like a well-aimed dagger. “That’s gay panic.”

Will snorts into his drink and immediately regrets it, nearly inhaling half a mouthful of wine as it goes down the wrong pipe. He coughs once, then twice, the tips of his ears burning. Nico glances sideways, the corner of his mouth twitching with restrained amusement.

“Jason does give off bi-disaster energy,” Will mutters hoarsely, recovering.

Nico hums noncommittally, like he’s weighing the accuracy of that statement against his own lived experience—but the spark of amusement in his eyes is unmistakable. It flickers beneath his lashes, quiet and warm.

Across the room, Lou Ellen and Cecil are wrapping up the performance of their lives. Cecil is on his knees, dramatically reaching out toward the ceiling like he’s summoning a higher power, while Lou Ellen belts out harmonies with a level of precision that suggests she missed her calling as a Broadway lead.

When the final chorus hits, Jason and Percy leap to their feet like groupies at a stadium concert, clapping and hooting with the kind of reckless enthusiasm that can only come from two grown men with absolutely no shame. Piper lets out a piercing whistle that nearly startles Will out of his skin.

Annabeth slow-claps from the armchair, deadpan as ever, but the curl of her smirk gives her away.

Cecil bows with a theatrical flourish. “Thank you, thank you. We’ll be here all night.”

Lou Ellen grabs his sleeve and drags him back to the couch, still flushed and breathless but clearly riding the high of a flawless execution. She flops down beside Frank and announces that she’s reclaiming DJ rights “ before the straight people ruin everything .”

Will laughs, breath easing out of him as he sinks deeper into the couch cushions. For the first time all night, he feels like he’s not on the outside of some elite, impossible circle.

This… is fun.

Gods, when was the last time he let himself just have fun?

He hadn’t expected that. Hadn’t expected the warmth of it, the weird comfort in being surrounded by people who knew each other too well and didn’t pretend otherwise. It’s chaos, sure—but it’s a good kind of chaos. Loud and messy and full of life.

But even as he lets himself laugh at Jason and Percy’s increasingly heated debate—Jason is passionately pitching a soulful acoustic version of “ Baby Got Back ,” while Percy is shouting about the emotional nuance of “ Let It Go ”—Will finds his gaze drifting.

Back to Nico.

Always, somehow, back to Nico.

(Somewhere, Percy, dead serious, pleads, “Jason, I can hit the high note. Let me prove it.”)

Sitting beside him, one leg crossed over the other, fingers curled loosely around a half-full glass of red wine. He’s the only one who hasn’t moved much—still and quiet, as if observing everything through a pane of glass. But there’s a softness to him now, barely there, the kind of thing most people would miss.

Will doesn’t.

He watches the way Nico’s lashes lower as he sips his drink, the way the flickering candlelight casts soft shadows along the sharp planes of his face. He watches the subtle tension in his shoulders when certain topics come up, and the way it slowly fades when no one presses.

Will’s still thinking about the phone calls earlier. About the word family said with a blade beneath it. About how Nico had shut the door on it, but the lock didn’t seem quite strong enough to keep it out.

He wonders what Nico’s world looks like when no one’s watching. Wonders if he’ll ever be allowed to see it.

He’s about to ask something—something small, just a thread to pull—when Jason appears again, seemingly materializing out of thin air with the energy of a golden retriever on espresso.

He thrusts a mic toward Nico like it’s an offering to a particularly irritable god. “Come on, man,” Jason pleads, grin wide and reckless. “One duet.”

Nico doesn’t even blink. His expression doesn’t shift. “No.”

Flat. Final.

Jason sighs, full theatrical despair. “Tragedy,” he declares, flinging himself backward onto the rug like he’s been slain.

Will chuckles, shoulders relaxing again.

Nico sips his wine, unconcerned, eyes flickering toward Will for just a second—just long enough to make his heart stutter in its rhythm.

And even as the chaos continues—Percy now trying to sing the opening line of “ Wrecking Ball ” like it’s a sea shanty—Will’s mind is still turning over everything he doesn’t know about Nico di Angelo.

But he’s sure of one thing now.

He wants to find out.

The night winds down with Will, Cecil, and Lou Ellen, the three of them huddled together on their tiny rooftop back in Harlem, legs tangled, pajama pants tucked into mismatched socks, and oversized coats thrown over their shoulders like armor against the cold. A halo of city light glows dimly above them, washing out the stars, but no one really minds.

Cecil passes the joint back to Lou Ellen with all the reverence of a sacred object, squinting up at the sky like it’s personally wronged him. “I’m just saying,” he announces, his voice slightly hoarse from a night full of singing off-key karaoke, “if Percy and Jason had sung that duet, they would’ve kissed. It was right there.”

“They totally would’ve kissed,” Lou Ellen agrees, smoke curling from her mouth in a slow exhale. She grins, tugging the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Annabeth would’ve sued them for emotional distress.”

Will laughs, quiet and winded with it, his head tipped back against the crumbling brick behind him. He watches the smoke and breath rise together, curling upward into the haze above the rooftops. The chill clings to his fingers and nose, but inside, something’s still warm. Still glowing. It’s soft, and strange, and not at all what he’s used to.

For once, he doesn’t feel like he’s on the outside looking in.

Not entirely.

“I can’t believe they invited us,” Will says after a while, the words delicate in his mouth, like they might shatter if he isn’t careful. “Like. Into their actual home.”

“Percy made you a drink,” Cecil points out. “That’s practically a marriage proposal in their weird, rich-people language.”

Lou Ellen snorts. “And Annabeth let him. Which means she approves of your union.”

She nudges Will’s knee with hers. “You better not blow it.”

Will groans, but he’s smiling. “I always blow it.”

“Nah,” Cecil says, stretching out and letting his boots thump against the rooftop. “You’re in, dude. We gossiped about them so hard, we manifested our way into their friend group.”

Lou Ellen laughs, loud and sharp like breaking glass. “Gods, we really did.”

The laughter fades into a hush, letting the night stretch out long and quiet around them. Below, Harlem is still alive—horns, sirens, laughter drifting from the open window of someone’s apartment. The city never stops. But up here, it’s almost peaceful.

Will glances at Cecil, who’s flicking the lighter open and closed, the tiny spark briefly lighting the shadows under his eyes. Lou Ellen’s fiddling with a loose thread on the blanket, her expression thoughtful in that very specific, overdramatic theatre-major way that means she’s about to spiral philosophically at any moment.

None of them say it, but it’s there.

That apartment was another world. Big and warm and opulent, like stepping inside a mythology textbook—but with wine glasses that probably cost more than Will’s monthly groceries. That couch alone could pay their tuition. The fish tank had its own light cycle. The walls were real exposed brick, not the kind that crumbles when you lean too hard.

It hadn’t felt like home.

But it had felt like something.

Will shifts slightly, the rooftop gravel scraping under him. His coat isn’t warm enough, and his socks have holes in the heels, and he’s pretty sure he left half a protein bar in his backpack that might have to count as breakfast.

They’re three broke kids in the city, cobbling together lives from patchwork dreams and shared leftovers. But tonight, they’d been invited in. Into marble and myth. Into laughter and olive oil and Nico.

Nico.

Gods, Nico.

He thinks about Nico’s shoulder brushing his. The way his mouth had curled around the word moaning like it was a secret and a dare. The way his voice had gone soft on the balcony, just for a moment. The apology. The quiet thanks.

Will’s chest aches with it.

With how much he wants to touch that world. With how much he wants to stay in it.

He lets the feeling settle deep—between his ribs, behind his sternum, in the spaces he usually tries not to name.

He glances at Lou Ellen. “What do we manifest next, oh wise theatre goblin?”

She grins, wicked and bright. “You and Nico. Making out. Right there.”

She points toward the chimney like she’s assigning blocking for a play.

Cecil hums. “Aesthetic.”

Will groans and drops his face into his hands, muffling his laugh. “You guys are the worst.”

But he’s smiling. And blushing. And very much not denying it.

Because maybe—for the first time—this isn’t just fantasy. Maybe it’s becoming something else.

Maybe Nico wants him back.

And maybe, just maybe, Will’s ready for it.

Even if he’s terrified. Even if it’s messy.

Especially because it’s Nico di Angelo.

And there’s no clean version of this story.

But Will never wanted clean. He wants real.

And gods help him, he’s already halfway in.

Chapter 15: My Found Family Has a Chaos Budget and My Will To Live Is Funding It

Notes:

sorry, not a whole lot of plot development here but i wanted to show the trio becoming genuine friends with the seven outwith all the solangelo pining/match making, and give the characters some agency other than meddling with will and nico's love lives so here u go :)

It starts with Hazel.

Hazel sits in the far corner of the library, tucked between a window and a low bookshelf, her sketchbook balanced on her knees. The light from the desk lamp casts a warm circle over her page, catching on the shine of her curls. Her pencil moves steadily, each stroke deliberate, fluid, like she’s drawing from something just beneath the surface of the world.

Will spots her after his late seminar and hesitates—just for a second. She looks peaceful. Focused. The kind of focused that feels like a spell you shouldn’t break.

But then she glances up, meets his eyes, and smiles—that soft, knowing smile that makes it seem like she already knew he was coming.

“Hey,” he says, adjusting his messenger bag as he approaches. “Mind if I sit?”

Hazel shakes her head and shifts over slightly, making room on the window ledge beside her. “I was hoping you would. You looked like you were in a hurry to flee the building.”

“I was,” Will admits with a tired groan as he sits down. “Group project. One guy thinks Ancient Medicine starts with Freud.”

Hazel winces. “Oof.”

“Exactly.”

Silence settles over them—easy, companionable. The kind that doesn’t ask to be filled. Hazel returns to her sketching, her pencil gliding smoothly over the page, and Will lets his eyes wander to her hands, then to the lines taking shape beneath them. He’s not thinking about Nico, not in that usual sharp, breathless way. He’s just here. And Hazel’s presence is... grounding.

She has a stillness to her that’s nothing like apathy. It’s the kind of quiet that listens. That notices. Like she’s storing everything away—people, conversations, textures, light—for when she needs it later.

“What are you working on?” he asks after a while, nodding toward her sketchbook.

Hazel tilts the book so he can see—a marble statue, cracked delicately through the shoulder. The figure is half-shadow, half-light, its expression unreadable. It looks like it’s in the process of vanishing, yet it holds fast to the page.

“I saw it in a museum back home,” she says, voice low. “The exhibit rotated out last year, but I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s this goddess figure, but no one’s sure who it’s supposed to be. The plaque just said Unknown Deity. Isn’t that wild? Worshipped for centuries, then forgotten.”

Will leans in, properly looking now. She’s captured the texture of the stone, the fine spider-silk cracks of erosion, the weight of time in graphite. “It’s beautiful,” he says, and means it.

Hazel shrugs like it’s nothing, but a hint of pink rises in her cheeks. “I think there’s something powerful in anonymity. Not having to mean one thing.”

Will nods slowly. “That’s… really cool. And also maybe the most poetic thing anyone’s said to me all week.”

Hazel smiles, faint but certain. “Most people don’t ask.”

“Well,” Will says, nudging her gently with his elbow, “I’m not most people.”

She lifts an eyebrow at him. “No. You’re not.”

And she says it like it’s not a compliment or a test—just a truth. Solid and unshaken.

Will smiles, something warm blooming beneath his ribs. He’s not trying to impress her. He’s not angling for Nico-shaped details. He just likes her. He likes this—this strange little corner of quiet, of graphite and stone and forgotten goddesses. He likes how Hazel Levesque makes everything feel a little slower. A little softer.

And that, he thinks, feels like a beginning.

He doesn’t tell anyone, but he starts studying in that corner from then on.

 

***

Cecil’s love language is sabotage.

Which is why, on a crisp, too-sunny Thursday morning, he drags a fold-out table, an aggressively pink glitter pen, and a stack of hand-lettered petitions onto the quad lawn—then parks himself directly across from Piper.

Piper, for her part, is running a booth for a student-led sustainability initiative. Her table is tastefully arranged with neatly stacked flyers, tiny potted succulents as freebies, and a hand-painted sign that reads Plant the Future . She’s wearing a sage green trench coat that somehow makes her look like the effortlessly cool lead in a Netflix original, and she’s passing out pamphlets with the ease of someone who could talk a charging bull into a vegan lifestyle.

Cecil, perched like a gremlin across from her beneath a too-small shade umbrella, unfurls his own handwritten banner: HOT PEOPLE DESERVE BETTER WI-FI . Below it, a clipboard balanced on a cracked display stand holds the petition in question.

Will arrives halfway through setup, balancing a to-go coffee in one hand and a stack of textbooks in the other, dressed like he’s already survived three back-to-back lectures—which he has.

He stops in front of Cecil’s table and squints at the glittered petition title. “This is what you’re doing with your political science minor?”

Cecil beams. “This is what democracy looks like.”

Lou Ellen, slumped in a folding chair beside him with her hood up and a half-eaten protein bar in one hand, doesn’t even blink. “I give you thirty minutes before she ruins you.”

Will sips his coffee and raises a brow. “That’s generous.”

Ten minutes later, Piper strolls over.

She’s got sunglasses perched in her curls, an iced coffee in one hand, and the calm, dangerous smile of someone who knows exactly how to end you without breaking stride. She pauses in front of his table, tilts her head, and peers down at the clipboard like she’s examining a strange new species.

“You’re funny,” she says eventually, voice light but edged with amusement.

Cecil bows from the waist. “I try.”

Will stands at the corner of the table, sipping from his coffee, trying and failing to look like he’s not fascinated by this unfolding power dynamic. Piper catches his eye and winks.

Without another word, she plucks the clipboard from its stand and signs her name in loopy, infuriatingly perfect cursive. At the bottom, she scribbles a note:

Nice try. Let’s collaborate next time. –P

She drops the pen, slides her sunglasses back into place, and returns to her booth like a victorious general.

Cecil is still grinning when Lou Ellen mutters, “So that’s how you lose with dignity.”

Will leans over the clipboard. “You’re going to frame that note, aren’t you?”

“I already have,” Cecil says, slipping it into a plastic sleeve.

But the war’s not over.

For the next two hours, Cecil and Piper volley chaotic flyers at each other from across the quad. Hers read Be the Change. Literally. His say If Plants Had Wi-Fi, You’d Care More. Piper starts offering ethically sourced mini donuts. Cecil counters with a bowl of off-brand mints labeled Bite-Sized Justice.

Will eventually settles on the grass nearby, working on a lab worksheet while pretending he’s not watching the entire situation unfold like a nature documentary. He helps Lou Ellen rewrite one of Cecil’s flyers after she points out a typo in the word “infrastructure.” (“ It’s sabotage, not illiteracy,” she says .)

At some point, Lou Ellen migrates toward Piper’s table and ends up manning it while Piper flirts her way through donations. When Cecil looks up and sees Lou Ellen laughing, Piper’s arm slung easily through hers, he drops his forehead dramatically to his clipboard.

“I’m in love,” he mutters.

“With which one?” Lou Ellen calls across the quad.

Cecil sighs. “Yes.”

Will doesn’t look up from his notes. “Can I please be excused from whatever this triangle is becoming?”

Cecil grins. “Nope. You're in it now.”

And the sun climbs higher over campus, glinting off sunglasses and glitter pens alike, as sabotage gradually becomes friendship. Or something equally dangerous.

 

***

Jason is the kind of guy who looks like he drinks black coffee and reads war memoirs for fun. The kind of guy who keeps his shoelaces perfectly tied, who probably has a “ no-nonsense ” playlist filled with instrumental scores and battlefield ambience. Will had always assumed he did pushups for fun. Voluntarily.

Which is why it’s so deeply unsettling to run into him at the campus café… holding a drink that looks like it was designed by a cartoon princess.

Will stops short in line, blinking.

It’s pink. Vivid, borderline radioactive pink. Topped with whipped cream, rainbow sprinkles, and a paper straw with tiny pastel hearts.

Jason notices him staring.

He blinks once, completely unfazed, then lifts the cup like a toast. “Hazel’s sick,” he explains. “It’s her comfort order. I told her I’d FaceTime her and drink it on camera so she feels better.”

Will’s mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. “That’s—actually really sweet.”

Jason just shrugs. “Yeah, well. She’d do the same for me.”

There’s no embarrassment in his voice, no sheepish fumble to reclaim his hypermasculine edge. He just says it. Simple. Steady. Like it's obvious.

Will’s response dies in his throat. Instead, he nods slowly and glances back at the line as Jason walks past him, sipping the whipped cream without even breaking stride.

It’s not a moment that ends in a bonding session or a dramatic confession. They don’t talk about fathers or trauma or Nico.

But when Will walks past Jason on the quad later that week—Will with a cup of black coffee and a granola bar, Jason leaning against a campus tree with the same ridiculous drink—Jason raises it in salute. A flick of his fingers. A knowing smile.

Will waves back, startled by the warmth blooming in his chest.

***

Cecil and Leo bond over their shared inability to leave anything un-hacked.

It begins with a vending machine in the student union that devours Leo’s five-dollar bill like a personal insult and then blinks out with a smug hum.

Cecil, who’s been leaning against a pillar with a stolen smoothie and the air of someone narrating a heist movie in his head, watches it happen. Slowly—dramatically—he pushes off the wall and crosses the room like a gunslinger in a cyberpunk Western.

“That machine just rob you?” he asks, voice low and dark, like he’s about to file a police report or declare war.

Leo doesn’t even look away from the machine. “It stole my money,” he says, eyes narrowed, “and gave me nothing but judgment.”

Cecil squints at the screen. “Unacceptable.”

Fifteen minutes later, they’ve drafted a third-year electrical engineering student who looks like he regrets every life choice that brought him here. Cecil’s half under the machine, grease on his jeans, the borrowed screwdriver clenched between his teeth. Leo hovers like a surgical assistant, passing wires and mumbling affirmations.

A crowd gathers. Phones are out. Bets are placed.

And then—with a mechanical wheeze and a victorious shudder—the vending machine whirs to life and begins to eject bottles of Fanta one after the other, like it’s vomiting carbonated guilt. The first hits the plastic chute so hard it bounces. The second rolls onto the floor. By the fifth, students are cheering.

“You’re beautiful,” Leo breathes, gently lifting a bottle like it’s a miracle baby.

“I know,” Cecil replies, deadpan, snapping a photo of the open wiring and texting it to a contact labeled “ Mysterious Guy With Drone Army. ”

When Will arrives—having just come from bio lab, sleeves rolled and smelling faintly of ethanol—he pauses at the edge of the chaos, backpack slipping off his shoulder.

There are eight Fanta bottles stacked in a precarious pyramid, the engineering student is stress-sweating through his hoodie, and someone has graffitied JUSTICE FOR SNACKS on a nearby napkin.

Will stares. “What the hell did I miss?”

“Justice,” Cecil says solemnly, brushing Fanta off his sleeve.

“Art,” Leo says at the same time, grinning.

“Property damage,” Will mutters, eyeing the screwdriver.

“Semantics,” they reply in perfect unison.

By the end of the week, the campus has a new title for them: the Chaos Bros. Will coins it after walking into the apartment one night to the smell of burnt plastic and the sight of Cecil and Leo crouched over a folding scooter that whirs like an angry mosquito and gives off visible sparks.

“I don’t want to know,” Will says, dropping his bag by the door and backing away like the scooter might become sentient.

“You really don’t,” Lou Ellen calls from the kitchen, stirring instant ramen with the same energy one might use to prepare a potion.

Later that night, Will finds them sitting cross-legged on the living room floor in the glow of three different laptops, surrounded by takeout containers and open schematics of the campus network. They’re muttering about " load balance overrides " and “ stealth ping ,” the kind of language that sounds like it could either solve world hunger or cause a blackout.

Will leans on the back of the couch, arms crossed. “This isn’t about the vending machine anymore, is it?”

Cecil just grins. “Scientific reasons.”

Leo holds out a screwdriver like it’s a peace offering. “You in?”

Will groans. “I’m pre-med. This is how I lose my scholarship.”

He takes the screwdriver anyway.

Because of course he does.

***

Will’s halfway out of the campus bookstore, arms full of anatomy flashcards and an energy drink that tastes like battery acid and regret, when he nearly collides with Annabeth Chase.

She materializes like a tactical strike—tight ponytail, Olympus University tee under a blazer, and the kind of intensity that makes Will instinctively take a step back.

“I heard you’re tutoring freshman bio,” she says, voice calm, eyes dangerous.

“Yes?” Will replies, wary. Annabeth has the energy of someone who has both a five-year plan and a private kill list.

She hands him a coffee with unnerving precision. “I have a thesis meeting tomorrow with a professor who thinks sleep is optional and carbon-neutral design is a personal attack. I need a crash course in cellular respiration—specifically how to integrate it into green insulation materials.”

Will squints at the coffee. “Is this a bribe?”

“I’m asking you to help the future of sustainable architecture.”

He considers saying no. He really does. But she’s already planned his schedule down to the minute, and there’s caffeine in his hand, and she looks like she eats med students for breakfast.

“…Fine,” he sighs. “But I need twenty minutes and a table where no one will bleed on me.”

Later, they’re seated at a café table surrounded by flashcards, highlighters, and the caffeinated aftermath of someone who learns by absorbing entire textbooks through osmosis. Annabeth interrupts only to clarify metabolic pathways or argue that mitochondria should be renamed out of sheer spite. Will’s vaguely terrified. Also vaguely impressed.

He’s mid-explanation of the Krebs cycle when a smoothie thuds onto the table.

Percy Jackson appears, backward cap, crooked grin, and a shirt that reads Fish Are Friends AND Food.

“Hey,” Percy says, like this is totally normal. “Whatcha doing?”

“Bio,” Annabeth replies flatly.

Percy leans in to Will. “So this is the legendary tutoring session.”

“She ambushed me outside the bookstore,” Will says.

Percy nods, sipping something disturbingly green. “Did she pull the whole ‘save the planet ’ line?”

“She did.”

“And it worked?”

“She gave me coffee and guilt. I folded.”

Annabeth doesn’t look up. “If you’re not helping, go flirt with the barista again.”

“I wasn’t flirting,” Percy says, offended. “I was complimenting his latte art.”

“You told him it was the most beautiful foam swirl you’d ever seen,” Will deadpans.

Percy shrugs. “It was.”

“Will,” Annabeth says briskly, “transcription versus translation?”

Will launches into the answer while Percy sketches a squid with eight-pack abs in the margins of Annabeth’s notes.

Two hours, three coffee refills, and one minor RNA-induced meltdown later, Annabeth stands. “Thanks.”

Will’s about to say no problem when she leans down and hugs him. Hard. Like a linebacker. He lets out a startled squeak.

She pulls back without comment, drops something on the table, and says, “Here.”

It’s a coffee sleeve—stitched from an old campus flyer. Handmade. Recycled. Functional.

“You made this?”

She lifts a brow. “You cared about architecture.”

“I explained glycolysis.”

Annabeth’s already gone.

Percy lingers long enough to raise his smoothie and say, “Dude, if she gives you a tote bag next, you’re basically family.”

Then he’s gone too.

Will just sits there, holding a homemade coffee sleeve and rethinking every life decision that’s led him to this exact moment.

***

It’s the kind of science building where the lights flicker in the hallway and every room smells like formaldehyde and microwave soup.

Will’s running on four hours of sleep, a coffee the color of existential dread, and the residual stress of Cecil trying to convince him that bioethics “ isn’t real if you don’t believe in it .”

Which is why he doesn’t even notice the large figure occupying the last remaining lab bench until he’s halfway through pulling on his gloves.

“Hey,” says a deep voice beside him. “You good?”

Will startles hard enough to nearly knock over the pipette rack. He turns—blinks—and finds Frank Zhang staring at him with the concerned expression of someone who has definitely saved people from wildfires before.

Will tries to pull himself together. “Yeah. Totally. Just… here for the extra credit assignment. You?”

Frank nods. “Yeah. Professor Lydell said we could run the joint simulation if we wanted crossover credit for environmental science and human physiology.”

Will stares. “You’re majoring in bio, right?”

Frank shrugs modestly. “Double major. Bio and Environmental Science.”

Will blinks. “You’re double majoring. And still look like you sleep?”

Frank grins. “I take naps in the arboretum. No one ever checks.”

There’s a beat of silence as they both stare down at the lab protocol. Frank’s writing is neat and compact, and Will tries not to be jealous of someone who can draw perfect mitochondria freehand.

They get to work—measuring enzyme reactions, comparing cellular respiration under different temperature conditions—and somehow, it’s… chill.

Frank is steady and methodical, and he lets Will vent about his schedule without judgment. Will learns that Frank’s a bit of a disaster with timed tests but can memorize whole textbooks, and that his go-to stress relief is boxing or building terrariums, depending on the mood.

Halfway through, Will drops a slide and swears under his breath. Frank just laughs and hands him another one, already prepped.

“Cecil says I break everything I touch,” Will mutters.

Frank snorts. “Cecil thinks bees are surveillance drones. I wouldn’t worry too much.”

Will laughs, startled and genuine, and for the first time, he looks at Frank and sees something other than the quiet, intimidating guy with terrifying biceps and a mythic aura.

He sees a fellow student. A double major. A guy trying to make it through the semester just like him.

Later, as they wrap up, Frank gathers their notes into a surprisingly well-organized binder. “Hey,” he says, like it’s an afterthought, “you wanna come by the greenhouse sometime? I can show you the climate control stuff. It’s cool. Might be helpful if you’re doing pre-med environmental studies.”

Will raises an eyebrow. “You’re telling me you can make plants vibe better with HVAC?”

Frank smiles. “Basically.”

Will grins. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

And maybe—just maybe—he starts to think that this whole being-friends-with-the-Seven thing is less terrifying than it used to be.

Frank offers Will a ride home that rainy afternoon and doesn’t say anything when Will’s hands shake on the seatbelt.

He just drives carefully, points out street art like it’s rare birds, and doesn’t ask questions when Will stays quiet the whole ride.

***

Percy just keeps showing up.

He noogies Cecil in the quad without warning, then steals his sunglasses and runs off laughing like a golden retriever who’s learned mischief.

He texts Lou Ellen grainy selfies from increasingly questionable campus bathrooms with captions like “rate my emo” and “am I giving Nico or giving Nico but make it lifeguard?” —to which she always responds with harsh but fair criticism and at least one meme.

He fist-bumps Will in passing like they’ve been best friends since preschool and shouts “ Doc Solace! ” across the student union loud enough to make heads turn.

Will never corrects him.

(And maybe he starts looking forward to hearing it more than he’d like to admit.)

***

And then there’s Nico.

Always at the edges. Always orbiting. Always just near enough that Will feels the pull like a tide under his skin—quiet but impossible to ignore.

He appears in fragments. In half-lit corners of the library, curled in leather armchairs like he was painted there centuries ago and just hasn’t moved. In seminar lounges where the air smells like dust and ambition, his fingers skimming the pages of a book in a language Will doesn’t recognize. In late-night hangouts where the volume is low and the wine is rich with tannin, Nico stands by the window in black, sipping from crystal goblets with the detachment of a ghost and the presence of a blade.

He rarely speaks. But when he does, his words feel heavier. Weighted. Like each syllable has been chosen with the same precision he uses to sharpen eyeliner or dissect ancient texts.

“You’ve got ink on your cheek,” Nico says one afternoon, breaking the silence of the philosophy lounge like it’s a string pulled too tight.

Will looks up from his notes, blinking. He’s surrounded by open books, highlighters, coffee cups. Nico stands on the other side of the low table, black hoodie loose around his frame, dark hair falling into his eyes like it’s been styled by accident or divine intervention.

Will reaches up to swipe at the mark but misses—wrong cheek, too fast.

Nico doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t smirk. Doesn’t mock.

He just steps forward, slow and deliberate, and lifts a hand.

Will freezes.

Nico’s fingers brush the curve of his cheek, cool and careful, and his thumb—just barely—presses against the skin below Will’s eye. It’s featherlight, clinical. Almost. But it lingers a second too long. Long enough to steal the air from Will’s lungs.

And then the ink is gone. So is Nico’s hand.

Will’s pen slips from his fingers and hits the floor with a clatter that feels embarrassingly loud in the hush of the room.

Nico’s gaze flickers to it, then back to Will.

Neither of them moves.

Outside, someone laughs in the hallway. A door creaks. A clock ticks.

But in that moment, all Will can hear is the echo of Nico’s voice and the phantom warmth of his touch.

He’s not sure what Nico meant by it. 

But he thinks about it for days. 

***

Will stumbles into the apartment like he’s been shipwrecked by academia. The front door slams behind him with a dramatic finality that only someone who’s survived a three-hour lab can manage. He drops his messenger bag into the sagging thrift-store armchair with the reverence of someone offering tribute to the gods of exhaustion. His shoes are off before the second breath. He faceplants into the couch like it owes him rent.

“Organic chemistry is a hate crime,” he mumbles into the throw pillow, voice muffled but heartfelt.

From the kitchenette, which is really just a counter with a cracked hot plate and a wildly malfunctioning microwave, Lou Ellen’s voice floats out. “Did you eat today?”

She’s standing on a creaky wooden chair in mismatched socks and a too-big hoodie with faded Broadway logos on the sleeves, half-balanced on one leg like a disgruntled flamingo. Her hand is wrist-deep in the cabinet above the fridge, wrestling with a stubborn jar of peanut butter like she’s doing experimental theatre about starvation.

“I had… coffee,” Will says.

“That’s not food.”

“I chewed the stirrer,” he adds, still not lifting his head.

Lou Ellen makes a noise of deep exasperation. “Men will literally become clinically dehydrated before admitting they’re hungry.”

“Tell me about it,” Cecil calls, emerging from his bedroom like a deity of aesthetic crimes. He’s wearing a mesh crop top, leopard print pajama pants, and a faux-fur jacket in the kind of shade that screams cursed vintage.

Will cracks one eye open and squints. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Piper,” Cecil says, flopping into the far end of the couch and kicking Will’s foot off the cushions like it’s a casual declaration of war. “She said it belonged to a silent film actor who died mid-monologue. It's probably haunted. Or dramatic. Or both.”

“I love that for you,” Lou Ellen says, triumphant as she hops down from the chair with the peanut butter clutched in one hand and a fork she definitely did not have two seconds ago.

Will groans. “Okay. What did I miss? Who did you emotionally seduce today?”

Lou Ellen plops into the armchair with the ease of someone whose life is a sequence of campfire tales. “Had lunch with Piper.”

Will lifts his head. “Alone?”

“I mean, Jason was there, but he was hunched over a tablet whispering about tort law. Piper and I talked about postmodern theatre and queer narratives for an hour. She asked for recs. I gave her my annotated play copy. She called it ‘incisive .’ I ascended.”

“She’s officially on the Seven’s cultural think tank,” Cecil stage-whispers. “Soon she’ll be writing their manifestos.”

Lou Ellen scoops peanut butter directly into her mouth and says, deadpan, “She said I’m the only person who’s read her actual senior project and not just the curated Instagram posts. I think she trusts me.”

Will whistles low. “That’s basically a marriage proposal.”

“She’s not wrong,” Lou Ellen murmurs, dreamy. “Let’s not pretend I wouldn’t let her stage-manage my whole life.”

Cecil grins. “Meanwhile, I spent most of the day helping Leo rewire the tech lab. He claims the overheads now respond to ‘emotional shifts .’”

Will blinks. “You mean the lights?”

“They changed to blue when I sighed,” Cecil says proudly. “Leo swears it’s science. I think it’s witchcraft.”

“You both need supervision,” Will mutters, rubbing his temples.

Lou Ellen perks up. “Annabeth cornered me in the library and asked if I wanted to help plan a guest lecture series. Strategy, outreach, digital media. She said—and I quote— ‘You think in narrative arcs .’”

Will’s mouth drops. “Annabeth asked for your help?”

“I think she sees me as, like, a morally flexible strategist. Which I’m fine with.”

Cecil claps a hand to his heart. “Meanwhile, I told Frank I think the fridge rice is haunted. He gave me his lunch and told me to ‘honor the spirits .’ I have no idea what’s happening anymore.”

Will pushes himself upright, his body protesting every inch of motion. “Okay. So you’ve both infiltrated the Seven.”

“We’re building alliances,” Lou Ellen says solemnly.

“Expanding our chaotic reach,” Cecil nods.

Will looks between them. “Are you in some kind of social arms race I missed the memo on?”

“No,” Lou Ellen says.

“Yes,” Cecil says at the same time.

Lou Ellen tosses her fork into the sink like a dagger. “We’re making friends, Will. Actual, terrifying, beautiful friends who have wine cellars and Greek sculptures in their bathrooms.”

“And they think we’re interesting,” Cecil adds. “Or at least mildly amusing.”

Will leans back against the couch, heartbeat slowing, something warm blooming in his chest. Not just from the heat of the apartment—currently provided by a space heater that hisses like it’s haunted—but from the way Lou Ellen’s laughing with peanut butter on her sleeve, and Cecil’s jacket is shedding fur all over the couch, and none of them seem out of place anymore.

“Percy invited us to the campus field day next weekend,” Lou Ellen says, suddenly.

Will chokes. “We’re going to be seen with them again? In broad daylight?”

Cecil shrugs, stretching out across the couch and stealing half of Will’s blanket. “Get used to it. We’re cool now.”

And for a brief, impossible moment, Will lets himself believe that maybe that’s true. Maybe this weird, wonderful orbit they’ve stumbled into isn’t temporary. Maybe, for the first time in a long time, he’s not just surviving.

He’s part of something. Something chaotic and glittering and held together with glue and found affection and threats of espresso-based bribes.

He’s not just in it.

He belongs.

Chapter 16: Cecil Reads Me Gossip About The Sex Life I Didn’t Know I Had

It’s well past midnight, and the apartment is in its usual state of barely-contained entropy. There’s a half-eaten bag of popcorn on the windowsill, three mismatched mugs on the coffee table (one of them has definitely been there since last Monday), and a philosophy textbook being used to level a chair.

Will’s curled on the couch in his threadbare sweatpants and an old Star Wars hoodie, clutching a chipped mug of tea that’s long since gone cold, eyes glazed over from too many hours of studying enzyme kinetics. Lou Ellen is on the floor surrounded by a constellation of highlighters and open notebooks, her latest theatre paper sprawled across every surface within reach.

Cecil is upside-down on the couch, his legs hooked over the back and his phone dangling dangerously over his face, which is illuminated in eerie blue light like a horror movie reveal.

Then he makes the noise.

A strangled, giddy little gasp that sounds somewhere between I just saw a ghost and I just remembered my ex’s birthday unprompted .

Will nearly drops his tea. “Don’t make that sound,” he says, alarmed. “That’s the sound you made when you found the dark web version of RateMyProfessors .”

Lou Ellen, cross-legged like a gremlin priestess mid-ritual, peers up from her notes with mild suspicion. “Is this going to ruin our lives?”

Cecil doesn’t answer right away. He just scrolls, face slack with fascination and low-grade existential dread. He looks like he’s either seen the face of God or is currently having his soul harvested via a campus Wi-Fi signal.

Then, solemn as a prophet and twice as dramatic, he whispers, “You guys. We’re famous.”

Will groans, dropping his head against the couch cushion. “No.”

“We’re infamous ,” Cecil clarifies, flipping upright and nearly elbowing Lou Ellen’s notes to the floor in the process. “There’s a thread.”

Will blinks. “A what ?”

“A thread ,” Cecil repeats, reverently. “Multiple, actually. On the campus forum. About us. Specifically, about our connection to the Seven.”

Lou Ellen reaches for Will’s tea like it’s whiskey. “Read it. Slowly. So I can die in real time.”

Cecil clears his throat with all the gravitas of someone about to perform Hamlet’s soliloquy in a Denny’s parking lot.

“Okay. First post: ‘Anyone else notice how the blonde guy that’s always in Ambrosia & Grounds keeps showing up wherever Nico di Angelo is? Coincidence? I think not.’”

Will slaps a hand over his face. “I don’t even go there anymore. They raised their prices! I can not afford to keep spending my share of the water bill on coffee.”

“Next one,” Cecil says gleefully, scrolling. “Quote: ‘I heard the guy who works at the bookstore once special ordered a first edition in Ancient Greek for Annabeth and now she lets him borrow her annotated Iliad .’”

Lou Ellen raises an eyebrow. “That’s not even a good lie. Annabeth would never.”

“She’d make me pass a quiz first,” Will mutters.

“Oh, it gets better,” Cecil says, eyes sparkling with unholy joy. “There’s a theory that we—and I quote— ‘were chosen by the Seven after passing a series of secret initiation trials involving a bookstore, a cursed latte, and a rooftop séance .’”

Will chokes on nothing. “That was one time !”

“And it wasn’t cursed,” Lou Ellen adds. “It was just aggressively overpriced oat milk.”

Cecil scrolls dramatically. “Now we’re getting into cult territory. One post says: ‘The three new regulars at Nico’s table? Definitely not human. One of them’s a hacker, one’s a witch, and the blond one glows in the dark .’”

Will gapes. “I do not glow.”

“You absolutely glow,” Lou Ellen says, nodding like it’s a known scientific fact. “It’s like being friends with a sentient nightlight.”

“There’s a whole sub-thread just about the glow,” Cecil reports, eyes wide. “Someone theorized you’re a fallen star being rehabilitated by Nico, who is, naturally, a disgraced death god seeking redemption through academia.”

Will makes a noise of protest, but it’s half-choked laughter. “That’s… oddly flattering.”

“It gets disturbingly romantic,” Cecil continues, squinting at the screen. “There’s a three-part fanfic series based on you and Nico sharing one cigarette and realizing you’re soulmates in a post-apocalyptic underworld AU.”

Lou Ellen coughs. “Okay, now I need a drink.”

“Oh, here’s a new one,” Cecil says, gasping. “This one says: ‘There’s no way that group is real. I think they’re a performance art piece funded by the Classics Department. Their costumes are too good .’”

Will collapses backward onto the cushions, covering his eyes with both hands. “I’m going to fake my own death. Tell everyone I ran off to join a cult in Vermont.”

“Too late,” Lou Ellen says cheerfully. “One of the theories says you’re part of a long con where you seduce Nico to gain access to the Seven’s inheritance.”

Will bolts upright. “ We have an inheritance?! ”

“No one tell Piper,” Cecil mutters. “She’ll turn it into a PR campaign.”

Lou Ellen exhales slowly. “At this point, I’m surprised no one’s suggested we’re time travelers.”

Cecil scrolls again. Then pauses. Then turns the screen around with reverence.

At the top of the thread:

“Trio From the Future: Here to Save—or Seduce—Us All?”
( Mega Thread ) ( Spoilers )

Will stares at it, dead-eyed. “We’ve created a monster.”

“No,” Cecil says, full of chaotic pride. “We’ve become the monster.”

The thread is still open on Cecil’s phone, glowing faintly on the arm of the couch like a cursed object they’ve summoned and now can’t banish. The light pulses gently across his cheekbones, painting him in shades of myth and Wi-Fi.

They’ve stopped reading aloud—not because the posts have gotten less absurd, but because none of them can breathe. Either from laughing too hard, or from something quieter, something that’s curled up in the center of the room and settled in like a question they haven’t named yet.

Will is curled sideways on the floor, head tipped against Lou Ellen’s thigh. She’s absently braiding small, loose strands of his hair while scrolling through theatre reviews on her phone with her other hand, a queen holding court in sweatpants and chapstick. Cecil’s still upside-down on the couch like gravity doesn’t apply to him when he’s absorbing high levels of absurdity.

The room hums with low, lived-in quiet: soft notification chimes, the distant honk of a horn four blocks over, the occasional creak of their apartment’s ancient radiator like it's sighing along with them.

Then Lou Ellen says, softly, “Is this what it’s like for them all the time?”

Will cracks one eye open. “The Seven?”

She nods. “Being watched like this. Invented. Misunderstood on purpose.”

Cecil flips over onto his stomach, chin perched on the arm of the couch. “They never seem fazed.”

Will lets out a slow breath, watching the ceiling fan turn overhead. “No. They don’t.”

He thinks of Annabeth arching a single brow at a rumor and somehow silencing a room. Of Piper making eye contact while lying through her teeth, beautiful and unbothered. Of Percy laughing too loud and not caring who hears. Jason looking like a soldier sculpted from sunlight. Hazel, regal and restless like a poem that knows it’s being read. Leo, all quicksilver grin and restless hands, like a spark always looking for something to burn. Frank, steady and soft-spoken, with a strength that feels like the earth remembering its own weight. And Nico, Nico—dark-eyed and distant, standing like a statue in a thunderstorm, watching everything with that quiet kind of knowing.

“I used to think they were cold,” Will says. “Untouchable. Like… like they weren’t real.”

“They’re very real,” Cecil says, nudging him with a socked foot. “Remember last week when Percy ate an entire rotisserie chicken with his hands?”

Lou Ellen groans. “I’m still recovering.”

Will huffs out a laugh, but it comes from somewhere low in his chest. Tired. Truthful. “Yeah. But it’s like The Secret History , right? That weird, ancient beauty. Too clever for their own good. Too polished. Like they’re performing something the rest of us don’t even have words for.”

And gods, they are. Nico and his constellation of friends—effortless and golden and strange—feel like they’ve stepped out of some mythic footnote, brushing marble dust from their jackets as they recite poetry in dead languages and flirt like it’s a bloodsport. They move through campus like they’ve been here for centuries, like time bends politely out of their way.

Cecil perks up instantly, grinning like the comparison is a gift. “So you’re saying we’re Richard?”

Lou Ellen cackles, the blanket slipping from one shoulder as she throws her head back. “We’re definitely Richard. Poor, probably gay, and way too excited to be invited to the fancy classics table.”

Will groans into his hands, muffling the sound of his own embarrassment. “Gods, we are.”

The thing is—he’d always liked Richard. That longing for beauty. That desperation to be chosen. Will recognizes it like a bruise he presses just to make sure it still hurts.

“I call not dying first,” Cecil announces, stretching out on the couch like a tragic poet who’s had too much absinthe and not enough self-preservation.

“We’re not going to die,” Will mutters. But it comes out flat, like he doesn’t quite believe it. Like he knows—deep down—that no one steps into a story like this and gets out unchanged.

Because they’ve already crossed the threshold. The chandelier dinners. The whispered theories. The brush of a hand on a balcony and the echo of Nico’s voice saying moaning like a sin disguised as a secret. Because under all the jokes, something else is crackling in the air—like the moment before lightning, the split second between knowing and being known. A tension that feels like foreshadowing.

Will sits up, drawing his knees to his chest. His mug’s gone cold beside him, forgotten. “It’s just weird. We used to talk about them like they were a myth. And now we’re—”

“In the myth,” Lou Ellen finishes, soft.

Cecil shrugs, dramatic even in existential dread. “That’s what you get for falling in love with a haunted classics major who translates Ancient Greek curses in his free time.”

Will groans. “I hate you.”

Lou Ellen pats his back, fingers cool and grounding. “You love us. And you’re in it now, Solace. Deep.”

Will leans into her hand. Doesn’t argue.

Because she’s right.

He is in it.

In the late-night dinners and the cryptic looks. In the tangled academic references and the ink stains on Nico’s fingers. In the ritual silence of cigarette smoke curling off a balcony, in the shadows behind Hazel’s smile, in the way Frank speaks like he’s remembering rather than imagining. In the way Nico had said moaning like it was a secret with a key, and handed it to Will just to see what he’d do with it.

And maybe—just maybe—they’ve all wandered into something ancient. Something dangerous.

But he’s not backing out now.

He doesn’t think he could.

“Guys,” Cecil says some time later, his voice reverent in that horrible way that means he’s about to ruin someone’s life. He’s halfway upside-down on the couch again, legs flopped over the backrest, hoodie slipping off one shoulder, and his phone dangling precariously above his face. “There’s a new post.”

Will, curled up on the rug with a mug of sad microwave tea, groans. “Please.”

“No, seriously. It says: ‘I saw Will Solace and Nico di Angelo at the bookstore. Will touched Nico’s elbow. The tension was unreal. There was an aura. I am not exaggerating.’ ”

Lou Ellen, now perched like a gargoyle on the arm of the couch with a sketchpad balanced on one knee, grabs a throw pillow and hurls it with perfect aim. It hits Cecil square in the ribs. “There is no aura.”

“There’s totally an aura,” Cecil counters, clutching the pillow like a martyr. “This is like a slow-burn, queer-gothic, strangers-to-lovers, dark academia-core fanfic and we’re in it.”

Will lets out a strangled noise and flops backward, his head hitting Lou Ellen’s ankle with a muted thud. “We’re going to die.”

Cecil flips himself upright like a gremlin reborn, phone held aloft like it’s holy scripture. “Nope. We’re going to trend.”

The apartment is dim and cozy in the kind of lived-in way that says “ chaos happened here recently. ” There’s three jackets piled on the radiator, and a suspicious trail of glitter across the coffee table from Lou Ellen’s latest theatre project. The space hums with energy: comfort, mess, late-night delirium.

Cecil now has a blanket draped around his shoulders like a prophet in fleece, while Lou Ellen rests her chin on her hand and watches him with gleaming, predator-level amusement. Will is fully horizontal on the floor, a study in secondhand embarrassment and existential dread.

“Listen to this one,” Cecil says, already giggling. “ ‘Spotted: Will Solace and Nico di Angelo in the back corner of the library on Friday. He was leaning in close, hand on the table, whispering. I couldn’t hear what he said, but the vibes? Off the charts. Library hookup confirmed. Possibly cursed.’ ”

Lou Ellen lets out a low whistle. “Damn. That’s hot.”

“It’s fake,” Will sputters, bolting upright like a man possessed. “That didn’t happen! I—I mean, we were in the library once, but it wasn’t like that. He just wiped ink off of my cheek.”

Cecil raises an eyebrow with practiced judgment. “You were alone in the back corner?”

Will opens his mouth. Closes it. “That doesn’t mean anything!”

Lou Ellen narrows her eyes like she’s assessing a witness in a courtroom drama. “You’re blushing.”

“I am not—”

“You are,” Cecil declares, pointing triumphantly. “You’re blushing and looking at the ceiling like it’s gonna save you from your own gay thoughts.”

“I’m looking at the ceiling,” Will grits out, “because I am trying very hard not to imagine Nico whispering things to me in the back of a dimly lit library.”

And gods, is he ever.

The ceiling spins a little as his brain conjures it anyway—Nico, close enough to smell like cold smoke and expensive ink. Whispering, low and sharp, mouth barely moving, eyes dark and knowing. Long fingers trailing along spines of forgotten tomes, candlelight flickering like a prayer between them.

There’s a beat of stunned silence.

Then Lou Ellen gasps like she’s just had a religious awakening. “Oh my gods, you have thought about it.”

Will throws himself backward onto the floor and groans into the nearest throw pillow, trying to suffocate his own shame. “I hate you both.”

It’s not a lie. But it’s not really true either. He hates how right they are. He hates how vividly his traitor brain had filled in the gaps—velvet silence, Nico’s voice in Latin, a desk creaking under them like old wood surrendering.

Cecil is delighted. “Okay, but same. Black hoodie, long fingers on old books, that whole underworld prince vibe? Of course your brain went there.”

“It didn’t just go there,” Lou Ellen says, eyes glittering with menace. “It rented a studio apartment, put up shelves, started a garden.”

Will groans louder, dragging the pillow over his face like it’s a shield. “Why am I like this?”

Because he’s never wanted anything this badly in his life.

Because Nico looks at him like he sees something buried, something Will didn’t know was visible. Because Will’s body is a traitor, and so is his brain, and apparently so are his dreams, and everything Nico says loops in his head like a lyric he can’t stop humming.

“Because,” Cecil says solemnly, patting his arm with the gravitas of a death announcement, “you’re a touch-starved, overworked, repressed med student who accidentally fell for the first boy to make eye contact and mean it.”

“You’ve probably already had the dream,” Lou Ellen adds, all faux-casual, but her voice has the hushed weight of prophecy. “You know. The dream.”

Will peeks out from under the pillow, wary. “What dream?”

Both of them freeze like predators scenting weakness.

Will stares, already regretting everything. “Don’t—”

“Oh my gods,” Lou Ellen breathes, one hand over her heart. “He has .”

“I’m not talking about this,” Will mutters, sinking lower.

“You 100% are,” Cecil insists. “You woke up in a cold sweat. Palms pressed together like a prayer. Whispering his name into your pillow—”

“Cecil—”

“—legs tangled in the sheets like a Victorian ghost bride—”

“I hate you.”

And he does. He hates how accurately they’ve described it. The ache, the helpless heat of it. The half-remembered fragments: a lapel between his fingers. Nico’s breath at his throat. The illusion of softness, followed by something darker.

Lou Ellen leans forward with terrifying calm. “What was he wearing in the dream?”

Will groans and throws the pillow over his face again. “A suit, okay? And I don’t want to talk about it.”

Cecil makes a strangled, delighted sound. “Of course he was. Three-piece? Cravat? Were there rings?”

“Shut up,” Will hisses, voice muffled and desperate.

Lou Ellen is already typing furiously into her phone. “Dark academia sex dream. Nico in a tailored suit. Probably black silk. Underworld lighting. Whispering in Latin. Candlelight. Yes. Yes. I can work with this.”

Will lets out a noise that sounds like a prayer at the altar of his own doom. “I’m deleting myself from this friend group.”

But he’s blushing. And smiling, against the pillow. Because gods help him, he did dream of Nico that night.

It started with a suit. A book in Nico’s hands. A kiss pressed to the corner of his mouth like a secret. And it ended—well.

Let’s just say, in the dream, the desk didn’t survive.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Cecil says, grinning like the gremlin he is. “You’re just mentally ill in a sexy way. Like everyone else at this school.”

“Honestly,” Lou Ellen murmurs, reverent, “it’s romantic. In a doomed, tragic, Victorian ghost sex kind of way.”

“You two are feral,” Will says, muffled.

“Better than being pent up,” Cecil singsongs. “Which you very clearly are.”

Lou Ellen nudges his leg with her socked foot. “We’re here for you. Supportive. Respectful. Ready to throw you at him like a volleyball.”

Will groans again. But he’s laughing. That quiet, aching kind of laughter—the kind that bubbles up through the chest when you’re tired and full of too much love for the weirdos who won’t let you suffer alone.

They’re six and a half cups into the least expired tea in the apartment—something vaguely floral that Lou Ellen swears pairs well with mutual humiliation—when the conversation careens, predictably, into absolute hell.

Again.

Lou Ellen is curled like a mischievous cat in the corner of their sagging couch, swaddled in a fleece blanket patterned with tiny knives. She cradles her chipped mug like it’s a goblet of truth. “Honestly,” she says, too casual to be trusted, “it’s kind of romantic. Dream Will getting railed against a balcony by the boy of his nightmares.”

“More like the boy of his wet dreams,” Cecil adds from the floor, where he’s now draped over the shag rug with all the grace of a Victorian ghost in emotional ruin. His legs are thrown up against the coffee table, one sock half-off, phone blinking beside him like an evil talisman.

Will makes a noise—somewhere between a squeak and a suppressed scream—and buries his face in his hands. His tea sloshes dangerously. “I am not having those kinds of dreams. It was one time, one time! ”

“It was not one time ,” Lou Ellen says, beaming. “You moaned in your sleep last night. Twice.”

“I thought you were watching The Witcher ,” Cecil gasps in mock betrayal. “Turns out it was just you, dreaming about getting corrupted by Nico di Angelo in the rare books section.”

“I am begging you to stop,” Will groans, now having moved to the couch so he can sink deeper into the cushions like maybe they’ll swallow him.

Cecil shifts forward on his elbows, his expression wide-eyed and fake-gentle. “Do you want us to make you a dream journal? You can rate them. ‘Balcony Blowjob: Four stars, lost points for emotional damage. ’”

Will lifts his head to glare. “I did not dream that.”

“Oh?” Lou Ellen tilts her head, all wide-eyed curiosity and theatrical judgment. “You talk in your sleep too. You said, and I quote, ‘the way he said moaning ’—like it was a sacred text, Will. That was not sleep-talking. That was reciting filth like it’s a Rosetta Stone.”

Will opens his mouth.

Closes it.

There’s a moment of silence, suspended like a breath.

Then Will blurts, “Okay, it wasn’t a dream.”

The couch fully claims him now. He’s horizontal, legs dangling off one end, face flushed, hands thrown over his eyes like he’s in mourning. Unfortunately for him, Lou Ellen and Cecil have both pounced, climbed onto the battlefield—Lou straddling his legs like a judgmental goblin queen, Cecil perched on the back of the couch like a demon ready to strike.

“What the hell does that mean?” Cecil demands.

“You’ve been spending too much time with Nico, you’re turning into a cryptid, too,” Lou Ellen says flatly.

Will’s heart hammers in his chest. His voice is weak, fragile. “It wasn’t just a dream.”

“Tell us exactly what happened,” Lou demands, jabbing his thigh with the precision of someone who has never known mercy.

“No,” Will moans into the pillow. “You’ll make fun of me.”

“We’re already making fun of you,” Cecil says. “Give us material.”

Will lets out a sound like his soul exiting his body. “It was just… a conversation. On the balcony, at Percy and Annabeth’s.”

Lou snorts. “The night you came back inside looking like someone had rearranged your organs. You sat down and drank wine like you’d just run a marathon in emotional heatstroke.”

“I was flushed,” Will insists. “It was the wine. The weather. The—stop hitting me!”

Cecil is drumming on his chest now. “Spill it, Solace, or we start inventing the dialogue ourselves.”

Lou Ellen nods solemnly. “And our version will involve moaning. So much moaning.”

Will freezes.

Cecil’s eyes narrow like a predator scenting blood. “Wait. No way.”

“Nope,” Will says, too fast. “Nope, not what I meant—”

“HE SAID MOANING, DIDN’T HE,” Lou shrieks.

“Guys—”

“WILL.”

“FINE,” Will yells, flinging the pillow off his face with a dramatic flourish. “Yes! Yes, okay? There was moaning! Not, like, literal moaning, but he said the word! And I wanted to die on the spot but also ascend into some kind of horny afterlife and—oh my gods, I hate myself.”

Stunned silence.

Then Cecil collapses backwards with a shriek of delight, kicking the coffee table hard enough to send a spoon clattering.

“Nico di Angelo said the word moaning to your face!”

Lou Ellen is vibrating. “Was it, like, casual moaning? Or whispery, filthy, ‘Will Solace I want to ruin your life and leave your legs shaking’ kind of moaning?”

Will groans and flops an arm over his face. “He said I was thinking about him in bed. Which, I was. Then he said moaning. Like he was narrating my actual, literal breakdown. And then— then —he smirked. And left. I was alone. With my semi. And my shame.”

Lou gasps like she’s been kissed by a god. “You got a semi on the balcony?”

“It was the architectural tension!” Will hisses. “There were Corinthian columns involved!”

Cecil is wheezing. “That is the horniest sentence anyone has ever spoken in this apartment. And we’ve lived here.”

“I need to move out,” Will mutters. “Change my name. Transfer schools. Possibly countries.”

“Absolutely not,” Lou Ellen says, smug. “Not until you make out with him against the fish tank.”

“Or on the fish tank,” Cecil adds. “It’s definitely reinforced. Rich people glass.”

Will groans into his hands. “I am going to die before I ever kiss him.”

“No,” Lou Ellen says sweetly, brushing his hair out of his face. “You’re going to suffer. And then kiss him.”

“Probably a lot of suffering,” Cecil nods. “But also probably some hot, deeply unwise making out.”

Will lets out a strangled laugh despite himself. “You two are nightmares.”

Lou Ellen kisses his forehead like a curse. “We are your nightmares. Now go to sleep and dream about him again. But this time, get to third base so we can live vicariously.”

Will throws the pillow back over his face and exhales into the cushion like it’s the only thing keeping him from spontaneously combusting.

He’s still flushed. Still flayed open.

Because it wasn’t just the word moaning , or the smirk, or the wicked glint in Nico’s eyes like he knew exactly what he was doing.

It was the intimacy of it. The audacity.

The way Nico said it like a spell—like he was naming a secret Will didn’t even know he’d spoken aloud.

Will can still feel the ghost of it in his bones. The quiet click of the lighter. The press of silence between them. The city shimmering below while his entire body tuned itself to the shape of Nico’s voice.

It hadn’t been just horny. It had been holy. It had been humiliating.

Gods, he wants him. Not just in a balcony-blowjob, cursed-architectural-feature kind of way, but in the aching, terrifying way that sneaks up behind you and rewrites the entire layout of your heart.

He wants Nico’s attention, yes—but also his trust. His tired smiles. His stupid leather jacket draped across Will’s shoulders at a party they shouldn’t be at. He wants the rare softness, the complicated silence, the snarky comments over bitter coffee. He wants to know what Nico dreams about when he’s not guarding himself like a fortress.

He wants to be let in.

And still, beneath all that yearning—sharp and bright and embarrassing—there is want. Heat. A hunger that curls low in his stomach and reminds him that he is so screwed.

Will peeks out from under the pillow just long enough to find Lou Ellen watching him with something suspiciously like fondness.

“Go to bed,” she murmurs again, nudging his shoulder. “You’ve earned a little fantasy tonight.”

Will grunts, pushing himself up and stumbling toward his room like a man who’s just seen god and would like to lie down now.

Cecil yells after him, already pulling out his notes app. “Okay, but we need a working draft of your balcony fantasy so we can compare it to the next time you two are alone near architectural features.”

Will flips him off without turning around.

He gets into bed fully clothed, burritoed in three blankets, heart still pounding like it hasn’t gotten the memo that the conversation’s over.

And yes, okay, fine—he dreams about Nico di Angelo that night.

At first, it’s innocent. Quiet. Nico sitting beside him on the library steps, brushing ink off his cheek again, the way he did that one afternoon when the light caught his eyelashes and Will almost passed out on the spot.

But by the time the dream ends, Nico’s got him pinned to an ancient marble column whispering filthy Latin in his ear, and Will wakes up sweating, panting, and dramatically tangled in his sheets like a ghost bride with a secret.

Which, honestly?

Checks out.

Notes:

Ps, I’m trying to reply to all ur comments but ao3 keeps thinking it’s spam and
crashing :(

Chapter 17: I Am Not Flirting, I Am Providing Excellent Customer Service (Okay, I’m Absolutely Flirting, Please Let Me Live)

Notes:

ao3 still thinks I'm spam or a bot when trying to reply to comments on this fic, im not ignoring anyone, i see you all and love you so much <3 and i will respond as soon as ao3 gets it shit together (i wish cecil was real, he'd hack it for me)

Will is working the register at Elysium Books, the quiet hush of the store wrapping around him like a well-worn sweater. Outside, the sky is a pale, colorless thing, the kind of grey that leeches time from the day. It’s calm. Predictable.

Until the door opens, and the air shifts like someone’s stepped into a cathedral and slammed the door behind them.

The chime rings—not cheerfully, but sharply, like a glass teacup cracking down the middle.

And then Nico di Angelo walks in.

He’s a black silhouette against the cold light, all sharp edges and haunted elegance. His coat moves like it’s part of him, dark and fluid. His sunglasses are still on, though there’s no sun to speak of. He has his phone pressed to his ear, and Will’s already forgotten how to breathe.

“I said no,” Nico says, low and vicious, barely past a whisper—but the kind that carries. “I’m not flying back to L.A. this weekend.”

L.A. Not Milan. Not Rome. But still: a place of family and pressure and weight, Will’s sure of it. Because he hears it in the way Nico’s jaw tightens, the way he moves past the counter without looking, already mid-argument, already unraveling.

“I don’t care if it’s ‘expected of me ,’ I have classes, you can’t just—”

The rest is lost as Nico moves deeper into the stacks, his voice turning sharp and quiet, carving through the stillness like a knife sliding under skin. He paces the philosophy section like it personally offended him. He’s always been beautiful, but this—this is something else. A storm in human form. Grief made stylish. Control balancing on a thread.

Will pretends not to watch. He fails.

He’s barely breathing, barely blinking. Every nerve feels hyperaware. Of Nico’s voice. His hands. The dark shadow of his expression.

And something about the name he says next makes the hair on Will’s neck rise.

“You can tell Persephone to stay out of it.”

Will’s heart stutters.

Persephone— the Persephone. Not myth, not metaphor. Will’s heard her name before, always on the edges of conversation. Always in whispers. From Hazel’s mouth, once. From Jason, careful and hushed. They talk about her like she’s some unknowable weather system: glittering and dangerous.

“She has nothing to do with this,” Nico bites out, running a hand through his hair. The gesture is frustrated, habitual—and it messes him up even more, curls loose, posture unguarded.

“No, Father,” he says. “I said no. I’m not inheriting anything. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

A silence, then a bitter laugh. The kind that sounds like it’s been building for years.

“Then find someone else.”

The line goes dead.

Nico stares down at his phone like it’s something he’s considering setting on fire. Will forces himself to look away—too late. He’s been caught. He’s seen too much. Nico’s mask slips for only a second, but it’s enough to imprint itself in Will’s chest like a brand.

He fakes nonchalance, adjusting a stack of bookmarks he already alphabetized. His hands are shaking. He wants to say something, but he doesn’t know what’s safe. Or real.

Will can’t stop thinking about Los Angeles.

Not the real one—not the sprawl of palm trees and smog-choked freeways and designer sunglasses on hollow-eyed strangers—but the one that seems to hang over Nico like a storm front, dense and unmoving, the myth of L.A., the metaphor of it, something shimmering and rotten, all gold-dipped ruins and glittering expectations, a city that pretends to be light while swallowing people whole.

It’s the way Nico had said it— L.A. —not with anger or bitterness or even disdain, but with this strange, hollow kind of finality, like the word itself had already cut him open once and he didn’t want to give it the chance to do it again, like it wasn’t just a place but a sentence handed down, something he never agreed to serve.

And now it lives in Will’s head like a cursed prayer, City of Angels , ironic and cruel, because Nico’s last name is di Angelo , of the angels , and yet everything about him feels like it was carved from the edges of heaven after the lights went out—he’s all clean lines and dark shadows and silk-black coats and quiet fury, too elegant for the world and too tired to care what the world thinks of him.

Nico isn’t an angel, not in the way people mean it, not right now—not soft light or safe hands, not some gentle celestial thing with wings and mercy in his smile; he’s the angel after , the one they cast down and locked the gates behind, and Will can’t stop seeing it now, the way Nico looked in that moment, mid-argument on the phone, black coat flaring around him like the remnants of wings, sunglasses pushed back on his head and eyes shining with something fierce and wounded and unspeakably ancient.

Rachel had shown Will the painting during a lull at the restaurant, when the bar was clean and the lights were dim and she was trying to tame her curls into something elegant but they kept springing out from her updo in every direction, as if even her hair refused to be anything less than chaotic.

She’d shoved her phone into his hands without explanation, mid-rant about art school alumni who don’t tip, and said, “This. Look at this . Cabanel’s Fallen Angel . Lucifer, right after the fall. It’s the hottest painting in existence. Don’t argue with me.”

Will had blinked down at the screen, expecting something dramatic, but not… this. Not a figure so heartbreakingly human—slumped, half-naked, crumpled in grief and defiance, one luminous eye burning from the shadows like a smoldering coal. His face wasn’t twisted in rage but hollowed out by it, as if betrayal and beauty had been fused into the same expression. Will hadn’t understood half of what Rachel said about symbolism and Romanticism and moral ambiguity, but he’d stared at that face for a long time.

Because that’s what Nico looks like, when he’s arguing with his father over the phone. Like he’s just been thrown from someplace divine. Like he’s still burning a little from the impact.

And gods, Will is spiraling. Not just because Nico is beautiful—he is, painfully, obscenely, unfairly so—but because his pain is beautiful too, the kind of ache that doesn’t want to be healed, just witnessed, like a cathedral lit only by memory and the hush of things that were lost.

L.A. must have hurt him. Not in a clean way. In the way that makes you quieter without making you softer, in the way that builds a cage out of legacy and calls it love. Will doesn’t know what Nico’s connection to L.A. really is—not yet—but he can feel it, thick in the air when Nico says the word, the way his shoulders tighten just slightly, the way his jaw sets like he’s bracing for something worse than memory.

He talks about family like it’s a curse passed down, like bloodlines are written in binding contracts, like legacy is a weight he never chose to carry—and yet he carries it, all the same.

What kind of father leaves a son looking like that? Like the patron saint of ruin. Like he was sculpted to break hearts and cities in equal measure.

Nico, who moves like he’s already halfway gone. Nico, who waits at the edge of rooms like he’s bracing for exile.
Nico, who walks like someone trying to forget what belonging felt like.

Of the angels , and yet—he looks like something heaven made too well and then tried to destroy.

Will wonders what L.A. looks like through his eyes. If it’s boulevards and ghosts. If it’s a thousand unspoken goodbyes. If it’s sunlight that feels like surveillance and silence that feels like home. If it ever felt like home at all.

And somehow, it’s this that makes Will want to know him more—not the mystery, not the darkness, not even the beauty—but this quiet, splintered defiance, this sense that Nico was handed a script and walked off stage mid-performance.

He doesn’t want to fix him. He just wants to know him.

To trace the edges of that painting and ask what it means to fall, and whether Nico ever had a choice.

Footsteps approach.

Will doesn’t look up until he senses the shift—some invisible tug in the air, like gravity leaning sideways. Then Nico’s there, standing just in front of the register. Sunglasses hooked into the collar of his jacket, dark circles under his eyes, wind-tousled hair falling into his face. He looks tired. And unfairly gorgeous. And like he hasn’t slept since the last time Will dreamed about him.

“Hey,” Nico says, voice low and even, but there’s a rasp to it. Softer than usual. Maybe even careful.

Will’s throat goes dry. His brain short-circuits somewhere between say something charming and die quietly . He manages, “Hey,” but it comes out wrecked and breathless.

He clears his throat, tries again. “Hi. Welcome back to Elysium Books. We… uh. Still have books.”

Nico raises an eyebrow.

His mouth twitches, just slightly—like he’s trying not to smile and losing the fight. “I’ve noticed,” he says.

Will wants to melt into the floor. Or climb over the counter. Or ask Nico to ruin his entire life and alphabetize the poetry section with him while they pretend Will isn’t pathetically in love with him.

Will could say something else. Something smooth. Something human. But he just grips the edge of the counter and thinks:

Gods help me, I’m flirting like a concussed Victorian orphan and he’s still looking at me like I’m interesting.

“Hey,” Will says, a little too brightly, a little too desperate not to stare at the curve of Nico’s mouth. “We just got in a shipment of new texts—some of them are, uh… classics-adjacent. Archaeology stuff. You wanna see?”

Nico raises an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth quirking like he knows exactly what Will is doing. But he nods.

Will turns too fast and nearly crashes into a display of Virgil translations. “Cool. Great. This way,” he says, pretending his ears aren’t pink.

They walk together toward the back of the store, weaving through poetry and philosophy, Will narrating the path like a nervous tour guide. “We’ve got Mesopotamia hiding behind the true crime, and the Bronze Age is flirting with Greek drama again—it's a whole scandal.”

Nico huffs a laugh under his breath, low and unexpected, and Will thinks: Success. Distraction achieved. Now all I have to do is not fall in love right here by the ethnographic studies.

He tries not to think about what Nico just said on the phone. About L.A. About inheritance. About the way he’d said I didn’t ask for any of this like it had been carved into him.

Will fails, spectacularly.

They’re standing near the classics section now, the bookstore hushed and golden with late afternoon light spilling through the high windows. Dust hangs in the air like pollen, like memory. Nico leans against the end of a shelf, arms crossed, shoulders taut beneath his coat like he’s still carrying the weight of whatever that call demanded of him.

Will wants to reach out. To brush away the tension in his jaw, the tightness in his spine, the storm still simmering behind his eyes.

He doesn’t, obviously. But the want sits heavy in his chest.

He clears his throat instead, pretending to straighten a stack of dog-eared Rilke paperbacks. “Rough call?” he asks casually, though his voice betrays him, too soft around the edges.

Nico doesn’t answer right away. His sunglasses are perched in his hair now, and his gaze flickers toward Will before slipping away again. Then he shrugs—shoulders barely moving. “Family.”

Will bites his lip. “Ah.” He hesitates. “Father?”

A short, quiet hum of confirmation. Nico’s face stays carefully blank, a shuttered window behind thick glass. It’s not that he’s cold, Will realizes. It’s that he’s contained—like he’s learned the hard way how much it hurts when people start asking questions they don’t actually want the answers to.

Still, Will can’t help himself.

“Is he… strict?”

Nico exhales, low and sharp, and for a moment Will thinks he’s overstepped. But then Nico turns his head just slightly, offering him a glance sidelong and shadowed. There’s something behind his eyes—not quite anger, not quite grief, but the glimmering edge of a wound that’s too old to bleed and too deep to ignore.

“Something like that,” he says.

Will swallows hard, unsure what he’s reacting to more—the flatness of Nico’s tone or the way it rings with something brittle, something that sounds like it was once softer, once more hopeful, before it was snapped under someone else’s expectations.

Nico trails a finger along the spine of a book without really seeing it. His voice, when it comes, is quiet—measured like he’s weighing each word before letting it go.

“He wants me to be a certain kind of person,” Nico says, eyes fixed somewhere just past the archaeology shelf. “Sharp. Obedient. Useful.”

Will doesn’t speak, afraid to break the spell.

Nico exhales through his nose, bitter-soft. “It’s like I was born with a job I didn’t apply for. And every time I try to walk away, someone reminds me that it’s not a job. It’s blood.”

He flicks his gaze toward Will, guarded but honest. “I didn’t ask for any of it. But it doesn’t seem to matter.”

The air between them thickens, full of things Will doesn’t know how to say. That his heart is doing that awful, embarrassing yearning thing again. That his brain is screaming mafia prince while his chest is whispering you didn’t ask for this, did you? You just wanted to be loved.

He pictures Nico growing up in some cavernous L.A. estate, marble floors and empty halls echoing with silence and orders. Nico, a child told to sit still and be good and become something cold and sharp and useful. Nico, who learned to wear black like armor because no one could see him bleed in it.

He blurts before he can think better of it, “You know, if you ever need someone to talk to—”

Nico’s head turns sharply, eyes locking onto his. For a second, Will’s stomach plummets. He braces for the inevitable shut-down, the glare, the you don’t know me that Nico has every right to say.

But it doesn’t come.

Instead, Nico watches him, gaze unreadable but lingering. And then—so quiet Will almost misses it—he says, “Thanks.”

And there’s something about the way he says it that lodges under Will’s ribs like a splinter. Because it’s not sarcastic. Not dismissive. It’s quiet. Unpolished. Honest.

A fragile olive branch from someone who’s not used to reaching out at all.

Will’s heart stumbles, clumsy and stupid in his chest. The overhead lights buzz. The bookstore smells like dust and coffee and old pages, and Nico’s shadow stretches long on the floor beside him, dark and lean and just out of reach.

“Anytime,” Will murmurs, meaning it more than he probably should.

And for a moment, it feels like the universe is holding its breath between them—poised on the edge of something that could be terrifying or beautiful or both.

Because maybe Nico won’t take the offer. Maybe he’ll never say another word about it.

But Will will remember this. The weight of that thanks . The way Nico di Angelo—mysterious, guarded, carved-from-stone Nico—looked at him and let something real slip through the cracks.

Nico’s hand stills on the edge of the shelf.

“I don’t want to read about this right now,” he says quietly. His voice isn’t sharp, but it lands like a blade anyway. “Classics. Tombs. Ruins. Dead names carved into stone.”

Will blinks. “Oh—shit. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine,” Nico cuts in, a little too fast. He steps back from the shelf like it’s suddenly turned radioactive. “It’s just… I live in this. Funerals and antiquities. I breathe it. Sometimes I want to forget all of it exists.”

Will’s heart lurches. His throat goes dry. He’s brought Nico right back into a world he was trying to escape, and he hadn’t even realized it.

Will’s stomach twists, heat flooding his face. “I wasn’t trying to—I thought maybe it’d be something you liked, not—” he fumbles, gesturing helplessly at the books, at the aisle, at everything. “I didn’t mean to make it worse.”

Nico looks at him, and something in his expression shifts—like a breeze catching a curtain, something private fluttering just barely into view. Not annoyed. Not angry. Just… moved.

His gaze lingers on Will, steady and quiet, and the corner of his mouth tugs like he’s trying not to let the warmth show.

“I know,” he says softly.

And for a second, it feels like he sees straight through Will—all the effort, all the care—and chooses not to look away.

The silence between them stretches, filled only by the quiet hush of the bookstore—pages turning somewhere in the back, the low hum of a heater kicking on, a world distant from the one Nico had walked in from.

Will fidgets with the edge of a display table, trying not to let the ache in his chest show. “You don’t have to talk about it,” he says gently, barely above a whisper. “I just— I didn’t mean to make things worse.”

Nico exhales, a sound that’s half-sigh, half-laugh, as he slides one gloved hand into his coat pocket and studies the spines of the books lining the archaeology section. His eyes move like he’s reading them, but Will can tell he’s not really seeing anything at all.

“I wasn’t going to come here today,” Nico says after a beat, his voice low and strange, like it’s a confession he didn’t expect to make. “I was just walking. Nowhere in particular. Just… trying to outrun it, I guess.”

Will watches him quietly, not daring to interrupt.

Nico shifts his weight, shoulders still tight beneath his coat. “I was all the way down by the river when he called. My father.” His mouth twists like the words taste sour. “And I knew what it would be. Same conversation. Same expectations. He doesn’t ask anymore—he tells. And I’m supposed to listen. Supposed to step into the role. Whatever that means.”

Will’s heart clenches. He doesn’t know what the role is—he doesn’t know if it’s mafia heir or estranged socialite or something older, deeper, harder to name—but he knows Nico doesn’t want it. That much is clear in the way his voice drops when he says supposed to .

“And I don’t know why,” Nico continues, quieter now, eyes still locked on the row of books, “but as soon as I answered the call, I started walking here.”

Will blinks. “Here?”

Nico nods once. “To the shop. To you.” Then, quickly, like he’s trying to bury the vulnerability: “I figured you’d be working.”

Will’s breath catches, and he feels something flicker in his chest—delicate, dangerous. “You were looking for me?”

Nico’s eyes meet his then, dark and clear and impossible to read. “I was hoping,” he says simply.

And it’s not grand or dramatic. It’s not even romantic, not really. But something about the word— hoping —lodges itself in Will’s ribs like an arrow made of light.

He wants to reach for Nico. Wants to take that hurt and soften it, wants to lace their fingers together and say, It’s okay, you don’t have to be anything for anyone. Not here. Not with me.

But he doesn’t move.

He just smiles, small and sincere. “Well,” he says, his voice suddenly too tight, “you found me.”

Nico huffs a breath—maybe a laugh, maybe not. But he doesn’t look away.

Nico’s words hang in the air, soft but sure, like he’s just offered Will a dare wrapped in velvet. Will stares at him for a second too long, his brain catching up a half-step behind the rest of him.

“Pick one for me.”

Will blinks. “Sorry?”

Nico closes the book he’s been absently flipping through—it looks like something dense, something historical, its cover worn in the way that suggests reverence but not love. He slides it back into its place on the shelf with a precision that feels practiced, deliberate. Then he turns to Will fully, the corners of his mouth tugging into the ghost of a smile.

“Pick a book,” Nico repeats. “Something you like. Something you think I should read.”

It’s such a simple thing, the kind of request people make all the time. But coming from Nico—who holds his silences like currency and lets almost no one in—it feels different. It feels like being handed the keys to a room Will didn’t know he was allowed to want to enter.

He lets out a breath of nervous laughter, rubbing the back of his neck. “That’s a lot of pressure.”

Nico’s smirk deepens, a little tired, a little amused. “I think you can handle it.”

And gods, Will wants to. He wants to impress him. To hand him a piece of his soul and hope Nico doesn’t look away. He wants to pick something that will say all the things he doesn’t know how to put into words—You matter. You don’t have to carry all of it alone. I see you.

And just like that, Will’s heart kicks up a notch, stammering somewhere between panic and delight. He feels it flutter in his chest like a dog scrambling on hardwood—no traction, no control. His pulse thuds embarrassingly loud in his ears as Nico stands there, expectant, framed in quiet lamplight and the soft hush of the bookstore.

He drags his gaze across the nearest shelf, suddenly hyperaware of every book title staring back at him like a test he didn’t study for. If he picks something too academic, he’ll sound boring. Too sentimental, he’ll sound—well, like the guy who writes love letters in the margins of his textbooks and has dreamed about kissing Nico di Angelo in approximately seventeen different lighting scenarios.

And Nico… Nico doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’s into sappy. At least not the kind of sappy Will is. Nico is mystery novels with gothic prose and morally gray protagonists. Nico is ink-stained pages and fog on cemetery gates. He’s brooding shadows and biting wit and Will is—

Will is so hopelessly gone.

But then he remembers something. Not on this shelf. Not even in this section. Something different. A little weird. A little wonderful.

“Hang on,” Will says, breathless, and he gestures for Nico to follow him.

Nico raises an eyebrow but obliges, and he moves in step behind Will. His shoes are soft against the hardwood, nearly silent, but Will can feel him there—his presence steady, his curiosity quiet and heavy between them.

It reminds Will, inexplicably, of a story he read once. Of a man who walked through the underworld with music in his mouth and hope in his throat, not daring to turn around. Not daring to look at the one he loved in case she vanished like mist.

Will leads, but he feels like the one being led. Like if he looked back, Nico might disappear into shadow. Like this moment—this quiet thread of something blooming—would snap under the weight of his attention.

He wonders if Orpheus walked like this: spine rigid with longing, heart caught between footfalls, each step echoing with the unbearable ache of what he couldn’t see. If the silence behind him became too loud. If he loved her too much to bear the not-knowing.

Maybe Orpheus didn’t fail. Maybe love just demanded too much of him. Maybe the turning wasn’t weakness but devotion—desperation. Maybe it was a kind of faith to doubt.

Will’s fingers brush the doorframe as they reach the next room, and still, he can’t help it. The quiet is too much. The pull is too strong.

He turns.

Just to make sure Nico is still there. 

They weave past poetry and through the slim nonfiction aisle, emerging into the front alcove where the streetlight outside filters through the large window and paints the room gold. This is Will’s favorite corner of the shop—where the staff display lives, and where sunbeams gather like lazy cats in the late afternoon.

The display table is small and slightly crooked, draped in a linen cloth that’s already gathering bookstore dust. Propped on its surface is a crooked sign, hand-lettered in Kayla’s sleep-deprived scrawl: Books That Feel Like a Warm Hand on Your Back.

Will had picked them all. Every single title. A labor of love disguised as a favor to a friend, something to make the world a little softer in the corners. He hadn’t known if anyone would care—Kayla had just wanted it done, muttering something about essay deadlines and caffeine poisoning—but Malcom had given him a thumbs-up and Will had arranged them anyway, careful and quiet, like setting the table for someone who might need to feel at home.

He runs his hand along the stack now, letting his fingers pause on the spine of a slim paperback. He lifts it with a small inhale, considers it, then turns and offers it to Nico like it’s something breakable and precious.

Nico tilts his head as he takes it. The title reads: When Breath Becomes Air.

“It’s a memoir,” Will says, suddenly aware of how fast his heart is beating. “By a neurosurgeon. It’s about his life—and, well, death. But also living. Purpose. That kind of thing.”

He rubs the back of his neck, suddenly self-conscious. “It’s kind of heavy, but it’s one of the reasons I picked pre-med. I read it when I was sixteen and… I don’t know. It just stuck.”

Nico doesn’t say anything at first. He stares down at the book, fingers brushing the edge like he’s feeling for a pulse. His expression doesn’t shift, not really—but Will can tell he’s reading something, even without turning a page.

Then, slowly, Nico flips it open. He skims the first lines with the quiet intensity of someone who’s used to finding ghosts between lines of text.

Will shifts his weight, ready to backpedal. “You don’t have to—”

“I want to,” Nico says, cutting him off gently.

He’s still flipping pages, but there’s something softer in his voice now. Less armor, more breath. “You said it’s about purpose?”

Will nods. “Yeah. And choice. What it means to live on your own terms, even when those terms are… complicated.”

Nico hums, quiet and thoughtful. His eyes linger on a passage, and Will doesn’t ask which. He doesn’t need to.

He closes the book carefully, like it might try to fly away if he’s not gentle. When he looks back up, there’s something new in his gaze—not quite a smile, not quite relief, but something warmer than anything that had crossed his face since he walked in.

“You picked this for me,” Nico says. It’s not a question, not really.

Will shrugs, one shoulder rising and falling like he’s trying to shake off the way his chest feels too tight. “It seemed… fitting.”

And to his surprise, Nico lets out a breath—not a sigh, not frustration. Just air. Like maybe, just maybe, something has unknotted in his chest.

“I haven’t wanted to read anything lately,” Nico murmurs, thumb running along the book’s spine. “Classics. Archaeology. All of it… it’s too much. Too many ghosts.”

Will’s breath catches.

Nico lifts the book slightly. “But this doesn’t feel like death,” he says. “It feels like someone trying to make sense of life. Even if it’s ending.”

Will swallows, heart clenching. “Yeah,” he says. “Exactly.”

There’s a moment. A stillness. The city outside murmurs against the windows, soft and far away.

Then—unexpectedly, gently—Nico leans a little closer. “Thanks,” he says, and this time, it’s not tired or weary. It’s real.

And Will thinks maybe, just maybe, the bookstore dust isn’t the only thing clinging to this little corner of the world. Maybe something warmer is settling in, too.

He watches as Nico tucks the book under his arm like it already belongs to him.

And Will—Will tries very hard not to fall in love right there in the front window of a myth-themed bookstore. But gods, it’s getting harder by the minute.

There’s a beat of silence between them, the kind that hums low in the chest, heavy with something unsaid but not unwelcome. Then Nico’s mouth curves—barely, subtly, like a secret he’s only half-decided to share.

“You’re not what I expected,” he murmurs.

The words land like a dart to Will’s sternum. He flushes immediately, ears going pink, neurons misfiring like a row of short-circuiting Christmas lights. “Good surprise or bad surprise?”

Nico tilts his head slightly, considering him with those dark eyes, still shadowed beneath the curve of his lashes. Then he hands the book back—gentle, deliberate, like he’s placing it into Will’s care instead of just completing a transaction.

“I’ll let you know,” he says, voice dipped in something that feels dangerously close to flirtation.

Will fumbles with the barcode scanner like it’s personally betrayed him. He rings the book up with hands that only tremble a little (a medically notable decrease in fine motor control under emotional duress—normal, totally normal). He slides the paperback into a paper bag, careful and practiced, though his brain is screaming at full volume the entire time.

Do not brush his fingers. Do not brush his fingers. Do not brush his fingers.

He brushes his fingers.

Only a whisper of contact. Barely a breath. But it’s enough to short-circuit his entire sympathetic nervous system.

Nico doesn’t react—not visibly. Just stands there, still and quiet, a storm tucked into expensive black fabric. But then—just as he’s about to turn—he leans in.

Will feels the whisper before he hears it. A shift of air against the shell of his ear.

“Thanks, Will,” Nico says, low and close.

Will’s heart executes a perfect backflip and slams directly into his ribcage. Tachycardia. He’s officially in tachycardia. His pulse is probably hovering somewhere in the 120s, maybe higher. His palms are sweating—palmar hyperhidrosis. His mouth is dry—classic parasympathetic shutdown. And he’s 90% sure he’s about to go into cardiac arrest from one (1) whispered thank you.

“Anytime,” Will manages to say, and gods help him, he means it. He would throw himself in front of a speeding subway car for this boy. He would commit tax fraud. He would learn Latin.

Nico turns, sunglasses sliding back into place like a curtain closing on a scene Will isn’t ready to end. He walks out of the store with the same eerie grace he walked in with—silent, composed, unreadable.

And Will just stands there, gripping the edge of the counter like it’s the only thing keeping him from melting into a puddle of post-flirtation medical symptoms.

Kayla, emerging from the back room exactly thirty seconds too late to witness any of it, takes one look at him and says, “Did you faint standing up, or are you having a religious experience?”

Will just stares at the door, lips parted, heart still racing.

“I think,” he says faintly, “I need to lie down. Or perform an autopsy on myself.”

And then, in a voice barely audible over the sound of his dignity slipping through the floorboards:

“He whispered in my ear.”

Behind him, Kayla is like a judgmental bookstore goblin—muffin in one hand, highlighter in the other, and an expression that says I saw everything and will absolutely be annoying about it.

“You are so in love,” she sing-songs, hopping up onto the counter like the little chaos demon she is.

Will groans and slumps forward, burying his face in his hands. “Kayla. No.”

“You picked him that book,” she continues, utterly unbothered. “ That book, Will. You never recommend that book.”

“I put it on the staff picks table,” Will mutters into his hands.

“Yeah, and then you stared at it for three weeks waiting for someone with soulful eyes and unresolved trauma to waltz in and pick it up,” Kayla says, kicking her feet against the counter. “And now you’ve handed it over. Directly. With your actual hands. It’s practically a proposal.”

Will lifts his head just enough to glare at her. “I will lock you in the supply closet.”

She smirks. “You won’t. Because I know your secret.”

Will narrows his eyes. “Which one?”

“That you’re a big soft nerd,” she replies, poking his shoulder. “And that you want Nico di Angelo to hold your hand while you read tragic memoirs and make out in the break room.”

“That is so specific,” Will says, voice climbing toward despair.

Kayla grins. “You’re just mad because it’s true. I’m telling Malcolm.”

Will blanches. “You wouldn’t.”

“I absolutely would,” she says, already sliding off the counter with practiced menace. “He’s gonna start shelving romance recs under your name.”

“Kayla—”

“Too late!” she calls, muffin already in her mouth as she disappears down the aisle. “The prophecy is in motion!”

Will groans and collapses face-first onto the counter.

Because it is different. He’s recommended When Breath Becomes Air before, but never like that. Never because it felt like the only thing in the whole store that could say what he couldn’t. He’s always left it there—quiet, hopeful, waiting. Like a message in a bottle.

And now Nico’s walking away with it in his hands.

And Will Solace, certified emotional disaster, is so utterly, hopelessly screwed.

Notes:

ok so a heavier chapter, not much fun or chaos here, but i promise the next few chapters span a chaotic open mic night that *might* just get us closer to a solangelo first date, who knows? (its me , i know, because i've already written it)

Chapter 18: I Witness a Dirty Dancing Reenactment and Accidentally Sell My Soul to A Humiliation Ritual Disguised As An Open Mic Night

Notes:

this is one of those chapters when im reading it back half 'what possessed me to write this' and half 'oh gods, have i finally taken things to far', anyways hope you enjoy—for a truly immersive experience i suggest listening to justin timberlake's sexy back while you read :)

It starts with Lou Ellen slamming a crumpled flyer down on their sticky apartment kitchen table like she’s just uncovered the Dead Sea Scrolls or a prophecy foretelling chaos.

“Open mic night,” she announces, eyes gleaming with the same manic energy she gets whenever she talks about immersive theatre or how to stage a convincing fake haunting. She’s in her rehearsal clothes—combat boots, star-patterned tights, and a sweatshirt that says GAY DRAMA IS STILL DRAMA in peeling letters.

Will doesn’t even look up from his anatomy textbook. “No, we’re not going.”

“Yes, we are,” Cecil says from the fridge, one hand wrist-deep in a jar of suspicious salsa while the other crams chips into his mouth. He’s dressed like an ‘80s club kid had a fashion emergency ’—fishnet sleeves, glitter eyeliner, and cargo shorts. “Lou Ellen signed us up.”

“You signed us up?” Will echoes, horrified, like they’ve just told him his organs will be featured in a live dissection.

Lou Ellen shrugs, unbothered, peeling an orange with the concentration of a bomb tech. “Technically, I signed myself up. You’re coming for moral support.”

Will slaps his highlighter down like it’s responsible for the downfall of civilization. “I have an anatomy midterm.”

Cecil grins, licking chip dust from his fingers. “You can study the anatomy of bad decisions. Think of it as extra credit.”

Which is how Will ends up wedged into a rickety stool at a sticky table in the back of the campus bar, where the lighting is moody in a way that says this establishment has seen crimes and the speakers are hanging on by wires and good intentions.

The stage is less a stage and more a raised platform made of questionably stained plywood. There’s duct tape over the microphone cord. The bar smells like spilled tequila, cheap beer, and recklessness. Someone behind the bar is serving drinks in mismatched mugs, and a neon sign over the liquor shelf flickers like it’s haunted.

Someone in fairy wings and a ski mask is halfway through a breathy acoustic rendition of “ Smells Like Teen Spirit ,” strumming with the solemn intensity of a bard mourning a fallen king.

“This is cursed,” Will whispers.

“This is art,” Lou Ellen counters, scribbling furiously in a spiral notebook that may or may not be a performance analysis journal. Will suspects she’s ranking people based on cult-leader energy and projected stage aura.

Across from him, Cecil is two drinks in—one of which is violently blue, the other suspiciously smoking. He slurps from both like a connoisseur and narrows his eyes toward the stage.

“I’m giving this guy a seven,” Cecil says, nodding at ski-mask-fairy, “for commitment. Loses points for breath control.”

Will buries his face in his hands. “I can’t believe I’m here.”

“You love it here,” Lou Ellen says serenely, as if they haven’t just watched a guy in chainmail try to recite slam poetry about the Peloponnesian War. “And you’ll love it even more when you see who else showed up.”

Will groans. “No.”

She grins. “Yes.”

Because of course— of course —open mic night at the campus bar isn’t just theatre kids, art majors, and feral undergrads testing their indie band breakup songs.

No, not in their lives. Not anymore.

And when Will finally looks up?

The Seven have entered the bar.

Because fate is a drama kid. And it’s giddy.

Which is when Will hears that voice. Low, smooth, effortlessly unimpressed.

“I can’t believe you dragged me to this.”

Will looks up—because of course he does—and there he is.

Nico di Angelo, standing just inside the bar’s dim lighting like he’s materialized out of shadow, as if the night itself needed someone moodier to represent it. He’s dressed in head-to-toe black (as usual), layers of dark wool and expensive-looking leather draped over his frame like he’s just emerged from brooding in a cathedral or emotionally haunting a Victorian greenhouse.

His sunglasses—yes, even indoors, even at night—are perched on top of his head, holding back his rumpled curls in a way that makes Will’s heart do something medically concerning.

He looks completely out of place in this glitter-stained, beanbag-chaotic student bar. Like someone dropped a tragic marble sculpture into a frat party and no one’s had the nerve to ask it to leave.

And somehow, impossibly, he’s looking right at Will.

There’s the tiniest lift at the corner of Nico’s mouth—barely there, but there —and Will forgets how to swallow.

Piper and Jason are next to him, already engaged in what looks like a complicated handshake–elbow–finger-gun–forehead-tap sequence that Jason is visibly failing to keep up with. Piper’s cackling, Jason’s trying to look cool, and Nico stands between them like a beautiful funeral guest who’s resigned himself to the chaos.

But he doesn’t look as annoyed as he sounds.

In fact, Will would bet actual money that he doesn’t have that Nico knew exactly where they were going tonight. That the dramatic eye-roll was more performance than protest. That maybe—just maybe—Nico had known Will would be here, and had come anyway.

Will immediately panics and pretends to be deeply fascinated by his now room-temperature chamomile tea. He stares into the cup like it’s going to offer him emotional stability or a medical license.

“I hate it here,” he mutters under his breath.

“You love it here,” Cecil says gleefully, swirling his radioactive drink like a prophecy.

Lou Ellen has already clocked the situation and is scribbling something into her notebook with the intensity of a person chronicling a live romantic comedy. She mouths oh my gods at Will, then draws an anatomically correct heart and stabs it with a quill.

Will’s palms are sweaty. His pulse is elevated. His internal organs are trying to crawl out through his ribcage.

It’s not the worst reaction he’s had to Nico showing up somewhere.

But it’s close.

Jason drops into the seat next to Lou Ellen with the uncoordinated grace of a man who forgets he's built like a linebacker. The chair shrieks in protest. Will’s tea sloshes. His entire body seems to land an inch too far to the left.

“Did you guys see that guy with the ukulele?” Jason asks, breathless. “He played four songs.”

Piper, standing behind him with the cool composure of someone born on a runway and raised in an anarchist bookstore, snorts. “You only liked him because he winked at you.”

Jason blinks, visibly calculating. “He did?”

Piper rolls her eyes and turns to Will and Cecil, who are slouched on either side of a table sticky with spilled cider and mystery glitter.

“Can we sit here,” she asks, “or is this a private pity party?”

“It’s always a pity party,” Cecil deadpans. “But sure. Misery loves chaotic company.”

Which is how Will ends up pressed between Nico di Angelo and Lou Ellen—two forces of nature who, while diametrically opposite in energy, both have the ability to completely hijack his central nervous system.

Lou is still scribbling feverishly in her notebook, muttering phrases like liminal spaces and absurdist metatheatre and textual hauntology like she's summoning a dissertation demon.

Nico… just exists. Quiet and all-black, crossed arms, unreadable face. One knee pressed lightly against Will’s under the table. Just enough to feel like static. Just enough to make Will’s hypothalamus launch into a frenzied feedback loop.

Onstage, someone is delivering a spoken-word poem that might be about trains. Or trauma. Or maybe both. There’s a lot of yelling about steel and departure.

Will tries to focus on the poem. On the blinking fairy lights above the stage. On the crumbs on the table. On anything other than the fact that Nico’s knee is brushing his.

He is not succeeding.

“Next up,” the emcee says, adjusting their mic and visibly regretting every life choice, “we have… Lou Ellen.”

Lou Ellen flashes a manic smile and downs the last of her drink like it’s a shot of liquid courage, then sweeps onto the stage in a flurry of scarves and righteous theatre kid wrath.

She announces, “This is an excerpt from my immersive dramatic reimagining of the Furies, if they ran a dive bar and refused to let the patriarchy in.”

Will’s jaw drops. “What.”

Cecil just leans back, arms crossed, smug. “Buckle up.”

The lights dim. A red bulb flickers. Somewhere, someone plays a single discordant piano note. Lou Ellen howls. The audience is silent, spellbound. Or possibly afraid.

Halfway through the monologue, she hurls a chair offstage and screams, “ YOU DON’T GET TO ATONE WITH CRAFT BEER, ALEXANDER .”

Will glances around. No one seems too traumatised yet, but there is still time. 

Cecil is clapping in time. Jason looks emotionally devastated. Piper fans herself with a drink menu.

Leo arrives exactly then, sliding into an open seat with a to-go cup of something that smells like an actual science experiment and no context.

“Did I miss the rage monologue?” he asks brightly. “I’m here for the chaos factor.”

“You’re just in time,” Piper grins. 

“What are you performing?” Leo asks Nico, poking his shoulder.

“I’m not,” Nico says flatly, not even bothering to turn his head.

Leo’s grin spreads like a controlled fire. “You will.”

Will thunks his head lightly against the table and groans. “We’re never getting out of here alive.”

“I hope not,” Cecil says, reverent. “This is the most fun I’ve had all semester.”

Will lifts his head just long enough to look at Nico, who’s sitting stiff-backed beside him, gaze locked on Lou Ellen’s performance like it’s a puzzle he can’t stop trying to solve.

Then Nico glances at Will, slow and deliberate. Their knees are still touching.

He raises one brow. Barely. But it sends Will’s pulse into overdrive anyway.

Will is certain of three things:

1. Tonight is completely unhinged. 
2. His friends are charming, chaotic disasters.
3. He is already in love with a boy who smells like smoke and disappears like it—and that boy is perilously close to figuring it out.

And the worst part?

It’s kind of the best night of his life.

The table is already teetering on the edge of madness when the rest of the Seven return from the bar in a slow-moving wave of laughter, condensation-slick glasses, and entirely too much energy for a weeknight.

Hazel appears first, balancing two drinks in one hand and looking far too elegant for someone who just elbowed her way through a crowd of drunk theatre majors. She slides a drink in front of Nico with a smirk and murmurs something too low for Will to hear—something that makes Nico’s ears go faintly pink.

Behind her, Annabeth arrives with a tray stacked so precariously it defies physics, gives Jason a look that could level empires, and mutters, “Next time, you’re carrying.”

Percy is trailing just behind, holding what might be five different fruity drinks in both hands like a very chaotic waiter. “Okay, who ordered the ‘lava hurricane ’? Because it’s leaking and possibly sentient.”

Leo pounces on his drink without hesitation, nudging Cecil in the ribs as he slides into the seat beside him. “It’s finally time,” he whispers dramatically.

Cecil leans in like they’re conspiring to rob a museum, and shoots a suspicious look in Will and Nico’s direction. “You mean—”

Leo nods. “Operation: Undead Flirt Watch.”

Cecil cackles.

Will narrows his eyes. “I’m right here.”

“We know,” they say in unison.

Piper slips into the chair next to Annabeth, all long limbs and dry wit. She gives Nico and Will a once-over and lifts a perfectly sculpted brow. “Hmm,” she says, sipping her drink. “I leave for five minutes and the tension triples.”

Will sinks lower in his seat. Nico reaches for his drink like it’s the only solid thing left in the world.

Jason, already sipping something suspiciously green, glances between Nico and Will with a grin that says he’s watching the opening scene of a rom-com.

“So… are you two…?” he asks, trailing off with a raised eyebrow.

“Nope,” Will blurts.

“Definitely not,” Nico says at the exact same time, voice flat.

The overlap is immediate. Too quick. Too loud.

Cecil lifts his drink with a smirk. “Smoooooth.”

Annabeth hums, exchanging that look with Hazel—the one that says, we know exactly what’s going on, and we are absolutely going to talk about it late r.

“Seriously,” Leo says, poking Will’s arm, “was that blushing? Is your pre-med heart rate elevated right now?”

Will mutters something about vasodilation and core temperature shifts that no one listens to.

And somewhere between the clinking of glasses, Cecil’s whispered theories, and Piper declaring she’s going to read everyone’s romantic aura, Will catches Nico’s eye.

For a second, the noise fades.

Nico holds his gaze, steady and unreadable.

Then—just barely—he smiles.

And Will? Will forgets what embarrassment even is.

Will has barely recovered from watching Lou Ellen channel the Furies with such conviction that one guy actually fled the room, when the next name is called.

“Next up… Percy Jackson and Jason Grace?”

Will blinks.

Cecil leans forward so fast he nearly knocks over his drink, eyes locked on the stage like he’s about to witness a minor deity ascend. “No,” Will mutters, already bracing.

“No, they wouldn’t.”

“They would,” Lou Ellen breathes, hands clasped in front of her like she’s watching two Greek statues come to life to perform interpretive dance.

And sure enough, Percy and Jason are already clambering onto the low platform stage—Jason doing it in one overconfident leap that ends with him smacking his shin against the mic stand and nearly taking it out, while Percy manages to trip over the speaker wire, recover with a spin, and slap Jason’s shoulder like they planned it.

The mic lets out a squeal of protest. Jason fumbles it upright, nearly drops it again, and Percy just leans in like this is all part of the show.

“Hey, guys,” Percy says, his grin bright enough to qualify as a lighting effect. “So, uh, we didn’t plan anything.”

“Which is why this is going to be awesome,” Jason adds, already finger-gunning at a table of bewildered freshmen.

Somewhere behind them, Piper visibly slouches in her chair and drags a hand down her face. Annabeth is whispering something to Leo—based on her intensity and Leo’s manic nodding, it’s either an escape route or a tactical takedown plan.

Will glances sidelong at Nico.
He’s leaned back in his chair like the chaos around them is background noise—arms folded, boot hooked casually around the chair leg, expression unreadable. But Will’s learned to read him by now. The slight twitch at the corner of Nico’s mouth, the subtle gleam in his dark eyes—it’s there. That traitorous spark of amusement.

Will swallows.

Because that’s all it takes. One almost-smile. One look that lasts half a second too long. And suddenly Will’s heart is doing somersaults, his stomach’s filing an official complaint, and he’s acutely aware of every square inch of air between them.

Which isn’t much.

The table is small. Nico’s boot is close enough to touch. His shoulder brushes Will’s every time someone shifts too hard and jostles the chairs. Will can smell his cologne—something dark and clean, like cold night air over old paper and smoke—and it’s not fair.

He tears his eyes away before he does something stupid like sigh or melt or propose marriage.

Nico glances at him from the corner of his eye. Just a flicker. Like he knows exactly what Will’s thinking. Like he’s amused by it. Like he likes being the source of Will’s slow, very bisexual unraveling.

And Will?

Will is so utterly, helplessly doomed he’s not even sure he wants to be saved.

Then the music starts.

It’s Justin Timberlake’s “ SexyBack .”

The opening beat pulses through the bar like a warning bell from the gods. The entire room hesitates. The bartender audibly snorts.

Someone near the back murmurs, “No way,” like they’ve just spotted a cryptid, which—fair.

Jason, bless him, immediately commits. He spins in place, does a double finger-gun, and starts moving like a camp counselor possessed by the spirit of a disco ball. His hips shimmy with such reckless abandon that Lou Ellen physically recoils. “That man is going to sprain something,” she mutters, half in fear, half in admiration.

Percy, not to be outdone, starts strutting. Back and forth across the stage like he’s on a personal catwalk made entirely of bad decisions and unchecked overconfidence. He spins, throws finger hearts into the crowd, then—Gods help everyone—reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a pair of aviators. With slow, dramatic flair, he slides them onto his face.

Then he moonwalks.

“Oh my gods,” Will whispers, frozen halfway between horror and religious awe.

“They’re serious,” Cecil says, like he’s narrating the discovery of fire.

“They’re always serious,” Lou Ellen agrees, scribbling in her notebook like she’s documenting the final stages of human civilization.

The chorus hits. Loud. Unavoidable.

“ I’m bringin’ sexy back—YEAH! ”

Jason yells the “ YEAH !” like it’s a battle cry and pelvic thrusts so violently a girl in the front row drops her drink.

Percy follows it with a spin and a slap on his own ass. “ Them other boys don’t know how to act—YEAH !”

“Please,” Will begs the ceiling. “Please smite me.”

Jason points at Percy like they’ve rehearsed this for weeks. “ Take it to the chorus!”

Percy whips off the aviators, points into the crowd, and belts: “ Come here, girl! ”

Hazel audibly gasps. Annabeth looks like she’s trying to calculate an exit strategy involving duct tape and a fire alarm.

Leo wheezes so hard he almost falls out of his chair.

“I’m going to jail,” Annabeth mutters into her drink. “I don’t know what for, but this feels illegal.”

Then the chorus hits full force. Percy grabs the mic, puts one hand dramatically over his heart, and sings like he’s in a breakup scene in a country music video: “Dirty babe… you see these shackles, baby, I’m your slave—”

Jason joins in:
“I’ll let you whip me if I misbehave—”

Will spits tea everywhere.

“Nope!” he gasps. “Nope, I’m out—”

But Nico grabs his sleeve before he can flee.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he murmurs.

It’s soft, almost a joke—but there’s an edge beneath it. A weight that settles into Will’s chest like a command. Nico’s voice is low and steady, velvet over steel, with laughter coiled behind every syllable like smoke rising from something smoldering.

Will freezes.

He could go. He should go. His entire body is telling him to move , to run, to flee this cursed bar and the mortifying ordeal of being seen with the people desecrating the sanctity that is the Future Sex/Love Sounds album—but Nico’s fingers are still brushing the fabric of his sleeve. Light enough to be casual. Firm enough to be possessive.

And gods help Will—he stays.

He sits back down, trying not to think about how his pulse is visibly throbbing in his neck, how his stomach swoops like he’s on the edge of a cliff. He can feel heat prickling along his spine, arousal curling in his gut—not crude, not frantic, just there , humming low and steady like the bass of the terrible speaker system still playing Justin Timberlake.

Because Nico is watching him.

Not the stage. Not the chaos. Him.

And Will—flushed and vibrating with the kind of hormonal panic that makes medical textbooks read like erotica—watches back.

Because he can’t not.

Then they both stare, frozen, as Percy spins again and Jason jumps from the stage into a half-split that should not be physically possible for someone built like a linebacker.

“Is this the end of the world?” Will asks weakly.

“ Go 'head, be gone with it!” Jason yells, winking so hard it might be a medical event.

“ Go 'head, be gone with it! ” Percy echoes, and now they’re doing synchronized finger snaps, stomping around like they’ve just invented sexy musical theater.

Someone in the audience screams. It might be out of fear.

“I’m calling campus security,” Annabeth says, deadpan, but doesn’t move. 

Piper sips her drink and mutters, “Let the boys crash and burn.”

“Let them cook,” Leo says, already filming. “This is history.”

Jason leaps off the tiny stage and lands in a wide stance, hands on his hips, chest heaving like he just won the Olympic gold in Chaos.

Percy finishes by tearing off his flannel and throwing it at Leo, who catches it one-handed and yells, “Encore!”

Nico leans toward Will. Quiet. Dangerously calm. “If they start stripping, I’m leaving.”

Will nods, clutching his drink. “I’ll go with you.”

And then Jason steps forward, arms wide like he’s summoning a lost lover from across a misty moor.

“ Perce! ” he bellows—voice thunderous, overdramatic, undeniably theatrical.

Percy, never one to be outdone, drops into a crouch like he’s in a Marvel movie mid-fight sequence. There’s a beat of silence, a single collective inhale from the crowd—and then he bolts.

“No,” Will says, panic blooming in his chest like wildfire. As if the sheer force of his denial might stop time. Or gravity. Or Percy Jackson.

“ Yes ,” Nico says quietly beside him, and Will genuinely can’t tell if it’s encouragement or prophecy or a dark invocation that will echo through eternity.

Percy launches .

It’s not so much a jump as it is a full-blown aerial assault. His sneakers leave the ground like they’ve been summoned by divine chaos. His hair is windblown despite the complete lack of breeze. Somewhere, probably, a bald eagle screeches in patriotic approval.

Jason catches him with the practiced ease of a demigod who has absolutely never practiced this before but is too stubborn to fail now. He staggers back a step— almost tips into the mic stand—but corrects his balance with a triumphant grunt and locks his arms around Percy’s waist like he’s cradling a golden retriever mid-air.

Percy’s legs swing out behind him in a glorious arc, a flawless execution of the infamous Dirty Dancing lift, his arms raised high like he’s claiming the heavens. “ Nailed it! ” he yells, because of course he does.

Jason grins so wide it threatens to split his face. He looks like a proud dad at the school talent show. A proud dad who accidentally bench-pressed his spouse in front of the entire campus.

Jason and Percy’s performance ends with a standing ovation—Piper wolf-whistles loud enough to scare someone in the back row, Annabeth mutters something about the slow downfall of Western civilization , and Leo is already hunched over his phone at the table, fingers flying as he slices the footage into what will definitely be a cursed TikTok edit.

The bar explodes . Someone screams like they’ve seen God. Someone else tosses confetti that definitely wasn’t part of the décor. Leo climbs onto a table and starts chanting “ Kiss! Kiss! Kiss !” at the top of his lungs.

Annabeth facepalms with the force of a woman who has seen this too many times. “We said no lifts this semester,” she mutters to no one in particular.

“I think I saw this in a vision,” Hazel whispers, clutching her drink.

Cecil is vibrating. “They’re either soulmates or war criminals.”

Lou Ellen clutches her chest like she’s witnessing opera. “We are not worthy.”

Will can’t breathe. “I think I’m having a cardiac event.” He leans his head back against the wall, dazed. “I’m going to dream about this and not in the way I want.”

“I’m going to pretend this never happened,” Nico mutters.

But when Will glances at him, Nico’s smirking.

Not the cold, distant smirk of someone unimpressed, the one he wears like armor when the world tries to look too closely. No—this one is softer. Warmer. The kind that unfolds slow and subtle at the corners of his mouth, like it wasn’t meant for anyone else to see.

It’s a secret smile.

The kind that says: I’m having fun. And maybe—just maybe—I’m glad you’re here to see it with me.

And gods, Will feels it like a pulse beneath his skin—hope blooming in his chest so fast it’s almost dizzying.

“Are they… dating?” Cecil asks, stunned.

“I think we’re witnessing the slowest burn in history,” Lou Ellen murmurs, misty-eyed.

“I thought Annabeth and Percy were monogamous?” Will asks, voice dazed, like he’s questioning the fabric of reality.

“Modern relationships are complicated,” Leo says, zooming in on his phone camera. “And hot.”

Jason lowers Percy to the floor like a victorious gladiator dismounting a chariot. They high-five so loudly it echoes. Percy throws his arms in the air.

“We’re bringing Sexy back!” he yells.

The bar roars again.

And then—just to add insult to whatever this injury is—Nico di Angelo claps. Once. Slowly.

Will turns toward him, horrified and starstruck. “Do they… always do this?”

Nico raises an eyebrow. “No,” he says dryly. “Sometimes there’s glitter.”

Will files that horrifying thought away for later.

The lights flicker slightly above them—cheap bulbs trying their best in the too-hot, too-crowded campus bar. The scent of sticky cider, old varnish, and something aggressively citrusy from the bathroom air freshener hangs thick in the air.

Will, who’s been nursing a sweating glass of water now his tea is finished because he has a three-hour anatomy lab tomorrow and also would prefer not to vomit mid-dissection, is mid-sip when Leo swivels toward him with the kind of gleam in his eye that usually precedes either genius or jail time.

“Wait,” Leo says, slapping the table and nearly knocking over a glass of whatever radioactive-looking cocktail Piper’s drinking. “Aren’t you from Texas?”

Will chokes. “What?”

Leo points a finger in triumphant accusation. “I knew it. I can smell a Texan.”

“That’s not a thing,” Will croaks, dabbing at his shirt with a napkin. “You can’t smell—”

“Tell them,” Lou Ellen says, now gesturing to the rest of the group like she’s making a courtroom declaration. “Tell them you grew up in Austin.”

Annabeth perks up instantly, nearly dropping her drink. “Wait, seriously? You’ve been holding out on us? You’ve got Lone Star secrets?”

Percy narrows his eyes. “Do you own cowboy boots? A hat?”

Will sighs and rubs his face, already regretting ever being born. “I did. When I was ten. And no, I didn’t sing in rodeos or whatever you’re about to say next.”

Jason leans forward across the table, looking both intrigued and deeply sincere. “Did you ride horses?”

“Did you wrangle cattle?” Piper jumps in, chin in her hand, grinning like she’s watching a particularly spicy rom-com. “Do you know how to lasso?”

Nico, caught mid-sip of his drink, coughs quietly—once, sharply—and sets his glass down with more force than necessary. He doesn’t look at Will. Instead, he stares very intently at a breadstick, jaw tight, expression carefully blank. Too blank.

“I’m going to leave,” Will announces, starting to push his chair back.

“Stay,” Nico says quietly—and for once, there’s laughter threaded through his voice, warm and unguarded.

Will looks up, and there it is again: that crooked half-smile. Nico’s elbow rests lazily on the table, dark hair falling into his eyes, and he’s watching Will with a kind of quiet fondness, like he’s memorizing the moment without meaning to. It’s disarming. Intimate. Like the air between them has shifted, softer now, charged in a different way.

Will’s pulse stutters. He’s not sure if it’s the smile or the way Nico’s fingers are slowly tracing the rim of his glass.

There’s a beat of silence too loaded to be casual.

Great. Now he’s flustered and being accused of yeehaw crimes.

“You’re from Texas ,” Leo repeats, still riding the wave of discovery. “Which means you can do country songs.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Will says, his voice rising an octave. “That’s not a thing!”

But Leo is already pulling out his phone like he’s summoning spirits. “Okay, pick one: Country Girl (Shake It For Me) or Dicked Down in Dallas ?”

Will gapes at him. “Leo.”

“Oh, Dicked Down in Dallas ,” Lou Ellen gasps, snapping her fingers like she’s solving a cold case. “But slow it down. Make it tragic. Make it art.”

Percy lets out a strangled noise, half-choking on his drink. “Dude. Please.”

“I’ll play guitar,” Leo offers, now fully invested. “Jason can do background vocals. He’s got that whole sad cowboy thing going on.”

Jason, currently trying to fix his disheveled hair in a mirror behind the bar, gives a thumbs-up without even looking.

“I don’t—” Will starts, but Piper cuts him off, already grinning.

“It’s happening,” she says. “You have no control anymore.”

“I never had control,” Will mutters, which is true on so many levels he can’t even count.

“You gonna sing or not, cowboy?” Nico teases, elbowing him in the ribs with a smirk.

Will blinks.

Not because of the elbow—that was barely a nudge—but because of the tone .

Nico said cowboy . Like a joke. Like he was teasing . Like he knew exactly what he was doing.

It sends Will’s brain directly into the sun.

He turns to look at Nico, heart thudding loud enough to qualify as a cardiac event. There’s a hint of mischief in Nico’s smirk, just enough curve to his mouth to be dangerous . His elbow still lingers too close, his whole body angled toward Will like gravity’s a suggestion and Will’s the stronger pull.

Will is very aware of the heat in his face. The way his pulse stutters. The sudden, vivid image of Nico saying cowboy in an entirely different tone. One that’s low and close and breathless. One that implies riding of the distinctly not horseback variety .

But just as the warmth builds—just as the spark in Nico’s eyes threatens to undo him completely—memory crashes in like a tide he never sees coming.

It always does. No matter how hard he tries to outrun it, his past finds the cracks in his chest and pours itself in like smoke. Because he can flirt, sure—can banter and blush and imagine Nico’s hands on his hips—but underneath all that is a boy who spent years trying to unlearn the drawl in his voice and the way his heart tripped whenever he heard his mother’s name on a radio.

And then it hits him—like a heatwave in the back of his throat. The murky twang of summer nights, the smell of hay and sweat and stage lights. Barbecue smoke curling under the stars. His mom’s voice over a mic. The sound of boots on floorboards. He had been that kid. The one in boots too big for his feet, hiding in the wings of whatever venue Naomi Solace was playing that week.

He’d spent years trying to erase it. But the ghost of it still lingers. The twang, the swagger, the heat.

Now he’s staring down a table of people—including Nico di Angelo, who is watching him with such quiet, curious interest that Will’s brain short-circuits.

And the truth is—he wouldn’t even be considering it if Nico weren’t looking at him like that. Like he’s worth listening to. Like he’s something surprising and golden and just a little bit wild. Will can feel the weight of Nico’s gaze on him, steady and amused, and all he wants—more than dignity, more than revenge for the childhood trauma of rodeo banjos—is to make Nico smile like that again. The way he had back at the bookstore. Quiet. Real. Just for him.

He sighs. “I’ll think about it.”

The cheer Lou Ellen lets out nearly knocks over a candle. Someone claps. Someone definitely yells “ Yeehaw !” from the next table over.

And Leo, grinning like he just won the lottery, slides the mic across the table to Will. “I knew you were my favorite.”

Will glares at the mic.

And the mic glares back. 

And gods help him—he might just do it.

Chapter 19: Will Solace’s Guide to Performing A Cursed Country Mash-Up While Horny, Drunk, and in Love

Notes:

i replied to some comments, ao3 thought i was a bot again, i will try again later, but know i love and appreciate you all dearly!

After Will reluctantly agrees to consider singing with Leo (and Lou Ellen’s already halfway through crafting elaborate stage personas in her Notes app—Will’s includes “ haunted Texas prince of twang ” and Leo’s just says “ gremlin with a guitar ”), the night only derails further.

The stage lights flicker overhead like they’re powered by ghosts. The air smells like cheap beer and vaguely singed popcorn. The walls of the campus bar are plastered in overlapping flyers—drag nights, debate club meetups, something called Lizard Fest—and Will can feel the bassline of a Taylor Swift remix pulsing through the floorboards from the other room.

Then a guy in a beanie shuffles onstage. No intro, no vibe check—just sits on the edge of the stool with a banjo that’s missing a string and starts plucking out something that sounds like a lullaby for the already damned.

It’s… haunting. In a way that feels entirely unintentional.

The lyrics begin as a soft meditation on “ late-stage capitalism ” and “ existential dread ” and somehow veer into a passionate lament for a raccoon named Gary.

“Vibes,” Piper says, sipping from what is definitely a coffee mug and definitely not filled with coffee. Her pinky’s extended like she’s judging a wine tasting in a haunted vineyard. “Strong woodsy despair energy.”

“This is giving me flashbacks,” Percy says, eyes narrowed at the stage like he’s trying to place a suspect in a police lineup.

“To what?” Will asks warily.

Percy shrugs, still squinting. “That time with the raccoons in Prague.”

Jason, mid-sip of something orange and suspiciously glowing, snorts so hard he nearly aspirates. “You mean the diplomatic incident ?”

Leo glances up from his phone, where he’s been editing TikToks of Jason and Percy’s performance like a man possessed. “Oh, we’re telling that story now?”

“I’m not telling it,” Percy says. “I’m just saying. Vibes.”

Will looks from face to face, fully alarmed. “What happened in Prague?”

“Nothing,” Annabeth says without looking up, her annotated playbill lit by her phone flashlight. “It was handled.”

Handled. Sure.

The banjo guy ends his set by letting out a long, guttural scream. No build-up. Just full-throated anguish. It echoes around the bar like a ghost being evicted mid-therapy session. Everyone freezes.

And then— slow clap .

Nico di Angelo, seated with the ease of someone who has emotionally absconded from every school event since birth, raises one hand and claps exactly three times. The sound is eerily graceful. Reverent. Possibly sarcastic.

“You’d be surprised how often that works,” Nico murmurs when Will shoots him a stunned glance.

Will writes Nico di Angelo: finds haunted screams relatable?? in his mental file titled “ Things That Make Me Want to Kiss Him and/or Ask if He’s Okay .”

Next, a girl with a harp appears—flower crown, glitter under her eyes, flowing layers of linen like a sentient poetry thesis. She plucks a delicate intro, celestial and hypnotic.

Then she opens her mouth and starts singing about lizard people in the government, crop circles, and the Great Pigeon Uprising of 2007.

Lou Ellen leans in, whispering, “Is this Cecil’s soulmate?”

“Shut up ,” Cecil hisses, but his eyes are gleaming like twin conspiracy candles. 

Lou Ellen is taking notes. Possibly emotionally. Possibly for summoning purposes.

Hazel lets out a sigh so wistful it could soundtrack a French art film. “This reminds me of that time we got stuck in Area 51.”

Will nearly drops his drink. “You… what ?”

Frank just groans. “You don’t want to know.”

“No, I do ,” Will insists.

“Let’s focus on the harp,” Piper interjects quickly. “She’s really good at plucking.”

Percy snorts into his drink, which earns him an elbow from Annabeth, who doesn’t look up but definitely hits center mass.

Then there’s a slam poet who strides onstage barefoot and delivers a guttural, impassioned performance titled Ode to My Missing Left Sock. It’s not bad—if you ignore the part where he weeps openly and does a slow interpretive roll across the floor.

Jason looks genuinely moved. “That’s… relatable.”

Percy nods solemnly. “Left socks are always the first to go.”

“I think he’s hexing us,” Nico mutters, eyes narrowed like he’s calculating the spell matrix.

Lou Ellen squints. “That’s absolutely a hex.”

Will stares, wondering if it’s possible to be cursed by metaphor. “Is this normal?”

“Twice, maybe three times a year,” Piper says, still sipping.

“You want real curses?” Leo adds helpfully. “You should’ve seen the goat farmer in Santorini.”

Annabeth flips a page. “Which time?”

Leo tilts his head. “The second time. After he summoned the thing.”

Jason groans. “The thing. Man. That was wild.”

Will is spiraling. “What thing ?”

Frank sips his drink. “We’ve said too much already.”

Hazel just hums like this is all perfectly reasonable.

And then—because apparently the gods are real and have a sense of humor—a guy in a ripped tank top and dramatic eyeliner walks onstage juggling knives.

He drops one.

Nobody flinches.

“Good form,” Piper says, tipping her mug.

“Reminds me of Leo’s birthday party,” Jason adds with the breezy nostalgia of someone who has repressed most of the trauma.

Will opens his Notes app just to type Never go to Leo’s birthday.

And next from him, Nico is watching the stage, legs crossed, expression somewhere between boredom and admiration. When he catches Will looking, he doesn’t smirk this time.

He just raises a single brow.

Will’s heart does something completely unhinged in his chest.

And the night is still far from over.

“You have to do it,” Leo says, crouched on his rickety chair like a gremlin prophet. “The crowd is restless. They hunger for drama. They crave Texan ballads and cowboy angst.”

Will buries his face in his hands. “I hate all of you.”

Lou Ellen clasps her hands like she’s praying to the theatre gods. “Will, please. Do it for the art. Do it for the gays. Do it for tragic character arcs and emotional vulnerability.”

“I haven’t even picked a song.”

“I have ,” Cecil announces, pulling out his phone. “I made a playlist called ‘Will Solace Cowboy Elegy Vibes ’—don’t ask how long it is.”

“You’ve never even heard me sing!”

“And yet,” Lou Ellen whispers, eyes wide with conviction, “I believe .”

Leo grins. “Come on, Cowboy. It’s your destiny. Also, Nico is totally watching.”

Will goes very still and thanks the gods that Nico is involved in a conversation about tasteful mausoleum design with Annabeth and a very confused Percy. 

Cecil’s grin widens. “Yeah. We saw the smirk. He wants you to suffer beautifully. ”

Lou Ellen clutches Will’s arm. “Be the drama you were born to embody.”

And gods help him—he starts to stand.

“Well, I’m not doing this sober,” Will announces, gripping the edge of the table like it might anchor him to reality. His knuckles are white. His voice, however, is already teetering on the edge of regret.

The entire table turns toward him in eerie synchrony—like synchronized swimmers choreographed by Dionysus, eyes gleaming with shared delusion. Chairs creak. Glasses tilt. Lou Ellen grins like she’s about to open a forbidden tomb.

“Say less,” Leo declares, already halfway out of his seat. He windmills his arm in the direction of the bar with the flair of a man who once made direct eye contact with chaos and gave it a thumbs-up. The bartender, who clearly regrets every life choice that’s brought him to this moment, sighs and starts pouring something that should not shimmer in the dim bar light but very much does .

“This will end poorly,” Annabeth sighs, already pulling out her phone with the solemnity of a war correspondent live-tweeting a political scandal.

“To document it,” she clarifies when Percy raises a brow.

Lou Ellen leans across the table, eyes gleaming like she’s about to sell Will a haunted amulet and whisper something about consequences being optional. “What’s your poison, cowboy?”

“I—” Will starts, but he’s interrupted by fate itself.

A shot glass appears in front of him like an omen. No one saw where it came from. No one asked. But there it is, sweating slightly and glinting under the string lights like a dare.

“Tequila,” Cecil intones, materializing next to him like a vodka-soaked specter from beyond the veil. He gestures at the glass with reverence. “Don’t think. Just vibe.”

“Vibe?” Will echoes faintly, eyes darting between the shot and the rapidly derailing group. “We’re using vibe as a verb now?”

“You’ve met us,” Piper says, already tossing back her own shot with the calculated grace of someone committing to a bit. She slams the glass down and raises a single brow, daring the world to stop her.

“Do we even know what’s in this?” Jason asks warily, peering at his drink like it might contain answers—or spirits of the ghost variety.

“It’s glowing,” Leo announces with pride, cradling a second shot between his palms like he’s discovered liquid enlightenment. “That’s a good sign, right?”

“No,” Nico says flatly from Will’s other side, the word delivered with the kind of deadpan certainty that implies personal experience and collateral damage.

Leo hands him one anyway.

Nico doesn’t even blink.

He just raises the glass between two fingers, tilts it toward Will like a silent toast, and—gods help Will—drinks.

Will stares. That’s all he can do.

His stomach flips—messy, graceless, like a gymnast who didn’t stick the landing. The tequila sits untouched in front of him, forgotten, irrelevant. Because now Nico’s lips are parted slightly from the drink, and Will can’t stop watching the way his throat moves when he swallows. The slow tilt of his head, the delicate flex of muscle under pale skin.

It’s obscene, almost—how effortless it is. How Will’s brain completely abandons language in favor of hunger.

Nico sets the glass down, licking a drop from his bottom lip without thinking.

Will is going to die here. He’s certain of it. Death by neck, probably. Or lip. Or the casual ruin of Nico di Angelo’s collarbone.

He doesn’t move. He just sits there, staring, praying no one notices the way his pulse is trying to claw its way out of his throat.

And Then There Were Shots. Many, Many Shots.

The second shot tastes like victory and regret. The third is a dare. The fourth is a mistake they all collectively agree not to acknowledge.

Percy starts a chant in what may be Latin—or possibly just gibberish with confidence—and slams his fist on the table like he’s conjuring sea monsters. Jason joins in, banging a spoon against his glass to keep time. Annabeth rolls her eyes, muttering something about “mutually assured destruction,” but still downs her next shot like it’s a tactical maneuver.

Hazel is drawing constellations on Frank’s forearm with an eyeliner pencil while he solemnly nods like she’s inscribing a prophecy. Frank has somehow ended up wearing Cecil’s jacket. No one knows how.

Leo is arguing with the bartender about the flammability of coffee creamer. “It’s not for fire,” the bartender insists. “Then why does it have vibes ,” Leo counters, waving a lighter.

Cecil is mid-monologue about how the slam poet’s missing sock is “a n allegory for the queer diaspora ” while Lou Ellen adds haunting kazoo underscores, her eyes closed like she’s feeling the tragic weight of the gay sock experience.

And Will?

Will is spiraling in slow motion.

Because Nico di Angelo is still next to him. Not chaotic. Not loud. Just steady and lethal, like a slow-moving eclipse. He sips from his glass—something clear, precise, and unforgiving—like it’s no big deal, but his eyes are gleaming and his shoulders have finally uncoiled from that constant state of tension. There’s a flush blooming high on his cheekbones, soft and a little cruel. His foot brushes Will’s under the table, like an accident. It’s not.

He’s watching Will now. Not staring—watching. Like he sees something new and isn’t sure whether to touch it or let it burn.

Will feels his pulse jump like a rabbit in a thunderstorm.

And then Nico smiles.

Not a smirk. Not a ghost of amusement. A real one—small and slanted and so rare that Will feels his entire ribcage pitch forward, like his sternum is making room.

Oh no , he thinks. That’s it. That’s the smile. I’m ruined.

He reaches for his glass and finds Lou Ellen standing at his shoulder like a gremlin mid-ritual.

“I'm in love,” he mouths to her.

“You’ve been in love,” she whispers in his ear, deadpan. “Now you’re powerful.”

She slides him another shot like she’s arming him for war.

Will’s not powerful. He’s clinically compromised. His prefrontal cortex is going offline. His heart is knocking into his ribs like it’s trying to break out and do something extremely unwise.

Nico catches his look. Tilts his head. “What’s that face for?”

Will fumbles. “Nothing. Just—you seem… more relaxed than usual.”

Nico lifts an eyebrow, that same devastating eyebrow. “I’m not made of stone.”

Across the table, Leo actually chokes on his drink.

“ Debatable! ” he wheezes, pounding his chest like that’ll stop the coughing.

Jason and Percy are now arm wrestling while reciting the Greek alphabet. No one understands how. Annabeth has started color-coding a spreadsheet titled "Will's Inevitable Emotional Collapse." Piper has a bar back cornered in debate about the structural integrity of her cocktail-napkin Parthenon. Lou Ellen has two sets of sunglasses on and is assigning roles for Will’s stage number using a Dungeons & Dragons alignment chart.

Cecil is still gone. No one panics. He’s either stealing a disco ball or setting up a projector for dramatic lighting. He thrives in mystery.

Nico’s leg is still pressed lightly against his.

He hasn’t moved. He hasn’t looked away.

Will—who had absolutely not intended to get drunk tonight—leans back in his chair and exhales slowly, trying to reset his vestibular system with deep breaths and wishful thinking. He has a lab tomorrow. A morning lab. On hematologic disorders, no less. Blood. Cells. Microscopes. The kind of class where your hand can’t shake even a little or you ruin the slide and your GPA.

This had not been in the plan.

His plan had involved tea, flashcards, maybe falling asleep with his textbook again. Not shots of glowing liquor and the ambient chaos of what feels like a Dionysian bacchanalia disguised as campus open mic night.

And definitely not Nico di Angelo, tipsy and beautiful, sitting next to him like some moody oil painting come to life.

Will can tell Nico’s not drunk , not completely—his movements are still precise, his voice low and even—but there’s a looseness to him tonight. A slight curve to his spine as he leans back in his seat, a flushed pink at the high points of his cheekbones, just under the shadows of those unfair lashes. His gaze is less guarded. Still sharp, still unreadable, but like the lock’s been picked and the door’s cracked open an inch.

And all those rumors? That Nico never gets drunk, that his blood is probably 80% espresso and ancient grudges, that he once downed an entire bottle of whiskey without blinking just to win a dare and walked away without a wobble?

Will suspects they’re mostly true. But tonight?

Tonight there’s something almost human in him. Something tender. And if Will had any common sense left, he would not be noticing that. He wouldn’t be clocking every change in Nico’s physiology like it’s a diagnostic case study. He wouldn’t be watching the way Nico’s fingers curve around his glass or the way his lips part just slightly when he breathes.

But Nico turns toward him then, just a little more—hips angled, body language open in that subtle, practiced way that makes Will feel like he’s being granted an audience with something divine.

And then he smirks.

Slow. Lethal. A knife dipped in honey.

The kind of smirk that belongs in dark libraries and locked-door mysteries. The kind of smirk that makes Will’s brain short-circuit in four languages and seventeen biochemical systems.

I could ruin you , that smirk says.
And Will—Will, hopeless romantic, struggling pre med student, fool—is already undone.

He catalogs the symptoms because it’s all he knows how to do:

• Heart rate: elevated.
• Respiratory rate: compromised.
• Pupils: dilated (but that could be the lighting).
• Core temperature: rising. Probably a full degree.
• Judgment: impaired.
• Object permanence: only exists when Nico’s in the room.

Diagnosis: terminal attraction.
Prognosis: no recovery expected.

Nico takes another sip of his drink, eyes not leaving Will’s, and Will swears his frontal lobe detonates .

He’s not sure if it’s the alcohol or the proximity or just the fact that Nico seems to have momentarily let him in —but Will is buzzing. Not drunk exactly, not yet. Just lit from within like he’s been electrocuted by eye contact.

He tells himself he’s still in control.

Then Nico leans a little closer and says, “You’re flushed.”

Will’s whole soul malfunctions.

No. No, he is not in control.

Leo slaps the table like a man possessed by both Dionysus and caffeine. Empty shot glasses rattle, Piper’s half-built Parthenon made of cocktail napkins collapses, and Percy spills half his drink down his front.

“It’s time!” Leo declares, eyes wide, grin feral.

Will jolts so hard he nearly knocks over his own glass. “Time for what ?”

Leo, already standing, throws one arm toward the stage like he’s about to host an award show. “Your debut, Cowboy .”

Will immediately clutches his drink like it might shield him from public humiliation. “I said I’d consider it,” he protests, voice pitching higher as chaos swirls around him.

Jason and Percy rise in unnerving unison, looming like twin agents of mischief. Before Will can flee, they’re on him.

“We’ll carry you if we have to,” Jason promises, deadly serious as he grabs one arm.

Percy nods solemnly, taking the other. “We’ve done it before.”

Will opens his mouth to ask when— when had they ever carried him on stage?—but Jason is already tugging him to his feet, and Percy is humming what might be the SexyBack melody under his breath.

And then—just before Will is fully swept away—Nico stands.

He doesn’t rush. He just finishes the last of his gin and tonic, tips the glass with quiet elegance, and sets it down like he’s placing a piece on a chessboard. The clink of it landing on the table is absurdly loud over the rising background chatter.

Then he looks at Will.

Not with amusement. Not with mockery.

But with something quieter. Steadier. Something that settles deep in Will’s chest and thrums like a tuning fork. Nico’s gaze pins him in place—cool and dark and earnest .

“You’ll do fine,” Nico says.

The words aren’t flirty. They’re not teasing.

They’re sure .

And gods help him—Will forgets how to breathe.

There’s something about the way Nico says it, low and certain, like he already knows what Will sounds like under stage lights. Like he wants to hear it. Like he’s not just encouraging him—he’s asking for it.

And that— that —is enough.

Will lets himself be pulled from the table, staggering slightly as Jason and Percy hoist him between them like two cheerful golden retrievers guiding a very anxious, very flustered deer.

Somewhere behind him, Lou Ellen’s cheering, Leo’s howling victory, and Annabeth is already recording.

But none of it matters.

Because Nico is still watching. And his expression hasn’t changed.

And suddenly, that’s reason enough.

Will, drunk and love-struck, thinks: I’m going to die.

And it might just be worth it.

Will stares at the microphone in his hand like it’s a venomous snake about to strike. He has no idea how he got here. One second, he was sitting at the table, very responsibly nursing his fourth—maybe fifth?—vodka and soda, and the next, he was up on stage, next to Leo, under the worst string lights he’s ever seen.

“You ready, cowboy?” Leo grins, already wearing a cowboy hat that absolutely did not exist five minutes ago.

Will squints at him. “Where… where did you get that?”

“Don’t ask questions,” Leo says. “Embrace the yeehaw.”

And Will—drunk, in love, slightly aroused and apparently self-destructive—does exactly that.

Leo slams his palm down on his phone like he’s detonating a glitter bomb. The opening twang of Country Girl (Shake It For Me) explodes through the campus bar speakers, so loud it rattles the glasses on the counter. A cheer erupts from the crowd—half confusion, half unhinged enthusiasm.

Jason, already several drinks in, lets out a war cry that sounds like a battle horn. From somewhere near the bar, Percy howls like he’s communing with a full moon. Piper snorts into her drink, Hazel gasps in delighted horror, and Annabeth mutters, “We should’ve stopped them when we had the chance,” but makes no move to actually intervene.

Will sways where he stands under the spotlight. The stage feels both too small and impossibly huge. His brain, fogged with tequila and dread, is screaming abort mission , but his boots are rooted to the floor, traitorous and still.

And then Leo starts singing.

Correction: Leo starts belting . With the commitment of a man who has never once experienced shame in his life.

“ Gonna watch you make me fall in love! ” he yells, tossing an imaginary lasso over the crowd. The bar loses it .

He throws an arm around Will like they’re about to storm the gates of musical hell together. “Come on, Solace,” Leo grins, “show me your Texas!”

And gods help him—Will joins in.

Something inside him snaps. Or maybe releases .

His southern accent, normally faint and long buried beneath layers of self-control, therapy, and academic burnout, rips its way out like a feral cat finally let loose from its cage. It's wild. It's unapologetic. It’s twangy.

“ Shake it for the young bucks sittin’ in the honky-tonks! ” Will hollers, just slurred enough that Lou Ellen screams with laughter from the front row.

Cecil bangs the table like he’s in a courtroom drama. “ Your honor, this man is possessed! ”

Jason is pounding the floor like it owes him money. Percy’s howling again. Frank looks genuinely startled and mutters something about “ the power of country. ” Hazel’s crying from laughter. Piper’s doubled over, gripping Leo’s abandoned smoking drink like it’s sacred.

And Nico—

Nico di Angelo is staring .

He hasn’t moved from the table, but his entire posture has shifted. Arms uncrossed. Shoulders leaning in. Eyes wide and locked on Will like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing.

Will—mid-boot-scoot, mic clutched in one hand like a lifeline—catches Nico’s expression out of the corner of his eye.

It’s not just surprise.

It’s something warmer. Something like wonder. Something dangerously close to fond .

And maybe it’s the tequila, or the vodka, or the blinding stage lights, or the absolute absurdity of this moment—but Will feels it.

All of it.

The heat under his skin. The thrum of music and attention. The way Nico’s gaze lingers like it’s mapping constellations across Will’s face. The fact that this ridiculous, chaotic, neon-lit moment has cracked something open inside him that feels like joy .

Leo throws in an aggressive air guitar solo. Will spins—badly—and bumps the mic stand, catching it at the last second with all the grace of a very drunk, very flustered cowboy.

The crowd roars.

Annabeth buries her face in her hands. “We’re never recovering from this.”

Nico’s smirking now. That rare, real kind of smirk. The one Will’s seen maybe twice in his life. He’s clapping slowly, deliberately, as if to say I saw that. I liked it.

Will tips an imaginary hat toward him with a wink he’ll later deny remembering.

And keeps singing. Because somehow, impossibly, this night is his .

Leo suddenly grabs Will’s wrist and spins him like they’re in the middle of a Texas barn wedding with open bar and no supervision. The lights from the stage catch on Leo’s wild grin and the glitter he’s mysteriously acquired on his cheek. His cowboy hat is tilted halfway off his head, and he’s whooping like he just won a rodeo.

Will stumbles. Nearly crashes into a stool. Regains his balance with the kind of grace only alcohol and panic can provide.

“Do-si-do, motherf—!”

“Language!” Piper calls out from their table, clutching her phone with both hands like she’s filming the next great American documentary. She zooms in dramatically. “Think of the children!”

Jason and Percy are no longer being restrained by Annabeth. They’re full-on square dancing in the middle of the floor, kicking their boots out in opposing directions like they’ve been choreographing this for months. Jason attempts a spin and knocks over a barstool. Percy yells “ Yeehaw !” with enough commitment to make the bartender wince.

Annabeth, still seated, covers her face. “I don’t know them,” she groans, but her shoulders are shaking suspiciously.

Hazel and Frank are clapping along from the sidelines like supportive parents at a kindergarten recital. Will catches Nico’s gaze and nearly trips over Leo’s foot. Nico’s watching him. Not laughing. Not judging. Just watching.

And Will—drunk, dizzy, probably doomed—spins harder.

Without warning, Leo hits next track on the phone like a DJ possessed by the spirit of chaos. There’s a split second of silence—just enough time for Will’s brain to scream what now —

And then the opening line of Dicked Down in Dallas slams through the speakers like divine punishment.

“ Dicked down in Dallas !” Leo bellows, lifting his hat into the air like it’s a blessed relic.

Will, completely unhinged now, throws his head back and yells, “R ailed out in Raleigh !” way too loud and with zero shame.

The bar explodes.

Percy lets out a scream-laugh and topples into his chair in slow motion. Jason is clapping so enthusiastically he forgets where the beat is. Piper wheezes, doubled over, tears running down her cheeks.

“ Tag teamed in Tennessee! ” Leo shouts, pointing at the ceiling like he’s summoning the country music gods.

Will is panting, off-balance, flushed head to toe. “ Ate out in Austin !” he yells, both hands in the air—and the moment it leaves his mouth, his eyes go wide. “Oh gods.”

That was definitely not the lyrics. 

Cecil, from the back of the bar, absolutely howls , nearly choking on his stolen cocktail.

Lou Ellen slams a fist on the table. “ YES! You’re reclaiming your roots , you magnificent disaster!”

Will’s heart is pounding. His face is on fire. He risks a glance back at the table—

And Nico di Angelo is leaning forward slightly, one hand pressed to his mouth—not in horror, but in a failed attempt to hide a laugh.

Will catches the glint of it. That rare, real amusement.

Maybe it’s the music, or the tequila, or the raw absurdity of yelling about being eaten out in Austin—but something about Nico’s expression makes Will feel like maybe, just maybe, he hasn’t totally embarrassed himself.

He’s lit up with adrenaline. Buzzing with something dangerously close to joy.

And gods help him, the song isn’t even over.

At some point, Will forgets the words.

Or maybe the words forget him .

They slip right through his tequila-vodka-chamomile tea-slicked brain, vanishing into the neon air like they were never there to begin with. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the thud of the bass vibrating through the floor, Leo’s chaotic cackling, and the crowd's fever-pitched screaming.

Will is stomping his sneakers like they’re steel-toed boots, arms flailing with the loose, liquid rhythm of a man who’s been possessed by the ghost of country music. He and Leo are locked in some unholy parody of a line dance—there’s elbow swinging, shoulder bumping, and a dramatic, slow-motion twirl that almost takes both of them down.

Will is sweating. Hard. His hair’s a mess, his shirt is sticking to his back, and his accent has gone full Texas . Drawled vowels and shouted nonsense fly from his mouth with no filter, no mercy, and absolutely zero sense of rhythm.

By the time the song crashes to an end—abruptly, thanks to Leo tripping over a mic cable and sending his phone yeeting across the stage like a comet—the two of them are doubled over, panting, dizzy, and dangerously close to falling over.

The crowd? Loses it.

Chairs scrape. Glasses slam. Someone lets out a yeehaw so loud it echoes off the walls. Jason and Percy charge the stage like overexcited golden retrievers at a family reunion and promptly lift Will and Leo into the air like victorious gladiators.

Will is limp in their grip. A flushed, delirious mess.

From the crowd, Nico claps—slow and deliberate, like a villain in an indie noir film. His expression is unreadable, but the corner of his mouth twitches. Just enough to make Will’s heart trip over itself.

“Dude,” Leo gasps, looping an arm around Will’s shoulders, voice full of ragged joy. “We crushed that.”

Will lets out a breathless wheeze. “I’m gonna puke.”

He means it. The room is tilting. His blood is 30% alcohol and 70% regret. His limbs feel like pool noodles. His face is hot, and not in a sexy way—in a hospital visit if you don’t hydrate way.

The applause is still going when Percy throws both hands up like a frat bro at Coachella. “Encore!” he roars.

“Encore!” Jason echoes, slapping Percy’s back like they’ve just won the Super Bowl.

Leo, whose phone has miraculously survived, lifts it like a sword. “Encore!” he cries, triumphantly scrolling for the next disaster.

Will, still airborne and half-conscious, flops his head backward. “Nooo encore,” he mumbles, voice slurred and soul already leaving his body. “No encore. No bones left. I’m soup.”

“Oh, we’re doing this,” Percy says, his eyes wild with power. “What’s the vibe? Do we go Shania Twain or Nickelback?”

Jason looks like he’s confronting a life-or-death decision. “But Shania …”

“But Nickelback ,” Percy counters, deadly serious.

Lou Ellen, who has climbed onto a chair like a tipsy ringmaster, slams her empty drink down on the table. “Do both. Shania Twain’s Man! I Feel Like A Woman mashed up with Rockstar. Make history.”

Cecil’s already got his phone out, typing with the urgency of a hacker trying to defuse a bomb. “I can get a backing track in five.”

Hazel leans toward Frank, wide-eyed. “Do you think this is how Rome fell?”

Frank doesn’t even blink. “Maybe.”

Annabeth sighs deeply, rubbing her temples like she’s trying to keep her last three brain cells from resigning. “We do not have the infrastructure for another performance.”

Leo, unbothered and glowing with mischief, holds up his phone like it’s the final piece of Exodia. “I have Cotton Eye Joe if we need a tiebreaker.”

And Will?

Will is swaying in Jason’s grip, boneless and dazed. His eyes drift toward Nico, who’s still at the table—still watching.

And when Nico catches his gaze, he doesn’t smirk this time.

He smiles.

And Will, somewhere in the hot, chaotic mess of his mind, thinks: Oh no. I would do it all again. If it made him smile like that, I would do it again. 

Percy points at Leo like he’s just discovered the Holy Grail. “ That’s the one!”

Will, is currently blinking slowly at the table like he’s trying to solve a riddle written in Morse code. His curls are a windswept mess of sweat and static electricity, his cheeks are flushed scarlet, and his smile is lopsided and faint—more like an echo of a smile, like he’s already halfway to dreamland but forgot to tell his body.

He sways a little in his chair.

“Hey, buddy,” Cecil says gently, leaning in like he’s approaching a drunk raccoon. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Will squints. “ All of them. ”

“That’s fair,” Cecil says, impressed.

Will giggles. Actually giggles . The sound bubbles out of him, light and airy and way too soft for the chaos that’s still unfolding around them.

That’s when Nico stands.

No announcement. No grand gesture. He just rises from his chair, graceful and composed, his drink left untouched beside him. His dark eyes flick across Will, tracking every unsteady shift in his posture, every slow blink, every dreamy half-mumbled phrase.

Then, wordlessly, he steps forward and places a hand on Will’s wrist.

It’s not rough. Not commanding. Just… steady. Anchoring.

“Come on,” Nico says quietly, his voice cutting through the noise like a warm blade. “Let’s go.”

Will blinks up at him. He looks dazed, like someone just turned the lights on in a cathedral. “Where we going?”

“Outside,” Nico says, already guiding him to his feet. He moves gently, almost clinically efficient, but his hand doesn’t leave Will’s wrist. Not once.

Will stumbles as he stands, legs made of jelly and sin. Nico catches him without hesitation, a hand pressed lightly to the small of Will’s back.

His touch is warm. Steady. Real.

“We’re gonna miss Cotton Eye Joe ,” Will slurs, dragging his feet with all the conviction of a man being pulled away from his destiny.

“You’re going to puke if you don’t get some air,” Nico replies, deadpan, barely missing a beat. “And I’m not letting you throw up on Leo’s shoes. They’re probably haunted.”

From across the room, Leo lifts his head from his phone and yells, “ I heard that! And they are! ”

Nico doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t even blink. He just starts walking, slow and deliberate, like he’s done this a hundred times—like he’s leading someone out of a burning building instead of a campus bar filled with neon lights and chaotic friends and the sticky ghosts of bad decisions.

His fingers are still wrapped around Will’s wrist. Light, but firm. Steady. Coaxing. It’s not possessive—it’s grounding. And somehow, that makes it worse. Or better. Will can’t tell. All he knows is that something tight and unfamiliar twists behind his ribs, sharp and hot and a little terrifying.

He lets Nico guide him. Lets his steps fall into rhythm beside his. Lets his body lean in—just slightly—more than he means to. Like his bones know something he doesn’t. Like gravity’s changed direction.

And Nico doesn’t pull away.

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look over, doesn’t do anything but stay exactly where he is—quiet, solid, close enough that Will can feel the brush of his coat against his arm with every step. The press of their shoulders whenever they shift to avoid a table or drunken straggler.

They slip through the crowd like it’s parting just for them, the noise fading into something distant and meaningless. Will follows like a sleepwalking saint, dazed and half-glowing, trailing behind the dark figure that pulled him from the noise.

He can hear his own heartbeat in his ears. Loud. Unsteady. Distracted by the shape of Nico’s hand against his skin.

Because Nico’s still touching him.

And it’s not a grip anymore. It’s not about balance or urgency or crowd navigation. It’s something else. Something that feels like—

Like a tether.

Like a promise.

Chapter 20: I Drunkenly Confess My Love, Then Immediately Confess My Lunch

Notes:

thank you all so much for all the love on this fic, i never thought so many people would care about this silly story <3

Nico maneuvers Will through the chaos of the bar with an ease that feels suspiciously practiced—like he’s done this before. Maybe not with Will, but definitely with someone equally self-destructive. Probably Leo. Or Percy. Or gods help him, both at the same time. Nico moves like a man who’s had to drag someone out of a glitter bomb incident or a foam party gone wrong. He’s too calm. Too efficient. Will is starting to suspect Nico has a mental flowchart for “ Escaping Dumbass-Induced Public Mayhem .”

Will, meanwhile, is operating on half a liver and zero coordination. He stumbles over someone’s abandoned tote bag full of yarn and what looks like a taxidermy squirrel, barely avoiding a catastrophic collision with a beanbag chair that smells faintly of regret and vape juice. Nico doesn’t even blink. His hand just tightens around Will’s arm—firm, grounding, terrifyingly competent—as he steers him with the deadpan grace of someone who once had to carry Percy Jackson out of a bar because he thought a mop was a sea monster.

Will vaguely registers Percy howling something that sounds like “ Yeehaw ” behind them. Someone’s chanting “ Cotton Eye Joe ” like it’s a summoning spell. The bar smells like spilled cider, bad decisions, and someone’s cheap body spray, but Nico—Nico smells like smoke and something darker, woodsy and clean and quietly expensive. It makes Will dizzy for entirely new reasons.

He expects Nico to disappear at any second—turn into smoke or shadows or something equally poetic and unfair. But he doesn’t. He’s still there, real and solid, hand firm on Will’s arm like he’s anchoring him to this moment.

The door swings open with a gust of icy air, and Will practically falls into the night.

He gasps.

The cold hits him all at once—like diving headfirst into a snowbank with his clothes on. The streetlamp above them flickers once, as if even the electricity isn’t sure what’s happening tonight. Will’s curls are sticking to his forehead, damp with sweat, and the sweat instantly freezes.

“Breathe,” Nico says, low and calm. His voice is steady in that way that makes Will want to cling to it like a life raft. He guides Will toward the curb, his hand finally slipping from Will’s arm, though he stays close—close enough that their shoulders brush when Will sways slightly.

Will sucks in a deep breath. It smells like wet pavement, old beer, streetlamp ozone, and Nico’s cologne—earthy and cool and probably worth more than the combined contents of their apartment fridge.

“I’m fine,” Will lies, blinking up at the sky. “Just needed some air. I can totally sing another—”

“No, you can’t,” Nico cuts in, deadpan. “You looked like you were about to fall off the stage and into Leo’s haunted boots.”

Will laughs, then groans, leaning against the building like it might absorb some of his chaos. “You didn’t have to rescue me.”

“You looked like you were going to faceplant into a cymbal. Or try to crowd-surf in a room with no crowd.”

Will presses the back of his hand to his forehead like a swooning Victorian widow. “You wound me.”

Nico raises an unimpressed eyebrow, then shoves his hands into the pockets of his coat. His hair is windswept from the breeze, his cheeks faintly pink from the cold—or maybe from the bar, it’s hard to tell. “And if they’d dragged you into Cotton Eye Joe , we’d be calling an ambulance right now.”

Will groans again. “You’re not wrong.”

“I rarely am.”

There’s a beat. Will turns toward him, swaying just enough that he has to catch himself on Nico’s shoulder. Nico doesn’t flinch. He just tilts his head slightly, amused, letting Will balance there for a second.

“You know,” Will says, voice low and sloppy with affection, “you’re kind of bossy when you’re being heroic.”

“You’re kind of reckless when you’re being cute.”

Will blinks. His heart does something weird and fluttery in his chest—palpitations, he thinks distantly. He’ll write it down later.

“You think I’m cute?”

Nico doesn’t answer.

He just shrugs, glances sideways at him with that little almost-smile again—tiny, private, lethal—and then looks away.

And Will, dazed and freezing and dizzy from tequila and flirting, thinks he might just throw up and fall in love in the same ten minutes.

Will tilts his head toward Nico, still leaning just slightly on him, his curls bouncing a little as he shifts. The breeze picks up, slicing through his shirt, and he sways again, teeth chattering.

“You cold?” Nico asks, already shrugging out of his coat.

Will shakes his head—then immediately regrets it. “Nope. I’m good. Great. Perfect.” He hiccups. “A little woozy. A little in love. But, like… functionally fine.”

Nico pauses. “Did you just say—?”

Will talks over him. “Also, you’re really pretty. Like. It’s unfair. Honestly, rude. Obscenely pretty.”

Nico freezes. His hand stills where he’d started to offer Will his coat. “Oh,” he says.

Will blinks up at him. He has the distinct thought—somewhere between tequila haze and catastrophic yearning—that if he were sober, he’d be mortified. But he’s not sober. He’s floppy and warm and slurring like a country boy at his first rodeo, and Nico di Angelo is standing in front of him with that face.

“You have, like…” Will makes a vague gesture that’s meant to encompass all of Nico. “Cheekbones. Eyes. Face. And that little smirk thing you do sometimes? Disrespectful.”

“Will—” Nico starts, clearly trying very hard not to smile.

“And your hair?” Will barrels on. “Unreal. Like it’s been tousled by the ghosts of the Renaissance.”

Nico actually laughs. Quiet and breathy, like he’s startled by it. His cheeks have gone pink—not just from the wind, Will’s sure of it—and he ducks his head slightly, shoulders drawing in like he’s trying to make himself smaller.

“I think you’re drunk,” Nico says, voice soft but amused.

“I am drunk,” Will agrees. “But that doesn’t make you less pretty. It just makes me less capable of not saying it out loud .”

There’s a beat of silence.

Then Nico murmurs, almost like he didn’t mean to say it aloud, “You’ve got those ridiculous curls… and that look. Like you walked out of a painting or something.”

Will’s jaw drops. “That was the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me and I think I just blacked out.”

Nico shrugs, but his ears are fully red now, and there’s that small, secret smile again—like he’s tucking the moment away somewhere private. “Don’t read into it.”

“I will be reading into it,” Will says solemnly. “For the rest of my natural life.”

They both laugh—Will’s loud and breathless, Nico’s quieter but still real. The kind of laugh that sneaks out when you’re not watching for it.

Another gust of wind whips by and Will shivers again. Nico, without a word, steps closer and drapes his coat over Will’s shoulders. It smells like him. Like cedarwood and something faintly herbal and sharp, like expensive apothecary soap. Will nearly whimpers.

“I can’t feel my legs,” he says cheerfully. “But I feel… very seen.”

“I’m regretting this already,” Nico mutters, though his eyes are still soft.

“No you’re not,” Will says, and leans against him just a little harder.

And Nico doesn’t move away.

Will blinks. Slowly. He registers the words— walked out of a painting or something —and they hit him like a gentle slap made of poetry and longing and emotional catastrophe.

His brain goes completely blank.

His mouth, unfortunately, does not.

“Oh my gods,” Will groans, dragging both hands down his flushed face. “I’m embarrassing. I’m—oh gods, I’m that guy . I did a country mash-up and then tried to flirt while slurring. You probably think I have a drinking problem.”

Nico, still leaning against the wall beside him, watches this spiral unfold with an expression that could only be described as mildly endeared chaos witness . His arms are crossed, black shirt with a few buttons popped that displays his collarbones, and the breeze keeps catching the edges of his hair just enough to make him look like a gothic movie poster that fell in love with autumn.

Will gestures vaguely at the night air. “I wasn’t even going to drink , you know? I have lab at nine. I had one shot. One. And then suddenly there were glowing drinks and a kazoo and Lou Ellen screaming about representation and Leo was singing about getting railed in Raleigh and—”

“You had five shots,” Nico cuts in helpfully.

Will stares at him. “ How do you remember that? You drank too!”

“I paced myself,” Nico says, deadpan. “Also, I didn’t yell about being eaten out in Austin.”

Will makes a strangled noise. “ Nico. ”

Nico’s mouth twitches. “Just saying.”

Will groans and slumps down onto the curb, head in his hands again. “You’re never drunk. It’s like some kind of unfair god-tier immunity. Meanwhile I’m over here trying not to throw up feelings. ”

There’s a pause.

Then Nico says, quieter this time, “You’re not embarrassing.”

Will peeks at him through his fingers. Nico’s looking at him now—not teasing, not smirking. Just… soft. Steady. His dark eyes calm in a way that makes Will’s heartbeat trip.

“You’re just very…” Nico waves a vague hand in the air, as if trying to pluck the right word from the breeze. “ Honest. ”

Will squints. “That’s a polite way to say I have no filter.”

Nico shrugs, a small, lopsided smile tugging at his mouth. “It’s refreshing.”

Will drops his hands to his lap. “That’s another polite way to say I’m a mess.”

“Maybe,” Nico says. “But you’re a charming mess.”

Will’s heart tries to stage an escape through his ribcage.

“…Do you practice being this cool, or is it genetic?” he mutters.

Nico huffs a laugh. “You think I’m cool? You just publicly performed a country song mash-up while drunk and in love.”

Will stares.

“I mean,” Nico adds, suddenly awkward again, gaze flickering away like the words cost something to say, “in the general sense. Like… you’re in love with the world. With people. You glow at everything. It’s… very you. You’re just… always full of light. Like something from myth. The kind of person ancient poets would’ve written hymns about. Music and healing and sunlight, all wrapped up in someone who still gets stage fright at karaoke.”

Will forgets how to breathe.

It hits him not like a rush of heat—but like warmth unfurling slowly beneath his skin, blooming in the hollows of his chest, his fingertips, his throat. He feels it. That ridiculous, impossible, glowing feeling. Like the warmth of a campfire on a winter night. Like the way golden hour slides through the blinds and makes even cracked apartment walls look soft and holy. Like someone’s lit a candle right behind his ribs.

He glances at Nico—Nico, who is not looking at him now, who has his shoulders hunched slightly, like he regrets saying it, like the words might drift off and vanish into the cold air before Will can catch them.

And Will wants to catch them.

Wants to press them to his chest like a keepsake. Wants to carve them into stone and place them on the shelf of things he never thought he’d be allowed to have. Not from Nico di Angelo. Not from anyone.

Then he groans, loud and dramatic, and flops backward onto the cold concrete like he’s swooning in an over-the-top Victorian drama. “I’m going to die. ”

Nico nudges his sneaker with the toe of his boot. “You’re not going to die.”

“I might,” Will mutters, throwing an arm over his face, though the smile tugging at his lips betrays him. “But at least I’ll die knowing you think I’m charming.”

Nico’s voice is barely audible—but it’s there. Warm and shy and so close to fond it makes Will ache.

“You are.”

And Will, lying there on the curb, with the taste of tequila still clinging to his mouth and the stars spinning overhead, swears he’s glowing. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. He means it in the gut-deep, golden-laced, mythic way.

He feels lit from within. Like a lantern. Like someone who could light the way for someone else, if only they’d let him.
Like someone Nico might be starting to see.

And that? That might just kill him after all.

Will lies there for a moment, basking in the warmth of Nico’s voice, the strange and steady pulse of something beautiful blooming between them. He feels like a lighthouse, like a star, like a boy carved out of gold leaf and held together by the echo of Nico’s words—

—and then, suddenly, all that warmth starts to shift.

It lurches in his stomach.

Curls low in his gut.

Begins a steady, horrifying roll upward.

Oh no.

Will blinks up at the stars, which are now… shimmering in a way that is distinctly unstellar. The curb tilts. His internal organs begin filing evacuation notices.

He swallows hard. “Uh-oh.”

Nico, still standing over him, raises a brow. “What?”

Will runs a mental checklist like he’s triaging himself in an ER:

• Sudden onset vertigo? Check.
• Nausea? Rising like a Greek chorus.
• Sweaty palms? Absolutely.
• Flushed skin? Already glowing. Spiritually and unfortunately.

He does the math—five shots (or six?), minimal food, one ill-advised karaoke performance, and roughly six minutes of holding eye contact with Nico di Angelo, which should be considered a physiological stressor in itself.

“Too much light,” Will mumbles. “I’m overheating. System overload. Liver function compromised. This is how I die.”

Then he rolls over and, in the most humiliating act of his young life, violently throws up on the pavement.

There is a wet splatter .

A pause.

A gust of night wind that does not, unfortunately, blow away his shame.

“Oh gods,” Will groans, dragging a hand across his mouth and instantly regretting it. “This is it. My legacy.”

Nico, bless him, does not back away like a disgusted sitcom character. He crouches beside him, calm as ever, and pulls a pack of tissues from the inner pocket of his coat (that Will is still wearing and praying he hasn’t splattered vomit on) like he’s been carrying them just for this exact moment.

“You’re not dying,” Nico says dryly, pressing a tissue into Will’s hand. “You’re just drunk. And dramatic.”

Will wipes his mouth and squints up at him. “You still think I’m charming?”

Nico’s mouth twitches. “We’ll revisit that question when you’re not leaking tequila onto the sidewalk.”

And Will, pale and trembling and covered in the ghost of country mashup shame, leans against the brick wall and thinks: yeah. Definitely worth it.

Will barely has time to groan out a warning—“ It’s happening again” —before he’s leaning over and vomiting a second time . This one somehow manages to be more dramatic than the first, complete with full-body heaving and an undignified noise that echoes far too loudly in the empty street.

“Oh gods ,” Will wheezes, bracing himself against the pavement with both hands like he’s just lost a boxing match. “Make it stop. Smite me. Strike me down.”

“You’re fine,” Nico says calmly, like he hasn’t just witnessed the boy he maybe-sort-of-likes violently upchuck twice in a row. He pulls Will’s curls back with surprising gentleness, fingers brushing the back of Will’s neck like he’s done this before. Which is both comforting and slightly terrifying.

Will makes a weak noise, somewhere between a groan and a sob. “I’m supposed to be the doctor here,” he mutters. “I’ve literally done clinical rounds. I’ve studied the effects of alcohol on the gastrointestinal tract. I’ve written papers. I’ve taken exams. I passed organic chemistry, Nico .”

“And yet here we are,” Nico replies, completely deadpan, crouched beside him like the ghost of boyfriends present.

Will glares at the streetlight. “This is humiliating.”

Nico hums. “Is it?”

“Yes!” Will snaps, swaying slightly. “You were just comparing me to, like, mythological poetry and sunlight and divine radiance and then I—” He gestures vaguely to the pavement. “—projectile ejected three tacos and half a tequila sunrise onto the street.”

“Honestly,” Nico says, tilting his head in mock thought, “it was kind of impressive. You committed.”

Will groans and flops back against the brick wall. “Stop trying to comfort me with sarcasm.”

“I’m not,” Nico says, with a maddening little smirk. “That was comforting. This is me being supportive.”

“You’re supposed to be the emotionally repressed one,” Will grumbles. “I’m supposed to be the composed one with medical training and ironclad dignity.”

“You’re wearing glitter on your cheeks,” Nico points out.

Will touches his face. “It’s Lou Ellen’s. She said it was for—” He hiccups. “—theatre reasons.”

“Sure it was.” Nico pulls another tissue from the mysterious depths of his coat and presses it into Will’s hand. “You want to keep spiraling or can I offer you a breath mint?”

Will narrows his eyes. “You carry mints?”

“Do I look like the kind of guy who lets someone throw up near him and walk away with tequila breath?”

“Gods,” Will mutters, dramatically pressing the tissue to his face. “I’m going to have to move. Change my name. Start over. Burn the shirt.”

“You’ll be fine,” Nico says, and this time his voice is actually soft. Genuinely gentle. He reaches out and adjusts Will’s collar with careful fingers, like he's smoothing something out—not just the fabric, but the moment.

Will stares at him. “Are you flirting with me while I’m actively in my most disgusting state?”

Nico shrugs. “I’ve seen worse.”

Will’s laugh is watery and half-delirious. “Gods, I think I love you.”

“Don’t say that while your breath smells like bile, Solace.”

Will grins weakly, still slumped against the wall. “So there’s a chance.”

Nico rolls his eyes. But he doesn’t walk away.

Will takes the mint with the reverence of a man being handed the last scrap of dignity he has left. He pops it into his mouth and lets it dissolve slowly on his tongue—cold, sharp, and overwhelmingly spearmint. It's almost enough to erase the tequila tang still clinging to his molars.

Almost.

He glances over at Nico, who’s still crouched beside him with one knee bent and one arm resting on his thigh like it’s the most natural position in the world. The streetlight above them halos the top of Nico’s head, casting faint gold over his dark hair, catching on the curve of his cheekbone. His skin glows faintly in the cold night air, not with Will’s usual sun-warm vibrancy, but like moonlight caught in smoke—cool, ethereal, unreal.

Gods, he’s beautiful.

And Will—Will is drunk, and stupid, and still vaguely sticky from where he accidentally leaned into his own vomit. But none of that stops the ache curling through his chest, rising into his throat. He wants to kiss him. He really wants to kiss him. Wants to lean in and press his mouth to Nico’s and feel something other than dizziness and regret for just one second.

But he doesn’t.

Because this— this —is not how it should happen.

Not with his breath laced with bile and mint. Not with tequila still sloshing in his gut like a storm tide. Not with his hair tangled and his dignity somewhere back on the stage with the last of Leo’s hat tricks.

He wants their first kiss to be something good. Something real. Not a punchline. Not a half-remembered blur at the end of a chaotic night.

Nico shifts slightly, and their knees bump again.

Will forces himself to look away. “You don’t have to keep sitting here with me.”

“I know,” Nico says, soft and steady. “But I want to.”

Will feels the words settle under his ribs like a heartbeat. He turns his head just enough to meet Nico’s eyes, and for a moment, they just look at each other—no jokes, no chaos, no crowd.

Just the two of them on the curb in the cool dark, breath turning to fog, hearts thudding in time.

The moment stretches—holds—and Will smiles. Small. Crooked. Full of something that tastes almost like hope.

“Thanks for the mint,” he says eventually, voice low and fond.

“Don’t mention it,” Nico replies, mouth quirking. “It’s a part of my very specific post-vomit charm.”

Will huffs a quiet laugh and tucks his legs under himself. He’s still dizzy. Still probably going to have the worst hangover of his academic life. But right now, with Nico beside him and the night cool against his skin, it doesn’t feel so bad.

He’s not kissing him. Not yet.

But gods, he wants to.

The night outside the bar is crisp—the kind of cold that feels like a slap to the face after the fug of sweat, tequila, and chaotic yelling inside. It needles into Will’s flushed cheeks, stings at the back of his neck where his curls are damp with sweat, and creeps down the collar of his (Nico’s) coat like a reminder that he is very, very drunk.

The mint Nico gave him is still dissolving slowly on his tongue, numbing the worst of the tequila aftertaste. His stomach has mostly stopped pirouetting. His head is still spinning, but slower now, like a carousel winding down instead of a centrifuge. Nico’s presence beside him helps—silent, steady, all lean lines and quiet gravity. Will doesn’t lean on him, exactly, but the proximity is enough. He feels tethered.

And then the bar door slams open like it’s trying to win a fight with the frame.

“There they are!” Percy crows, bursting out into the alley like a champagne cork with legs, a drink sloshing in one hand and chaos blazing in his eyes. His hair is a disaster, his shirt is unbuttoned halfway down his chest, and his grin could probably be seen from space.

Jason trails behind him, wiping sweat off his forehead with the hem of his shirt like he’s just won a marathon. He’s grinning, too—loose and flushed and wild-eyed in the way that always makes Will suspect they’ve done something catastrophic.

“I told you they weren’t behind the bar,” Percy says, elbowing Jason with the force of a linebacker. “They’re out here. Lurking. Like sexy cryptids.”

Jason places a hand over his heart, solemn. “We were emotionally prepared to find you making out against a lamp post. Honestly? I’m disappointed.”

Will lets out a soft, garbled noise that’s somewhere between a groan and a whimper. His head thunks back against the brick wall. “Why are you both like this?”

“Because we’re your friends,” Percy says, full of reverence. “Also because we just brought the house down to Cotton Eye Joe.”

Will squints at him like he’s trying to read a foreign language through soup. “You… what?”

Jason beams. “Piper got the DJ to do a remix. It was like Cotton Eye Joe meets Eurotrash rave meets—what did Annabeth call it?”

“‘Cultural collapse in three-four time,’” Percy supplies helpfully, taking a dramatic sip of his drink like he’s in an indie film about heartbreak and line dancing.

“I’m so sorry I missed that,” Nico deadpans, his voice dry enough to qualify as a drought. He doesn’t look up, but the tiny tic of his jaw gives him away. Will can tell he’s amused. Probably. Or mildly traumatized.

Jason winks. “We dedicated it to Will. Said it was in honor of his people.”

Will, who is still slumped half-sideways against the curb with his knees pulled up and his brain wrapped in fog, covers his face with both hands. “My people?”

Percy shrugs. “You sang Dicked Down in Dallas. That makes you an ambassador now.”

Will lets out a sound that can only be described as goat-like despair . He contemplates melting into the pavement.

Jason drops into a crouch beside him, elbows on his knees like he’s settling in to watch a bonfire burn. He nudges Will’s side with the gentle insistence of someone who once tackled him into a lake during a field day. “You feeling okay, cowboy?”

“Don’t call me that,” Will mutters, dragging his hands down his face. He feels like his skin is vibrating. His teeth might be buzzing. The cold air has done nothing to sober him up, and Nico is still next to him, gorgeous and composed and watching him fall apart in real time.

“I was gonna say you looked pretty at home on stage,” Percy adds, propping himself up against the lamp post. His grin is pure chaos. “All flushed and wild-eyed and dripping in sweat. Like a rodeo fantasy gone rogue.”

Will groans again. “I hate this timeline.”

“You love this timeline,” Jason counters brightly. “You just can’t remember it through the tequila fog.”

Will opens his mouth to reply—and then Nico sighs beside him.

It’s not loud, but it’s sharp enough to cut through the drunken haze. Will blinks and turns toward him.

Nico stands in one fluid motion, coat flaring just slightly in the wind, expression flat but eyes a little too pointed to be neutral. “Do either of you morons want to be useful?”

Jason blinks up at him, sheepish. “We brought vibes?”

“Water,” Nico says, and it lands with the weight of divine judgement. “Go get him water.”

“On it!” Percy salutes with the hand still holding his drink. “Water for the cowboy.”

Jason scrambles upright like he’s been given a sacred mission. “Back in five. Maybe less if I don’t trip over someone.”

They take off like retrievers sent to fetch a stick from across state lines.

The night feels quieter now. The sound of traffic somewhere down the street. A siren in the distance. The wind brushing past the alley like it knows it’s interrupting something.

Nico sits again, slower this time, close enough that Will can feel the warmth radiating from him even through the buzz of alcohol and nerves.

“Your friends are a disaster,” Will says dryly.

Nico exhales, his smile crooked and wobbly and real. “Yeah. But we’re trauma bonded. There’s no turning back now.”

Nico’s quiet for a moment. Then he bumps their shoulders together—not hard, just enough to feel like something deliberate. Something real.

“I still think I could have managed Cotton Eye Joe,” Will mumbles weakly to the streetlamp. 

“ No ,” Nico says, and there’s a ghost of a smile on his face, “you need water, not another cursed public performance.”

Will chuckles, his head lolling back again, curls catching on the rough brick behind him.

Honestly? He still doesn’t know if he will remember this tomorrow. And that’s equal parts terrifying and relieving. 

He’s still sitting on the curb, the concrete cool beneath his thighs, the hem of his jeans damp from a mystery puddle he really hopes is water. His head is spinning again, just enough to make the streetlights above them blur into halos. There’s a smear of neon from the bar sign reflecting off the slick asphalt, painting Nico in soft golds and purples like he’s stepped out of a fever dream.

Will is very aware of his body. In the way that only drunk people are—every limb either too heavy or floating. His legs are noodles. His hands? Slightly tingly. His heart? Performing an upbeat jazz solo against his ribs.

Nico shifts beside him, Will can feel him there—solid and quiet and annoyingly composed, like the alcohol in Nico’s system bowed to his will and left .

Will, on the other hand, is still 80% margarita.

“You’re very steady,” he mumbles, mostly into his knees. “Like. Weirdly steady. Did you drink at all?”

“I had the same number of shots as you,” Nico replies, entirely too casual, “I just don’t get sloppy.”

Will narrows his eyes. “Are you human?”

Nico snorts. “Define human.”

Will groans. “Unfair. I am dying. I am disintegrating like an underfunded public building. And you’re just sitting there like some cool mythological statue brought to life.”

Nico looks over, raising one brow like a challenge. “Statues don’t usually carry hot, drunk pre-med students away from disaster karaoke.”

Will blinks at him, the compliment landing in slow motion. “Wait. Was that about me?”

“Yes. You are the disaster karaoke.”

Will flops dramatically against Nico’s shoulder with a sigh. “You’re mean.”

“And you’re…floppy.”

“Don’t say floppy ,” Will groans. “Nothing good starts with floppy.”

Nico doesn’t move away. Just lets him rest there, temple pressed against the cool silk of his shirt. It smells like smoke and mint and whatever expensive cologne Nico always wears that makes Will feel like he’s in a cologne ad called Brooding Shadows and Regret.

“I don’t know if I want to remember this tomorrow,” Will says after a beat.

Nico hums. “I kind of hope you do.”

Will’s stomach does something deeply stupid.

And yeah. Maybe he does want to remember this—the blur of laughter and tequila, the way the night feels warm and liquid around the edges. The sting of embarrassment softened by something gentler beneath it. Nico’s shoulder beneath his cheek, solid and steady, the quiet rhythm of his breathing anchoring Will in place. The fact that, through all the noise and chaos and neon-slicked absurdity, Nico came outside—for him.

Maybe he wants to remember all of it. The way Nico looked at him when he was on stage. The way it felt to laugh with him, to lean in close and not flinch away. The quiet miracle of simply being wanted back.

But also—

Will’s stomach turns, less from the tequila and more from the creeping dread of memory. Because he’s pretty sure—no, he’s almost certain—he said too much. Let something slip in the blur of slurred sentences and Nico’s gaze under the glow of streetlight. A confession, maybe. Or something close enough to it that it’s going to haunt him forever.

Did he say he loved him? Or did he just think about it a little too hard?

He squeezes his eyes shut, willing the pavement to swallow him whole.

Maybe he wants to remember the feeling.

But he definitely needs that water first.

And maybe—if the gods are kind—hydration will chase away the memory of him half-collapsing into Nico’s arms and murmuring something dangerously close to “ you’re it for me. ”

Yeah.

Water. Urgently.

The quiet stretches for a few more blissful seconds—Will’s head against the wall, Nico’s shoulder brushing his, the sharp buzz of streetlights humming overhead like the universe is trying to remember the words to a lullaby. Will’s fingers are splayed on the sidewalk like he’s trying to hold on to the planet. His skin is tingling, the air sharp in his lungs, and Nico is right there, real and solid and devastatingly gentle.

Then the bar door creaks open again.

Jason jogs back into the alley, a plastic water bottle in one hand and an expression halfway between concerned older brother and smug matchmaker who’s just won a game of chess in five moves.

“Okay, hydration delivery complete,” he announces, holding the water aloft like it’s a torch. “Percy got intercepted. Annabeth pulled him into some kind of public declaration ritual. There was kissing. Possibly a speech.”

Nico snorts, soft but unmistakable. “Of course there was.”

Jason shakes his head, beaming. “They’re standing on a table now. She’s quoting Plato. I’m pretty sure this counts as performance art. Or a proposal.”

He crouches again and hands Will the bottle. Will fumbles it like it’s made of lava, then finally manages to twist the cap with trembling fingers. Water sloshes down his chin as he drinks, and he tries to act like that was on purpose.

“Slow,” Nico murmurs beside him, watching him carefully. “Small sips.”

“‘M trying,” Will mutters, voice muffled by the bottle. His teeth click against the plastic as he tips it back again. “Water’s good. I love water. Big fan of H-two-Ohhhh... gods.”

Jason chuckles. “Yeah, he’s gone.”

Will, cheeks flushed and curls sticking to his forehead, squints up at him. “No, I’m fiiine. Nico gave me a mint. I’m fresh as a daisy.”

“You’re sweating like a daisy in a sauna,” Jason says fondly, but there’s no real judgment in it. Just that steady, easygoing Jason energy—equal parts protective and proud. He shifts to lean against the wall, arms crossed, watching the two of them with a kind of detached satisfaction, like a dad admiring a finished science project. Or maybe a deity of lighthearted chaos watching two mortals finally fall into his trap.

Nico stands again, brushing off his coat with a casual flick of his fingers. “I’m taking him home.”

Jason raises his eyebrows, the grin already curling at the corners of his mouth. “ Home -home or—”

Nico cuts him off with a look so flat and sharp it could flatten a mountain range. “Don’t.”

Jason lifts his hands in surrender, biting back a laugh. “No judgment, man. Just saying—if you need a sock for the door—”

“Jason,” Nico says, and it’s calm, but it carries the same weight as a courtroom gavel. “I swear.”

Will, still seated on the curb, flaps his hand vaguely. “No socks. I hate socks. They’re always getting lost. And judged. Like right socks are fine, but left socks have to be brave. ‘Cause they’re always missing. And it’s not fair, Jason.”

Jason nods solemnly. “That’s very true, Will. Very brave of you to speak out.”

Nico presses a knuckle gently to his mouth like he’s trying very hard not to laugh. “Let’s get you up, Solace.”

Will squints up at him with the dazzled, dreamy expression of someone who’s just been invited to ascend Mount Olympus. “You said my last name.”

“I tend to do that when I’m dragging someone home by force,” Nico mutters, but he reaches out a hand anyway.

Will takes it like it’s sacred.

He wobbles to his feet, water still clutched in one hand, Nico’s grip firm and warm in the other. His legs feel like noodles. His head feels like soup. But Nico is there—close and real and quietly heroic—and honestly, that might be enough to carry him all the way home.

Jason watches them go, still leaning on the wall, still smiling to himself.

“Call me when you get back,” he says. “Y’know. Just so I know the patient survived the journey.”

Nico doesn’t reply, but he raises one hand in a half-salute as they walk off down the sidewalk, Will leaning into him with each step, water bottle swinging like a pendulum in his hand.

Jason watches until they disappear around the corner.

Then he grins and heads back inside.

Chapter 21: I Accidentally Invite the Love of My Life to Bed, He Chokes, I Panic, and Now We’re Both Staring at the Floor Like It Has the Answers

Nico pulls out his phone, thumb gliding across the screen with quiet precision. He murmurs something to the rideshare app, and the city responds like it always does—indifferently. The streetlight above them flickers like it’s considering becoming a star, and Will watches it from the curb with a kind of reverence.

He shifts, the warmth finally catching up to him—his skin sticky beneath the weight of Nico’s coat, heat pooling in all the wrong places. Carefully, he shrugs it off, the wool heavy and rich with Nico’s scent—smoke and dark cologne and something he can’t name. He holds it out, the fabric bunched in his arms like an offering.

“Here,” he murmurs. “I’m overheating.”

Nico’s brow furrows. “You’ll get cold.”

Will shakes his head, flushed and breathless. “I don’t get cold. Well, I don’t usually. I run hot.” Then, after a beat—just long enough to be intentional—he adds, “Always have.”

Nico blinks, caught off guard, and Will sees it—that flicker of awareness, of something sharp and wanting behind his dark eyes.

Nico takes the coat, saying nothing, but the silence between them thickens. He shakes it out with a practiced flick, then slips it back on with that impossible elegance—collar settling perfectly, shoulders squared, like the whole moment never happened. Like Will didn’t just all but purr in the street about his body temperature.

The next thing he knows, a sleek black car glides to a stop at the curb—luxury sedan, tinted windows, the kind of Uber that doesn’t show up unless you’ve got a platinum-tier account or a trust fund to match. It’s silent, spotless, and smells like new leather and understated wealth.

Like Nico.

And Will, still flushed and far too aware of his own skin, suddenly isn’t sure if the heat in his body is leftover from the coat—or from the boy it belongs to

Nico helps him up, an arm tight around Will’s waist as he guides him toward the backseat like it’s muscle memory. The world tilts. The sidewalk rolls like a ship deck. Will’s legs are mostly decorative at this point.

The cab door opens. Nico’s hand is on the small of his back—warm through the thin fabric of Will’s shirt—and that alone feels like a gravitational event.

He slumps into the seat gracelessly, landing with a thud and a wheeze. Nico slides in beside him and pulls the door shut, muttering a greeting to the driver like he’s done this before. Like Will isn’t the first mess he’s had to carry home.

It’s quiet in the cab. Quiet and weirdly vast. The city blurs past in streaks of neon and shadow, and Will’s head tips to the side until it finds a shoulder—Nico’s shoulder. Solid. Warm. Steady.

There’s an arm around him. Nico’s arm.

Will doesn’t move. He doesn’t want to move.

Will’s brain is useless—no better than warm static and tequila residue, scattered neural impulses firing in chaotic succession. And yet, through the haze, his body continues to document with clinical precision, as though his subconscious has decided to take vitals mid-heart attack. 

He has to think about it clinically—catalog every nerve ending like he’s prepping for surgery—because if he lets himself feel it all at once, he will straddle Nico in the back of this cab, propose marriage with his whole chest, and then immediately die of embarrassment before they even hit 125th Street.

There is contact. Prolonged, deliberate contact.

His left deltoid is aligned flush against Nico’s, humerus to humerus beneath coats and shirts and the illusion of casual proximity. The pressure is steady—measured in newtons, probably, if Will were capable of math. There’s no movement to suggest discomfort. No myoclonic twitch. No withdrawal reflex.

Nico’s arm is draped around his shoulders with the kind of ease that speaks to muscle memory—or maybe quiet intent. His hand rests against Will’s upper arm, over the insertion of the biceps brachii, fingers splayed loosely but with enough surface contact that Will can feel every shift in skin tension. The thermal output radiating from Nico’s core is significant, a steady wave of infrared warmth bleeding through the fabric and igniting Will’s already overactive sympathetic nervous system.

Will notes—helplessly, clinically—that his own heart rate is elevated, his breathing shallow, intercostal muscles tightening with each exhale as though preparing for impact. His skin is hypersensitive; every square inch where they’re touching feels alive with action potentials.

He can feel the thrum of Nico’s pulse beneath his sternum—strong, regular, hovering just under 72 bpm, if Will had to guess. The location is specific, tactile: left side, beneath the fifth rib, apex of the heart tilted just-so toward Will’s temple. It shouldn’t be possible to feel this connected through layers of wool and cotton and late-night tension—but he does.

And Nico doesn’t move away. Doesn’t shift. Doesn’t flinch.

He just holds him. Quietly. Like Will belongs there. Like the contact is intentional and not incidental.

The taxi hits a rut in the road and jolts, just enough for Will to pitch forward a fraction of a centimeter—and Nico’s grip tightens, imperceptibly but undeniably. His fingers flex, contracting around the lateral head of Will’s triceps, grounding him with pressure and heat and presence.

Will swallows. He’s aware—acutely—of the flush rising along his neck, the dilation of his blood vessels, the overfiring of his parasympathetic system trying to counteract the hormonal hurricane raging inside him. The scent of Nico’s cologne is embedding itself into his hippocampus forever. His whole body feels like it’s trying to rewrite its internal chemistry in real time.

The medical term for this, he thinks distantly, is total systemic collapse due to close proximity with an emotionally devastating person.

Still, he lets his head rest a little more heavily against Nico’s shoulder. No words. No permission needed. Just… presence. Breath to breath. Pulse to pulse.

And Nico doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. He just keeps holding on.

Diagnosis: clinically devastating.

Prognosis: terminal pining.

Recommended treatment: more contact. Possibly mouth-to-mouth. For science.

Nico shifts slightly, adjusting so Will can lean more comfortably against him. It should be impossible, how toned his arm is—solid beneath the layers of wool and cotton, lean muscle wrapped tight around bone like a secret. Will registers the density of deltoid and bicep beneath his cheek, the steady tension of someone used to carrying weight—physical or otherwise.

He wants to make a joke, something stupid and easy to deflect how dizzy this closeness makes him. But the words are buried somewhere behind the flutter in his chest and the heat blooming along his spine.

Nico’s heartbeat is right there—steady and close, a quiet rhythm pulsing beneath skin and fabric, echoing softly against Will’s ear. It’s calm in a way Will isn’t. Measured. Certain. The kind of heartbeat that could anchor ships or undo saints.

If Will had the strength—or a pen, or any functioning brain cells left—he’d write sonnets about it. Terrible, adoring ones. Probably in iambic pentameter. Definitely embarrassing.

Instead, he whispers, “You smell expensive.”

Nico snorts. “It’s cologne.”

“What is it called,” Will slurs, “Death and Tax Evasion?”

“Close,” Nico murmurs, the edge of a smile in his voice. “Something French. Hazel bought it for me.”

Will nods solemnly. “Tell her it’s working.”

The cab takes a turn and Will’s entire world lurches. He grabs for something and finds Nico’s shirt. It's soft. Unfairly so. Like silk woven from dark secrets.

“You good?” Nico asks, his voice low and close to Will’s temple.

Will nods into his shoulder. “Never better. I think I’m having a medical event. But like… a sexy one.”

Nico laughs—an actual, startled laugh—and Will’s heart tries to fist-pump out of his chest.

He closes his eyes, head heavy against Nico’s collarbone, and lets the city slide past. Outside, New York is howling and endless. Inside the cab, it’s all dark fabric, steady breathing, and the quiet thrum of something dangerous and sweet blooming between two boys who don’t know where this is going—just that neither of them wants it to stop.

Not yet. Not like this. Not when Will can still feel the beat of Nico’s heart like a secret he’s been trusted with.

And gods, he wants to be trustworthy.

He just has to survive the ride home first.

Just when Will thinks he might be gaining some semblance of self-control—when the warmth of Nico’s arm starts to feel less like a siren call and more like a life raft—Nico opens his mouth and ruins everything.

“È ubriaco, eh?” the cab driver says, glancing at them in the rearview mirror with a knowing smirk.

Nico chuckles, the sound low and intimate. “Molto. Ha fatto uno show… interessante.”

Will stiffens. Not because he understands what’s being said—his brain is too fogged with tequila and Nico’s cologne for that—but because Nico is speaking Italian.

Italian .

Will’s brain shuts down. Literally. He feels it stutter like an engine trying to start on iced-over fuel.

Because here’s the thing: Nico di Angelo speaking Italian isn’t just hot. It’s devastating. It’s spine-melting, blood-warming, kneel-on-the-marble-floor-of-your-own-destruction kind of hot. It’s like stumbling into a ruined cathedral and hearing a hymn echo through the bones of ancient walls—sacred and profane all at once. It’s smoke and velvet and ruin, soft syllables curling like a hand at the base of Will’s spine. Every word Nico utters in that low, unbothered cadence feels like an invocation—like he’s being summoned, undone, rewritten. It’s a fever dream of longing he didn’t ask for but is now actively drowning in, head-first and panting.

And the worst part—the best part—is the sound of it. The shape of it.

Because Nico doesn’t just speak Italian. He breathes it. Lets it slip off his tongue like he’s confessing something forbidden. Like every vowel is laced with secrets and sin. And gods, when his voice drops—just slightly, just enough—Will hears it all wrong in the best possible way.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair that half those words sound dangerously close to a moan. Or a whimper. That soft, slanted lilt of his vowels curls behind Will’s ribs like a promise, like a hand in the dark. Every syllable grazes Will’s skin like teeth. Like the brush of knuckles down his spine. And Will—Will is going to combust.

His knees feel unreliable. His thoughts are static. He’s not even sure what Nico’s saying anymore. Could be a murder plot. Could be poetry. Could be a grocery list. It wouldn’t matter.

Because Will’s body hears it first.

His pulse stutters. His breath catches. There’s heat pooling low in his abdomen, slow and impossible to ignore, and gods—he has to look away. Has to close his eyes, think clinically, breathe deeply, recite amino acid structures in his head or he’s going to do something deeply embarrassing and illegal in this taxi.

All because Nico di Angelo is speaking Italian like it’s a sin he wants Will to commit.

Will, very helpfully, mutters under his breath, “Pretty. So pretty.”

Nico glances down, startled. “What?”

Will blinks blearily up at him. “You. Talking like that. I—gods, you’re so pretty. You’re so hot. It’s illegal.”

Nico makes a choked sound somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. In the front seat, the cab driver nods like a priest presiding over a wedding.

“È il tuo ragazzo?” he asks, clearly amused.

Nico flushes faintly, barely audible as he mutters, “No. Solo un amico.”

But the cab driver is not deterred. He waves a hand in the air and scoffs. “No, no. Si vede. È evidente. Guarda come ti guarda.”

Will is too busy staring at Nico’s mouth to question a single word of what’s being said. His fingers have curled into the fabric of Nico’s coat like it might keep him tethered to this plane of existence. The vowels, the cadence, the ease with which Nico moves between languages—it’s all too much.

He could die happy right here. In the back of a cab. On the cusp of vomit and confession.

““What are you guys talking about?” Will slurs, lifting his head just enough to squint suspiciously between Nico and the cab driver.

Nico straightens like he’s been caught mid-crime. “Soccer.”

Will narrows his eyes. “Soccer?”

“Yes,” Nico says immediately, a little too loud. “The sport. With balls. And… grass.”

Will blinks. “You hate sports.”

“It’s European ,” Nico insists, like that explains anything. His eyes dart to the window, the floor, the existential void.

Will stares at him another beat, then drops his head back on Nico’s shoulder with a sigh. “You’re such a bad liar.”

Nico exhales through his nose. “You’re too drunk to know that.”

“I’m not drunk,” Will whispers. “I’m just… feeling everything all at once.”

There’s a pause.

Then Nico says, softly, “I noticed.”

The cab bumps over a pothole, and Will sinks deeper into the warmth beside him. The rumble of Italian resumes between Nico and the cabbie, but Will’s already drifting—floating on the sound, the rhythm, the steady thump-thump of Nico’s pulse under his cheek.

He doesn’t know what’s being said. He doesn’t care.

All he knows is that Nico smells like cologne and warmth and ancient poetry, and Will—gloriously, irrevocably drunk—is the luckiest idiot alive.

Even if he might throw up again before they reach his apartment.

Will isn’t entirely sure how they get there.

One moment he’s melting into Nico’s side in the back of the cab, listening to soft Italian syllables and trying to remember how breathing works, and the next he’s blinking blearily out the window at the crooked streetlamp outside his apartment building.

He squints. “Wait. How’d he know where I live?”

Nico shifts beside him, warm and steady, arm still around Will like he’s the only thing keeping him upright. “You told him,” Nico says, his voice low and amused. “Sort of. You slurred something about a Greek restaurant and a mailbox with teeth.”

Will blinks. “That… tracks.”

The driver throws the car into park. Nico leans forward, smooth and unbothered, and pulls out a wallet that looks exactly as expensive as you’d expect from someone who drips old money and disdain in equal measure. He slides out several crisp bills with the detached ease of someone tipping the world just to keep it quiet.

Will watches, dumbfounded, as Nico hands over what must be a thirty—no, forty —percent tip.

The driver beams. “Vedi? Un vero gentiluomo,” he says, pocketing the bills with flair. Then he gestures between them with a conspiratorial wink. “Buona fortuna, ragazzi.”

Will narrows his eyes. “What’d he say?”

Nico clears his throat. “Nothing. Just—uh. Soccer again.”

Will frowns. “The soccer is back?”

The driver cackles and says something else—too fast for Will to catch. Nico gives him a tight smile and shuts the door with finality.

The cab pulls away.

Will stares after it. “Okay. What. Was. That .”

Nico’s expression doesn’t move, but there’s a pink flush creeping into his cheeks. “Nothing.”

Will, still very drunk and very prone to spirals, stares at the empty curb where the cab was just parked. “You were talking about me, weren’t you?”

Silence.

“I knew it.”

Still nothing.

Will groans, swaying a little on his feet as the night air slaps him across the face like a disappointed aunt. “And you tipped him like, what—ninety bucks? Is that normal? Was that like— a rich person bribe ? Do you just casually throw money around? Are you secretly a mob boss? Are we in a crime novel?”

Nico doesn’t answer. Just gently hooks a hand around Will’s elbow and starts walking him toward the building.

Will’s brain continues its downward spiral. “Gods, your wallet is probably made of like. Moon leather. Do you know what my wallet’s made of? Suffering. And expired coupons.”

Nico chuckles. “You’re a mess.”

“Your wallet could pay off my textbooks,” Will mutters.

Nico pulls out the building’s front door key from Will’s own bag with practiced ease. “And yet,” he says, dry, “you’re still the one I’m carrying upstairs.”

Will blinks. “You’re not carrying me—”

Nico opens the door. “Not yet.”

Will’s brain blue-screens.

And Nico, of course, doesn’t even smirk this time. Just guides him inside, as casual as ever, as if he didn’t just hand the cab driver enough money to fund a small revolution and make Will feel like the lead in an art house romance flick called Tipsy in Tequila: A Tragedy in Three Acts .

The stairwell feels like Everest.

Will clings to the railing with one hand and Nico with the other, swaying slightly as they ascend. Each step creaks under his sneakers like it’s personally offended by how drunk he is. The world spins gently, like it’s on a turntable someone forgot to switch off.

“I’m paying you back,” he announces, somewhere around the second floor.

Nico doesn’t even glance over. “No, you’re not.”

“I am,” Will insists, voice thick with tequila and righteousness. “That cab fare was obscene.”

“You were obscene,” Nico says mildly. “I was handling the situation.”

Will glares at the banister, like it personally caused all of this. “Still. I don’t like having debts.”

“Good thing you don’t owe me one.”

Will squints at him. “That’s not how that works.”

Nico stops outside Will’s door, steadying him with one hand at the small of his back. “It’s exactly how that works.”

And gods, that hand . Will can feel it—warm, grounding, right at the base of his spine. Like it’s been there forever. Like it belongs there.

“No,” Will slurs, fumbling in his bag for his keys with all the grace of a raccoon in a wind tunnel. “I—I don’t like it. I don’t like accepting stuff. Makes me feel like a—a stray dog someone fed and now I live under their porch.”

Nico blinks. “That’s… specific.”

Will nods solemnly. “I’m a dignified dog. I wear a bandana. I’m proud.”

“You’re drunk,” Nico corrects. He gently takes the keys from Will’s hand—thank the gods, because Will’s fingers are now tangled in the lanyard like it’s a trap laid by fate.

But Will keeps going. “It’s just—I’m not used to this. People buying me things. Helping. I usually pay. I do stuff. I take care of things.”

Nico unlocks the door. “You also vomited in a gutter fifteen minutes ago.”

“That’s beside the point.”

He’s not sure if it’s the alcohol or the way Nico’s always just so calm about things—like he doesn’t get it, like none of this is a big deal—but Will’s throat tightens. The tequila buzz swirls dangerously close to something more emotional.

“It’s not charity,” Nico says gently, pushing the door open and guiding him inside. “It’s me making sure you don’t pass out in a bar booth and end up as a cautionary tale on a student orientation slide.”

Will flops onto his couch like a fallen king. “Still feels like charity,” he mumbles.

Nico crosses the room and flicks on the lamp. A warm, golden glow spills into the quiet, softening the corners of the apartment, casting long shadows across Nico’s face like brushstrokes in oil.

“Then call it…friendship,” he says simply, as if the word isn’t a blade.

Will stares at him—blurry-eyed, sleep-heavy, stomach still roiling—but something in his chest pulls tight, sharp and aching. Friendship . That’s what Nico calls this. What he names the coat wrapped around Will’s shoulders, the way he invited him out onto the balcony with a cryptic promise, the way his voice softened when he said stay .

Will isn’t sure if that makes him feel better or worse.

Because this—this—doesn’t feel like friendship. This feels like something fragile and burning. Something holy.

Will swallows hard, gaze flicking over the way Nico stands in the half-light—shoes off, hair mussed from the wind, jaw set like he’s bracing for impact. He looks unreal. Untouchable. And Will—drunk, dizzy, unbearably warm—wants to do things to him that friends definitely don’t do.

He wants to trace the sharp line of Nico’s collarbone with his mouth. Wants to press kisses into the dip of his throat, into the spaces that look like secrets. He wants to feel the weight of Nico’s body on top of him, to memorize the exact sound Nico makes when he finally falls apart.

He wants to take his hand in the middle of a crowd. He wants to pull him close when no one’s watching.

He wants .

And it’s terrifying.

Will lies back, eyes fixed on the ceiling now, heart pounding like a drum too fast for the tempo of the room. He doesn’t speak, because if he does, it might come out as a confession.

This isn’t friendship, he thinks.

And gods help him—he hopes Nico feels it too.

He closes his eyes and groans softly. “I’m going to Venmo you so aggressively in the morning.”

Nico snorts. “I’m blocking you.”

Will lurches upright from the couch like a man resurrected mid-dream. “Water,” he mumbles. “Life. Hydration. Salt balance. Basic human dignity.”

He stumbles toward the kitchen like he’s crossing the battlefield at Troy, one hand dragging along the wall for balance. His socks slip slightly on the uneven floor, and he nearly faceplants into the hallway mirror.

He catches a glimpse of his reflection.

“Gods,” he breathes. “I look like a hungover poet trying to cosplay as a Victorian ghost with commitment issues.”

From behind him, Nico’s voice floats in: “That’s oddly specific.”

Will waves a hand in the air without turning around. “Don’t perceive me.”

He makes it to the fridge, yanks it open—and pauses.

There is nothing remotely helpful inside. Half a lime. A very old yogurt. Three takeout soy sauce packets. A La Croix that might predate his birth.

He grabs the La Croix with the solemnity of a man grasping at hope. It’s damp, half-frozen, and smells vaguely of disappointment.

And then the spiral begins.

Nico di Angelo is in his apartment.

In this apartment. With its flickering light, the bookshelf propped up by a brick, the drooping spider plant, the permanent stack of medical textbooks on the stove (he’s not cooking , who has time to cook?), and the throw blanket that’s technically clean but definitely lived several lives.

Will leans against the counter, head spinning. He hears the radiator hiss behind him, that signature death rattle like a dragon sighing through a straw.

He closes his eyes. This is it. This is my villain origin story.

Of all the apartments in New York, he had to walk into mine. The one held together by caffeine, borrowed textbooks, and inherited curses. He probably lives somewhere with actual light fixtures and a working intercom. Maybe even a balcony. He’s all pressed collars and ancient poetry, and I—

“Are you monologuing again?” Nico asks from behind him, dry.

Will startles so hard he drops the La Croix. It thunks harmlessly on the linoleum. “I wasn’t monologuing. I was… internally spiraling. Very different.”

Nico, still somehow composed after tequila and Dicked Down in Dallas , steps into the kitchen, arms crossed. He’s ditched his jacket, rolled his sleeves up, and looks like the star of an indie film about cursed heirs and doomed love.

Will considers fainting. Or throwing himself into the sink. The sink gurgles in agreement.

“So,” Nico says casually, leaning against the counter. “Highlights from the night?”

Will snorts. “Which part? The Dirty Dancing lift? The kazoo-accompanied sock elegy? Me yelling about being railed in Raleigh?”

“Honestly,” Nico replies, deadpan, “the kazoo was tasteful. Added drama.”

Will picks up the La Croix again and presses it to his forehead like a cold compress for shame. “You say that like you’re not horrified by my entire performance.”

“Oh, I’m horrified,” Nico says. “But only by the lyrics.”

Will peeks at him through his fingers. “You clapped.”

“You were entertaining,” Nico admits, a little smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. “And very… shiny.”

Will groans. “Don’t say shiny.”

“You were!” Nico shrugs, bumping their shoulders together. “Like a disco ball having a breakdown.”

Will sighs dramatically. “I’m never going to recover.”

“I’m going to bring it up every time you look smug for the next year.”

“Of course you are,” Will says. But he’s smiling.

He drinks the La Croix. It tastes like regrets and carbonation.

And when he lowers the can, Nico is still there, warm and steady, like none of it—the off-key singing, the neon sweat, the sheer absurdity of the night—bothered him one bit.

And for a second, Will thinks… maybe he doesn’t need to be embarrassed. Not with him.

Will stretches, makes a noise that’s somewhere between a yawn and a battle cry, and announces, “I’m taking a shower. Because I smell like tequila and the concept of regret. And I still have glitter on my face.”

They make their way out of the kitchen in a lazy shuffle—Will trailing heat and shampoo plans, Nico carrying a mug like it’s armor. When they reach the couch, Will tosses a thick, chaotic-looking binder onto Nico’s lap with a mischievous glint in his eye.

“This,” he says solemnly, “is one of Lou’s plays. May the gods have mercy.”

Nico doesn’t even look up as he settles deeper into the cushions, the binder resting ominously in his lap. “You reek of consequences.”

Will grins, already backing toward the bathroom. “You’re getting sassier. I don’t hate it.”

Nico lifts an unimpressed eyebrow and finally opens the binder. Will hears the faint rustle of pages, then Nico’s dry, flat voice: “ Act One: The Grief of Tap . …Okay.”

Will cackles as he disappears down the hallway. “It only gets worse from there.”

He snorts and disappears into the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes later, Will emerges—clean, slightly steadier on his feet, and feeling approximately 12% more human. He’s in his favorite plaid pajama bottoms, damp towel slung around his neck, and yeah, okay, he forgot a shirt, but whatever. It’s his apartment. He lives here. He can be shirtless in his own home.

He pads barefoot into the living room, hair still damp and curling at the ends, the cold air biting pleasantly at his chest and arms. Nico is where he left him, curled on the far side of the couch like a particularly judgmental gargoyle, binder open in his lap, expression unreadable.

Will flops down beside him with the grace of a man who still has tequila in his bloodstream. “So? What’s the verdict? Do we support Eurydice’s emotional tap solo or…?”

Nico makes a sound. It’s brief. Choked. Like he swallowed a word that might’ve been murder or moan.

Will blinks at him. “You good?”

“Fine,” Nico says—too fast, voice tight. His eyes snap back to the binder in his lap like it’s suddenly become very interesting or very dangerous. “It’s… ambitious. Lou Ellen should be restrained. But in, like, a loving way.”

Will laughs, then tosses the towel aside and leans over slightly to get a look at the page Nico’s on. His bare shoulder brushes Nico’s in the process—just a light, casual touch.

Nico goes very still.

Will doesn’t notice. Or he does, but he chalks it up to Nico just being Nico—eternally tense and perpetually annoyed by everyone, even the people he likes.

“I’m just saying,” Will continues, blissfully unaware, “if the birds appear on cue and she actually pulls off that smoke machine reveal in Act III? She’s either winning the campus theatre award or getting expelled. Could go either way.”

Nico makes a noncommittal noise. Will glances over—and pauses.

He’s flushed. Not dramatically, just a faint pink creeping across the tops of his cheeks, catching in the glow of the lamp like a secret.

Will frowns. “Are you warm? I can open a window—”

“I’m fine,” Nico says quickly—sharper than necessary. He clears his throat, eyes fixed on the same paragraph he’s been staring at for a full minute. “This apartment’s just… warm.”

Will hums, sitting back again. “Yeah, sorry. I’d turn on the AC but it’s possessed and only blasts Arctic death wind or nothing at all.”

Nico nods once. Stares directly at the coffee table like it contains the secrets of the universe.

Will, still not connecting a single dot, stretches—arms lifted high over his head, a low groan escaping as his spine cracks. His pajama pants slip just a little lower on his hips, exposing the sharp lines of his waist, the soft dip of skin above the waistband. “Ugh. That’s the good stuff.”

He glances sideways just in time to catch Nico very deliberately not looking at him.

Weird.

But also… not? Nico’s always like that. A little unreadable, a little tightly wound. He’s probably still stewing about the bar. Or the cab ride. Or the very real possibility that Lou Ellen actually bought a fog machine off eBay and plans to use it as a character in Act III.

Still—there’s something different in the silence now. Something quieter. Tighter. Like the air itself has gone still, waiting for something to break.

Will doesn’t notice the way Nico’s throat bobs. Doesn’t see the sharp breath he takes through his nose. Doesn’t catch the way Nico’s gaze flickers—just for a second—to the bare V of his hips before jerking back to the binder in his lap, like he’s trying to physically staple his attention elsewhere.

All Will knows is that he feels warm. Buzzed. Boneless and half-sunk into the couch. Drunk. Soft at the edges. There’s a storm of feelings building in his chest, but he can’t name them. All he knows is this: Nico is sitting beside him. Nico smells like leather and clean laundry. Nico read a cursed theatre script just because Will asked him to.

And Will is entirely, catastrophically in love.

Will smiles, small and soft. “You’re a good guy, you know that?”

Nico doesn’t look at him.

But he nods again—tight, like he has to wrestle the word into existence, “thanks.”

And then Will sighs like he’s just been told he can’t nap for a week. He drapes himself further across the couch, legs half-dangling, arm flung dramatically over his face like a starlet in a tragedy. The world still tilts a little every time he blinks, but he’s home, and Nico is beside him, and that should be enough to make up for everything.

But it isn’t.

“I hate this,” Will mutters, mostly to the ceiling. Or the gods. Or maybe just the vague sense of doom hovering over him like a drunken halo.

Nico—still sitting stiffly on the edge of the couch, doing a truly terrible job of pretending to be invested in Lou Ellen’s stage directions—glances over, cautious. “Hate what?”

Will groans and lets his arm slide dramatically off his face, fingers flopping onto the cushion. “That I have to go to bed.”

Nico blinks, caught off guard. “I—wasn’t aware that was a controversial decision.”

Will tries to sit up and nearly falls sideways instead, catching himself with a vaguely heroic flail. He gestures vaguely at the ceiling with the enthusiasm of someone who’s already lost the thread of his own story. “No, I mean—ugh. I have a lab tomorrow. A real one. The kind where if you show up late, Dr. Asclepius eats your GPA alive. And I already missed last week because of… something. Possibly emotional damage.”

Nico tilts his head, frowning like he’s trying to decode Will in real time. It’s not going great.

Will flops back again, sighing with the exaggerated agony of someone who’s had just enough tequila to be both dramatic and sincere. “I can’t skip again. He’ll smite me. He knows things. He has that witchy stare.”

“So…” Nico says slowly, like he’s trying to step around a trap, “you’re going to bed.”

Will nod solemnly. “Regretfully.”

There’s a pause. The air shifts.

Nico moves like someone unplugged from a socket—abrupt and awkward, pushing his hands against his knees like he’s launching himself into orbit. “Right. Okay. I’ll—yeah, I’ll head out then.”

Will bolts upright too fast. The room tilts sideways and he nearly goes with it. “No!” he blurts, voice too loud, too sharp.

Nico freezes mid-motion, wide-eyed.

Will blinks at him, heat rushing to his face. “I mean—not no like that. I just—I just—ugh.”

Words flee his brain like startled animals. His tongue feels clumsy, dry. Everything is spinning—Nico’s expression, the memory of his arm around Will in the cab, the smell of his coat, the way he looked curled up on Will’s couch, reading cursed theatre like scripture.

And then there’s the Italian. The memory of it—low and rich, curling through the air like smoke. 

And now he’s leaving?

Will fumbles toward clarity, trying not to trip over his own mouth. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he says again, softer this time. “I just—I would love for you to stay.”

It hangs there, raw and too honest.

Nico looks at him, finally, and it’s the longest eye contact they’ve made all night. His eyes are dark, unreadable—but focused, like Will is suddenly the only thing in the room worth looking at. His cheeks are still flushed, the red high on his cheekbones, and there’s a tension in his jaw that speaks of control being carefully held.

His mouth opens, then closes again. He swallows. His gaze snaps back to Will’s. Wide. Sharp. Searching.

But then—lower. Flickering, hesitant, hungry. Down over the slope of Will’s bare chest, the faint sheen of moisture on his skin, the subtle rise and fall of breath. His collarbone, his stomach, the soft indent just above the waistband of his pajama pants.

The air between them crackles—thick with something weightless but heavy. Like static. Like a storm about to break.

Will’s heartbeat stutters. He’s suddenly very aware of everything: the cool air on his overheated skin, the lazy sprawl of his own limbs, the way Nico’s eyes drag slowly, reluctantly, back up to meet his. There’s something there. Something undeniable.

And Will—glowing, drunk, aching—is helpless to stop the words from tumbling out.

“Like. I’d love nothing more than to take you to bed—”

Nico chokes.

Audibly. His whole body jerks like he’s been hit with a low-voltage curse. His mouth parts, stunned, but no sound comes out.

Will flinches, eyes wide. “Okay. Wait. Let me rephrase that.”

“You better,” Nico mutters, voice rough, ears burning pink, neck flushed a deep, telling red. It could be embarrassment. It could be heat. It could be both.

“I didn’t mean, like, take you to bed take you to bed,” Will stammers, hands flailing as if he can physically grab the words and drag them backward. “I mean—well, I do, obviously. I want to. Like, very badly. Oh gods, I’m making this worse.”

“You really are,” Nico croaks—but he doesn’t move away. Doesn’t shift. If anything, he leans slightly closer, elbows on his knees, binder forgotten between them. His gaze is fixed. Intense. And Will swears he can feel Nico’s pulse in the room, thrumming like a second heartbeat.

Will exhales, chest rising and falling too fast. His skin feels too tight, his blood buzzing under it. “I just meant—I don’t want anything like that. Not tonight. Not when I’m drunk out of my mind and taste like regret and lime juice, and I have to drag myself to bio lab in five hours and pretend I’m a functioning adult.”

There’s a beat.

Nico swallows again. Something in him eases—not entirely, but enough to let the edges soften. His voice, when it comes, is low. Rough. “Okay.”

Will nods. His voice drops, softer now, like something secret being given away. “I want to remember it. If it ever happens. If you ever… if we ever…”

He trails off, lightheaded from more than just tequila. Floating on heat and hope.

Nico’s eyes go unreadable again, but his voice isn’t. “Will,” he says, firm but low, like a vow. “Don’t worry—I’m not going to try and crawl into bed with you. You’re still too drunk for that, I wouldn’t do that to you. I want—I just…yeah, you’re right. Not like this..”

Will swears he feels the words settle on his skin like warmth. Not the sharp heat of embarrassment or shame—real warmth. Like sunlight breaking over a horizon. Like something sacred being protected.

Something unknots in his ribcage, and he lets the air slip free.

Because Nico’s right. He is too drunk. His head is fuzzy, his body loose and strange, the kind of tired that makes him reckless. He wants—gods, he wants—but that doesn’t mean he’s ready. And the fact that Nico knows that, that he said it out loud, that he’s protecting them both from regret without making Will feel foolish for wanting him—

For as long as Will’s known Nico, he’s seemed untouchable. Sharp edges and quiet strength and that effortless self-possession that comes from knowing how to keep the world at a distance. Will never really imagined he’d get to touch him. To hold him. To want this—whatever this is—with the kind of hunger that strips you bare.

But what stuns him most is how safe he feels.

Not because Nico is being gentle—though he is. Not because Nico said no, even though it was what Will needed to hear. But because there’s never even a shadow of doubt in his mind that Nico would ever push him too far. Never a moment when Will has to wonder if his boundaries would be respected.

He trusts him. Implicitly. Irrevocably.

And he hadn’t realized, until now, how rare that feeling was. How sacred.

The warmth lingers beneath his ribs, fragile and golden. He doesn’t feel small under Nico’s gaze—he feels seen. Held, even when they’re not touching. Like Nico’s not trying to take anything from him, but offering something instead.

“Okay,” he murmurs. “Cool. Glad we’re on the same page.”

There’s another stretch of silence, thick with everything unsaid. Not tense—just charged. Soft and brimming with restraint.

Will snorts and flops back against the couch. “Because I think I’d break something.”

And what he doesn’t say—but thinks, hazy and full of quiet affection—is: I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to mess this up. I want our first time to mean something. 

“Your dignity,” Nico replies dryly.

“Long gone,” Will grins, closing his eyes. “It fled the moment I said ‘ do-si-do, motherfucker .’”

Nico snorts, then stands, brushing off his jeans like he’s shaking something out of himself. He doesn’t quite meet Will’s eyes as he says, softer now, “Alright. I’ll go. Let you get some sleep before your lab.”

Will watches as Nico crosses the room, fluid and quiet, pausing at the door to shrug into his coat. His silhouette glows faintly in the light spilling from the kitchen—sharp angles and shadowed eyes. He lingers there, hand on the doorknob like it’s the thing tethering him to the earth.

Then he glances over his shoulder. “We’ll do this again. When you’re less drunk. And not covered in tequila and… poor choices.”

Will groans into the couch cushion. “I was hoping you’d forget the vomit.”

“I won’t,” Nico says, smirking like sin and starlight. “But maybe next time, you’ll remember the good parts.”

Will lifts his head just enough to watch him go. Nico lingers a beat too long—just long enough that Will’s breath catches, that something in his chest glows warm and honeyed and aching.

And then the door clicks shut.

Will slumps back into the couch, dizzy and bare-chested and hopelessly in love. The room sways. The ceiling spins.

Outside, the city hums like it doesn’t care.

Inside, Will closes his eyes and smiles, soft and secret, like he’s holding something fragile in his palms.

He tastes lime and longing on his tongue.

And dreams of dark eyes and restraint dressed in kindness.

And a promise—unspoken, but certain—that this isn’t the end.

Notes:

Hello beloved readers!!

First of all—thank you SO much for all the love. Every comment, every kudos, every little scream into the void genuinely means the world to me. I’ve been floored (and occasionally feral) at how kind, funny, and ridiculously clever you all are. The love you’ve given this fic makes my whole week, and I just want you to know I see you, I adore you, and I am clutching my heart like a Victorian heroine in a thunderstorm about it.

Special shoutout to those of you who include your favourite quotes or moments in your comments—you are my weakness. Like, yes. Please tell me what lines made you laugh, cry, clutch your phone like it personally betrayed you. It’s so fun seeing what parts resonate with people, and it keeps me going more than I can say.

I am trying to reply to everyone’s comments, but alas, Ao3 has decided I am suspicious and keeps thinking I’m a bot. Which is both hilarious and tragic. So if you’re wondering why I take so long to reply to your beautiful words—it’s not ghosting, it’s Ao3 shenanigans. I literally have a backlog of responses typed in my notes app waiting for the sacred window where I can post them without being smited by the algorithm.

Anyway—new chapter! I hope you enjoy it. I hope it makes you laugh, swoon, and maybe want to yell at the characters for being disasters, and me for writing them that way. And yes, the slow burn continues to burn even *slower*. I am both sorry and not sorry.

Thank you again for all the love. You are my favourite kind of chaos.

Chapter 22: Bio Lab Nearly Kills Me, But Nico di Angelo Giving Me a Scarf Resurrects Me Like a Victorian Bride

Notes:

the amount of love on the last chapter...guys you are all to kind and too sweet, i love you all endlessly, here's some more gay yearning, as a treat <3

Will wakes up to the dulcet tones of hell.

Specifically, Lou Ellen pounding on his bedroom door like she’s hunting ghosts and Cecil shouting, “ Rise and regret, sunshine! ” from somewhere deep in the apartment—but somehow it echoes directly inside Will’s left ear like a curse.

He groans. Everything hurts. His mouth is the Sahara. His tongue feels like it’s been sandpapered by a vengeful god. His stomach is doing advanced interpretive dance. His skull is actively attempting a jailbreak through his temples. His spine crackles when he breathes. The light seeping in through the curtains is both too bright and aggressively judgmental.

He is, medically speaking, a biohazard.

The door bursts open with the subtlety of divine wrath.

“Did you die?” Lou Ellen demands, squinting into the room.

“I want to,” Will mumbles from under his blanket.

Cecil pokes his head in. “Do you remember anything after you and Nico disappeared into the night like cursed soulmates?”

Will lets out a long, high-pitched noise and shoves the blanket over his head. “Please let this be a dream.”

Lou Ellen throws herself dramatically onto the foot of his bed. “Come on. We were respecting your privacy . And definitely not taking bets. But now it’s morning and I need answers. What happened? Did you kiss? Did you cry? Did he seduce you in Latin? Ancient Greek? Did you die? ”

Will peeks out from beneath the comforter, eyes bloodshot and haunted. “I remember… vomit.”

Cecil winces. “Oh, buddy.”

“Did he see the vomit?” Lou Ellen asks, scandalized.

Will nod slowly, like a man remembering war.

Cecil hands him a water bottle like a priest offering holy relics. “And yet he stayed?”

Will takes a sip, then another, then flops back down. “He held my wrist. Then held me in his arms in the cab.  And told Percy and Jason to get me water. Like he was— in charge .”

The words hang in the air like an electric current, and Will immediately wants to take a third sip just to cool down his face.

Because gods, he liked it. Liked the firmness of Nico’s grip, the quiet authority in his voice, the way he took control without making a scene. Will had been an absolute mess—drunk, reeling, mortified—and Nico had just handled it. Had handled him.

And yeah, okay. Maybe it is the hangover talking. Or the fact that his entire body is still buzzing with residual tequila and sexual frustration. But being manhandled by Nico di Angelo? Carried like some tragic romantic heroine in a Victorian fainting spell?

Will’s pretty sure that alone accounted for at least 30% of his current headache and 100% of his current problem.

Lou Ellen’s eyes go wide. “Oh no.”

“Oh yes ,” Will says, voice hoarse. “He was speaking Italian. Italian , Lou. He and the cab driver were just… chatting. In this hot, calm, murdery tone. I couldn’t understand anything. It was erotic and terrifying. ”

“Wait, wait,” Cecil says, eyes gleaming. “He spoke Italian ? To a cab driver? While cradling you in his arms like a sexy fallen angel with a hero complex?”

“I think they were talking about me.” Will presses a hand to his forehead. “I mean, I very much felt like I was being talked about. But I can’t be sure, because I was very drunk, and Nico was speaking Italian while holding me in his arms, so my brain short-circuited and could only process how absurdly hot he is. Everything else was just static and cologne fumes. And then I said something about how pretty he is. Out loud. In English. Like a fool. ”

Lou Ellen is vibrating. “Okay but that’s not even the worst part, is it?”

Will groans. “No. Because then. Then. I invited him to bed .”

Cecil gasps. “You what? ”

Will gestures vaguely at the ceiling. “I don’t even remember saying it. I just know that one minute I was wrapped in a towel, and the next I was declaring my undying thirst in the general direction of his face.”

Lou Ellen collapses backwards onto the mattress, cackling. “Oh gods. Tell me you didn’t try to kiss him.”

“No!” Will says. “I mean—I don’t think so. I wanted to, but I also tasted like vomit and failure, so thankfully my last brain cell took over and powered down my motor functions.”

Cecil wipes a tear from his eye. “This is incredible. This is Shakespearean .”

Will clutches the blanket tighter. “It was supposed to be flirty . Like, hot. And then I puked and said ‘take me to bed’ like I was auditioning for a period drama and an exorcism.”

Lou Ellen pats his leg sympathetically. “So what now? You gonna call him?”

“I don’t have his number. But I do have bio lab,” Will says miserably.

There’s a beat of silence.

Then Cecil yells, “You have bio lab in fifteen minutes!”

Will shoots upright and immediately regrets it. The world tilts. His body screams.

He freezes. Blinks. Blinks again.

Fifteen—?

“No,” he croaks. “No, that can’t be right, I set an alarm, I had time—”

He fumbles for his phone, thumbs shaking, eyes barely able to focus as the lock screen comes into view. 8:45 a.m. His lab starts at 9:00. Panic slams into him like a second hangover.

“Oh my gods,” he gasps. “I have to—I have to find my notes—where are my shoes?”

“Bold of you to assume you wore shoes home,” Lou Ellen says, peeling a grape.

“No,” he whimpers, collapsing back onto his bed with the exaggerated despair of someone auditioning for a tragic opera. “I can’t go to lab. I’ll contaminate the petri dishes with shame.”

Lou Ellen doesn’t miss a beat. She storms in from the hallway with the righteous fury of a stage manager fifteen minutes before curtain and hurls one of Will’s sneakers directly onto the bed. “You puked in front of your crush and invited him to bed. You can handle a microscope.”

Will groans into his pillow, then peeks out with one bloodshot eye. “Barely,” he mutters, groping around for his other shoe like it might crawl under the bed to escape him.

Cecil moves to the doorway, leaning dramatically against the frame, nursing coffee from a chipped mug shaped like a skull. “And if it helps,” he says, voice way too chipper, “we’re very proud of you. And also a little scared of what’s gonna happen the next time Nico sees you.”

Will tries to sit up and immediately regrets it—he sways like a broken marionette, grabbing the bedpost to steady himself. “I am never drinking again,” he croaks, patting his chest like he’s checking for signs of life.

“You say that,” Lou Ellen says, not unkindly, now shoving his backpack into his arms. “Now go. Go be a scientist, you hot mess of a mythological metaphor.”

Will stumbles toward the door, one shoe still untied, muttering something about mitochondria and the fragility of human dignity.

***

Will is 73% sure he’s dead.

Not in the fun, poetic way—no Greek tragedy, no softly glowing ghosts drifting through Elysium—just dead in the deeply unsexy, stomach-lurching, academically doomed way. Corporeally. Emotionally. Spiritually.

He’s slumped over his lab bench like a dying Victorian heroine, squinting at the harsh overhead lights with all the loathing of a vampire being forcibly baptized. His lab coat is wrinkled, his notes are smudged with existential despair, and his brain is dribbling out his ears.

Next to him, Michael Yew—who got paired with him after the first week because their original lab partners both defected to saner pastures—chews a pen with the intensity of someone imagining it’s Will’s spine.

“You look like you got hit by a tractor. Then hit on by the tractor. Then the tractor ghosted you.”

Will groans. “Please don’t use verbs around me.”

Michael rolls his eyes. “You better pull it together, Solace. If I have to carry this lab again because you were too busy doing body shots off some emotionally unavailable twink, I swear to the gods—what did you do last night?” he interrupts himself, squinting at Will with reluctant curiosity, like he’s bracing for impact.

Will drops his forehead to the lab bench. “Country mashups. Public humiliation. Very possibly confessed something dramatic and romantic while covered in tequila and a little vomit.”

Michael makes an unimpressed noise. “Of course you did. Was there kissing?”

Will lifts his head just enough to squint at the microscope in front of him. “No. There was vomiting. Then I think I invited a boy to bed. In that order.”

Michael sighs deeply. “Dude.”

“I hate myself.”

Doctor Asclepius sweeps past—unblinking, eagle-eyed, radiating the exact energy of someone who once watched a student mix bleach with ethanol and has never recovered.

“Mr. Solace,” he says, not slowing. “If you contaminate this lab with your hangover, I will give your spot to the nearest potted plant.”

Will straightens like he’s been struck by Zeus himself. “Understood, sir.”

Michael snorts, passing him the staining solution. “You’re so lucky I don’t let you crash and burn. So, who’s the guy?”

Will doesn’t answer immediately.

Because how do you explain Nico di Angelo to someone like Michael Yew? How do you explain a boy carved from midnight and mythology, with a voice like a cello string and eyes that make you feel like you’re being studied and understood at the same time? How do you explain the way he lingers when he doesn’t have to, or the way held you in his arms in the back of a taxi cab like it meant something ancient?

Instead, Will mutters, “A friend. Kind of.”

Michael huffs. “A friend you want to do ungodly things to?”

Will fumbles the pipette and nearly knocks over the tray.

Michael catches it with one hand, lightning-fast, and glares at him. “Focus, you hungover disaster, I’ll take that as a yes,” he mutters, dropping the pipette back into the holder with more force than necessary. “Gods, I’m too old for this.”

Will stares into the microscope like it might tell him how to live his life. But it’s just blood cells. Stained and swollen, tidy or sick. Red and white and purple. No advice. Just shapes.

He thinks about Nico.

All monochrome—black coat, pale skin, dark eyes, quiet restraint. Like someone pressed from shadow and bone, a study in contrast. White knuckles. Black boots. The gray space between.

But sometimes, Nico blushes.

A faint flush high on his cheekbones when he’s caught off guard. The soft, startling pink of his ears when he’s teased. Will has seen it exactly twice and thinks about it more than is healthy.

He wants to see more. Wants to be the reason for color.

Wants Nico with red lips from kissing. Flushed cheeks from heat and want. Hickeys blooming violet at his collarbones like some dark, delicate constellation. He wants to trace them with his mouth. Map them with his hands. Learn Nico’s body like it’s anatomy and poetry at once.

He adjusts the fine focus on the microscope. The slide shifts.

Still no answers.

Just the ache. Just the want. Just the blood in his own veins, pounding out a rhythm of want, want, want .

He sighs and rests his chin on his palm, vision already starting to blur again.

Nico’s face—cool and unreadable and heartbreakingly soft at the edges—flickers in the back of his mind. The feel of Nico’s coat brushing his arm. Nico’s voice in Italian. That smirk. Will pinches the bridge of his nose.

He still doesn’t have Nico’s number. He doesn’t know what to say. And if he doesn’t get his shit together, he’s going to fail bio and die alone with nothing but shame and vaguely erotic country music memories to keep him company.

Gods, he hopes Nico remembers the good parts.

(He also hopes he never remembers “ ate out in Austin .”)

By minute twenty-five of the lab, Will is fully convinced the ethanol fumes are liquefying his frontal lobe.

“This is a hate crime,” he mutters, squinting into the microscope like it might jump-scare him. “I’m going to throw up again. And this time, it won’t be Leo Valdez’s fault. It’ll be these lymphocytes.”

“It’s a leukemia slide,” Michael corrects, stabbing their worksheet with his pen. “Try not to contaminate it with your feelings.”

Will gags. “Why does it look like it’s judging me?”

“Because it is, and so am I.”

Will clutches the edge of the table like it might stop the room from tilting. The smell of ethanol and stain is clinging to his clothes, his mouth, his soul. He’s sweating, trembling, and vaguely hallucinating a tiny cowboy hat on one of the neutrophils.

He swears it winks at him.

“Okay,” Will croaks. “I’m officially dead. This is the afterlife. I died somewhere between the tequila and the eurotrash Cotton Eye Joe remix and now I’m in hell.”

Michael shrugs. “Honestly? Respectable way to go.”

Will fumbles his gloves on with the enthusiasm of a man preparing to enter battle with no armor and a plastic butter knife. The gloves squeak against his clammy palms, fingers catching, twisting, snapping. He glares at the latex like it personally betrayed him.

“I’m a healer,” he mutters. “A future doctor. I shouldn’t be here.”

The fluorescents above buzz like a migraine in light form. The whole lab smells like antiseptic and academic despair—formaldehyde, bleach, and the subtle undertone of crushed dreams.

“You’re in a hematology lab,” Michael replies without looking up, scribbling on their worksheet like he’s writing a Yelp review of the ninth circle of hell. “Seems kinda relevant, genius.”

“This isn’t medicine,” Will hisses, clutching the pipette like a rosary. “This is torture.”

“It’s blood, Will.”

Will peers through the microscope. “It’s white blood cells that look like angry raisins. I’m being punished.”

Michael snorts. “You know who’d be good at this?”

Will doesn’t even look up. “If you say Nico di Angelo, I will drink the staining reagent.”

“I was gonna say Frank Zhang,” Michael says. “But now that you mention it, yeah, di Angelo probably embalms frogs for fun.”

Will lets out a noise somewhere between a gasp and a sob, slouching over the lab bench like a Victorian heroine with a weak constitution. His goggles are fogging. His lab coat has a coffee stain from last week that he hasn’t bothered to explain. His stomach gurgles ominously.

The centrifuge whirs like it’s mocking him.

“I need help,” Will moans. “I need Gatorade. I need a priest.”

Michael sighs and claps a gloved hand on his shoulder like a battlefield medic. “Buddy. Idiot. Disaster. Focus. One cell cluster at a time.”

Will makes a wounded noise as he stares down the slide again, praying for divine intervention—or maybe just a campus-wide power outage.

At this point, either would work.

And then, as Michael adjusts the slide for a smear of iron-deficiency anemia, Will stares down the microscope and sees nothing but the shape of his own undoing. Not from the lab. Not from Nico. Not from the impossible gentleness of last night—the soft ache of limbs brushing in the dark, the weight of Nico’s gaze, the promise tucked behind a nearly-kiss.

It felt like a beginning.

Something fragile and electric. Something terrifying in its possibility.

He doesn’t know if he’s ready.

But gods, he wants it.

Wants the slow unraveling, the bite of longing beneath his ribs, the heat of Nico’s hands on his skin. Wants to learn every language Nico speaks—Italian, sarcasm, silence, devotion. Wants to be fluent in them all.

He adjusts his goggles and exhales softly, but it doesn’t help.

Because no microscope slide could ever offer answers to what burns behind his ribs.

And recovery, he’s beginning to realize, was never the goal.

***

Will stumbles out of the lab like a man who’s barely survived a war.

He’s pale. Sweaty. Smelling faintly of formaldehyde and defeat. His lab coat is crumpled in his arms like a shroud. He’s not sure he’s walking in a straight line, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Except maybe sleep. Or maybe an exorcism.

He’s halfway to collapsing on the nearest bench when he sees him.

Nico .

Leaning against the brick wall just outside the science building like he’s been carved there—cool and immutable and entirely too composed for someone who had to drag Will home covered in tequila and shame last night. He’s dressed in black, of course, but this time it’s intentional. Curated. A fitted black turtleneck beneath a sharply tailored coat, all smooth lines and quiet defiance. There are silver rings on his fingers, glinting when he shifts, and a soft charcoal scarf looped once around his neck, the ends falling just so against the lapels of his coat. The fabric looks expensive—like something salvaged from a dead prince’s wardrobe—and it only makes him look more unreal.

Sunglasses are perched on top of his head, pinning back his unruly hair like some casually devastating crown. His boots are planted in that maddening, effortless way—one ankle crossed over the other, posture relaxed but alert, like he could either start a conversation or end a bloodline depending on how Will greets him.

He looks like a Renaissance painting that gave up on sainthood and decided to minor in seduction. And he’s holding a paper bag.

Will nearly trips over his own feet.

It’s fine. He catches himself. Mostly.

His pulse is suddenly, clinically alarming. Elevated. Fast. His mouth is dry. His hands are cold, but the rest of him is overheated, flustered, spiraling—classic symptoms of what he will now be documenting as Acute Nico Exposure Syndrome . He doesn’t need a stethoscope to know his heart is thundering. Doesn’t need a lab to know he’s glowing. Not metaphorically. Literally glowing.

Nico straightens slightly when he sees him. There’s a flicker of something across his face—relief, maybe. Or fondness, cool and hidden like the ember of a flame beneath ash.

Will’s voice is already halfway lost in his throat, but he forces it up. “You’re... here.”

Nico lifts the bag slightly. “I brought carbs.”

Will, fully wrecked, just nods, because that’s the sexiest thing anyone’s ever said to him.

And gods, the scarf. Will wants to unloop it with his teeth.

Nico pushes off the wall, steps closer, and—gods—he smells like cloves and winter air. Will wants to curl up and cry into his coat.

“This is for you,” Nico says, lifting the bag.

Will stares at it. Then at him. “Is that…?”

““Hangover supplies,” Nico confirms, as if it’s nothing. “Gatorade. Tylenol. Crackers. Gum. Also a granola bar because I just know you didn’t eat yet.”

Will can only blink.

It’s such a simple gesture—mundane, even. But to Will, it feels tectonic. Like the kind of small kindness that rearranges something fundamental inside you.

“You brought all that for me?” he asks, a little stunned.

“You said you had an early lab,” Nico replies, shifting just slightly. His voice is quieter now. “I figured you’d need it.”

Will is going to melt. He’s going to become a puddle of formaldehyde and longing on the quad. He’s not sure if it’s the blood sugar drop or the sheer emotional weight of the moment, but something in him is dangerously close to short-circuiting.

His brain—desperate for grounding—clings to the facts.

Gatorade : Electrolytes to counteract dehydration, sodium and potassium to ease the muscle cramps building in his shoulders.

Tylenol : Acetaminophen, not ibuprofen—safer for his already protesting liver.

Crackers : Bland, absorbent, the best thing for nausea this side of an actual stomach transplant.

Gum : Saliva production. Helps with the dry mouth and the sour taste of regret.

Granola bar: Carbs. Protein. Exactly the thing to stabilize blood sugar and stop him from blacking out during in his post-lab traumatised state.

Will knows all of this. Has prescribed some version of this hangover kit to half the campus at some point. But no one’s ever done it for him.

And that’s the thing. Nico remembered. He listened. He thought about it—about him—and then he did something about it. No fanfare, no teasing. Just quiet, intentional care.

It shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

But it is.

It’s everything.

“You brought me Gatorade,” Will whispers, eyes wide. “You’re—literally—an angel of mercy.”

“I’m not an angel,” Nico mutters, but the tips of his ears are pink. His gaze flickers—over Will’s face, down to the unbuttoned collar of his shirt, then back up again like he’s trying not to look too long. But he is looking. And gods, Will feels it.

Will’s brain short-circuits.

Because no, maybe Nico isn’t an angel—but he looks like one. A fallen thing. Too sharp for heaven, too beautiful for earth. And that name—di Angelo—it shouldn’t fit, but it does. Like some cruel joke the universe played when sculpting cheekbones like that and giving him a mouth made for silence and sin.

Will can’t stop staring. Can’t stop feeling it—the way Nico watches him like he’s just as much of a mess, like he wants to touch and doesn’t know how to ask. Will wants to say yes. Wants to say please.

He suddenly remembers that he’s flushed and disgusting and vaguely damp with trauma sweat. He probably has blood in his hair. He resists the urge to hide behind the bag.

“You’re too good to me,” he mumbles, taking it. “I mean, seriously. You saw me throw up tequila. I think I offered to take you to bed. I vaguely recall—did I hallucinate you speaking Italian to a cab driver?”

Nico lifts an eyebrow. “Unfortunately, you didn’t hallucinate any of that, or fortunately—depends how you want to play this.”

Will groans and buries his face in the crook of his elbow. “I want to die again. And this time, let me stay dead.”

Nico lets out the smallest huff of a laugh. “Eat something. Then you’re allowed to die.”

Will peeks up at him, stomach flipping in ways that have nothing to do with nausea now. “Thanks. For this. Really.”

Nico just shrugs again. But his voice is soft when he says, “Anytime.”

And Will—hungover, aching, still reeking of formalin—can’t help but grin like an idiot.

Because Nico di Angelo just brought him Gatorade.

And that feels dangerously close to love.

They end up walking through the quad.

It’s one of those bright, too-crisp mornings where everything feels just a little too loud—birdsong, bike wheels on pavement, undergrads throwing frisbees like they’re auditioning for Olympic chaos. Will has to squint at the sunlight even with his sunglasses on (Nico’s sunglasses, he’s somehow acquired them, don’t ask), and he still feels like a human-shaped hangover with legs, but… Nico’s walking beside him.

And somehow, that makes everything quieter.

They stroll past the fountain, then the old stone path with the wisteria arch that looks way more romantic than Will can currently handle. Nico’s hands are stuffed in the pockets of his coat, his shoulder bumping Will’s occasionally as they move.

Will peels open the granola bar from the survival bag and takes a bite. It tastes like sawdust and salvation.

“You feeling human again?” Nico asks.

“Debatable,” Will says through a mouthful of oats. “I’ve regained language. That’s about it.”

There’s a soft huff of a laugh beside him.

They walk a little more in companionable silence, passing students hunched over laptops on the grass, a dog in a sweater, a couple making out under a tree like they’ve invented kissing. Will tries not to feel jealous. Not of them—just of the simplicity.

“So,” Nico says, tilting his head slightly. “I’m supposed to remind you that you drunkenly agreed to go mechanical bull riding next week.”

Will nearly chokes. “I what ?”

“Leo has it booked. There was a flyer. You were enthusiastic.”

“I need to be institutionalized,” Will moans. “Please tell me you’re not going.”

Nico’s mouth twitches. “You asked me to. Said—and I quote— ‘If I die, I want it to be in your arms or on a bull .’”

Will stops walking. “Oh gods.”

“I said yes,” Nico adds casually, eyes forward, like he’s talking about the weather.

Will groans into his sleeve. “I don’t even remember that.”

Nico hums, glancing sidelong at him. “How much do you remember?”

It’s not accusing. Not judgmental. Just… careful. Measured. Like he wants to know what’s still theirs and what got lost somewhere between tequila and chaos.

Will runs a hand through his curls, and exhales like he’s trying to empty out a pressure valve inside his chest. His heart still feels too close to the surface, like a bruise you don’t remember getting—tender, unexplained.

“Not much,” he admits. “Country Girl, the vomiting… you speaking Italian. I think I might’ve told you you’re pretty?”

“You did,” Nico confirms, tone unreadable.

Will winces. “Oh gods. Was I… awful?”

Nico is quiet for a moment.

Then he says, softly, “No. You were—” He hesitates. “You were just you.”

Just you.

The words slide beneath Will’s skin like a thread through a needle. And yet—something in them itches. There’s something else, something that didn’t make it through the haze of alcohol and chaos, something important, and Will can feel the absence of it like a missing tooth.

There’s a space in his memory shaped like Nico—something warm and tender and half-expressed. Like he reached for something in the dark and almost grasped it. Almost.

Will risks a glance at him. Nico’s still looking ahead, profile calm and composed, but his ears are pink. There’s something behind his eyes too—an echo of something said, or heard, or felt.

Will swallows, suddenly unsteady. “Did I say anything else? Like, anything important?”

Nico shrugs. “Nothing you can’t say again. Sober.”

It’s a gentle answer. It should be reassuring. But it lands somewhere low in Will’s stomach, soft and warm and flickering—like a lit match resting on the edge of kindling.

He knows he said something. He can feel the ghost of it in his chest. Like the echo of a secret his heart is still keeping from him.

But Nico’s not pushing.

And maybe that’s the hardest part—knowing that something might’ve slipped out, something real, and he missed it. Or worse: Nico didn’t.

But still. There’s no accusation in his voice. No teasing. Just patience.

And that bright, fluttering thing in Will’s chest—hope, maybe, or the beginning of a second chance—stirs again.

He clears his throat, awkward again. “Do I still have to ride the bull?”

Nico glances at him, deadpan. “Absolutely.”

Will groans. “You hate me.”

“I really, really don’t,” Nico says.

And Will, dizzy and aching, can’t stop the smile that spreads across his face.

They keep walking, a few steps beyond the archway now, the buzz of campus life humming around them like static. Will’s fingers toy with the edge of the granola wrapper in his pocket, his heartbeat climbing again for entirely non-medical reasons.

He clears his throat. “So. Uh. About the cab ride.”

Nico’s head tilts ever so slightly, but he doesn’t respond right away. Just keeps walking.

Will barrels ahead, courage bolstered by adrenaline and leftover sugar from the juice Nico gave him. “You were speaking Italian. I didn’t understand it, obviously, but I knew that wasn’t about soccer.”

Nico exhales—barely a sound, almost a sigh. “Of course it wasn’t about soccer.”

Will grins. “Ha! Knew it. You lied.”

“I panicked,” Nico mutters.

Will nudges him with his shoulder. “So what was it about?”

Nico looks like he’s seriously considering pretending he doesn’t remember. But after a long pause, he sighs and says, almost too casually, “The driver asked if you were my boyfriend.”

Will nearly trips over his own feet.

He recovers with a wobbly laugh and a triumphant, “ Knew it. I knew he was asking about me.”

“You were mumbling about my face,” Nico says dryly, but there’s a flicker of pink across his cheekbones. “He assumed.”

Will grins wider, almost giddy. “What’d you say?”

Nico doesn’t answer right away.

That’s what makes Will pause. Really pause. Because suddenly, Nico’s gaze isn’t amused anymore—it’s distant. Guarded. He’s gone quiet, the way he sometimes does when the conversation shifts too close to something tender.

“You didn’t like the question,” Will says, gentler now.

Nico hesitates. Then shakes his head, just once. “I didn’t know how to answer it.”

Will’s smile falters—but only for a second. He pushes through it, the way he always does when he’s not sure if his heart is allowed to hope.

“Okay, but… would it be so bad?” he asks, and the words feel like something more than casual. Like a line being drawn, a quiet invitation.

Nico stops walking.

Will turns, the wind catching the edge of his jacket. His heart launches itself into his throat, banging against the back of his ribs like it’s trying to claw its way out.

“If someone thought I was your boyfriend,” he continues, his voice quieter now, more fragile. “If I was your boyfriend. Would that be… awful?”

Nico doesn’t answer.

Not right away. Not for a long, heavy moment.

And in that silence, Will spirals.

Because last night, in a haze of warmth and vulnerability, Nico had called him a friend. And Will had smiled, nodded, said nothing—because what else could he say? That it wasn’t enough? That the word scraped against something tender inside him? That being just friends felt like witnessing a masterpiece he wasn’t allowed to touch?

Nico had curled around him like something precious but out of reach, like a gift wrapped in caution tape. And Will had clung to that closeness anyway, not with contentment, but with the desperate ache of someone pretending it was enough. Pretending it didn’t crack something open in him just to be near and unloved in the way he wanted.

But this moment feels different. Like something’s balancing on a knife’s edge—something Will isn’t sure he’s allowed to want.

His pulse stutters. Maybe he’s pushed too far. Misread the signs. Built something out of tension and kindness and proximity, and imagined it was love. Maybe this—whatever this is—was never more than friendship with a few extra heartbeats thrown in.

But then—

“No,” Nico says. Softly. Firmly. Like he’s choosing the word on purpose. “It wouldn’t be bad at all.”

Will exhales like the sun just broke through cloud cover.

There’s something too big in his chest. Something golden and tender and unspooling at the edges, like he might start glowing if Nico so much as looks at him. Which—he doesn’t. Nico’s gaze stays on the grass, or the trees, or some impossible horizon, his jaw tight like the words cost him something. But they’re there. Spoken. Real. Anchored now in the space between them.

Will lets his arm brush against Nico’s, casual and deliberate all at once.

“You know,” he murmurs, emboldened by the echo of that single, perfect no, “you could ask for my number. Like, if you wanted.”

Nico huffs. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. “I know.”

Will grins, sharp with wonder. “Just checking.”

Nico’s voice is still echoing in his ears, tucked into every pulse point: No. It wouldn’t be bad at all.

And Will doesn’t breathe for a second. Maybe more. The silence that follows doesn’t drag him under this time—it lifts him. Like a tide rising just to carry him forward. Something tugs behind his ribs, gentle and wild all at once.

Nico still isn’t looking at him.

But the words are there. And Will knows.

He’s not imagining it.

And that’s when the moment shatters.

Footsteps. Loud, fast, chaotic ones. Will doesn’t even have to look up to know.

Leo.

“ My favorite emotionally repressed duo! ” Leo crows as he jogs up to them like he’s being chased by an idea. He’s grinning, sunglasses slightly askew, hair windblown like he’s just come from doing something illegal and probably flammable.

Hazel and Frank follow more slowly—Hazel with her arms crossed and eyes narrowed like she already regrets being associated with Leo in public, Frank walking with the tentative patience of a man who knows exactly what kind of chaos he’s wading into and has simply resigned himself to it.

Nico straightens immediately. The tension in his shoulders returns like a snap. His expression shutters.

Will pulls back too, blinking like he’s been shaken awake. He instinctively steps a little to the side, like distance might make his flushed cheeks less obvious.

Hazel’s eyes flicker between them, too perceptive for anyone’s good. Frank doesn’t say anything, but his brow rises just enough to count.

Leo, oblivious as ever, barrels onward. “Sooo... have you picked out your bull riding outfit yet, Will?”

Will glares at him. “Leo.”

“I’m thinking fringe. Or sequins. Or fringe and sequins.”

“ Leo .”

“Picture it,” Leo continues dreamily. “You. A mechanical bull. That country accent coming out like a battle cry. Nico in the front row, probably swooning—”

Will makes a strangled noise. Nico doesn’t look at him, but Will feels the sideways glance.

Hazel clears her throat, loudly.

Frank pretends to examine a nearby trash can with sudden, intense interest.

Leo spreads his hands. “Look, all I’m saying is, if I don’t get to watch you flail around like an anxious rodeo prince, I’m going to be emotionally devastated.”

Will mutters something that sounds suspiciously like “I’m going to flail you off a roof.”

But Leo just grins wider and slaps him on the back. “Thursday, baby. It’s destiny.”

Nico shifts beside Will. Not far, not cold—just enough that Will can feel the shift in mood like a change in barometric pressure. The moment is gone. The words still linger, sweet and electric, but they’ve been tucked away again, sealed between them.

Hazel loops her arm through Leo’s. “We were heading to grab coffee. You guys coming?”

Nico hesitates. Will does too, uncertain.

But then Nico glances over at him—brief, unreadable—and says, “Maybe later.”

Hazel nods like she understands something neither of them have said. She gently pulls Leo along, who’s still describing various rhinestone vest options like he’s building a Pinterest board in his head.

Frank, the last to turn away, gives Will a subtle, encouraging smile.

And just like that, it’s quiet again.

Will exhales. “We… were having a moment, weren’t we?”

Nico hums. “We were.”

Will presses a hand to his face. “Gods. Leo.”

Nico’s voice is quiet, amused. “You’re still cute when you suffer.”

Will groans into his palm. “This is my villain origin story.”

The quad is quieter now. Leo’s chaos has faded into the distance, and the late-morning air wraps around them with a sharp chill. Will hadn’t noticed it before—not over the hangover haze and Nico’s proximity—but now it sinks into his skin, quick and mean.

He shivers.

Nico notices. Of course he notices.

“You’re freezing,” he murmurs, like it’s a personal insult.

“I’m hungover,” Will mutters, tugging his hoodie tighter around himself. “My body’s in crisis. I’m usually warm. Like… obnoxiously warm.”

Nico hums. “Not today.”

Then—wordlessly—he unwinds his scarf.

It’s soft. Black. Worn in the way things get when they’ve been lived in, not discarded. And Nico steps forward, closing the space between them with deliberate ease.

Will blinks. “You don’t have to—”

“Let me,” Nico says.

And gods, Will lets him.

Nico lifts the scarf and moves close—closer than necessary. Will’s breath catches as Nico drapes it around his neck, his fingers brushing the skin just below Will’s ear, then trailing down the line of his throat.

It’s a gentle motion. A perfectly innocent touch.

Will nearly groans.

He feels like he’s been set on fire—his neck is flushed, his pulse thudding so hard it’s almost dizzying. He’s aware of every nerve in his body, every brush of wool and skin and warmth. Nico’s hands are steady. Patient. Too patient.

“You’re always running hot,” Nico says, voice low and smooth. “Didn’t expect to see you shaking.”

Will chokes on a laugh that’s half gasp. “Yeah, well. You try vomiting up your soul in front of someone you like and see how your internal temperature holds up.”

Nico’s eyes flick up—sharp and unreadable, but his fingers stay where they are, just at the edge of Will’s collarbone, where skin meets fabric. There’s a pause. A breath between them. A tension so thick it feels like gravity, pulling Will forward inch by dangerous inch.

“You like me?” Nico asks, barely above a whisper.

Will’s throat is dry. “I’m wearing your scarf.”

Nico’s smile is slow, spreading like a secret. “Fair.”

Will shudders, and it has nothing to do with the cold.

Then Nico’s fingers brush the back of his neck as he adjusts the scarf—just a flick of skin on skin, light as a whisper, but Will whimpers . It escapes before he can stop it, soft and involuntary, and Nico’s gaze darkens immediately.

Will sways slightly, his knees suddenly unreliable.

“Thanks,” he rasps, desperate to sound normal. “For the scarf. And, uh… making sure I don’t collapse from exposure.”

Nico steps back, barely. “You owe me your life.”

Will exhales shakily. “Dangerous words.”

Because the thing is—he would. Will would give his life for Nico without hesitation, without drama, without needing to be asked. He would walk into fire, wade through monsters, bleed out on marble floors if it meant Nico would be okay.

He would carve out his heart with steady hands and offer it up, trembling and raw, like a sacrament. Like something holy. He’d place it at Nico’s feet, not because he expects anything in return, but because love—real love—asks for everything. And Will has always been willing.

Gods, if Nico only knew.

Will bites the inside of his cheek to keep from saying any of it. To keep from falling to his knees right here, in front of everyone, and asking Nico what he’s supposed to do with all this feeling.

Dangerous words, indeed.

Nico just looks at him—steady, unreadable, like he’s weighing something ancient and important. Like Will is a question he’s finally ready to answer.

Will swallows hard and doesn’t move. The scarf around his neck is warm, too warm now, the wool soft against his skin and clinging to Nico’s scent—something dark and clean, like cedar smoke and midnight. Expensive, understated, unmistakably him.

The ghost of Nico’s touch still lingers, a phantom heat along the curve of Will’s neck, just beneath the scarf. It thrums under his skin, subtle and electric, like a secret being whispered to his pulse.

And gods help him… he never wants it to stop.

He could live in this moment—suspended between breath and possibility—forever. Let the world fade out around them. Let time stall here, with Nico’s eyes on him and something unspoken straining in the quiet between them.

It’s unbearable. It’s everything.

And Will—aching, awestruck, already too far gone—would let himself burn for it

Chapter 23: I Swear a Blood Oath to Ask Out Nico di Angelo and He Immediately Vanishes Like a Victorian Ghost With Commitment Issues

Notes:

im sorry if the slow burn is burning a little too slow, but i promise this chapter begins the arc that brings us to the solaneglo kiss we've all been waiting for, there's just a lot more yearning and a good measure of angst (i'm so sorry in advance) before we get there, but as compensation i'm giving you two chapters tonight and racing my way through editing the next few so you guys won't have to suffer for much longer! as always, thank you so so so much for all the love and comments, i'm working my way through them to get back to you all (despite ao3 having a personal vendetta against me), i love you all so much!!!!! <3<3<3

The scarf is currently draped over the back of the apartment couch like a war trophy. Or a shrine. Or a deeply embarrassing metaphor for Will’s emotional constipation.

Lou Ellen plucks it off the couch with two fingers and holds it up to the light like it might whisper ancient secrets.

“You’re in love,” she says, completely unprovoked.

“I’m not,” Will says, not looking up from his textbook.

“You are,” Cecil says from the kitchen, head poking out of the fridge like a particularly smug meerkat. “You just keep pretending it’s about weather preparedness.”

Will doesn’t respond. He doesn’t need to. His silence is already screaming.

Lou Ellen wraps the scarf around her neck and strikes a dramatic pose. “Just imagine it,” she says, voice dipped in sarcasm. “You return it to him slowly, reverently. Your fingers brush. He stares at your mouth. The moment lingers. Then—bam!—make-out central.”

“I hate both of you,” Will mutters.

Cecil tosses a baby carrot at him. “You should ask him out.”

“I can’t just ask him out ,” Will says, catching the carrot on instinct and then immediately throwing it at the trash can. He misses. “He’s Nico di Angelo .”

Lou Ellen tilts her head. “What does that mean?”

Will gestures vaguely. “He’s… cool and mysterious and beautiful and probably descended from literary vampires. I wear socks with cartoon bones on them. We’re not the same species.”

Cecil flops onto the armchair, swinging his legs dramatically over the side. “You sang Dicked Down in Dallas and then threw up in front of him. If he still talks to you after that, you’ve got a shot.”

“That is not the bar,” Will says, flailing a hand toward the ceiling as if the gods might appear to back him up.

“It’s your bar,” Lou Ellen shrugs from where she’s lounging upside down in the armchair, legs draped over one arm and her head nearly brushing the floor. “We’re just helping you limbo under it.”

Will groans, loud and dramatic, and lets himself sink even further into the couch. At this point he’s practically horizontal, his legs tangled in a blanket and one sock sliding halfway off his foot. He stares at the ceiling like maybe, just maybe, it’ll part open and grant him a moment of clarity. Or smite him. Either would be fine.

“What if he doesn’t even like me like that?” he mumbles into the pillow that’s been serving as his emotional support cushion for the past twenty minutes.

Lou Ellen doesn’t miss a beat. “He gave you his scarf.”

Cecil, emerging from the kitchen with a bowl of dry cereal and absolutely no spoon, adds, “He brought you hangover food.”

“He speaks Italian to you,” Lou Ellen continues, flipping upright with the agility of a theatre goblin. “That’s practically third base.”

“He looks at you like you personally invented light,” Cecil says around a mouthful of cereal, spraying crumbs and sincerity in equal measure.

Will makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be the death rattle of his remaining pride. He covers his face with both hands. “I’m going to die here. On this couch. Buried under the weight of my own romantic ineptitude.”

Lou Ellen leans over and pats his socked foot with the solemnity of a priest giving last rites. “We’ll put the scarf in your coffin. Folded neatly. Maybe stitched into the lining.”

Will peeks through his fingers, curls mussed, eyes bleary. “Do you think I should actually ask him out?”

Cecil and Lou Ellen don’t hesitate. They turn to him in perfect, terrifying synchronicity, wearing matching expressions that practically radiate the words about time .

“YES,” they chorus, voices echoing slightly in the cramped apartment.

Will blinks. “That was fast.”

Lou Ellen throws a pillow at his head. “You’ve been pining for weeks. Months . Years actually. At this point, it’s basically a health hazard.”

“Romantic dehydration,” Cecil adds, nodding wisely.

Will stares at the ceiling again, as if it might finally give him a sign—preferably in the form of a flaming letter from the universe that says he likes you back, you idiot .

The ceiling, however, remains tragically silent.

But the scarf is back on the couch. Draped across the back like a relic, soft and black and worn at the edges. Will picks it up without thinking, fingers curling into the wool. It still smells like Nico. Like cologne and wind and the faint scent of old paperbacks.

Will twists the scarf in his hands—once, then twice, until it’s a soft black knot in his lap. The apartment feels quieter now, the laughter fading into a hush that settles over them like a blanket. Outside the window, the hum of the city goes on, but inside it’s just the three of them, and the weight of everything Will hasn’t said.

“I just…” Will starts, then stops. The words snag in his throat like burrs. He pushes a hand through his curls and stares down at the scarf again. “I don’t get it.”

Lou Ellen leans forward slightly, the pillow she threw earlier now hugged to her chest. “Get what?”

“All of it.” Will gestures vaguely, like the idea of Nico is too big to name outright. “Nico. The looks. The scarf. The… whatever this is.”

Cecil, for once, doesn’t have a quip ready. He just tilts his head and waits, quietly chewing on another mouthful of cereal.

Will exhales through his nose, voice lower now. “There are so many rumors about him. Everyone says he doesn’t date. That he’s not the relationship type. That he avoids commitment like it’s the plague.”

Lou Ellen frowns, but she doesn’t interrupt.

“He told me,” Will continues, softer now, “he doesn’t do relationships. That it’s easier not to. He said he sticks to one-night stands because anything else is too complicated. Too much.” He swallows, throat tight. “So why would I be the exception? Why would I be the thing he makes room for?”

There’s a long pause. The kind that stretches and hums with something heavy but unspoken.

“You don’t know that you’re not,” Lou Ellen says gently.

Will looks up.

“You don’t know what’s happening in his head,” she continues. “Maybe it’s always been easier for him to push people away, but that doesn’t mean he wants to do that forever. And maybe…” She hesitates, searching for the right words. “Maybe he’s trying something different. With you.”

Will presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. “That’s a lot of pressure.”

“It’s also kind of beautiful,” Cecil says, surprising them both. He sets his cereal aside and leans back, folding his arms. “You’ve seen the way he looks at you, Solace. He’s not just here for a good time.”

Will huffs out a breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “I don’t want to read into something that’s not there.”

“You’re not,” Lou Ellen says softly. “He doesn’t just let people in, Will. But you’re already inside. I don’t think he knows how to kick you out.”

Will falls quiet again. The scarf is still warm in his lap. Still carrying that soft scent that makes his chest ache in ways he doesn’t have names for.

“I don’t want to mess it up,” he admits.

Cecil nudges his foot. “Then don’t.”

It’s said so simply, like that’s all there is to it. But maybe it is.

Maybe love isn’t always fireworks and declarations. Maybe sometimes it’s slow mornings, quiet gestures, a scarf left behind without a word.

Maybe it’s choosing to stay, even when everything in you is scared.

Will exhales slowly, fingers still tangled in the scarf. The fabric is soft under his hands, but his chest feels tight, knotted with thoughts he’s never quite said out loud.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing,” Will admits finally, voice small. “Like… literally. I’ve been on maybe four dates. Total. And every single one was a disaster.”

Cecil doesn’t even blink. “Oh, we know. The guy who cried about his ex during appetizers? Iconic.”

Lou Ellen grins. “And don’t forget crypto guy. You almost left your body at the table.”

Will groans. “You two are too invested.”

“And then there was the one who ghosted mid-entree,” Cecil adds, counting on his fingers. “And the coffee-order therapist.”

Will sighs. “He said I have abandonment issues because I drink black coffee.”

Lou Ellen snorts. “I mean… fair.”

Will glares. “Not the point.”

“Right, sorry,” she says, raising her hands in mock surrender.

“And it’s not like I haven’t…” He hesitates, scratching the back of his neck. “I mean, I’ve had hookups. But not because I wanted it that way. Not really. It just never felt like more was on the table. And it always felt like something was missing.”

His voice dips lower, like the truth is something fragile he doesn’t want to break.

“I think,” he says, “it’s always been Nico. In the back of my head. Even when I wasn’t letting myself think about it. Like… I was just waiting. For him. Or something like him. Which is maybe stupid, because I don’t even know if he sees me like that.”

There’s a brief silence. A kind of reverence, like even Cecil knows not to crack a joke—at least, not yet .

But then, inevitably:

“So what I’m hearing,” Cecil says, squinting thoughtfully, “is that you’re Lizzy Bennet, and Nico di Angelo is your emotionally constipated Mr. Darcy with a tragic backstory and impeccable bone structure.”

Will stares at him, baffled.

Lou Ellen cackles. “It’s the most accurate thing you’ve ever said.”

Will groans, but it’s softer this time. More of a whimper into the scarf. “Why is my life a Regency novel written by a sad, gay cryptid?”

“Because Nuco di Angelo is a sad, gay cryptid,” Cecil replies sweetly. “And you, my dear Lizzy, are deeply in love with a brooding aristocrat who probably owns emotional horses.”

Will lets out a weak laugh in spite of himself.

“Also,” Lou Ellen adds, nudging his knee gently, “hopeless romantic or not—you’re allowed to not know what you’re doing. It doesn’t mean you’re not ready. It just means you’re human.”

Will doesn’t respond right away. He stares down at the scarf in his lap, fingers brushing lightly over the folded edge.

“I want to do it right,” he says quietly. “With him. If I even have a chance.”

“You do,” Cecil says, with surprising certainty.

Lou Ellen nods. “And you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be honest .”

Will breathes in deeply, steadying himself.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

And the scarf—warm and dark and soft with promise—remains curled in his lap like a question he’s finally almost ready to answer.

“Alright,” Lou Ellen says, clapping her hands once like they’ve just concluded a séance. “Here’s the deal.”

Will looks up warily. “What deal?”

“The one where,” Cecil says, leaning in with mock seriousness, “the next time you see Nico di Angelo, you ask him out.”

Will immediately flails, nearly upsetting the scarf and his dignity. “What? Just like that?”

Lou Ellen shrugs. “Yes. Just like that. You, the scarf, and your feelings. All on the table.”

“That’s not a table,” Will groans. “That’s a public execution.”

“Oh, please.” Cecil rolls his eyes. “You’re acting like you’ve never seen a boy in a tailored coat and emotionally black turtleneck before.”

“I haven’t seen that boy in a turtleneck and survived,” Will mutters, clutching the scarf dramatically to his chest.

“Then it’s fate,” Lou Ellen says, grabbing a makeup brush from the table and poking it at him like a wand. “Pinky swear. Blood oath. Whatever it takes.”

Will eyes the brush warily. “Is that the one you use for stage makeup?”

She smiles beatifically. “It’s been purified. Probably.”

He stares at her. Lou Ellen stares back, entirely too calm for someone who once performed a monologue from Macbeth under a blood moon.

Will groans again but extends his pinky with the solemnity of someone who’s either accepting a challenge or falling directly into a trap. He’s not entirely convinced Lou Ellen isn’t enacting a binding pact on the River Styx. There’s a definite gleam in her eye, and he’s pretty sure she muttered something in Latin under her breath.

“I’m going to regret this,” he mutters.

“Correct,” Lou Ellen says, linking her pinky with his.

Cecil immediately joins in, linking pinkies with his left hand and holding up his right as if he’s officiating a legally binding ceremony—or possibly a cult ritual. “Repeat after me: I, Will Solace, solemnly swear—”

Lou Ellen, ever the enabler of dramatics, produces a tiny pin from her pocket. “To make it official,” she declares, a hint of mischief in her tone.

Will eyes the pin warily. “You know, from a medical standpoint, sharing a pin for a blood oath is an absolute nightmare. There’s a whole list of blood-borne pathogens we could—”

Lou Ellen rolls her eyes, but hands him a small bottle of hand sanitizer. “Here, Dr. Solace. Sanitize away.”

With a resigned sigh and a roll of his eyes, Will takes the sanitizer, applying a liberal amount to the pin and waiting a moment for it to dry. “Fine, but if we end up with tetanus, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Cecil laughs, light and carefree, and after making sure Will sanitizes the pin once again, pricks his own finger first, a small bead of blood welling up. He offers the pin back to Will, who sanitizes it diligently before taking his turn.

With a dramatic sigh, Will pricks his finger, just enough to draw a tiny drop of blood, and presses it against Cecil’s and Lou Ellen’s fingers, respectively, their eyes locked in a moment laden with more than just the mingling of blood.

“There, are we now blood brothers? Is that how this works?” Will asks, half-mocking, half-serious.

“Something like that,” Cecil replies, his voice low, a smirk playing on his lips. “Now, back to business—Repeat after me: I, Will Solace, solemnly swear—

Will rolls his eyes. “ Cecil .”

“—to ask out my tragically beautiful, emotionally complex crush,” Cecil continues, undeterred, “the next time fate throws us together under mysterious, brooding circumstances.”

Lou Ellen, deadpan: “Or at minimum, in front of a coffee cart.”

Will groans and flops sideways onto the couch, dragging the scarf with him like a shroud. “I hate both of you.”

“You love us,” Lou Ellen replies.

“You definitely love Nico,” Cecil adds with a wicked grin.

But Will isn’t listening anymore.

Because somewhere in the warm, slightly cologne-scented folds of fabric, his brain is spiraling into another direction.

He’s picturing Nico—shirt slightly unbuttoned, waistcoat tailored within an inch of its life, the fine lines of it pulling perfectly at his waist. His dark curls tumble messily into his eyes beneath the flickering light of a Regency ballroom chandelier, golden and soft, haloing him in a way that’s almost holy.

Nico, standing at the edge of a marble foyer, candlelight dancing along the sharp edges of his face, his expression unreadable but devastating. A gloved hand extends—pale leather, immaculate, purposeful—and Will takes it because of course he does. His own fingers tremble as they meet, and even in the fantasy, Will can feel the weight of Nico’s gaze—cool and assessing, but burning underneath.

He imagines them slipping through a grand estate with arched gothic windows and secrets hidden in every hedge maze turn. Nico’s coat flares in the wind as he walks the grounds like some reluctant heir to an ancient curse, boots crunching softly over gravel. The scent of old paper, clean linen, and something darker—something like smoke or myrrh—follows in his wake.

Will sees it like a dream: Nico turning sharply on the edge of a wrought-iron balcony, wind tugging at his collar. His voice is low and bitter, saying something cutting and tragic that makes Will’s heart fracture in poetic thirds. A classic line from a classic novel—something about loneliness, about legacy, about being loved too late or not at all.

And then—gods help him—Nico’s voice drops even lower, more intimate, more dangerous, as he steps closer through the fog and candlelight. He holds out his hand, that same elegant hand, and whispers with quiet desperation, “ You have bewitched me, body and soul.”

Will nearly chokes on air.

“Will?” Lou Ellen snaps her fingers in front of his face.

Will jolts. “What?”

“You blacked out there for a second,” she says, amused.

“I was… visualizing.”

“Was he wearing a suit?” Cecil asks, already knowing the answer.

“…Yes.”

“Was there an ancestral manor involved?”

“Shut up,” Will mutters, burying his face in a pillow this time.

But the fantasy lingers—velvet and smoke and shadow and Nico, smirking in the flickering candlelight, looking at Will like he might be worth unbuttoning for. Like Will is a secret worth undoing slowly, reverently. That look—sharp and soft all at once—burns itself behind Will’s eyelids like an afterimage, something he knows he’ll see every time he closes his eyes tonight.

And despite everything—his anxiety, the tequila flashbacks, the general chaos of their lives—Will’s heart gives the faintest, traitorous flutter of hope.

Hope that maybe this isn’t all in his head. That maybe he’s not just another one of Nico’s fleeting moments. That maybe, just maybe, there’s something more waiting for them beyond scarf exchanges and almost-kisses and candlelit fantasies.

Next time , he tells himself, burying his face in the scarf that still smells like cedar and cologne and something inexplicably, unbearably Nico.

Next time, he’s asking. No more maybes.

And the next few days pass in a chaotic, caffeine-fuelled blur.

Will, Lou Ellen, and Cecil fall back into their usual rhythm—orbiting the Seven like academically exhausted satellites caught in their glossy, chaotic gravitational pull. It’s comforting, familiar, borderline mythological at this point. And it should be simple.

Except Will has made a Very Official Blood Oath to Ask Nico Out.

Which would be easier if Nico di Angelo—beloved dark prince of the classics department and possible cryptid—would stop vanishing like a cursed heir in a gothic novel.

Seriously. Where is he?

Will tries to play it cool. Chill. Aloof. Emotionally normal.

He fails immediately.

***

Annabeth is halfway through a vertical stack of architectural theory, reading three books at once. Her annotated sticky notes look like battle plans. Cecil has claimed he’s “ just exploring ” and vanished somewhere between the law reference section and a suspiciously cursed hallway on sublevel B. Lou Ellen is muttering about “ structural chaos ” while building a very aggressive sculpture out of periodicals and scotch tape.

Will leans against the bookshelf next to Annabeth. Very casual. Entirely normal.

“So,” he says, voice cracking halfway through the word. “Uh. Haven’t seen Nico around lately.”

Annabeth doesn’t even glance up. “He’s avoiding the sunlight. And the Econ midterm.”

Will frowns. “Wait. He takes Econ?”

“No,” she says flatly, turning a page. “Exactly.”

Will stares into the middle distance for a beat too long, re-evaluating his life choices.

***

Piper is in line ahead of them, ordering something deeply complicated and non-caffeinated. Her phone is in one hand, her other gesturing wildly as she explains a dream in which the university was secretly being run by a network of sentient lizards disguised as professors.

Will waits until she’s reached the part where Annabeth was a double agent working for the lizards before trying, subtly: “So… has Nico been by recently?”

Piper raises one brow—perfect, devastating. “Nico? I think he’s in Vermont.”

Will freezes. “Vermont?”

“Or maybe Jersey,” she amends. “It had trees. Or ghosts. Could’ve been a vision. Honestly, I wasn’t paying attention.”

***

Leo is attempting to ride a unicycle while balancing a water bottle on his head and reciting Hamlet. No one has asked him to do this. Hazel is drawing quietly in a notebook the size of a small town. Frank is next to her reading something with so many redacted lines it looks like government surveillance files.

Will sidles up to Hazel, pretending not to be fraying at the edges. “Hey. Just wondering… have you seen Nico?”

Hazel smiles in that eerie, ethereal way of hers. “He said he needed to clear his head.”

Will squints. “Where?”

She taps her temple. “Spiritually.”

Before Will can decipher that, Leo crashes into a bench and yells, “He’s probably communing with bats!”

Frank, deadpan, doesn’t look up. “Last I heard, he was doing laundry.”

Will blinks. “So he’s either meditating, summoning bats, or folding socks?”

“Yes,” Hazel says, serene.

***

The dining hall is loud, chaotic, and bathed in flickering fluorescent lighting that makes everything feel one step away from a psychological thriller. Percy and Jason are mid-argument over something that clearly started as a joke and has now become personal. Percy is gesturing wildly with a spoonful of unnaturally blue pudding, while Jason looks personally offended by its existence.

“I’m just saying,” Percy insists, “blue food dye counts as a seasoning if you believe hard enough.”

Jason points his fork like a gavel. “That’s not how seasoning works.”

“It seasons the vibe .”

Across from them, Annabeth is trying to eat her pasta while reading a paperback of Macbeth and exuding the exhausted aura of someone whose boyfriend is also her full-time job. She stabs a piece of ravioli with the kind of precision that suggests murder isn’t off the table.

Will slides onto the bench next to Jason with all the grace of someone who has not slept and is surviving on pure academic trauma and caffeine. His tray rattles on impact.

“Hey,” he says, trying to sound casual. “Quick question. Is Nico… okay?”

Jason stiffens. Like, full-body freeze. Fork halfway to mouth. Eyes darting toward Piper, who is across the table scrolling her phone with the practiced detachment of someone who knows chaos is coming.

Will leans in. “Wait. You know something.”

Jason opens his mouth, visibly warring with himself.

That’s when Piper moves. She appears beside Jason like a summoned spirit, elbowing him in the ribs hard enough to make him wheeze.

“Don’t,” she says sweetly.

Jason coughs. “He’s fine. Totally fine. Just, um. On a spiritual retreat.”

Will blinks. “Like. At a monastery?”

Jason shrugs, adjusting his hoodie like it might hide his guilt. “More like… the East Village.”

Percy leans in from across the table, still holding the cursed pudding. “No, no. He told me he was going to a fencing match in Queens.”

Jason shakes his head. “That was Tuesday.”

“Right,” Percy says, ticking fingers off. “Then Wednesday was his ‘walk in the fog to embrace the void’ day. Or maybe that was a metaphor?”

Will groans and presses both palms to his forehead. “So I’m supposed to believe he’s either fencing, meditating, fog-walking, or—what was it—doing laundry?”

“Laundry was Monday,” Jason says helpfully.

Will slowly turns to Piper. “Is this a bit?”

She sips from her smoothie with zero shame and shrugs. “Hope that clears things up.”

It does not. At all.

Annabeth finally looks up, eyes narrowed, like she’s three seconds from turning this whole lunch period into a cross-examination.

Will leans back in his seat and lets his head thunk dramatically against the table.

Nico di Angelo has vanished and the only thing Will knows for sure is that he is very tired, deeply in love, and surrounded by liars .

Throughout it all, the Seven are utterly unbothered. Maddeningly vague. Like they’ve all agreed to the same elaborate cover story but forgot to compare notes. Their answers contradict. Their shrugs are synchronised. Piper winks. Hazel smiles. Percy tells Will, “ You’ll see him when you’re meant to.”

And it’s not helpful. None of it explains the hollowness blooming in Will’s chest.

Because Will knows what it feels like to be left.

His father was gone before he was even born. No note. No number. Just a name his mother refused to speak and an empty chair at every school recital. Will grew up knowing absence like other kids knew bedtime stories—something you recite enough times, it starts to sound normal.

He learned the weight of unanswered questions young. Learned how to smile through them, how to hold other people’s pain like it mattered more than his own. How to stop expecting explanations. How to stop needing reasons. How to swallow hurt like communion.

And now, standing in the center of yet another carefully constructed silence, Will feels that old bitterness bubbling up again—sharp and scalding and relentless.

He’s not mad at Nico, not really. He’s mad at the silence. The vanishing. The way people disappear without warning and the rest of the world keeps spinning like it didn’t happen. Like they didn’t leave a crater behind.

It’s a cold kind of rage, not the loud, explosive kind—but the quiet fury of a kid who packed a bag for a dad who never came home. The fury of someone who’s spent a lifetime pretending it didn’t matter.

He doesn’t want to be this angry. Doesn’t want to compare Nico to a ghost he never met.

But the truth is, Will has never known how to stop loving people who disappear.

And he’s so, so tired of being left behind.

So Will watches doorways like they’re sacred. Glances down every hallway like it might bend time. His heart leaps at every flicker of dark fabric. Nico’s scarf is still folded on his bed. He hasn’t dared to wear it, not yet.

Instead, he waits.

Because wherever Nico has vanished to—Will is still here, tethered to the memory of a paper bag and a scarf and eyes that watched him like he was sunlight on marble.

Hope burns in his chest like candlelight.

And Will waits. But Nico doesn’t show. 

***

The night sky sprawls above them in a haze of navy and scattered stars, soft and humming with distant city noise. The rooftop feels both too big and too small at once—like a secret, forgotten stage where the only audience is the moon.

Will lies flat on his back on a pile of old blankets, limbs splayed like he’s trying to melt into the concrete. The joint in his fingers has long since burned down to ash. He doesn’t remember how many they passed around. Enough that Lou Ellen is now humming “ Moon River ” in falsetto while staring reverently at a pigeon on the next building over.

“It’s staring back,” she whispers.

“That pigeon has seen some shit,” Cecil mutters from his seat on an overturned milk crate, eyes wide. “He knows secrets. Government secrets.”

Will exhales slowly, smoke curling up toward the stars. His brain is warm and fogged, thoughts sloshing like soup.

“He’s avoiding me,” he says at last, voice a little too heavy for how high they are. “Right?”

Cecil peers over the edge of his hoodie. “Who?”

Will flops an arm over his eyes. “Nico.”

There’s a pause. Then Lou Ellen flops down beside him, throwing an arm dramatically across his chest like a fainting Victorian widow.

“We’re not doing sad pining while high,” she announces. “It’s in the group rules.”

“I just—” Will gestures vaguely upward, toward the pigeon. “Did I do something wrong?”

“You threw up tequila while wearing his coat,” Cecil offers. “But like, romantically.”

Will groans. “What if I freaked him out? What if I said something? Or did something? What if he realized I’m just—a dumb, flirty med student who can’t even handle a scarf without turning it into a metaphor for eternal love?”

Lou Ellen gently bops his forehead. “You’re not dumb.”

Cecil points the joint at him. “You’re flirty and emotionally repressed. That’s hot.”

Will exhales a laugh that doesn’t feel very funny. “What if he changed his mind? What if he never actually liked me? What if he just… thought it was a joke?”

Lou Ellen props herself up on one elbow. “You think Nico di Angelo would joke about feelings? He says three words per conversation. Two of them are usually ‘death’ and ‘library .’”

“Exactly,” Will groans. “What if I imagined it all? What if he gave me the scarf out of pity ?”

Cecil throws a pebble off the roof. “You don’t pity someone and then hold them in your arms and whisper in Italian and feed them mints like a sexy woodland nurse.”

Lou Ellen’s hand pats Will’s cheek with exaggerated tenderness. “Sweetheart. You invited him to bed. He didn’t run . He helped you puke and flirted back in a sexy European language.”

Will lets his hands flop dramatically at his sides. “You’re high and biased.”

“We’re loyal,” Lou Ellen corrects. “And observant.”

Will stares up at the stars, quiet for a beat. “I just… thought maybe he’d come find me. Like before.”

Cecil leans back and squints at the sky. “Sometimes ghosts gotta haunt in private first.”

Lou Ellen curls up beside him again. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

There’s a beat of silence. The pigeon flaps its wings and vanishes into the night.

“...Do you think he’ll come back?” Will asks softly.

Cecil hums, passing the last of the joint back. “He’s Nico di Angelo. He always comes back. Usually when you least expect it. Like a tax bill. Or a meaningful poem.”

Will isn’t wearing the scarf tonight.

It’s folded neatly on top of his pillow, carefully tucked away from the drifting smoke. He’d placed it there on purpose—didn’t want it to absorb the haze of cheap weed and rooftop chaos. Didn’t want to ruin the faint trace of Nico that still clung to the fabric: that clean, cold scent of rain on marble and citrus, like something expensive and unplaceable. He wants to keep it like that. Wants to keep something .

“He gave his scarf,” Will says quietly. “And then he vanished. Who does that?”

Lou Ellen is draped dramatically across a beat-up lawn chair, one sock half off and hair coming undone like she’s molting. She peers at him with glazed but affectionate eyes. “Someone dramatic. Which, dear William, you knew he was.”

Cecil exhales a puff of smoke like a wizard delivering a prophecy. “That scarf is not a casual item. That’s a Byronic Hero accessory. That’s a token .”

Will huffs. “You think?”

Lou Ellen leans toward him with uncharacteristic gentleness. “He didn’t give that to just anyone, Will.”

Cecil, from his perch on the milk crate throne: “He wrapped you in his signature item like a gothic romance protagonist. You don’t do that and then ghost a guy.”

“That’s not a ghost move,” Lou Ellen agrees, solemn now. “That’s a breadcrumb trail. That’s like—‘ follow me through the fog and discover your destiny ’ vibes.”

Will groans, dropping his head into his hands. “You guys are high and ridiculous.”

“And correct,” Cecil says. “That scarf is the plot hook in your romantic arc.”

“He gave you a piece of his armor,” Lou Ellen murmurs. “Or like… his softness. The part of him no one gets to see.”

Will thinks about the scarf—not up here in the smoke and chill, but where it really lives now. On his bed. On his pillow. The place it ends up every night without fail, whether he means to move it or not. It looks absurdly ordinary in the daylight. But curled against the corner of his sheets, holding the faintest trace of Nico’s scent like a secret? It feels like something else entirely.

Like a place holder. Like a promise.

Like a quiet, unspoken soon .

Because gods, Will wants Nico there for real. Not just in fleeting moments or dark alleyways or crowded bars. He wants him in his bed. In his arms. Pressed against him in the quiet, private hours when the city goes still.

He wants to watch Nico unspool. Wants to feel those rings tug at his hair as Nico fists his hands in it. Wants to taste the kind of sighs Nico doesn’t let himself make in daylight. The kind of sounds Will’s imagination keeps getting just wrong. He wants to get it right.

He groans softly into the night air.

Cecil pats his knee. “That sounded erotic and painful.”

“It was,” Will mutters.

Lou Ellen, exhaling smoke beside him, raises an eyebrow. “The scarf still on your pillow?”

Will nods.

“Yeah,” she says. “That checks out.”

“I don’t want it to be just a moment,” he admits, voice low, hoarse around the edges.

“It wasn’t,” Lou Ellen says. “You don’t give away your favorite scarf to ‘a moment’.”

Cecil nods solemnly. “That was a message. In fabric form. A declaration of aesthetically repressed feelings.”

Will leans back on his hands, eyes closing for just a second, letting the warmth of their words settle into his chest like something sacred.

“Okay,” he says softly. “Then I’ll wait.”

Chapter 24: This Milk Run Ends in Confessions, An Almost Kiss, and Emotional Whiplash

It starts with cereal. Or rather, the lack of milk to pour over it.

“Will,” Cecil groans, dramatically shaking an empty carton above his head like it’s a prophecy. “We are out of milk.”

Lou Ellen clutches her box of cereal like it’s been personally betrayed. “We are out of milk and justice in this godforsaken apartment.”

“I just got home,” Will mutters from the couch, where he’s been curled like a depressed shrimp under an old throw blanket, trying very hard not to spiral again. “I’m not going back out.”

Cecil points accusingly. “You’re the only one with shoes on.”

“Because I never took them off,” Will says, voice flat. “Because I walked in and was immediately greeted by loud opinions and an empty fridge.”

Lou Ellen slides onto the couch beside him and pokes his shoulder. “You need the air. You’re brooding.”

“I’m not brooding,” Will snaps, which would be more convincing if he didn’t look like the physical embodiment of a rainy love song.

“You’ve been staring at your phone like you’re waiting for a text that’s never going to come,” Cecil says, then softens a little. “You’re gonna make yourself sick.”

“I’m already sick,” Will mutters. “In the heart. In the soul. In the gastrointestinal tract.”

Lou Ellen leans over, faux-gentle. “Please, golden boy. For the milk. For your health.”

Will drags a hand down his face. He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to leave the warmth of the apartment, or his blanket, or the corner of the couch he’s turned into a shrine of silent suffering. But the walls feel too loud tonight. Nico’s name is lingering like incense in every conversation, even the ones that don’t say it out loud.

He needs air. Even if it’s just bodega air.

“Fine,” he says at last, untangling himself from the blanket with a groan. “But if I get hit by a car and die, I’m haunting both of you.”

“Romantically, I hope,” Lou Ellen says brightly.

“Tragically,” Cecil corrects. “He’ll wail at the windows like a Victorian widow.”

Will shoves his hands in his coat pockets and heads for the door. “I’m not above pushing you down the stairs.”

He doesn’t take the scarf.

It’s still on his pillow—tucked against the case like a placeholder, a promise, a ghost of something he wants too much to touch. He doesn’t want it to smell like the smoke and chill of Harlem. Or anything but Nico.

So it stays where it is.

Will steps out into the cold, the streetlights hazy and gold. His breath fogs in the air. His heart feels like it’s trying to write sonnets through his ribcage.

He doesn’t let himself look back.

Just forward.

Toward the store.

And maybe—if the gods are merciful—toward whatever comes next.

Will’s head is down as he rounds the corner—hood up, limbs heavy, muttering curses about overpriced oat milk and the betrayal of roommates who send him out into the cold like a sacrificial lamb.

Which is why he doesn’t see the person standing in his path until he walks directly into them.

Chest-first.

Hard. Steady. Warm beneath thick layers of wool.

Will stumbles back like he’s touched a live wire, ready to start swinging. “What the—! Are you mugging me?!”

There’s a beat. Then a familiar voice, dry as frostbite:

“Seriously?”

Will’s breath leaves him in a rush.

Nico.

Of course it’s Nico.

Because the universe delights in cruelty, and the fates—fickle, theatrical things that they are—clearly crave spectacle.

He’s standing beneath the flickering lamplight like he belongs there—cloaked in another black, scarf looped around his throat like some gothic warlock prince returned from exile. His coat is tailored, his expression carved from marble and shadow, and Will can barely process it. Because it’s Nico. Here. Now. After days of nothing but silence and half-truths and the unraveling echo of his name in Will’s mind.

“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” Will snaps, jabbing a finger at his chest as if it might keep him from exploding. “You can’t just materialize all brooding and mysterious like that. Some of us have fragile nervous systems. It’s rude. ”

Nico blinks once. “You walked into me.”

Will’s hands fly into the air. “You disappeared! ”

The words break out of him like a dam giving way—sharp and frantic and tangled with things he’s spent too long trying not to feel. All the sleepless nights, the unanswered questions, the irrational hope every time he turned a corner, piled behind his ribs like stormwater. And now it’s flooding.

“You ghosted! I thought you’d moved to Vermont to become one with the bats! Or joined a coven in the East Village! Or—I don’t know—walked into the fog to embrace the void like some tragic, leather-clad Byron knockoff!”

Nico doesn’t even flinch. He just stands there, dark and quiet and maddeningly unreadable.

“I never said any of that,” he says calmly, like Will isn’t one sentence away from rupturing a lung.

“You didn’t say anything, ” Will fires back. His voice cracks on the last word. “You left. After everything. You didn’t text, you never even asked for my number. You didn’t show up. And I didn’t even know if you were okay. Do you have any idea what that did to me?”

The words hit the cold air and hang there—fierce, aching. Unsaid for too long.

“I’ve been abandoned enough for one lifetime,” Will continues, quieter now, shaking his head like he’s trying to clear fog from his own thoughts. “By people who were supposed to stay. By people who owed me more than you ever did. And I survived it, you know? I got really good at surviving it. So maybe I shouldn’t care this much. Maybe it’s stupid to care this much. But I do. I did. ”

The rage is already retreating, leaving behind something more raw. Something hollowed out.

“I made a blood oath,” Will mutters, bitter. “And then you vanished like the brooding love interest in a Brontë novel, and I just—” His voice falters. “I didn’t know what I did wrong.”

Nico doesn’t move. His eyes are steady, unreadable. The silence stretches long and thin between them, pulled tight as a violin string.

And then, of all things, Nico says:
“You made a blood oath? ”

Will groans. “Don’t change the subject.”

But some part of him is already unwinding at the edges. Because Nico’s here. Because he didn’t stay gone. Because even if Will’s unraveling, at least someone is still listening.

Even if it’s the boy who wrecked him just by leaving.

“Was it binding?” Nico asks, and gods, the deadpan is almost enough to make Will scream.

“Lou Ellen officiated.”

Nico’s lips twitch. It’s the tiniest thing. Barely there. But Will catches it. And it nearly knocks him out.

“Of course she did.”

Will exhales, dragging a hand through his hair. “Seriously though… are you okay?”

Nico hesitates. Then nods. “Yeah. I just needed a minute.”

Will’s heart hammers against his ribs. “A minute and nine days ,” he mutters, but it comes out soft, not biting.

Nico shrugs, the fabric of his coat shifting like shadows in motion. “I’m not used to people noticing when I disappear.”

It’s a simple sentence. Quiet. Almost careless.

But it hits Will like a blow to the ribs.

He goes still, every nerve ending humming, heart tripping over itself in the echo of those words.

Because gods—of course Nico thinks that. Of course he’s convinced that no one notices when he disappears. That’s the armor he wears, the version of himself he’s spent years perfecting—cool, detached, untouchable. But it’s not the whole truth. It never was.

Will can see it now, clearly—how Nico slips through rooms like smoke, keeps one foot out the door even when he’s standing right in front of you. How easy it must be to believe the world won’t miss you when you’re the first to leave. When you’ve always had to.

But people do notice. Will noticed. Lou Ellen and Cecil noticed. And gods, even the Seven—for all their cryptic shrugs and evasive answers—they noticed, too. They didn’t tell Will where Nico went, sure. But that wasn’t apathy. That was protection. The kind you give to someone you love. Someone who needs time and space and gentleness, even if he doesn’t know how to ask for it.

Will can’t help thinking about Hazel’s serene deflections, Annabeth’s sharp glances, Jason’s tension and Piper’s timely interruptions. They weren’t just lying to cover for Nico—they were protecting him and whatever truths he isn’t ready to share yet. But they missed him. Will doesn’t doubt that. And that means Nico was wrong. Not about everything—but about this.

He is noticed. He is missed.

And Will wonders, quietly, what it must be like to move through the world and not know that. To live with the constant, gnawing belief that absence is easier than presence. That silence is safety. That disappearing is easier than being seen.

It makes something twist behind Will’s ribs—fierce and aching and suddenly protective. Because Nico di Angelo isn’t nearly as composed as he wants people to believe. He’s not just the shadow in the corner, the black coat and the deadpan stare.

He’s a boy learning how to stay.

And gods, Will wants him to know—he can.

And something breaks open in Will.

Not just affection— need.

Not just missing— yearning.

It’s not dramatic. It’s devastating in the smallest, most ordinary way. He wants to know Nico in all the quiet, unremarkable hours people forget to romanticize. Wants to see what Nico looks like in lamplight, bent over a book. Wants to hear what his laugh sounds like when it’s startled out of him at midnight. Wants to learn every scar on his hands by touch, not by story.

He wants to pull him in by the scarf still looped around his neck and kiss him until Nico forgets how to vanish.

It’s not even about the kiss.

It’s about the staying.

He looks at Nico—really looks. At the faint pink at the tips of his ears from the cold, the way his scarf is slightly crooked, the hesitation in his shoulders—and thinks: I notice everything about you.

But Will doesn’t say any of that.

He just breathes, “Well. I noticed.”

And Nico—Nico smiles.

Not out of habit. Not to deflect. Not sharp or smirking or distant.

Just a flicker of truth, uncertain and impossibly tender. Like he doesn’t quite know what to do with the fact that someone saw him, and stayed.

And Will—shaking with cold and love and the dizzying, unbearable ache of wanting someone this much—thinks of Darcy in the rain, and Heathcliff on the moors, and all those doomed, beautiful men in doomed, beautiful books who loved too hard, too quietly, too late.

But this isn’t fiction.

This is now.

And Nico is standing in front of him, real and cold and here.

Will clears his throat abruptly, the way someone might after nearly saying I want you to kiss me senseless in a thunderstorm. He steps back, blinking too hard. “I, uh—need to get milk.”

Nico blinks. “Right now?”

Will shrugs with all the dignity of a man pretending he didn’t just nearly have a full-blown literary yearning crisis in the middle of a sidewalk. “We’re out. It’s urgent.”

There’s a pause.

Then Nico says, quiet but steady, “I’ll come with you.”

Will’s breath catches.

They fall into step side by side, the cold biting gently at their cheeks. Nico keeps his hands in his pockets, his scarf tucked close around his throat. Will tries not to look at it too much. Or at the curve of Nico’s jaw in the streetlight. Or how he walks like someone who’s constantly expecting to disappear again.

They walk in silence for a while. Not uncomfortable. Just… layered.

Will doesn’t ask where Nico’s been. He wants to. Gods, he wants to.

But instead—“So. How did you end up with the Seven? The glamorous cult as it were.”

Nico exhales a laugh. It’s soft, like a puff of fog. “They’re not a cult.”

“They have coordinated wardrobes and shared trauma.”

Nico tilts his head. “Okay. Fair.”

They round a corner, shoes scuffing softly on the sidewalk, the yellow glow of the corner store coming into view.

“I met them at summer camp,” Nico says eventually.

Will nearly drops his wallet. “Wait. I’ve heard that rumour. That was real ?”

“Very real,” Nico says dryly. “It was one of those fancy camps rich parents send their kids to so they don’t have to parent over the summer.”

Will frowns. “Like horseback riding and archery?”

“No,” Nico says, expression flat. “Like fencing and etiquette and ‘how to navigate diplomatic dinners .’”

Will gapes. “Are you serious?”

“They taught us how to do formal introductions in three languages,” Nico continues. “One year, we spent July learning how to identify forged artwork. Another summer we had a guest speaker teach us about wine pairings. We were thirteen.”

Will is silent for a full five seconds. Then: “So it was… Gossip Girl Summer Institute ?”

Nico smirks. “Something like that. Camp Olympus. Don’t ask.”

Will stares at him. “Is that why Piper can talk her way out of parking tickets in French?”

“And why Leo’s con artistry is indistinguishable from charisma,” Nico says. “And why Jason knows how to ballroom dance.”

“That explains so much, ” Will mutters.

“They flew us to Europe when we were older,” Nico adds. “Two-week cultural immersion trips. Museums. Château tours. You know. The usual.”

Will’s head is spinning. “Okay, hang on. You guys went to some elite, ancient secret camp for Baby Rockefellers, learned how to fence, seduce, and steal art, and then still managed to grow up with trust issues?”

“Trust issues were a prerequisite,” Nico says, deadpan.

They reach the corner store and Will pushes the door open, warm air rushing out in a blast of fake lemon cleaner and too-bright fluorescents. Nico ducks in behind him, that same quiet ease about him, like he knows how to belong even in the weird liminal space between sidewalk and checkout line.

As Will reaches for the carton of oat milk, he glances sideways, keeping his voice casual. “You liked it? The camp?”

Nico goes still for a moment, eyes fixed on a row of overpriced cereal boxes. When he answers, his voice is soft—measured.

“I did, actually. At first.” He exhales, and there’s a weight to it, like memory pressing in around the edges. “It was… new. Exciting. I was kind of obsessed with everything—the cabins, the training, the stories. I wouldn’t shut up about it. Tried to get everyone to play Mythomagic with me.”

Will smiles at that. He can picture it too easily—Nico, small and wide-eyed, clutching a deck of cards, rattling off facts about underworld monsters with a mile-a-minute enthusiasm that’s hard to reconcile with the quiet, sharp-edged version of him that exists now.

“But then…” Nico trails off. His gaze drops. “Things changed.”

He doesn’t elaborate. Doesn’t have to. The silence that follows is enough. Heavy and unfinished, like a sentence left to rot in the throat.

Will doesn’t push.

Nico shifts, shoulders rolling like he’s shedding something invisible. “Eventually, I found my way back to it. To them. Hazel helped a lot. And Jason.”

There’s a flicker in his expression as he says their names—gratitude, maybe. Or something more fragile. Something hard-earned.

“I don’t know,” Nico finishes quietly, almost to himself. “I guess it got better.”

Will swallows, the carton of oat milk cold in his hands. He wants to say something—to ask what changed, what pulled Nico away and what brought him back—but he can feel, instinctively, that it’s not the time.

Some wounds speak in riddles. Some stories only unfold in pieces.

Will closes the fridge door, oat milk in hand. “Must’ve been nice. The found family part.”

“It was,” Nico says. And then, after a beat: “Still is.”

They lock eyes across the dairy section. It’s ridiculous. Romantic. Lit by fluorescents and half-frozen mozzarella sticks.

Will’s heart flutters anyway.

He turns back to the counter, cheeks warm. “You know, I’ve never felt more like a peasant than right now,when you’ve just told me you spent your teenage summers identifying forged art.”

Nico doesn’t smile, exactly—but there’s a flicker of something softer at the edges of his expression. “You’re not a peasant,” he says, voice low and even. “You just weren’t raised in a cult masquerading as a summer program.”

Will huffs a laugh, caught off guard by the tenderness buried under the sarcasm. “Right. Of course. The old rich-kid cult loophole.”

Nico turns toward the counter. “Now hurry up and pay. You look like you’re about to pass out in front of the energy drinks.”

They step out into the cold, Will clutching the milk like it’s some kind of peace offering to the gods of pining and heartbreak. Nico walks beside him, scarf tucked neatly around his throat, hands in his coat pockets, a quiet shadow against the halo of streetlight.

“Okay,” Will says, mostly to distract himself from his own thoughts. “So this summer camp. You all met there?”

Nico hums in affirmation, breath curling in the air. “Yeah. We were all dumped there every year, like some kind of gilded boarding school in the woods. No cell service, too many rules, and counselors who thought horseback fencing was a good way to build character.”

Will blinks. “Horseback fencing?”

“Don’t ask,” Nico mutters. “Frank broke his arm. Leo started a small fire. Piper got banned from the stables for something involving glitter and a horse named Blackjack.”

Will can’t stop laughing. “You’re making this up.”

“I wish I were.”

They keep walking, the rhythm of their steps syncing up like it’s something they’ve done a thousand times before. The city buzzes around them—streetlights, distant traffic, a siren wailing somewhere far off—but here, between them, it feels oddly quiet. Like they’re the only two people in the world.

Will risks a sideways glance. “So that’s where Percy and Annabeth met too then? He told me they’ve been together since they were sixteen.”

The words, light on the surface, hang suspended between them, gaining weight from the subtle shift in Nico’s expression. His mouth tightens—just barely, just enough that most wouldn’t notice.

But Will is watching.

Suddenly, it all clicks into place—the long pauses whenever Percy’s name surfaces, the stories Nico narrates with a deliberate distance, the way he orbits around Percy and Annabeth’s romance like it’s a distant star: brilliant, blinding, utterly unreachable.

A sinking feeling tugs at Will’s heart, a mix of understanding and a sharp, jealous pang. Oh .

Silence falls, punctuated only by the distant hum of the city, as if even the streets know better than to intrude upon this revelation.

Because this—this realization is one of those truths you stumble upon without meaning to, a quiet, piercing insight that had been hiding in plain sight. And Will—gods, Will feels like an idiot for not seeing it sooner.

He observes Nico discreetly, noting the tight set of his jaw, the slight tension in his shoulders, the way his gaze fixes on a point far beyond the here and now.

“They hated each other for years,” Nico finally says, voice light but strained. “Well, pretended to. All that bickering, the arguing—like they were auditioning for enemies-to-lovers in a Shakespeare play. Everyone else saw it coming from a mile away. But them?” He shakes his head, a wry smile flickering. “Clueless.”

Will manages a soft laugh, though it feels hollow. “So what finally did it?”

Nico’s eyes shift to the pavement, his voice dropping. “One night, end of summer. We were sixteen. Camp threw this big farewell party—bonfire by the lake, ridiculous paper lanterns, too many marshmallows.”

Will senses the story’s turning point looming.

“Percy and Annabeth were still pretending not to be in love. So, someone—probably Piper, maybe Leo—shoved them both into the canoe lake.”

“Wait. Shoved them?” Will blinks, trying to picture it.

Nico nods. “Full-on ambush. Clothes and all. One second they were arguing on the dock, the next—splash. Gone.” His voice is low. “They ended up in the water. No one saw them come back up for a long time.”

“Wait. Their first kiss was underwater?”

“Of course it was. They had to be dramatic about it.” Nico’s mouth twists, a mix of amusement and something unnameably wistful.

Beneath his words lies a brittle layer. A quiet ache, carefully concealed within the soft roll of memory.

Will doesn’t push, doesn’t voice the thought aching on his tongue—That must’ve hurt. Watching. Knowing.

Instead, he offers, “That’s… kind of beautiful.”

Nico shrugs, his gaze still averted. “Yeah. I guess it was.” Then, quieter: “It was always going to be them.”

The finality in his voice settles heavily between them.

Will exhales slowly, his heart swelling with an odd, tender ache. He glances at Nico—shadows caught in the curve of his cheekbone, scarf fluttering softly in the breeze.

He wants to tell him: It doesn’t always have to be like that. You could still have your moment. Your lake. Your kiss.

But the words lodge in his chest, heavy like swallowed stones.

Instead, Will looks down at his scuffed boots, the cracks in the pavement, his own shadow stretching out long and silent.

Percy Jackson.

The golden boy of summer camp. Brave, effortless, mythological—how could Will ever compare?

He thinks of Nico at fifteen, all bones and shadows, silently yearning for a boy who never saw him that way. And then he thinks of himself now, just Will, with his messy life and his clumsy words.

But all he says is, “I’m glad they had that.”

It’s all he can offer. Honest. Ugly. Wrapped in something he can’t quite name.

Nico glances at him, and in that look, something lingers—sharp, assessing. As if he sees all of Will’s hidden thoughts, the ones not even voiced. As if he knows how hard it is, loving someone who once loved someone else.

“He didn’t know, did he?” Will’s voice is rough, dry.

Nico’s face hardly changes, but it’s enough.

“He didn’t,” Nico replies. “Not then.”

A pause. Then, almost reluctantly, “I told him. Eventually. After I figured it out—after I knew I was over it.”

“You told him?” Will is taken aback.

Nico shrugs. “It felt like unfinished business. One night at camp, I just… said it. Got it out. Annabeth high-fived me.”

Will chokes out a laugh. “She would.”

“Percy was—surprised,” Nico says, his eyes flicking away. “Said he wished he’d known. I told him I didn’t.”

Will watches how Nico’s shoulders stay just a little too tense.

“But it helped,” Nico continues. “I meant it. I really was over it. It was just… something I needed to say.”

Will wants to believe him. Maybe he does. But even now, there’s a flicker in Nico’s voice—a static hum of something unspoken. A truth too old to hurt, but too old to forget. First love is like that. A shadow that stays long after the light has changed.

He doesn’t say any of this. Just nods.

“And now?” he asks, his voice careful.

Nico looks at him. Really looks. There’s something softer in his eyes, something that belongs entirely to the present.

“Now he’s just Percy, he’s my friend,” Nico says evenly. “And I’m not in love with him.”

Will doesn’t push.

But he watches the way Nico’s hands curl in his coat pockets.

And he wonders, quietly, if there are some ghosts you don’t get rid of—only learn to live beside.

Instead, he nudges Nico’s arm with his own. “So what other elite summer camp disasters am I missing?”

That gets a real smile—small, crooked, but real.

“Jason once fell off a yacht trying to do a backflip. Piper pushed Leo into the Seine because he kept calling the Eiffel Tower ‘overrated modernist garbage. ’ Hazel can fence blindfolded. And Annabeth once forged a fake ID using only a printer, nail polish, and her considerable rage.”

Will blinks. “What was this camp?”

Nico exhales, almost a laugh. “A very expensive coping mechanism for rich parents with too many passports and not enough parenting skills.”

Will shakes his head. “No wonder you’re all like this.”

They turn onto Will’s block, the street quieter now, lights flickering over wet pavement. Nico’s scarf shifts in the breeze, brushing Will’s arm.

And for one fragile, fluttering moment, Will lets himself imagine what it might’ve been like to be there—with them. With him . All those years ago. Sun-warmed wood cabins and ghost stories by the lake. Nico’s voice in the dark. A different kind of history.

But all he says is, “Sounds like the kind of place that changes you.”

Nico’s quiet for a beat.

“Yeah,” he says at last. “It does.”

And Will wonders— maybe not all those changes were bad.

As they near the corner by Will’s apartment, the streetlamp overhead drapes everything in a golden hue that flickers across the cracked pavement like molten candlewax—every shadow under its light seems sharper, every line more defined. It’s under this dissecting glow that a question begins to gnaw at Will’s chest, a restless, insistent thing that claws for release despite his best efforts to restrain it.

The question slips out before Will can catch it, his voice casual, almost indifferent, but his heart is anything but. “So… Percy’s not your type?” The words float between them, tinged with a nonchalance he doesn’t feel, laden with all the insecurity and jealousy that he’s been trying to keep at bay.

Inside, Will’s stomach tightens, a knot of anxiety that twitches with every beat of his pulse. He can hear his heart thudding in his ears, loud and accusing, as he waits for Nico’s response. The silence that follows feels stretched, taut like a string waiting to snap.

In that brief pause, Will’s mind races, painting scenarios filled with doubts and what-ifs. He imagines Nico laughing off the question, brushing it aside with that ease he seems to wear like armor. Or worse, confirming Will’s deepest fears—that deep down, Nico still harbors something for Percy, something Will might never be able to overshadow.

Every moment that Nico is silent, Will’s thoughts spiral further. He imagines the way Nico’s eyes would linger on Percy across the campfire, the soft, wistful smiles when he thought no one was looking. How can Will, with his too-loud laughter and his awkward, gangly limbs, compete with someone like Percy Jackson—hero, leader, the boy with the ocean in his eyes?

He thinks about Nico’s past, the depth of his feelings for Percy that he had kept hidden like a sacred, painful treasure. Will knows love doesn’t just disappear; it transforms, leaves marks. What if Nico’s heart is like a palimpsest, old feelings for Percy etched beneath whatever new layers they might lay down together? Can he really expect to carve out a space for himself there?

His insecurities bubble up, unbidden but undeniable. Will wonders if he’s just the safe choice, the not-Percy, the one who’s here while Percy is not. The thought is a cold splash of reality against the warm, hopeful fantasies he’s allowed himself to entertain.

Nico actually laughs. Not a scoff, not a smirk, but something warm and smoky that curls out of him like breath on winter air. “No,” he says. “Not really.”

Will’s stomach drops, then swoops. A rogue wave in the middle of a heartbeat. “Okay, then… what is your type?”

Nico doesn’t answer immediately.

He tilts his head slightly, eyes drifting sideways. Watching. Studying. Calculating. The air stretches thin between them, taut as a pulled bowstring. He takes a step closer—slow, unhurried, like he’s choosing the exact moment to strike.

“Someone warm,” Nico says eventually, voice soft as velvet and low as thunder. “Not loud. Just… bright. Like they don’t even know they’re doing it. Like light leaking through cracks.”

Will forgets how to swallow.

Nico moves again—closer. Their shoulders nearly brush. His scarf shifts with the breeze, brushing Will’s hand, and Will forgets the concept of temperature entirely.

“Someone who sees people,” Nico murmurs, each word softer, closer, more devastating. “Who notices what others miss. Who listens. Who actually cares.”

Will’s heartbeat is no longer a heartbeat. It’s a storm.

“And it helps,” Nico adds, gaze dropping slowly to Will’s mouth, “if they’re beautiful. Stupidly so. All blonde curls and freckles and golden light, like a summer afternoon pretending to be a person.”

Will’s breath stutters. His skin is on fire and freezing at the same time. He’s always been warm, always glowed too hot—his mother used to tease him about running like sunlight—but now, standing here, hearing this, he feels incandescent.

Nico keeps going, closer still, a single breath away now.

“Someone good,” he says. “Good enough that it makes you want to be good too.”

Will is so still he’s not sure he’s alive anymore.

And then Nico leans in—just a fraction, just enough—and whispers in his ear, “Basically… you.”

Will’s brain doesn’t short-circuit so much as evaporate .

He can feel Nico’s breath, warm against his skin. Smells the faint trace of cologne and cold night and something that must be longing itself. Their lips are inches apart. Nico’s hand is at his side now, so close it hums like static.

“Wait,” Will whispers, blinking like he’s surfacing. “You—you mean me ?”

Nico leans back enough to meet his eyes. His gaze is sharp and soft all at once. “You asked.”

Will tries to laugh, but it catches in his throat. “That’s not—funny.”

“I’m not joking.”

And Will—Will feels everything .

The wind. The streetlamp’s flicker. Nico’s fingers brushing his jacket. The thrum of every blood vessel in his body whispering, now, now, now .

“I like you,” he says, all in a rush. “Like, really like you. And I know I’m bad at this—I vomited in front of you, which is historically terrible for romance—and I made this whole dumb oath with Lou Ellen and Cecil to ask you out and I was going to do it right, I swear, but then you disappeared and I thought I ruined everything and now I just—”

“Will,” Nico cuts in gently, a smile curling at the edge of his mouth.

Will doesn’t stop. “I wasn’t going to say anything because I didn’t want to be a thing you had to deal with, and I thought maybe I’d wait until I was less of a disaster, but then you looked at me like that and I—”

“ Will. ”

Will goes quiet.

Nico steps in, closer now—close enough that Will can feel the heat of him, the press of presence like gravity shifting. His fingers ghost up Will’s arm, slow and steady, stopping just at the crook of his elbow. A gentle hold, a tether. His face is right there, tilted up slightly, and in this light—this impossible golden flicker—he looks like something carved out of devotion and winter wind.

“I was coming to your apartment,” he says, voice low, like confession.

Will blinks, dazed and dizzy. “What?”

“I just got back to the city,” Nico murmurs. “And I was on my way to you. To ask you out.”

Will sways, like his body can’t decide if it’s real. “Seriously?”

Nico’s smirk deepens, wolfish and private. “You think I’d be wandering around Harlem in the middle of the night for fun?”

“You were coming to me?” Will breathes.

“I didn’t fly cross-country just to haunt your local bodega.”

And Will—Will forgets how to breathe. His chest is moving, but the air’s not making it all the way in.

The space between them narrows like a pulse, like a breath drawn but not yet released. Will doesn’t even realize he’s backing up until his spine meets the wall behind him, brick cool even through his jacket and flaming skin. Nico steps forward again, closing the final inch between them, until they’re nearly chest to chest. He’s not touching him—but gods, he might as well be.

Will is hyperaware of everything: the heat of Nico’s breath, the scent of his coat, the way his thigh brushes Will’s with every shift of weight. He catalogues the sensations with the quiet precision of a med student unraveling his own anatomy.

Increased heart rate. Muscle tension. Elevated temperature. Dilated pupils. Synaptic chaos. The fire at his skin’s surface and the flood behind his ribs.

He’s blushing again, glowing maybe—he knows it. From the tips of his ears to the soles of his sneakers.

Nico leans in, one hand braced beside Will’s head. His scarf brushes Will’s collarbone. Their faces are so close now that Will could count Nico’s lashes if he wasn’t too busy counting down the seconds until his heart gives out.

“You’re impossible,” Nico says, and the words brush against Will’s cheek like smoke.

“Why?” Will whispers, voice catching.

Nico’s eyes flick down to his mouth. “Because I came all this way to ask you out…”

Will’s breath catches. “And?”

“And now I want to kiss you instead.”

Will makes a sound—half-laugh, half-moan. His whole body leans in, chased by instinct and longing and the pressure of a thousand unsaid things.

Nico’s mouth hovers just over his. A ghost of contact. A breath. A promise. Their noses nearly bump. Will tilts forward, eyes fluttering shut.

But then—Nico pulls back.

Barely.

By a fraction of an inch.

Will’s eyes snap open, dazed. “You—?”

“Not yet,” Nico murmurs, and gods, he has the audacity to look smug about it. His voice is low, like a secret meant just for Will. “I’ve been on a plane all day. I smell like recycled air and jet lag. You deserve better than that.”

Will groans and lets his head fall back against the brick. “I hate you.”

“You’re blushing,” Nico says, quiet and fond, brushing a thumb along the edge of Will’s jaw before pulling away. “I can’t kiss you when you’re glowing like a celestial event. I might combust.”

Will’s laugh is shaky and desperate. “That’s not how spontaneous combustion works.”

“Tell that to my self-control.”

Will exhales through a stunned grin. “You’re the worst.”

Nico steps back, just far enough for Will to miss him. “And yet…”

And yet.

Will lingers there, heart thundering, body electrified, hands trembling like the strings of a harp too tightly strung.

The kiss hasn’t happened.

But the moment did .

And gods help him, it might be enough to kill him anyway.

Because for the first time in a week, he doesn’t feel like he’s falling apart.

Will lingers there, heart thundering, body electrified, hands trembling like the strings of a harp too tightly strung.

There’s a beat—barely a breath—and then Nico, still standing dangerously close, tilts his head. His gaze softens, but the glint of amusement in his eyes remains. “So,” he says, “this blood oath you mentioned earlier…”

Will’s eyes widen. “Oh my gods.”

Nico’s smirk returns in full. “Is that what you do with all your crushes? Involve blood rituals?”

Will groans, dragging a hand over his face. “No. No, it wasn’t—look, Lou Ellen and Cecil were being dramatic, and I was just—” He cuts himself off with a sigh, then drops his hand, meeting Nico’s gaze squarely. “It was a promise, okay? I swore that the next time I saw you, I’d ask you out.”

Nico blinks. Then—surprisingly—his expression softens even further. There’s no mockery in it, no bite. Just quiet warmth, and something gentle simmering just beneath the surface. “A blood oath to ask me on a date,” he repeats, voice low, like it’s the most ridiculous and romantic thing he’s ever heard.

Will, for once, doesn’t feel embarrassed. His cheeks are still on fire, sure, but it doesn’t feel shameful. Nico’s not laughing at him. If anything, he looks almost—fond.

“So?” Nico murmurs. “You going to keep your promise?”

Will breathes out a shaky laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.” He straightens, clears his throat, and tries to pretend he’s not seconds from dissolving into pure light. “Nico di Angelo, would you—um—go on a date with me?”

Nico hums, tilting his head like he’s considering it, like he doesn’t already know the answer. “That depends,” he says. “Will there be more blood rituals?”

Will rolls his eyes, smiling despite himself. “No. But there might be dessert.”

“Then I’m in,” Nico says, that same small smile curling at the edge of his mouth like a secret. “Text me.”

Will blinks. “I don’t have your number.”

Nico pulls out his phone. “Well, that’s tragic.”

They exchange numbers right there under the yellow wash of a flickering street lamp, surrounded by the low hum of traffic and the occasional blast of wind funneling down the avenue. Nico’s hands are steady as he types, but Will’s fingers fumble slightly on his cracked screen, nerves short-circuiting the motor control that med school had drilled into him.

When the contact saves, Will stares at it for a second longer than necessary. Nico di Angelo . No emojis, no surname abbreviations, no extra flair—just clean, sharp text. Uncomplicated. Unlike everything else about this boy.

Nico glances at him from under the dark sweep of his lashes. “You gonna text me? Or just keep staring at my name like you’re trying to decode it?”

Will blinks, startled. Then, flustered, he quickly types out a message. Hey. It’s Will. The disaster.

Nico’s phone buzzes in his hand. He reads the message, and that crooked half-smile appears again—softened by jet lag, a little crooked at the edges, but real.

“You forgot to add ‘charming,’” Nico says.

Will snorts. “Didn’t want to get ahead of myself.”

Nico pockets his phone. “Well. You did ask me out.”

“I did,” Will says, suddenly breathless. “I did .”

“And I said yes.”

Will nods, light-headed. “You did.”

“So,” Nico says, stepping back slowly, like the night’s spell isn’t quite broken yet. “Don’t overthink it, Solace.”

“I’m already overthinking it,” Will admits.

“I know,” Nico says, with maddening fondness. “That’s part of your whole deal.”

And then he’s walking away—just like that. Smooth as smoke, dark as shadow, disappearing into the night like a well-dressed ghost.

Will watches him go, heart stuttering like a broken metronome. He feels half-haunted, half-saved. He closes his eyes, leans his head back against the brick wall, and lets the wind sweep over him like he’s been rewound to the beginning of something. And for once, it doesn’t feel like an ending at all.

Chapter 25: This Was Supposed to Be a First Date, Not a Queer Remake of ‘She’s All That’, but Now I Have Perfect Hair, Cryptic Encouragement from Percy Jackson, and a Dinner Reservation I Booked in a State of Emotional Delirium

Notes:

okay first of all: yes, this chapter is long. i would apologize… but also there were ✨important things✨ to establish (which will all make sense later, i promise. trust the process. or don’t. i’m chaotic).

also let’s be real—I had to include the pre-date chaos. it was legally and spiritually required. lou ellen and cecil took over my brain and demanded a makeover montage, and who am i to deny the queer theatre kid and the tech bro with glitter?

i hope you all enjoy the humour and soft moments while they last, because… yeah. you thought the pining was bad? HA. just wait. the angst is coming next chapter. it’s already halfway down the block in a black hoodie with headphones in and a heartbreaking backstory.

i’m so, so sorry in advance. please remember that you love me.

thank you for all the love, comments, screaming, and general feral support—every single one gives me life (and makes will and nico suffer more, so really, you’re complicit).

okay. deep breath. here we go.

The quad is surprisingly sunny for a day destined to implode.

Will’s half-eaten sandwich rests on the bench beside him like a casualty of war, forgotten in the wake of his steadily unraveling sanity. He’s hunched forward, elbow on knee, chin in hand, eyes glazed over as he stares into some middle distance only he can see. Lou Ellen and Cecil are mid-argument—something about smuggling a coyote into their apartment and disguising it as a rescue dog—when Leo, Annabeth, and Percy materialize like a particularly chaotic mirage.

“There you are!” Leo crows, flopping onto the grass with the barely-contained energy of someone who’s definitely been banned from at least three state fairs. “Are you ready to get absolutely obliterated by mechanical livestock tonight?”

Cecil blinks. “Wait, we’re still doing the bull thing?”

“Obviously.” Leo grins like it’s the most sacred event on the calendar. “Tonight’s the night. Mechanical bull. Extreme yeehaw energy. Bring your health insurance.”

“We never got to go,” Will mutters, deadpan. “What a tragic loss for society.”

Leo gasps, clutching his chest as if Will’s just shot him point-blank in the heart. “Because you ghosted me. For love. ”

“Because Nico vanished into the night with no explanation,” Will corrects, tone dry enough to start a fire. “And none of you would give me a straight answer about where he was.”

“Yeah, you were spiraling,” Lou Ellen says, sipping her iced coffee like it’s tea, “but come on—Nico disappearing was dramatic. Mysterious. Honestly? Kind of hot.”

“So now,” Cecil adds, peeling the crust off his sandwich, “we’re going bull riding without you. As a tribute.”

“Wait—what?”

“You’ve got a date,” Lou Ellen says brightly. “We’ve got cowboys. Everyone wins.”

“Not real cowboys,” Annabeth clarifies, settling beside Percy and opening her planner with the precision of a general preparing for battle. “Just the dangerous, mechanical kind.”

“I plan to die gloriously,” Leo declares, with the confidence of a man who will be flung across a bar by a spinning steel beast and consider it a character-building experience.

“Anyway,” Percy cuts in, nudging Annabeth and turning to Will with the kind of casual smile that shouldn’t feel like an emotional gut punch but absolutely does, “tonight’s the night, right? You and Nico’s first date?”

Will’s stomach performs an Olympic-level backflip.

There it is. That tone. That effortless, cheerful inquiry. Percy, kind and oblivious, just tossing the question out like he hasn’t been the centerpiece of Will’s internal spiral for the past four days. Will knows now— knows —that Nico used to like him. Percy. And it’s fine. It’s fine . Will doesn’t resent him. No one with a functioning conscience could resent Percy Jackson.

But still, there’s a hollow echo in his chest, like the ache left behind when you open a door and find no one waiting on the other side.

“Yep,” Will says too quickly. “Tonight.”

Tonight. Their date. The one they agreed to over text, in a flurry of charged, stilted exchanges—half-flirting, half Morse code, late-night song recs and vague “ sleep well ” messages that felt like tiny bombs going off under Will’s ribs.

Tonight is the night. 

As in: Will Solace is going on a date with Nico di Angelo.

Nico, who smells like snowfall and sin—clean and sharp and just a little bit dangerous.

Nico, who never says exactly what he means, but always means more than he says—his words like riddles half-whispered in the dark, leaving Will chasing their echo hours later.

Nico, who once pressed Will against a wall, breath close and charged, gaze all storm and velvet—and then, with a smirk that could raise the dead, pulled back and murmured, “Not yet.”

And—gods help him—Will has dreamt of that moment again. But in the dream, Nico didn’t pull back. In the dream, Nico leaned in. His voice stayed low and velvet-dark, and matters progressed , as Donna Tartt—or more accurately, Richard Papen, wide-eyed and already halfway ruined—might put it. Kisses turned into hands, and hands turned into something else entirely, something dizzying and slow and terribly, beautifully inevitable.

Will had woken up tangled in sheets, sweating, guilty, and somehow still yearning.

He tries not to think about it now. Fails, obviously.

Because that’s the thing about Nico di Angelo: he doesn’t just show up in Will’s life. He lingers. He haunts. And Will, like a fool, keeps leaving the door open.

“You know,” Lou Ellen says, nudging Will’s shin with her boot like she knows what Will is spiralling about now, “it’s kind of poetic. While we’re off concussing ourselves in a honky-tonk bar, you and Nico are out doing… whatever it is you’re doing.”

“Do you know what you’re doing yet?” Annabeth asks, eyes still on her planner. “Because I swear, Nico hasn’t told anyone. ”

Will blinks. “Wait. He hasn’t told you?”

“Not a word,” Percy confirms. “Hazel tried. Jason tried. Leo tried. He won’t say a thing.”

“That’s suspicious,” Lou Ellen mutters.

“Everything about Nico is suspicious,” Cecil says, with deep affection.

“Seriously,” Annabeth says. “Not even a hint. I cornered him yesterday and asked point-blank. He blinked twice and walked away.”

Leo leans in like they’re swapping top-secret intelligence. “He always tells me when he’s brooding.”

“That’s not—” Will frowns. “Wait, really?”

“Oh yeah,” Percy says. “Last week he texted me ‘I require solitude ’ and then ghosted for thirty-six hours. Like he was off communing with shadows or something.” He shrugs, and then, softer, “Don’t worry. I think he just wants to surprise you.”

Which is, objectively, the worst thing Nico could have done.

Because Will realizes—slowly, like watching a car crash in a dream—that he has made no plans. None. Zero. Zilch.

He’s had days. Days . And he’s spent every single one of them spiraling about the potential meanings of Nico’s texts and whether he should wear something casual or something that says I respect you but would also like to kiss you very much . He’s replayed their almost-kiss at least seventeen times and tested three colognes.

But he has not, in all this time, figured out where they’re going.

“Oh no,” Will says out loud.

Lou Ellen looks at him, alarmed. “What?”

“I—I don’t have a plan,” he says, eyes wide. “I don’t have reservations. I didn’t even—what if everything is booked? It’s New York. It’s Friday. We’ll be wandering the streets like Dickensian orphans!”

Cecil leans back on his elbows. “That’s kind of romantic, though. Shared suffering.”

“This isn’t a Bildungsroman,” Will hisses. “This is real life.”

Annabeth pats his arm, trying to be helpful. “You could wing it.”

“You do not wing a date with Nico di Angelo!” Will says, scandalized. “He dresses like a European vampire. You think that man accepts casual vibes?”

Leo coughs pointedly. “He’s wearing a hoodie today.”

“It’s probably tailored.”

Percy raises an eyebrow. “He did once silently judge a waiter for bringing still water instead of sparkling. I swear the air temperature dropped three degrees.”

Will groans. “I’m going to die.”

Annabeth beams. “You’re in love.”

“I’m in danger.”

“I think it’s the same thing in your case,” Lou Ellen says, entirely too smug.

Will drops his face into his hands.

Because in just a few hours, he’ll be standing in front of Nico di Angelo with no plan, no reservations, and absolutely no idea what he’s doing.

This isn’t just a misstep.

This is a full system failure.

Will Solace is, under most circumstances, a man of structure. He keeps a color-coded Google calendar. He owns—and uses—a pill organizer. His desktop folders are labeled by class, date, and subtopic, and yes, maybe he once made a pro-con list to decide whether to break up with someone after two dates, but that’s not obsessive, that’s just efficient.

He is, as much as a pre-med student with two jobs and a codependent relationship with his anxiety can be, in control.

Except now.

Now, when it matters—when the entire fate of his romantic life is at stake, when the boy he likes (no, craves, no, aches for) is going to appear with cheekbones sharp enough to kill a man and eyes that say I’ve survived war and you will not survive this date—

Now is when Will’s brain has chosen to betray him.

No reservations. No itinerary. No emotional contingency plan.

Not even a playlist.

He has done none of his favorite things: no Yelp deep-diving, no printing a backup list of restaurants in a five-block radius, no checking Google Maps for optimal walking routes that allow for casual, romantic hand brushing. He hasn’t even stress-baked cookies, which is usually step one of any crisis. He hasn’t checked the weather. He hasn’t lint-rolled his jacket. He has forgotten how to function.

And it’s because of Nico.

Because Will cannot keep a single rational thought in his head when Nico is involved. Not when Nico is texting him vague, flirty things like “You’ll see.” Not when Nico smiles at him like he’s just won a war. Not when Will is busy falling in love with him every five minutes like it’s a scheduled event.

He used to be able to focus. He used to be good at focusing.

Now all it takes is one late-night music recommendation from Nico and he’s losing an hour staring at the ceiling wondering if it’s a metaphor. Now all it takes is a flash of pale wrists under a rolled sleeve and Will forgets what room he’s in.

He is going in blind.

And it’s not romantic. It’s not spontaneous. It’s not carpe diem.

It’s a goddamn death wish.

Because Nico di Angelo is many things—mysterious, sarcastic, full-time cryptid, part-time emotional landmine—but above all else, he is not the kind of person who thrives on poorly planned chaos.

That’s Leo’s brand.

Will’s brand is structured yearning. Carefully scheduled pining. Crushes that come with footnotes and follow-up questions. He is the kind of guy who would draft a thesis on “The Unbearable Hotness of a Boy in All Black” and then spend three hours formatting the citations.

But lately?

The citations have been replaced with heart emojis in the margins and doodles of gravestones labeled RIP Me.

His systems are failing. His brain is soup. And the worst part is, despite all of it—despite the lack of prep, despite the sheer terror of uncharted romantic terrain—he wants this.

But what has he done with this crush in the days in between asking Nico out and now? Nothing!

Well—no. Not nothing. He’s absolutely done things. Like:

• Had a panic attack in the laundry room after Nico texted “Good Morning.”
• Genuinely googled “what to wear on a date with someone who might be able to sense fear”
• Received a “can’t wait :)” from Nico and immediately spent forty minutes dissecting the smiley face—Was it sarcastic? Was it flirtatious? Was it a cry for help?
• Made Lou Ellen pretend to be Nico so he could rehearse casual ways to say “Hey, you look great tonight” without sounding like a malfunctioning audiobook

So, yes. Technically, some progress has been made. Just… not the kind that inspires confidence.

Will lifts his head from his hands, stares bleakly into the middle distance again, and wonders if Nico would be impressed or appalled if they just… ate pizza on a park bench. Under a streetlamp. Like lonely raccoons in love.

Probably both.

“Oh my gods,” Will mutters. “This is a disaster.”

“Not yet,” Cecil says, sipping his soda with the slow confidence of someone who thrives on watching others unravel. “But we believe in you.”

“That makes one of us,” Will grumbles, curling in on himself like a wilting houseplant.

“Look at it this way,” Lou Ellen says far too cheerfully, lounging back and propping one foot on Will’s abandoned backpack. “If the date goes terribly, at least you’ll be able to tell your therapist you tried.”

Will groans—full-bodied, soul-deep—and tips backward onto the grass like he’s auditioning for a tragic period drama. He flings both arms over his face, shielding himself from the sky, which is offensively cheerful: a bright spring blue that seems to scream hope! possibility! romantic success! in a tone that feels personally mocking.

He has never felt less prepared in his life.

“I’m going to ruin this,” he mumbles into the crook of his arm. “I’m going to ruin it, and Nico is going to vanish into the night like a disgruntled wraith, and I’ll have to transfer schools. Maybe countries.”

“There’s always Canada,” Cecil offers, lying beside him now, arms folded behind his head like this is all just an entertaining picnic.

Will squints at the sky, wondering if he could maybe get abducted by aliens in the next hour. It would be easier than facing Nico without a plan.

Before he can begin plotting his escape to the frozen north, Leo drops back onto the grass with a dramatic exhale. “Okay, but seriously—it is weird that he hasn’t told Jason.”

Will jerks upright, propping himself on his elbows. “You mean… Jason as in his best friend ? As in the guy who could probably get Nico to confess state secrets with one look?”

“Exactly,” Leo says, gesturing like he’s solving a conspiracy theory. “Nico is like… a professional secret-keeper. He’s built like a locked diary. But Jason? Jason’s the key.”

“Jason is the emotional support golden retriever Nico begrudgingly adopted,” Annabeth adds, adjusting her sunglasses without looking up from her planner.

“They’ve been close since forever,” Percy says, chewing a straw wrapper and blinking up at the clouds. “Since summer camp. Back when Nico still thought socializing was a form of dark magic.”

“He still thinks that,” Lou Ellen mutters from behind her iced coffee.

“Yeah, but Jason broke through that whole ‘touch me and I’ll hex you ’ vibe,” Leo says. “They’re tight. Jason’s the friend who knows how Nico takes his coffee and what his favorite Mythomagic card is.”

Will blinks, neck craning. “Wait, what is it?”

“ Thánatos, God of Peaceful Death, ” Leo says with finger guns and the exact tone of a guy who owns a cape unironically.

Will makes a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “So you’re telling me he hasn’t told Jason anything about tonight? ”

Percy rolls onto his side, resting his head on his palm like they’re gossiping at a sleepover. “Not a word. I asked Jason straight-up, and he looked so baffled I thought he was going to start checking missing persons databases.”

Annabeth’s voice softens. “Which is… kind of sweet, actually. Nico tells Jason everything. If he’s keeping this to himself…”

“Maybe it means something,” Percy finishes, still chewing the straw wrapper.

Will sits up, legs crossed tightly, hands clenched in his lap like he’s bracing for an emotional tornado. His heart is trying to punch its way out of his ribs.

“That doesn’t help,” he says hoarsely. “That actively makes it worse.”

Cecil pats his shoulder with fake solemnity. “He’s just trying to surprise you.”

Will huffs. “I hate surprises. I’m a Leo-Virgo cusp. My soul wants fireworks, but my brain needs an itinerary.”

“You’re a Virgo rising,” Lou Ellen says without looking up. “You need several itineraries. Preferably laminated.”

“You’re not a Leo,” Leo cuts in smugly. “I’m a Leo. You’re a Will.”

Everyone groans in unison. Percy throws a napkin at him.

“I’m just saying,” Will continues, already spiraling, “if he hasn’t told Jason , then what if this is, like… a test? Or a puzzle? Or—oh gods—what if it’s an elaborate prank ?”

“What would the prank be?” Percy asks, deadpan. “Nico shows up in a tux and a horse-drawn carriage, tells you it’s all a joke, and disappears into a sewer grate?”

Will opens his mouth to argue, pauses, and slowly closes it again. That is… not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

Annabeth glances up, smirking. “You’re spiraling again.”

“I live in the spiral,” Will says, flopping backward again. “The spiral is my permanent address. I’ve got mail forwarding.”

“Aw,” Leo coos, flopping beside him. “Young love.”

Will covers his face again. “I need a plan. I need a restaurant. I need a map. I need emotional armor. ”

“I think what you need,” Leo says, propping himself up on one elbow and grinning far too widely, “is to trust the process.”

Will cracks one eye open. He’s already lying on his back like a cursed maiden in a Victorian novel, and now the sun is burning into his retinas, the grass is itchy, and Leo is speaking in cryptic nonsense. “What process?”

Leo shrugs. “The… cosmic process.”

Will wants to scream. Or laugh. Or possibly both.

“The flow of the universe,” Percy chimes in, waving a hand vaguely above his head. “The divine choreography of emotionally stunted people falling in love.”

Oh. Great. So now the universe is choreographing Will’s love life. That feels illegal. That feels like something he should have to sign a waiver for. Was there a signup sheet? Did he miss the signup sheet?

“That’s not comforting,” Will mutters.

Annabeth shuts her planner with a snap, like she’s sealing a file marked “ Classified .” “Look. Nico’s a private guy. Secretive. Dramatic. A bit of a cryptid.”

Will nods slowly. That much is obvious. Nico communicates like a haunted mirror. Half the time, Will has to reread his texts five times before deciding whether they’re flirty, threatening, or both.

“A brooding vampire cryptid,” Leo says, beaming.

Will rolls his head toward the sky, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. Yeah. Okay. That’s accurate.

“But,” Annabeth continues, more gently now, “he’s also… intense. Thoughtful. Once he chooses someone, that’s it. Game over. He’s all in.”

Will’s heart thumps. Hard. Don’t read into that, he tells himself, which is exactly the kind of sentence someone says before reading into something for three consecutive days.

“Like a very focused crow,” Percy muses. “But instead of stealing shiny things, he hoards emotions.”

Will makes a sound that could generously be described as a strangled wheeze. His hands are clammy. He might be dying. “Are you saying… he likes me?”

Leo gasps theatrically, one hand to his chest. “We would never say that.”

Annabeth’s eyebrows shoot up. “We’re his friends. We have boundaries.”

“We would never betray Nico’s trust,” Percy adds with mock solemnity.

Will’s stomach does a full gymnastic routine. Oh my gods, they’re actually serious. They’re actually trying to protect him. Nico, the boy who disappears into shadows, who glares like it’s a love language, has people protecting his secrets like they’re guarding national treasure.

“By casually revealing how he’s been emotionally spiraling over you in the shadows like a Victorian governess,” Leo adds brightly.

Annabeth smacks his arm.

Will freezes. Emotionally spiraling? Over… me? His brain short-circuits like a broken printer. Static. All static.

Percy shrugs. “All we’re saying is… hypothetically, if someone had been quietly, dramatically yearning for months, they wouldn’t just say it. But they might show it. In… mysterious ways.”

Will’s mind flashes through every cryptic text Nico’s ever sent. Every stare. Every meaningful silence. Every half-smirk and ghosted goodbye.

“Vague texts,” Annabeth offers.

“Haunting bookstores,” Percy says.

“Threatening to set me on fire every time I mention your name,” Leo says proudly.

Will’s eyes widen, horrified and weirdly flattered. “He threatened to set you on fire?”

“Figuratively,” Leo says.

“Mostly,” Annabeth mutters.

Percy leans in a little, eyes kinder now. “Nico’s not great with words. Or feelings. Or sunlight. But he’s trying. And I think that counts for something.”

Will swallows. Hard. His throat feels like it’s full of glitter and barbed wire. The idea that Nico might be trying —that this is effort, that the silence, the mystery, the not telling Jason —might actually mean something —it’s overwhelming in the worst and best way.

“So what—you’re telling me I’m, what, part of some emotional long game?”

“More like a delicate, high-stakes operation,” Annabeth says, calm as ever. “We’ve all… nudged a few things.”

Will blinks. A few things?

His memories start rearranging themselves. Coincidences that don’t feel like coincidences anymore. Encounters that seemed random—serendipitous, even—but in hindsight carry the glimmering fingerprints of scheming. 

Everything feels staged. Like Nico’s been laying out breadcrumbs. Or—worse—like everyone around them has been rearranging the scenery, directing the lighting, pushing them closer inch by inch like theatre kids with a budget and no chill.

Will's stomach swoops. Even his two closest friends are not innocent in this.

He remembers Lou Ellen and Cecil dragging him to that coffee shop just after midterms, insisting it had the best espresso on campus—which turned out to be a bold-faced lie, because the espresso was watery and sad, but Nico had been there. Alone. Reading Ovid and drinking something dark like he was nursing a grudge against the sun.

And Will had thanked them for the rec.

“Strings were pulled,” Leo says. “Timelines adjusted. Seating arrangements reconfigured.”

Will gapes. “What?”

“Fake emergencies may have been staged,” Percy adds with the air of someone confessing a war crime and feeling no remorse.

“You didn’t hear that,” Annabeth says quickly, flipping her planner open again like that’ll reset the timeline.

Will sits frozen, breath caught in his throat. The world narrows to this patch of sunlit grass, this group of people who have apparently been conspiring around him like he’s the protagonist of a romantic spy movie he didn’t audition for.

“The point is,” Percy says, quieter now, “we wouldn’t be telling you any of this if it wasn’t important. If you weren’t…” He trails off.

“If you weren’t the exception,” Annabeth finishes, almost gently.

Will blinks.

He’s not sure his heart is still beating. The sun is hot on his face, the grass scratchy under his hands, and the air around him feels thinner somehow, like he’s just been given something fragile and glowing and not at all real. The exception.

The exception.

Because logically, he knows this. Or—he should know this.

Nico was coming to his apartment. Unannounced. Uninvited. To ask him out. He said Will was his type. He said he wanted to kiss him. That’s not nothing. That’s not ambiguous. That’s a series of words most people would categorize under “ romantic interest” or, at the very least, “ advanced flirting .”

But logic is slippery when you’re in love with someone who vanishes like fog and reappears with that unreadable half-smile and eyes like winter storms. Logic doesn’t stop the voice in Will’s head whispering: What if it’s a joke? What if it’s temporary? What if you’re just an experiment?

And then there’s the Percy thing . The revelation that Nico used to like him. Used to. Past tense, sure, but it’s hard to ignore how easily Percy fits into every room, how he lights up a conversation without even trying. Will doesn’t blame Nico—not at all. If anything, he understands. But knowing that… knowing that Percy was once the center of Nico’s orbit makes the possibility of being the center now feel unreal. Like a glitch in the system. A dream he’s going to wake up from.

But the way Percy and Leo are talking, the way Annabeth says exception like it’s a sacred thing—it shifts something in Will’s chest. A key turning in a lock he didn’t know was there.

Because maybe—maybe—Nico has talked about him. Not just to him, but about him. Maybe he’s sat on Jason’s floor or in Percy’s kitchen or across from Annabeth at that rooftop bar they all mysteriously end up at, and said something like, “ He’s smart, ” or “ He’s funny when he’s spiraling ,” or even, “ I think I like him .”

And that—gods—that thought hits harder than anything.

Because Will knows what it’s like to talk about Nico. He’s done it in half-whispers and dramatic monologues, in panicked text chains with Lou Ellen and late-night venting sessions with Cecil. He’s said everything, out loud, to other people, because it helped make Nico feel real. Tangible. Less like a dream and more like something Will could actually reach.

And now, imagining Nico doing the same?

It changes the shape of the night. Makes the air feel different. Like this isn’t just something that happened to Will—it’s something they’re both in, something they’re building, awkward and slow and real.

It makes him feel closer to Nico.

And that terrifies him. And thrills him.

And—because he’s still Will—makes him want to lie down in the grass and scream into the void.

“You guys are ridiculous,” Will says, voice faint and cracking around the edges.

Leo grins, all teeth and mischief and fondness, like he knows something Will doesn’t. “Oh, sweetheart. You haven’t seen anything yet.”

And for a moment, the quad falls away. The chatter, the soda cans, the smell of sunscreen and spring grass—all of it fades, leaving just this: the impossible weight of Nico di Angelo’s name, and three of the people who know him best, looking at Will like he’s the answer to a question Nico has never dared to ask aloud.

***

Later that night, the apartment is a battlefield.

Glitter floats through the air like pollen. Clothes are draped over every available surface—couch cushions, dining chairs, the one sad plant they all keep forgetting to water. Music blares from someone’s phone in the kitchen, and three doors slam in quick succession as Will, Lou Ellen, and Cecil dart between bedrooms, the bathroom, and their makeshift runway of a hallway like it’s a fashion show hosted by Dionysus and powered entirely by anxiety.

Will is in front of the mirror again. He’s been in front of the mirror for twenty minutes. He is currently wearing a black button-up—well-fitted, sleeves rolled up, collar open just enough to suggest he’s casual but interested —and staring at himself like he’s trying to summon answers through eye contact.

“I look like I’m going to a funeral,” he mutters, adjusting the collar for the fourth time.

“That’s probably a plus,” Lou Ellen calls from the bathroom. “You’re dating a goth Victorian ghost, not a camp counselor.”

“Not dating ,” Will calls back. “Going on a date. A singular. One. Uno. Date.”

“Not with that attitude,” Cecil says, emerging from his room wearing ripped jeans, a leather jacket, and a bolo tie he may or may not have stolen from the theatre department’s costume closet. “By the way… twenty bucks says you straddle him before dessert.”

Will chokes. “ What? ”

“You heard me,” Cecil says, leaning on the doorframe with the smug ease of someone who thrives on chaos. “Lou, you want in on this?”

“Hmm,” Lou Ellen says, poking her head out from the bathroom, one eye fully lined in glittering copper, the other mid-sparkle. “Depends. Are we talking first course, or full three-course sit-down situation?”

Will runs a hand down his face. “I hate both of.”

“No you don’t,” Lou Ellen says sweetly, disappearing back into the bathroom. “You love us. We are the wind beneath your rapidly unraveling emotional state.”

“I’m not unravelling!” Will calls.

“Sure,” Cecil sings. “Speaking of which, you need a jacket. What if he takes you somewhere rooftop-y and tragic?”

Will turns back to the mirror, now wearing a different shirt. It’s deep green and maybe too tight. Or maybe not tight enough. He’s not sure anymore. He might be hallucinating from deodorant fumes.

“I can’t do this,” he says. “I want to look hot but not like I’m trying to look hot. Like, hot by accident. Hot on purpose is too much.”

“Will,” Lou Ellen says, appearing again, eyeliner now winged and weaponized, “you could show up in a burlap sack and Nico would still look at you like you just handed him the keys to the underworld.”

Will groans and flops onto the couch, shirt halfway unbuttoned, eyes wide and tragic.

“I need help,” he says. “Real help. Not straddle-betting help. Actual fashion guidance.”

Cecil squints. “Okay, let’s assess. What do we know?”

“He’s wearing black,” Lou Ellen says.

“He’s always wearing black,” Will mutters into the throw pillow.

“Exactly,” Cecil says. “So you need contrast. Something that says, ‘Hey, I’m not brooding, but I am brooding adjacent. ’”

Will peeks up. “So… not the green shirt?”

Lou Ellen tosses a sparkly scrunchie at him. “Try the navy one. The one with the subtle pattern. It says ‘I read books and know how to make eye contact .’”

“That’s a lie.”

“Exactly,” she grins.

Will sighs and drags himself off the couch, disappearing into his room.

Behind him, Cecil plops onto the couch, legs dangling dramatically over the armrest. “Ten bucks says he makes a pun about shadows.”

Lou Ellen, now applying highlighter with the focus of a surgeon, hums. “Only if he’s nervous. Otherwise, he’s going full mysterious silence.”

“You guys are betting on Nico’s behavior now?” Will calls from his room.

“We’re betting on the entire evening, ” Lou Ellen replies. “It’s called emotional investment. Look it up.”

Will reemerges. Navy shirt. Good collar. Rolled sleeves. Collarbone visible—but not in a desperate way. His hair is still damp but Lou Ellen has promised the strategic deployment of product and prayer. He looks like a boy who’s either about to fall in love or get hit by a truck full of feelings.

They both stare at him.

Cecil whistles low. “Damn.”

Lou Ellen grins. “Yeah. That’s the one.”

Will’s face burns. He fidgets with his sleeve. “You really think so?”

“Absolutely,” Lou Ellen says, tossing him a small tube of cologne. “Now you just have to go on the date. Be gay. Be brave. And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Will raises a brow. “You’d set a bar on fire.”

“Exactly,” she says, beaming.

Will checks the time. Then checks it again. Then stands very, very still, heart pounding like a war drum.

Cecil stands too and claps him on the shoulder. “You’ve got this. Just don’t forget your wallet. Or your dignity.”

Will breathes in. Breathes out.

“I’m going to die,” he mutters.

“You’re going to kiss a boy,” Lou Ellen corrects.

“Same thing,” Will says.

He’s still standing by the door, frozen like a man waiting for a firing squad, when Lou Ellen claps her hands and points at the chair like she’s summoning a very specific type of chaos.

“Hair. Now. Sit.”

Will obeys, muttering something about being fine, which no one acknowledges. Lou Ellen pushes him down onto one of the kitchen chairs with all the gentle force of a woman on a mission. She’s already rolling up her sleeves like a stylist with a vendetta.

“You can’t go out there looking like a soggy Boy Scout,” she says, eyeing his damp curls like they’ve personally offended her. “Unacceptable.”

“I showered,” Will says defensively.

“You half-showered,” Lou Ellen says, cracking her knuckles. “You rinsed your body and then stood under the stream thinking about how Nico said ‘sleep well ’ last night.”

Will doesn’t respond. Which is to say—he absolutely did that. 

Lou Ellen picks up her spray bottle with the gravity of a woman about to summon a spirit. “Hold still.”

“I’m scared,” Will whispers.

“You should be,” Cecil says from across the room, standing behind their cluttered counter with a cocktail shaker in hand. “Because I’m making drinks.”

“Oh no,” Will mutters.

“Oh yes, ” Cecil grins. “Pregame for us. Liquid courage for you. Don’t worry, it’s mostly juice.”

He pours three mismatched glasses: one in a cracked mug that says World’s Okayest Roommate, one in a wine glass that’s definitely from the thrift store, and one in a Solo cup that’s somehow both bent and glittery.

He hands Will the mug. “To love,” he says dramatically, raising his glass.

“To drama,” Lou Ellen adds, not looking up from where she’s aggressively fluffing Will’s damp curls.

“To the hope that Nico doesn’t ghost me in person,” Will mutters, and takes a sip.

It’s… surprisingly good. Fruity. Sharp. Like Cecil. Will takes another sip, then winces as Lou Ellen scrapes a comb through a knot near the crown of his head with the ruthless efficiency of someone who has absolutely no time for drama.

“Stop squirming,” she says, holding the comb like a weapon. “You want volume, not a nervous breakdown.”

“I think it’s both,” Will says through gritted teeth, clenching the sides of the chair like he’s about to be waterboarded.

His hair is still a little damp—he thought it would air-dry like a beachy dream , but instead it’s doing the thing where his curls are attempting to frizz and clump simultaneously, and now Lou Ellen is attacking them with something that looks suspiciously like mousse.

“I didn’t even know we owned mousse,” Will mutters.

“You didn’t,” she says. “I did. Because I plan ahead.”

“And I hoard beauty products under the sink,” Cecil calls helpfully from the kitchen. “Don’t look in the third drawer unless you want to be cursed.”

Lou Ellen ignores them both. She’s spritzing, fluffing, scrunching—half stylist, half alchemist—and Will is just trying to stay still and not die of shame.

“You’ve got good hair,” she says, voice focused, fingers raking through his scalp with the clinical precision of someone who’s done this before. “Golden, thick, soft waves. A little too long right now, but we’re making it work.”

“I don’t have time for a haircut,” Will grumbles. “I barely have time to sleep. ”

“Well, lucky for you, this is a glam emergency, and I come prepared,” she says, producing a diffuser from somewhere in the chaos of their bathroom bag like it’s a sacred artifact. “And now we dry.”

Will freezes. “You’re not serious.”

“I’m always serious,” Lou Ellen says, plugging it in. “Tilt your head forward.”

He obeys, mostly out of fear. The diffuser hums to life, and suddenly she’s cupping his curls with practiced ease, lifting and twirling and doing something vaguely magical that smells like citrus and very faintly of glitter.

Will is equal parts terrified and grateful. His usual hair routine is: shampoo, towel-dry, pray for mercy . But this? This feels… intentional. Like he might walk out of here not just hot, but knowingly hot. Like the kind of hot that gets kissed in alleyways. Or stared at across candlelit dinners. Or—

“Stop making that face,” Lou Ellen says, tugging him gently upright again. “You’re overthinking your own hair.”

“I’m not,” he lies.

“You’re absolutely spiraling.”

“I am a perfectly calm individual,” he says, clutching his Solo cup with both hands like it’s a flotation device.

Lou Ellen squints at his head like she’s judging a sculpture. Then she fluffs one curl at the front, tilts her head, and steps back.

“There,” she says finally, satisfied. “You’re no longer damp. You’re artfully windswept. ”

Will blinks at his reflection in the toaster, the warped metal showing him a halo of sunlit waves, a jawline that looks a little sharper than usual, and cheekbones that might actually survive the night.

“I look like I just got out of a French film,” he says.

“A gay French film,” Lou Ellen corrects, tossing him a knowing grin.

“One where you fall in love at dusk and get emotionally wrecked before the credits,” Cecil adds, setting down his now-empty glass.

Will exhales. His hands are still shaking a little, but the air feels warmer. Softer. Charged.

He doesn't feel ready. Not at all.

But he might be… almost brave.

“You look like a boy about to get kissed under a streetlamp,” Lou Ellen corrects.

“You look like the kind of man who gets dragged into alleyways for makeouts and/or vampire politics,” Cecil adds.

“I don’t even know what that means.”

Cecil shrugs. “Nico will.”

Will is adjusting the cuffs of his shirt when Lou Ellen emerges from the bathroom with a makeup bag in one hand and a cowboy boot in the other.

“So,” she says, tossing the boot onto the couch and leaning against the wall with practiced cool. “Do you have protection?”

Will nearly drops his phone. “ What?! ”

“You know,” she says, batting her lashes. “A metaphorical emotional helmet. Or condoms. Either, really.”

“Oh my gods,” Will mutters, face going red.

“Both are important,” Cecil chimes in, flopping onto the couch and sipping what’s definitely just tequila in orange juice now. “Don’t want to catch feelings without the appropriate gear.”

“I hate you.”

“You love us,” Lou Ellen says, examining her glitter liner in the reflection of the microwave. “And you’re the one who decided to go out with the hot, brooding Italian boy who looks like he bites.”

Will groans. “He probably does bite.”

Cecil grins. “Then you better be ready.”

“I am not discussing this with you.”

Lou Ellen tosses him a playful wink. “Just remember—thumb in your fist. Supposed to help with the gag reflex.”

“It doesn’t, ” Will says flatly. “I’ve tried.”

Both of them howl with laughter. Cecil actually falls off the couch. Will buries his face in his hands and prays for divine intervention. Possibly via lightning strike.

“Okay, okay,” Lou Ellen says, wiping a tear from her eye. “We’ll stop. No more sex jokes.”

“For now,” Cecil mutters, climbing back onto the couch.

But then Lou Ellen straightens, her expression shifting from teasing to something softer. The mischief fades from her eyes, and for once, she doesn’t follow it with a joke.

She crosses the room with that quiet kind of purpose she saves for real moments—the rare ones—and adjusts the collar of Will’s shirt, smoothing it gently, like she’s grounding him. Like she knows he’s about to vibrate out of his own skin.

“Hey,” she says, voice low now, careful in a way she rarely is. “You look really good.”

Will swallows, the knot in his throat suddenly not from laughter.

He nods, eyes fixed on her hands as she fusses with his buttons—not in a rushed, chaotic way, but gently, deliberately, like a big sister seeing him off to prom. The kind of gesture that says I know you, and I’ve got you, even if she doesn’t say it out loud.

They don’t always do this—the softness, the stillness—but it’s there. Underneath the teasing, beneath the jokes about straddling Nico before dessert and comparing date anxiety to a medical emergency. Lou Ellen and Cecil are his people. Not just his chaos goblins. His home.

“You’re gonna do great,” she adds, fingers smoothing a wrinkle on his shoulder with finality.

Cecil, still sprawled on the couch in a glitter-smeared shirt and unbuttoned flannel, looks up from his drink. His voice, for once, is steady and sincere.

“Seriously. You’ve been a wreck about this, but… you really like him. And he likes you. A lot.”

He says it without theatrics. No wink. No teasing edge.

Just truth.

Will exhales slowly, chest tightening in that unbearable way that has nothing to do with his shirt and everything to do with how much he wants this to go right. How much it matters.

“Yeah. I know. I just… I don’t want to mess it up.”

Lou Ellen steps back, smiling now, but there’s something soft in it—proud, almost. “You won’t. You’re thoughtful. You’re hot. You’re emotionally repressed in a very charming way. That’s basically Nico’s exact type.”

Will huffs a laugh, cheeks warm.

And just like that, the air shifts again—lighter, steadier. He doesn’t say thank you, but he doesn’t have to. They know. He hopes they always do.

“Oh!” he says suddenly, grabbing his phone like it just gave him a second chance at life. “I did get reservations. That Italian place on 14th—the one Leo kept saying has a mural of Medusa in the bathroom?”

Lou Ellen squints. “The one that’s always booked three weeks out?”

“Yep. I called in a favor,” Will says, trying and failing to sound casual. “Chiara Benvenuti—you know, from my statistics class? Her family owns it. I helped her prep for her final project last semester and she owes me, like, two lifetimes of math-related emotional damage, so she pulled some strings.”

“She’s the one majoring in data analytics with a gambling theory concentration, right?” Cecil says dreamily. “Because that’s both incredibly niche and incredibly cool.”

“Yeah, her thesis is literally about probability curves in roulette,” Will mutters, still scrolling. “Anyway, I panicked while booking and tried to order in Italian over the phone and I think I accidentally called someone’s mother a cow. But they still took the reservation.”

Lou Ellen claps a hand over her mouth.

Cecil wheezes. “You international incidented your way into a date. I’m impressed.”

Lou Ellen grins. “Will Solace, charming his way through another disaster.”

“I’m proud of you, buddy,” Cecil says, lifting his glass in salute.

Will smiles. Not the tight, nervous one he’s been wearing all night, but a real one. Warm, crooked, a little amazed.

Will smiles. Not the tight, nervous one he’s been wearing all night, but a real one. Warm, crooked, a little amazed.

“Thanks,” he says. “For, you know. This. All of this.”

Lou Ellen bumps her shoulder against his. “That’s what we’re here for.”

Cecil stands up, pulling on his boots with a theatrical groan. “Now go. Be mysterious. Be sexy. Be respectfully horny.”

Will snorts, shaking his head—just as his phone buzzes in his pocket.

He fumbles for it, thumb suddenly slippery, heart skipping a beat like it knows what’s coming. One notification.

Nico di Angelo: I’m outside. No pressure. But if you ghost me, I reserve the right to raise you from the dead and yell at you.

Will stares at the message. It's so perfectly Nico—casual apocalypse energy, vague threat, flirting hidden behind necromantic menace.

His stomach flips. He is equal parts terrified and elated.

Lou Ellen notices the look on his face and arches a brow. “That him?”

Will nods, tucking the phone away like it’s about to explode. “He’s here.”

Cecil gives a dramatic gasp. “Our boy is being summoned.”

Lou Ellen fans herself. “Tell Death’s favorite intern we say hi.”

Will rolls his eyes. “I’m leaving before you can say anything worse.”

“Too late,” Lou Ellen calls as he heads for the door. “Go get emotionally ravaged by your vampire boyfriend!”

Will throws them a middle finger over his shoulder.

And then he’s gone, heart pounding, the scent of citrus mousse in his hair and the soft, terrifying hope that maybe—just maybe—this night will be worth every minute of panic.

Notes:

i’ve been chatting with some of you in the comments about the songs that inspired this fic/these scenes, so i figured i’d share them here too in case anyone missed that thread or just wants to cry to music like i do.

For Will's POV:

“Bags” – Clairo (gay panic with reverb)
“The (After) Life of the Party” – Fall Out Boy (Will-core, unfortunately, I've had this on repeat while writing this fic)
“Not Strong Enough” – boygenius (the fic’s soul, honestly)
“Iris” – Goo Goo Dolls (Will Solace at 3am staring at the ceiling)
“About You” – The 1975 (slow-burn yearning but make it self-destructive)
“I Wanna Be Yours” – Arctic Monkeys (sexual tension, poetic neurosis)
“Robbers” – The 1975 (they’d commit beautiful emotional crimes together)
“It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)” – The 1975 (he’s so not okay, one of my favourite songs ever)
“Northern Downpour” – Panic! (soft, sad, rain-on-the-subway melancholy)
“Guilty As Sin?” And “The Archer”– Taylor Swift (canonically Will-coded in this AU)
“Ceilings” – Lizzy McAlpine (floats out of Will’s soul like mist)
“Ghost of You” & “Bad Omens” – 5SOS (Will’s gay melodrama corner)
“Achilles Come Down” – Gang of Youths (Nico-coded but Will’s spiraling to it)
“I Bet You Think About Me” – Taylor Swift (purely for the “silver spoon/raised on a farm” line, I swear, not claiming that break up energy)
“Grand Theft Autumn,” “Of All the Gin Joints,” “I’ve Got a Dark Alley,” and “Bang the Doldrums” – all Fall Out Boy, all essential to Will’s descent into chaotic feelings (Bang the Doldrums is peak Will POV, probably my favorite song ever)

For Nico’s POV, I’ve got things like:
“I Don’t Care If You’re Contagious” – Pierce the Veil (unhinged yearning)
“G.I.N.A.S.F.S.” – Fall Out Boy (velvet rage + romantic repression)
“In Your Room” – Julia Wolf (cursed attraction)
“Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner” – Fall Out Boy (chaotic, weirdly intimate)

And for general fic chaos:
“SexyBack”, “Barbie Girl”, "Country Girl (Shake It For Me) - basically the songs that have been featured in the fic so far in chaos karaoke/open mic, but I totally see songs like "Kiss Me Through The Phone" and "International Love" and Gasolina" also fitting this vibe if you want to pretend that you're at an unhinged party with Nico and The Seven. Also “Super Rich Kids” – Frank Ocean (for Nico & the Seven’s deeply unserious wealth aesthetic), and “Campus” – Vampire Weekend (purely for college vibes and preppy chaos).

thank you again for all the love, the chaos, the unhinged comments, and the absolute art form that is your commentary. you make writing this fic so much more fun (and honestly? slightly more emotionally damaging. which is exactly how i like it).

see you next chapter for… even more consequences ❤️

Chapter 26: I Thought We Were Going on a Date, Not Into a Class Crisis (Apparently ‘Pick You Up’ Means ‘Chauffeured by Generational Wealth’)

Notes:

okay. so. listen.

i know what you’re about to read is… a lot. and i am so sorry in advance for the angst i’m about to drop on your doorstep like a flaming bag of emotional damage, but it had to be done. i swear i really debated whether to go this route—I stared at my notes, I re-outlined, I paced dramatically while listening to The Archer and Not Strong Enough on repeat. but in the end, it all felt too essential to who these characters are in this AU. i couldn’t let it be all sunshine and yearning flirtation. not yet. they had to break a little first.

so here it is. the great angst block of 2025. four chapters. 25,950 words. like ripping off a band-aid, but the band-aid is made of heartbreak and class anxiety and communication issues.

i know the tone shifts hard here, and i really hope you don’t hate it. please remember all the times you’ve ever said you loved me. remember that angst is my natural habitat—the chaos and romantic yearning is new, shiny, and experimental. this is where i thrive. this is my final form.

but i promise, this is rock bottom. this is the storm before the soft. once we get through this, things start looking up. the healing begins. the payoff will be worth it. (right? right?? please say yes.)

also: thank you for all the love on the song recs from the last chapter!! these next four are marinated in The Archer and Not Strong Enough energy, so really that was foreshadowing and you should consider yourselves thoroughly warned. don’t come for me unless it’s with tissues and emotional support snacks.

anyway. enjoy the suffering. i’ll be hiding behind will and nico using them as human shields. 💀☀️

love you. sorry. (not really). okay, maybe a little.

The apartment door clicks shut behind Will, and for a moment, the world narrows. His roommates’ laughter fades into a distant hum, the hallway’s fluorescent glare is eclipsed by the soft spill of golden hour, and Will stands frozen at the top of the stoop, heart fluttering in his chest like a moth pinned beneath glass.

He doesn’t know what he expected—Nico leaning against a lamppost, maybe, hood up, sarcasm sharp, hands buried in his pockets like always. Something casual. Containable. Something Will could brace himself for by repeating you are just a boy, you are just a boy until it felt true.

But this? This is not that.

A sleek, definitely-illegally parked, definitely-not-an-Uber black car idles at the curb, low and purring like it belongs to someone mythic—important in the way ancient things are important, without needing to explain themselves. The headlights glow soft in the amber dusk, casting long, deliberate shadows that spill like ink across the sidewalk.

And Nico is there.

Leaning against the car like he was painted into the scene, boot braced against concrete, arms folded in that particular brand of effortless defiance. He looks like a still from a foreign film Will wouldn’t dare admit he watched twice. The dying sun skims across his profile, catching in the curve of his jaw, the sweep of his cheekbone—turning him gold, turning him godly. Like a relic unearthed too late and too beautiful to belong to this century.

It’s almost indecent, how good he looks.

His hair is tousled just enough to suggest accident, which only confirms intention. The hoodie is gone—sacrificed, maybe—and in its place: a black button-down, sleeves pushed to his elbows with the elegance of someone preparing for something worth remembering. The collar gapes at the throat, loose and inviting, soft shadows catching in the hollow between bone and breath. Two buttons undone. Maybe three. Will doesn’t count. Can’t. It would feel like hubris.

The boots are polished. The posture, relaxed. But Will sees it—the faint tension in his hands, the way his fingers twitch like they’re used to holding onto something that might leave.

Then their eyes meet. And something shifts.

Not dramatically, not all at once—but like a lock clicking open. Nico straightens, not like he’s bracing, but like he’s settling. Like his bones are remembering their shape. Like the sight of Will is gravity, and for a moment, the night becomes real in the space between them.

His lips part—just slightly. As if a word had been waiting there, half-formed and fragile, but fled in the moment their gazes touched.

Will doesn’t know what it was.

But gods, he wants to.

Will steps down slowly, cautiously, like the sidewalk might vanish beneath him if he moves too fast.

He feels his chest twist around itself, caught between awe and pure secondhand embarrassment at how wildly out of his depth he feels. This is not the start of a casual first date. This is the part in a movie where the music swells and someone in the audience swoons.

The car alone is enough to cause an identity crisis. It gleams like it has never known rain or regret. The chauffeur in the front seat is absolutely wearing a cap. The back door is slightly open, like it’s all been choreographed— like Nico planned this.

Like Will is being picked up.

And gods help him, he wants to be. Picked up. Swept off his feet. Chosen.

He doesn’t say anything. He can’t.

Because Nico is standing there, impossibly beautiful and somehow nervous , and the golden light is curling at the edges of his dark shirt, and Will is struck by the sudden and terrifying realization that there is no returning from this.

Not for him.

“Hey,” Nico says, voice a little rough, like he’s been clearing his throat for the past ten minutes.

Will blinks. “Hey.”

And for a moment, they just look at each other.

The city moves around them—cars passing, voices distant, the scent of late autumn rising from the pavement—but none of it touches them. It’s like someone turned down the volume on everything else. Like the world tilted slightly, just to center this .

Will feels like he’s stepped into someone else’s movie. Someone cooler. Someone with artfully tousled hair and a curated Spotify playlist and a closet full of clothes that didn’t come from the sale rack. Someone who wears cologne that costs more than fifteen dollars and didn’t spend the last hour in a full-blown spiral about whether navy was too much.

But here he is anyway—Will Solace, golden boy undone, standing beneath a sky burning soft at the edges, molten gold seeping into blue like the evening can’t bear to let go of the day—and Nico is looking at him.

Really looking .

Not glancing. Not observing with that detached elegance he usually wears like armor. No, this is something else. Nico’s gaze moves over him like a slow exhale, deliberate and heavy with meaning. It starts low—at his shoes, scuffed just enough to betray the walk over—and climbs. Lingers. Rolls over the casual confidence of his sleeves, the line of his collarbone half-revealed by the open buttons, the soft fall of curls brushing his temple like they were placed there by hand.

And Will—gods—feels it. All of it. Every square inch of skin suddenly awake. Suddenly electric.

Then—just for a breath—Nico’s expression shifts.

It’s the smallest crack, but Will sees it, feels it like a pulse under the surface. A flicker in his eyes, a parting of his lips, like a thought stumbled mid-formation. Like whatever script he rehearsed vanished the moment he saw Will like this—unarmored, yes, but trying, glowing faintly in the dying light, and maybe… beautiful.

The air between them pulls taut, sparkling with something unspoken and thrumming, like a wire strung too tight between two bodies trying not to lean forward. There’s awe in Nico’s silence. Want, maybe. Something ancient and unsteady and unspeakably human.

Will’s chest feels too small to contain the sudden rush of it.

Because for the first time, he realizes—maybe Nico had been nervous too. Not guarded. Not unreadable. Just… hoping. And now here he is, seeing Will like this, taking him in inch by inch, and not turning away. Not vanishing.

Still standing. Still staring.

Still wanting.

And gods, if that isn’t something close to divine.

Will shifts on his feet, heart thudding like a drum, hands suddenly unsure of where to go.

Nico’s lips part again—just slightly, like the air between them is heavy—and then, softly:

“You look…” He swallows, eyes flicking briefly to Will’s collarbone and back up. “Really good.”

Will has been a lot of things in his life—tired, overwhelmed, emotionally repressed—but speechless isn’t usually one of them.

Right now, though?

Right now he doesn’t have a single damn word.

Because Nico is nervous. Nico di Angelo—the boy who stares down professors and has resting “ I’ve seen death ” face—is standing next to a car that probably came with wine service, and he’s nervous. Flushed, even, like saying it out loud cost him something.

“You too,” Will says, which is criminally inadequate because Nico doesn’t just look good—he looks unreal. Like he stepped out of a Vogue spread titled Ethereal Gothic Heir Falls in Love.

They both hesitate, standing there in the charged hush between them, until Nico glances back at the car, then at Will.

“I, uh,” Nico says, ducking his head slightly, a small smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. “I figured if I was going to pick you up… I should actually pick you up. ”

Will stares at him. “Is this… is this your car?”

Nico’s smile grows. “It’s… my family’s. Technically. I borrowed it.”

Will looks at the car. Then back at Nico.

“You borrowed a chauffeured car to take me to dinner?”

“I thought it’d be funny,” Nico says, and he’s blushing now, just slightly, but enough to make Will’s brain fizzle like soda. “And maybe… a little romantic. If that’s okay.”

Will is one bad decision away from fanning himself with his wallet. “Yeah. That’s okay.”

But inside, Will is spiraling.

Not visibly—his posture is easy, practiced, the kind you wear when you’ve had to pass for okay even when the floor’s falling out beneath you. But under the surface? Chaos. Bright, relentless chaos. Because of course Nico di Angelo has access to a chauffeured car. Of course the boy who dresses like mourning is a lifestyle and quotes dead poets like threats is also the quiet heir to some old-money empire that probably owns half of Italy and a minor moon.

It shouldn’t be surprising. It should be inevitable.

And yet it lands like a blow to the ribs. Sharp. Bruising.

Because Will forgets sometimes—wants to forget. Wants to pretend that Nico isn’t part of that world, the one gilded in unspoken wealth and quiet privilege. Wants to believe that when they sit side by side in a grimy bar or trade stories in the campus quad or share a sun-drenched silence in the library, that it’s even. That they’re even.

But this car—this ridiculous, glossy, purring car—says otherwise.

It’s not just about money. It’s about ease. About the way Nico stands like he’s never had to check a price tag or flinch at a bill. About the kind of life where comfort is assumed, where dinner reservations appear like clockwork and the word affordable is never needed. Nico doesn’t flaunt it. None of them do. The Seven are quiet about their privilege. They wear it like silk—light, breathable, inherited. Inevitable.

Will is grateful for that. Grateful they don’t make him feel smaller on purpose.

But the truth is—he’s never been able to pretend.

His life is one of bus routes and roommates and shoes repaired with duct tape. Rent payments made with breath held. Work shifts that blur together until he forgets what free time tastes like. He’s had to earn everything—grades, groceries, second chances. Nothing has ever been waiting for him at the curb with leather seats and soft jazz playing through invisible speakers.

And now, standing here, his shirt still faintly smelling like Lou Ellen’s citrus mousse, hair fluffed with desperate hope, he feels it. That line. Thin but unyielding. The thread of difference stretched taut between them—Nico in his sleek, impossible world, and Will on the outside, always looking in, always bracing.

And yet—

Nico is standing there.

Not aloof. Not polished. But nervous. Blushing. Tugging at his sleeve like a boy who isn’t quite sure how to be looked at. He didn’t bring the car to impress. He brought it because he thought it would make Will laugh. Because he thought it would be funny . Because he wanted, somehow, to delight him.

And gods—it does .

Will doesn’t know what to do with that. Doesn’t know how to cradle it without crushing it. Doesn’t know how to stop the part of himself that wants to flinch from kindness—because he’s so used to it costing something.

But Nico is still watching him. Still hoping.

And for once, Will doesn’t look away.

So he bites his tongue.

He doesn’t say, We could’ve walked.

He doesn’t say, This is too much.

Because it’s Nico.

And Nico is here. Trying. And Will will not— will not —ruin that.

So instead, he smiles. A little breathless, a little overwhelmed.

“Yeah,” he says, voice soft, eyes locked on Nico like there’s no one else in the world. “That’s okay.”

Nico steps forward, just a little closer, and opens the door for him.

It’s such a small gesture, but it sends a strange flutter through Will’s chest. Because it’s old-fashioned. Because it’s thoughtful. Because for a brief, dizzying second, it feels like being courted , and Will doesn’t know what to do with that.

He ducks his head in a silent thank-you and climbs in.

The inside of the car smells like leather and expensive air—like cedar, and cologne that probably has a name like Ghost in the Garden and retails for more than Will makes in a shift. The seats are so soft they could qualify as memory foam. The windows tint the city into something glossier than it really is.

Will exhales slowly, like he’s trying not to fog up the air itself. He adjusts his shirt and hopes the sweat along the back of his neck isn’t visible.

Nico slides in beside him and closes the door. The click is quiet. Precise. The cabin seals around them like they’ve entered another world entirely. The noise of the city dims instantly, reduced to a distant hush. It feels like the universe has drawn a curtain between them and everything else.

Will tries not to squirm.

Everything about this car is too clean, too curated, too much . It feels like stepping into a life that doesn’t belong to him—a life he’s only ever observed from the sidewalk. The kind of car that gets valet parked at fancy restaurants. The kind that features in movies with violins on the soundtrack. The kind of car you don’t own, but inherit. Quietly. Without fanfare. Just… expected.

And sitting inside it now, he’s reminded of something he tries not to think about often: the difference between where he comes from and where Nico comes from.

Not because Nico flaunts it—he doesn’t . Never has. He doesn’t act like money matters to him.

But money has always mattered to Will.

And in moments like this, it’s impossible to forget that they come from different worlds. Nico’s family has power. Old, quiet, dangerous money. The kind that gets passed down in dusty wills and whispered Italian. The kind that buys you chauffeured cars and private museum tours and a default sense of control.

Will grew up with the kind of money you stretch . Groceries carefully calculated. Rent scraped together with tips and nerves. He’s always counted—on coupons, on hours worked, on backup plans.

There’s no blame in it. No resentment. Just… dissonance. A soft ache in the shape of you don’t belong here that he’s spent most of his life ignoring.

But then Nico shifts beside him, a little stiff in the shoulders, like he’s the one who feels out of place. And Will glances over to find him not lounging, not posing, but looking down at his hands like they’ve betrayed him. Like he’s waiting to be told he did something wrong.

It’s a strange comfort, that nervous energy. The reminder that Nico, for all his mystery and money and mythic presence, is still just a boy trying his best.

Will is halfway through calculating how many times he should compliment Nico before it gets weird—three? four? not five, that’s too much—when Nico turns slightly, eyes still trained on his fingers, then looks up at Will.

And everything stills again.

“I made reservations,” he says.

Will blinks. “Oh?”

Nico nods, still fidgeting slightly with the hem of his sleeve. “It’s a place I’ve never actually been to, well I was there once, for all of two minutes, but I couldn’t stay…something came up with my dad and—never mind, not the point. The others—Annabeth, Percy, Leo, Frank—they’re obsessed with it. They keep telling me to go. Hazel and Piper too. They say it’s the best place in the city.”

There’s a pause. A little beat where Nico’s voice shifts—less casual now, more deliberate. Hopeful.

“I thought… maybe it’d be fun to try something new. Together.”

Will stares at him, completely still.

Oh.

Oh no.

Because he also made dinner reservations.

He made them after lunch, mid-panic spiral, pacing in the quiet corner of the library like a man possessed. He’d texted Chiara like he was calling in a favor from the mafia, begging her to double-check the pronunciation of ravioli al limone so he wouldn’t embarrass himself. He’d called the restaurant—twice—to confirm they’d received his booking. He wrote the directions down in his notes app and on a sticky note. He practiced saying the name out loud in front of his mirror like it was a confession. He planned this.

He was supposed to be the one who took Nico out. That was the idea. The intention. The desperate hope.

But now Nico is sitting beside him in the back of a car that costs more than Will’s financial aid package, all soft eyes and hopeful edges, looking—gods— proud of himself. Maybe even a little shy. Like this is a leap. Like he’s not used to doing things like this, and he’s bracing for Will to laugh, or shrug, or— gods forbid —correct him.

And Will can’t. He won’t .

Because suddenly, it’s so obvious—how hard Nico is trying. How much this night means to him, even if he’d rather set himself on fire than say it aloud. Maybe the car is too much. Maybe it’s theatrical and unnecessary and laughably over-the-top.

But maybe it’s also romantic. And brave. And impossibly, unbearably sincere.

And gods—Will was raised better than to ruin something like this.

He’s Southern. He was raised on “ yes ma’am ”s and hand-written thank-you notes, on opening doors and meaning it, on standing street-side to protect from traffic and ghosts, real or imagined. He was taught that you bring flowers when you care, that you pay when it matters, that you take care of the people you love even when you’re tired, even when it hurts. Kindness wasn’t optional. It was built into the scaffolding of who he was supposed to be.

He was taught to show up. To carry the weight. To give.

And now—here—he’s sitting in a chauffeured car while someone tries to do that for him .

A boy, no less. A boy in a black button-down and borrowed bravado, who showed up with a car that probably costs more than Will’s yearly tuition just because he thought it would make Will laugh. Because he thought it might make Will feel seen. Taken care of.

It’s disorienting.

Because there’s no script for this. No roadmap. None of the traditional roles apply—not when it’s two boys inching toward something gentle with too much history in their hands and no instructions for how to hold each other without breaking.

Gender roles never made much sense to begin with, but now it feels like static—like background noise behind something quieter and truer. There’s no cosmic rulebook for how a Southern bisexual boy is supposed to navigate this moment, this love, this trembling possibility.

There’s only the terrifying, breathtaking freedom of figuring it out as they go.

And Will—sweet, anxious, stubbornly polite Will—wants to get it right.

He just doesn’t know what right looks like yet. But he thinks, maybe, it might start with not turning away.

So he swallows the knot in his throat. Pushes the panic aside. And smiles—soft and easy, the way he does when he knows he’s standing at the edge of something important.

“That sounds great,” he says, and his voice doesn’t even crack.

Nico relaxes. Just a little. His fingers still curl in his lap, but his shoulders drop, and his mouth twitches like he’s trying not to smile too obviously.

Will looks out the window for a moment, pretending to be calm, then discreetly pulls out his phone and types a message to Chiara Benvenuti under the edge of his coat.

hey
sorry but can you cancel that res for tonight
i owe you a stats tutoring session and a free coffee
xoxo your fav TA

He hits send and tucks the phone away, guilt bubbling somewhere in his chest, but it’s softened by the look on Nico’s face—quiet and bright and full of effort . Will doesn’t care where they go, as long as that look stays.

As the car pulls away from the curb, Will dares one glance at Nico.

And promptly forgets how breathing works.

Gods , he’s beautiful.

There’s something cinematic about the way the streetlights catch in his hair, the way the gold of the sunset traces the line of his jaw, painting him in warm light like a saint or a secret. He’s ethereal in motion—sharp where Will feels soft, composed where Will is unraveling.

He’s glowing. Not in the obvious way, not in the spotlight, but in the kind of way that sneaks up on you. That makes you want to look twice. Bone structure carved like a cathedral, eyes unreadable but present , like he’s trying not to look too long and already failing.

Will exhales, long and slow.

He is doomed.

Already in deep.

And still, somehow, thrilled to be exactly where he is.

The car hums around them, smooth and silent, sliding into the river of New York traffic like it owns the lane. Outside, the city is lit in dusky gold and neon blush. Inside, everything is dim and soft and a little too quiet—like the space between heartbeats before something important happens.

Will crosses his legs at the ankles, fingers laced in his lap like a man trying to physically contain his feelings. His thigh is barely an inch from Nico’s—close enough to feel the heat radiating from him in the narrow space between. Close enough to ache.

He doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know if he should say anything. There’s a strange, expectant pause between them, like a held breath.

Then, finally:

“So,” Nico says, his voice cutting through the silence like velvet. Calm on the surface, but Will catches the slight lift at the corner of his mouth. “How was your day?”

Will blinks, like someone has just turned his brain back on. “Oh—good. Busy. I had a hematology lab this morning—gross, but fascinating—and then I, uh, met up with Lou Ellen and Cecil for lunch. We ran into Percy, Annabeth, and Leo, too, so it turned into this… weird little group hang.”

He pauses.

He considers mentioning that every single person in that group spent the meal casually confirming Nico is emotionally invested, using metaphors so dramatic they might qualify as a Greek chorus.

He decides, wisely, not to mention that.

“So naturally,” he says instead, “they’re now pre-gaming for mechanical bull riding.”

Nico huffs a laugh, a low, warm sound that curls around Will’s ribs. “Why am I not surprised?”

“You shouldn’t be,” Will says, relaxing slightly. “Lou Ellen was applying glitter like war paint. Cecil’s wearing a bolo tie. I think someone might die.”

“Probably Leo,” Nico says without hesitation.

“Definitely Leo.”

They both laugh, and for a moment, the air in the car shifts—lighter now. Like laughter cracked something open, let a little more oxygen in.

Will glances sideways. “How about you? What’d you get up to?”

Nico leans back against the leather seat, gaze drifting out the window with a half-smile. “I had a Latin seminar this morning. Spent most of it internally screaming because someone in the back kept saying ‘gladiator’ like it was a slur.”

Will chuckles, shoulders loosening.

“Then I was in the museum archive all afternoon,” Nico continues. “I’m working on a paper about Hellenistic funerary art. It’s just… a lot of urns. So many urns. I’m very emotionally attached to at least three of them.”

“That’s the most on-brand sentence you’ve ever said.”

“I’m just saying, one of them had a very tragic inscription.”

Will watches him talk, heart clenching. There’s something so tender about this version of Nico—still sharp, still biting, but softened at the edges. He’s here, showing up , when he could so easily vanish instead. He’s trying, in his way. Opening little doors Will never expected him to.

“I also got lunch with Jason and Piper,” Nico adds, after a beat. “Jason’s trying to convince me to go rock climbing with him this weekend.”

Will snorts. “Were you like, ‘Absolutely not, I’m allergic to gravity’ ?”

“Basically. I said I’d go if I could do it in all black and hiss at everyone.”

“That’s a yes in Nico language,” Will says, grinning.

Nico shrugs, but he’s smiling too. “Piper said the same thing.”

They lapse into quiet again, but now it’s companionable—easy. The kind of silence that hums with promise instead of tension. Outside, the city blurs past in streaks of warm light and motion. Inside, the space between them thrums.

Will shifts, just a little closer. Just enough.

“I’m really glad we’re doing this,” he says, voice low, barely more than breath. But honest.

Nico turns to look at him. For a second, Will can see the usual sarcasm flicker behind his eyes, like he’s going to deflect or joke—but it doesn’t come. Instead, Nico just nods.

“Me too.”

And Will’s heart does something traitorous and soft and entirely irreversible.

They’re still laughing when the car makes a smooth left turn.

Nico’s head is tilted back, hair catching faint gold from a passing streetlamp. “I give it ten minutes before Leo challenges the bull to a duel,” he says.

“Five,” Will counters. “He’ll ride it hands-free, fall, and claim he meant to do that.”

“Cecil will definitely place bets.”

“Lou Ellen will fight someone for calling it mechanical ‘horse riding. ’”

“I kind of want to go just to witness the carnage.”

Will laughs, a real one this time—bright and unguarded—and watches the way it makes Nico look over at him like he’s a secret worth knowing.

It’s… almost perfect.

The low hum of the engine, the golden wash of late sun through tinted windows, the quiet space between them filled with something that could almost be peace.

But then the streets begin to look familiar.

Will glances out the window and tries not to tense—but the recognition creeps in like cold water down the back of his neck. These blocks aren’t just nice. They’re curated . All soft-lit storefronts and understated wealth. Brownstones carved like cathedrals. Window boxes that bloom out of season. Restaurants with no signage at all—just heavy doors and exclusivity.

It’s the kind of neighborhood where money doesn’t shout. It hums, low and constant, like background music only certain people are tuned to hear.

Will’s heart skips. Not in the good way.

He sees a couple walking past, slow and content in their wool coats and clean lines. They look like they’ve never sprinted for a bus, never checked their account balance before ordering coffee. They walk like they belong here.

And Will—he knows this place. Not from dining. Not from dates. From working. From long walks home after late shifts, pausing outside menus taped to windows just long enough to dream. Doing the math in his head—how many hours, how many tips, how many sacrifices it would take just to sit down at one of those tables and not feel like an imposter.

His stomach knots. Tight. Familiar.

He glances back at Nico, still half-lit by the city, still talking about whether Piper would be the one to ride the bull just to prove she could. He looks happy. Relaxed, even. Not something Will sees often—not something anyone sees often—and Will can’t bring himself to interrupt that.

So he doesn’t say anything. Just smiles and nods and adds a joke about Piper staring down the bartender when they card her.

But as the car glides forward, he knows.

There are only a handful of restaurants in this part of the city, and all of them are out of his budget. Even for a special occasion. Especially for a special occasion. He can feel it in the plush leather seat beneath him, in the quiet engine hum, in the fact that the driver hasn't asked them for directions.

This is Nico’s world. Not in a showy way—never that—but in the effortless way of someone who grew up with old money, with quiet affluence, with names that open doors and cards that never decline.

And Will… didn’t.

He swallows. Straightens his shirt. Focuses on the sound of Nico’s voice, grounding and low.

He can’t panic. Not yet. Not here.

Not when Nico looks so hopeful .

So he leans in slightly, forces his smile to stay put, and says, “Okay, new prediction: Leo gets kicked out, Lou Ellen joins the rodeo, and someone calls Annabeth a city slicker and immediately regrets it.”

Nico smirks, like the image pleases him. “I’d pay money to see that.”

The car slows, then rolls to a gentle stop.

Will glances out the window—and his heart drops straight into his stomach.

No.

No, no, no.

The awning is unmistakable. Deep burgundy with elegant gold lettering. The kind of luxury that doesn’t need to announce itself because it’s already been whispered into the right ears. Soft lights strung above the doorway like stars caught in a net. The small, tasteful sign tucked beside the entrance reads House of Hesperides —the same as it does on his pay stub, on the receipts he files after every shift, on the branded wine openers they’re not supposed to steal. 

The windows glow warm behind hand-blown glass panes, and the wall facing the street features a sprawling canvas mural of a woman dancing in flames—one of Rachel's, Will knows. She rotates the art monthly. He helped her hang it. The inside will be filled with massive, abstract canvases, all original, all for sale . The food will be beautiful, minimal, plated like it’s auditioning for a magazine.

This is where he works, wearing an apron and the same tight-lipped smile he’s rehearsed a thousand times in the mirror.

A panic tightens in his chest, sudden and sharp, like he’s being dragged under.

He can’t be here. Not like this.

This is the restaurant where he works. The one where he spends his time darting between tables with aching feet and a smile so polished it might as well be laminated. Where he’s spilled wine and swallowed apologies. Where he’s scraped gum off mahogany booths and wiped down mirrors fogged by rich laughter. Where he’s stood invisible beside people like Nico—polishing glasses while they sipped vintage Chablis and didn’t see him at all.

This is where he serves people like Nico. Not where he dines with them.

And now he’s here. On the other side of the glass. On a date. With Nico .

The panic is immediate. All-consuming.

Because this place—it’s not neutral ground. It’s not just a restaurant. It’s a threshold. And Will Solace was never supposed to cross it wearing anything but an apron.

But Nico is already turning toward him, beaming. Not a wide grin—nothing showy—but something quieter. Truer.
A smile shaped like pride held softly in both hands. Like he’s offering Will something sacred, unsure if he’ll take it.

“We’re here,” he says, warm with something close to excitement. “I hope this is okay? Everyone’s been telling me to try it for weeks. Jason even tried to get me to ditch class to come for lunch here, so—figured it had to be good. First date, best recommendation. Thought we could try it together.”

Will swallows, hard. His throat clicks.
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

And Nico’s smile—still soft, still steady—flickers just slightly. Like a candle caught in a draft.

Will forces one of his own. Mechanical. Too many teeth. “Oh. This is… wow. Yeah. No, this is great.”

Nico watches him carefully. “Are you sure? You look—”

“I’m fine,” Will says, too fast. It lands like a dropped glass—sharp and unconvincing. He clears his throat. “I just wasn’t expecting it, that’s all.”

And that’s the truth. It’s also the kind of truth that hides the rest of itself behind a locked door. Because no, he didn’t expect this—but he recognized the neighborhood, felt the dread bloom beneath his ribs the second they turned the corner. He just hadn’t wanted to name it. Now it’s standing in front of him with hand-blown windows and an art mural he helped hang.

Nico hesitates. His expression shifts, softens, tilts toward concern like a plant toward the sun. “We can go somewhere else. If this isn’t what you want—”

“No,” Will blurts, louder than he means to. Too much. Too fast. It startles them both.

He laughs, brittle and bright, like it might hold everything together. “No—gods, Nico, this is perfect. Really. This is… this is great.”

A silence stretches—brief, but aching. Long enough for Will to realize he’s still smiling like it’s being stitched onto his face by force.

Then Nico nods. Relaxes again. Chooses to believe him even though something is telling him to doubt.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “Good.”

And Will—still standing there with a heart full of glass and gratitude and guilt—wishes it didn’t feel so much like a test he’s already failing.

Will scrambles to open his door before his face crumbles.

He can’t tell Nico. He won’t.

Because how does he even begin to explain that he works here? That he’s served tables here? That he’s wiped down the tablecloths and refilled the olive oil and memorized the price of every single bottle on the wine list because he can’t afford any of them?

He’s not ready for the conversation where Nico learns that this place is his world, but not Will’s . That this—romantic, candlelit, expensive—is normal for him. Expected.

And Will… he’s not the kind of person who takes someone on a date here.

He’s the kind of person who apologizes for the delay on the entrées and splits his tips three ways. He’s the guy who washes dishes after closing and counts coins for the subway.

He hasn’t even told Nico he works in a restaurant. That he has to work two jobs to stay afloat. Not because he’s ashamed of working—he’s not—but because it’s different now. It’s loaded . The way everything is when it brushes up against money.

And suddenly, it’s not just about pride.

It’s about what Nico will see —not just the reality of Will’s life, but the space between them. The difference. The lack.

So Will says nothing.

He swallows his panic. Puts his mask back on.

Follows Nico out of the car and into the restaurant where he knows every server, every hostess, every manager who might—at any moment—look up and recognize him.

And the worst part?

He’s smiling. Because if Nico thinks this night is going well, if Nico’s happy, that’s what matters.

Even if Will’s heart is pounding like a fire alarm beneath his ribs.

The doors open with a soft chime and a rush of cool, floral-scented air.

Inside, the restaurant is everything Will remembers and everything he’s been actively repressing: soaring ceilings, candlelight flickering against mirrored walls, and a rotating collection of original artwork—Rachel’s curated pride and joy. The lighting is warm and golden, the clink of cutlery delicate, the music some kind of ambient instrumental that probably costs a hundred bucks an hour in licensing fees.

Will swallows hard.

The hostess stand—more of a minimalist sculpture than a podium—is occupied by none other than Clovis .

Clovis. Would be Son of Hypnos if this were a fantasy book series. Notorious napper. Known for vaping in the walk-in fridge and falling asleep inside the wine cellar during the shift change.

Will watches, horrified, as Clovis looks up from whatever dreamlike trance he’s in, eyes slowly focusing behind the round frames of his glasses.

Recognition hits.

Will stares him down with every ounce of strength in his body. He throws the look. The do not say a word look. The if you blow this for me I will tell Rachel you keep Sour Patch Kids in the walk in next to the organic lamb look.

Clovis blinks once. Then, miraculously, says nothing.

Instead, he straightens lazily behind the podium and says, in the most monotone voice the gods ever cursed humanity with, “Welcome to House of Hesperides. You must be… di Angelo?”

Nico nods. “That’s us.”

Clovis grabs two menus with a level of effort that suggests it might kill him and steps out from behind the stand. “Follow me.”

Will follows, dying .

The restaurant is somehow even more beautiful than usual—probably because he’s not in uniform, not carrying a tray, not sweating over whether a birthday party table is about to ask him to sing. The dining room glows in warm tones—bronze and amber and candlelight refracting off wine glasses like spun glass. It smells like citrus peel and rosemary and whatever hope would smell like if it could afford a sommelier.

But it’s the painting that catches him. Always that damned painting.

It looms across the back wall like a relic from another world—Rachel’s centerpiece, bold and reverent and unignorable. Apollo and Hyacinthus , rendered in sweeping brushstrokes and burning gold, a tragedy stretched nearly floor to ceiling. The lighting is soft, deliberate, reverent—the kind used in chapels, not dining rooms—casting the figures in a glow that flickers like candlelight at a wake.

Apollo kneels at the center, radiant and unraveling, caught in the moment just before the grief shatters him. His arms cradle Hyacinthus’s broken body like something sacred, like something slipping through his fingers. Light pours from his skin in the way stars die—slow, catastrophic, incandescent. His mouth is parted, still mid-prayer or apology or plea, and his cheek rests against Hyacinthus’s temple like he’s trying to tether him to the earth with touch alone.

And Hyacinthus—gods.

He’s all collapse and beauty. His head thrown back, throat bared, lips slack in the stillness of death. His body curves into Apollo like he belonged there, even in the end. The blood on his chest spreads like ink in water, delicate and deliberate, and from the wound—already, impossibly—hyacinths bloom. Petals unfurl where breath should be. Love, made literal. Love, made ruin.

It’s brutal. Beautiful. Too much. Too real. Intimate in a way Will always thought art wasn’t allowed to be. And worse— so much worse —is the way it echoes across the restaurant.

Will has seen this painting a dozen times. He knows every brushstroke. Every fleck of gold. But tonight, it lands differently—like a blade beneath the ribs.

Because Apollo looks so much like him. And Hyacinthus—pale, dark-haired, haloed in loss—looks too much like Nico.

He shifts, breath shallow, a strange tightness clawing at his throat. He doesn’t believe in fate, not really. He’s a man of science, of blood and bone and measurable things. But standing here, beneath this painted elegy, beside the boy who’s always half here and half gone—he wonders.

If it’s a warning. If it’s a mirror. If it’s a prophecy. If it’s a love story already written in a language neither of them know how to speak.

The flowers have already started blooming. And Will isn’t sure who’s bleeding.

He tears his eyes away.

Not the time. Not the place. Not when he’s holding himself together with the fraying thread of an over-bright smile and sheer willpower—not to confess that he spends most nights folding napkins into swans and wiping fingerprints off water glasses right here .

Beside him, Nico is still looking up at the painting, brow furrowed in thought, lips parted like the ache of it lives somewhere in his chest too.

Will says nothing.

Because how exactly do you say, Hey, quick observation—did you notice we just walked beneath a thirty-foot depiction of a beautiful mortal boy who loved a god so much it got him killed? Super casual. No symbolism here! Haha!

And then Clovis stops.

At that table.

The one near the window, half-draped in lamplight, with the best view of the mural and just enough privacy to make every conversation feel like a secret. Reserved, usually, for regulars with personalized wine lockers and last names you only ever hear in whispered gossip or campaign donations. The table where Rachel once hosted an actual senator and made him cry with a tiramisu.

Will’s stomach plummets like someone cut the strings.

Clovis places the menus down with the lethargy of a man wronged by both time and capitalism, gaze distant, movements slow enough to be considered legally symbolic.

“Your server will be with you shortly,” he drones, like a sleep-deprived oracle. “Austin’s got you tonight.”

Will dies. Quietly. Spiritually. He is now a ghost.

Austin. His coworker. His friend. The same Austin who once watched him re-slice a loaf of sourdough five times to avoid a stress cry. The same Austin who knows, with bone-deep certainty, that Will’s actual “date night uniform” is black polyester and an apron covered in faint balsamic stains.

Nico slides into the seat across from him, graceful as ever, eyes flicking across the restaurant like he’s stepped into Mount Olympus disguised as a fine dining establishment. He looks delighted. Curious. Like this is a place full of art and quiet magic, not the exact same room where Will once spilled an entire bottle of cabernet onto a hedge fund manager’s wife and had to comp her dessert with trembling hands.

Will sits, somehow. And prays Austin will have the decency to fake amnesia.

“This place is…” Nico begins, eyes drifting upward toward the painting, his voice catching somewhere between reverence and disbelief, “insane. In a good way.”

Will makes a sound in response. It might be a word. Might be a wheeze. Hard to say.

Clovis—eternal menace, somnolent prophet—gives Will one last look, half-amused, half-still-dreaming, and then drifts away like low fog across a moor.

Will lowers himself into his seat like he’s afraid the cushion might reject him. Like the chair will sense he doesn’t belong and eject him with quiet, polite disdain.

Nico turns back to him, completely at ease, and leans in just slightly—close enough to fold the space between them, to make the candlelight seem deliberate. “You okay?”

Will nods. Too fast. “Yep. Totally. Fine. Just… wow. It’s all really…”

He gestures vaguely.

Expensive. Intimidating. Dreamlike in the way nightmares are sometimes dreams until you notice the teeth.

“…nice.”

Nico smiles at him—proud and just a little shy, as if he’s offering Will something delicate wrapped in paper and string. “I thought you’d like it.”

Will mirrors the smile, careful and practiced, the way you might handle porcelain with cracks you’re pretending not to see.

He doesn’t have the heart to say: I like you. But this place makes me want to crawl under the table and disappear into the floorboards.

He folds his hands tightly in his lap—grateful, suddenly, for Lou Ellen’s perfect ironing—and keeps his gaze fixed on the polished corner of the table instead of Nico’s face, which is too open. Too kind. Too real.

His heart pounds like it’s trying to escape. His skin feels like a costume stitched too tight. His mouth is the dry ache of test days and emergency calls—when the panic isn’t sudden, but slow and suffocating, the kind that settles in your bones.

He’d spent all day terrified of ruining this. He’d imagined the small, mortal mistakes: a spill, a joke that falls flat, spinach in his teeth, saying I like your soul when he means to flirt.

But he hadn’t prepared for this.

Hadn’t braced for the quiet devastation of sitting across from Nico—beautiful, sharp-edged, hopeful Nico—in a restaurant full of candlelight and murmured jazz and wine that costs more than his electricity bill, and realizing that this might be the thing that undoes him.

Not because he doesn’t care. But because he cares too much.

And because this unraveling isn’t dramatic or cinematic—it’s subtle. Thread by thread. Smile by smile. A slow, invisible undoing of the belief that he’s allowed to be here at all.

And gods, he hates that. Hates that it’s not a bad punchline or a clumsy move that might break the spell. But this: This ache. This quiet, tightening voice that whispers, You do not belong.

He breathes in. Breathes out. Don’t ruin it, he tells himself. Don’t ruin it now.

Not when Nico’s smile is real. Not when he’s trying—not cool or aloof or untouchable, but trying, in that brave, quiet way that feels more like a gift than anything Will knows how to accept. So Will straightens his spine, nods like it’ll anchor him to the moment, and clings to the only truth steady enough to hold: He wants to be here. With you.

And maybe—just maybe—that means something. Even if everything else—the fraying nerves, the ache of class lines drawn in candlelight, the weight of familiar eyes that know too much—says otherwise. Even if the table feels too expensive, the air too careful, the room too full of people who would never guess he folds napkins here three nights a week.

You just have to make it through the night without falling apart, he tells himself.

Without letting the cracks show. Without letting the noise win.

Surely, that’s still possible. Surely, hope is still allowed.

Isn’t it?

Chapter 27: How to Ruin Everything With the Boy of Your Dreams (While Your Coworkers Watch Like It’s Dinner and a Show)

Will barely has time to wrangle his breathing back into something resembling normal human function before Austin materializes at the edge of their table—silent, composed, and glowing with the quiet menace of someone who knows far too much .

He’s dressed in the standard House of Hesperides uniform: sleek black button-up, crisp apron tied with surgical precision, sleeves rolled just enough to show he means business but not enough to break the mystique. There’s a glint in his eyes—a dangerous, barely concealed curiosity—that says: I know exactly what this is, and I’m going to ask you about it when your date isn’t watching.

Will looks up and meets his gaze.

They stare at each other in perfect, absolute silence.

Austin raises one eyebrow. Really?

Will narrows his eyes. Don’t start.

Austin tilts his head slightly, the universal sign of This is the hill you’ve chosen to die on? Fascinating.

Will twitches an eyebrow back—just enough to communicate, with terrifying clarity: If you say a single word, I will fake a nosebleed, crawl under the bar, and haunt this place like a Victorian ghost until Rachel has to sage the walk-in cooler.

Austin’s mouth twitches. He looks one second away from laughing, but he restrains himself with the discipline of someone who has seen a grown man cry over a forgotten dipping sauce. He gives the barest of nods, a microscopic dip of his chin.

It’s the nod of a seasoned comrade. A you’re spiraling and I will not add kindling to this emotional dumpster fire nod. A we’ve made it through worse nod. The kind of silent battlefield communication forged not through war, but through too many shifts with drunk hedge funders, flirty wine moms, and that one guy who once tried to FaceTime his Pomeranian from table six.

This—this ridiculous, high-stakes moment of telepathic panic—is, somehow, the exact thing they’ve been training for.

Austin turns smoothly toward Nico, all professional polish, and opens his mouth to deliver the standard drink pitch.

Will exhales, very quietly.

He’s still dying inside. But at least he’s not dying alone.

“Good evening,” Austin says smoothly, smiling at Nico like nothing’s out of the ordinary. Not a flicker of surprise, not even the tiniest eyebrow twitch. He’s in full server mode—charming, polished, dead behind the eyes.

Will knows that mask. He’s worn that mask. Hell, he’s trained with that mask. But now he’s on the other side of it, and the surrealism is so strong he’s halfway convinced he dreamed this entire date during a nap in the break room.

“Welcome to House of Hesperides. Can I get you started with something to drink?”

Nico is flipping through the wine list with mild interest, completely oblivious to the telepathic breakdown happening beside him. Will can feel the waves of psychic energy radiating from Austin’s side of the table—like he’s trying to telepathically scream explain yourself, you absolute disaster while still smiling through a perfectly scripted monologue.

“I’ll have the Château Montvalet,” Nico says, tapping a name near the bottom of the page like he’s ordering a soda.

Will almost chokes.

The Château Montvalet. Not the most expensive wine on the list, but close. It’s got weight. Prestige. It’s the kind of wine the sommelier talks about like it’s an ex he never got over—longingly, wistfully, with too much emotion for a bottle of fermented grapes. Will has poured exactly one glass of it before—for a man wearing a Rolex, a silk cravat, and the smug aura of someone with a very complicated prenup. 

He feels, in real time, his bank account spontaneously weep.

“And for you, sir?” Austin asks, turning to Will with carefully blank amusement in his eyes. His face says professional server , but his eyes say do you want me to call an ambulance or are you powering through this?

Will clears his throat, praying his voice works. “Uh… water. Just water, thanks.”

Austin’s eyebrows flick up, just barely. A subtle are you sure? , followed by a silent respect, and possibly also you’re gonna need it, buddy. There’s something almost tender about it. The kind of empathy shared only between coworkers who’ve trauma bonded over spilled crème brûlée and guests who once asked for “ raw ice .”

Nico glances over, frowning slightly. “You don’t want wine?”

Will shrugs, attempting casual, which goes about as well as his chem lab did that time he set a pipette on fire. “Not really in the mood.”

Nico tilts his head, curious. “It’ll pair well with the duck—they dry-age it, right?” He looks to Austin for confirmation.

Austin nods, already scribbling on his notepad. “We recommend it with the house demi-glace.”

Will nods too, because of course he knows that. Of course he knows the wine pairs well with the duck. He’s said it dozens of times, smiling through gritted teeth, trying not to drop the bottle or mispronounce Bordeaux.

It’s not a refined palate. It’s not a culinary education.

It’s just part of the damn script.

He learned it in the back hallway behind the dish pit, during a pre-shift meeting with Rachel pointing at a slideshow of wine bottles and saying, “Repeat after me: ‘The tannins balance the richness of the glaze.’ ”

But Nico? Nico probably learned to taste tannins at summer camp. His wine knowledge was probably passed down by a private tutor wearing linen pants on a sun-drenched terrace in Tuscany.

It’s not Nico’s fault—none of this is. But Will still feels like a walking gap year away from belonging here. Like he’s in a play, but someone forgot to give him the script.

“I’m good with water,” Will says again, softer this time, as if the volume might make the choice sound less pathetic.

Nico nods, slowly, but there’s the faintest crease forming between his brows—less judgment, more quiet confusion. Not the kind that bruises, not yet. Just the kind that says: I don’t get it. Should I?

Will hates that it makes him feel like he’s failed some test he didn’t know he was taking.

Austin, mercifully, offers no commentary. Just gives Will a look as he takes the menus—brief, measured, and full of the exact kind of coworker solidarity that reads like a whispered prayer: I’ve got you, man. And then he vanishes, silent as absolution.

Will exhales, slow and shaky. His throat feels like cotton. He’s never wanted a glass of water so badly in his life—not because he’s thirsty, but because it’s the only thing on the table that feels like it won’t betray him.

Across from him, Nico glances up, folding his arms lightly on the edge of the table. There’s something startlingly steady in the way he looks at Will. Not probing, not expectant—just… there . A quiet kind of attention, the kind that makes Will feel like a matchstick trapped between friction and flame.

“So,” Nico says, voice low and even, “how’s hematology treating you?”

It’s not small talk. It’s a bridge. A gentle gesture of I see you, I remember this about you, I want to meet you where you are. Nico’s voice is soft but purposeful, like he’s being careful not to knock anything over—especially not Will.

And gods, that openness. That effort. Will can see it plain on Nico’s face, in the slight drop of his shoulders, the unguarded way he’s watching him now. Like he’s peeled away one of his thousand careful layers just to offer Will the chance to step closer.

Will should be able to answer. He’s answered this before. It’s one of the few parts of his life he knows how to talk about—how to explain, how to care about without apology. He’s ranted about red cell indices to Lou Ellen while burning pancakes. He’s walked Cecil through case studies at 2 a.m. while drinking orange juice straight from the carton. He’s cried about patient simulations and late-night study sessions and the way his hands shake sometimes during labs.

It’s his . It’s the one thing he always knows how to say.

But right now, under Nico’s gaze and the ghost of candlelight flickering between them, Will’s brain does the worst possible thing.

It blanks.

“Good,” he says automatically. “Fine.”

Nico pauses. Not pushing. Just… waiting. And then, with a tilt of his head, gentle but unmistakably curious: “Just fine?”

Will shrugs, his eyes darting to the wine glass, the bread plate, the tiny polished fork that probably has a French name he can’t remember. Anything but Nico’s face. “It’s a lot,” he says. “You know. Science.”

Science , Will thinks immediately, with the emotional force of a man watching himself trip down the stairs in real time. Great answer. Incredible. Truly the peak of eloquence. Someone please drop a bottle of Château Montvalet on my foot so I have an excuse to leave and die behind the wine cellar.

Science, his brain echoes, horrified. Really? That’s what we’re going with? That’s the hill we die on?

It’s like watching himself tumble down a metaphorical staircase in slow motion. Utterly preventable. Mildly embarrassing. Possibly fatal.

Somewhere in the distance, probably behind the wine fridge, Austin is lighting a candle in his honor.

But the truth is—Will can’t think. Can’t focus. Not when every cell in his body is tuned to the quiet chaos around him. It’s like trying to read poetry while standing under a waterfall. Every inch of his awareness is stretched taut, threadbare and unraveling, pulled over the simple, mortifying fact that everyone in this restaurant seems to have discovered a sudden and urgent need to pass by their table.

Not directly. Not openly. But enough to make it obvious—they’ve clocked him.

The host, who usually spends half the night pretending to meditate near the coat rack, has now wandered by three times. The Friday night busser, who once asked Will if all ducks were inherently French, is aggressively wiping down the same corner of a nearby booth with the devotion of a man searching for God. Even someone from the kitchen—definitely not front-of-house—has emerged, polishing a wine glass at the bar like it’s a Fabergé egg. Which, Will knows for a fact, is not her job.

He doesn’t need to check the work group chat to know what’s happening. But gods, he can feel it: 

Lacy: IS WILL ON A DATE??? AT THIS RESTAURANT???

Clovis: someone check the wine cellar i’m not convinced this is real

Rachel: he’s not wearing the apron?? is that… a COLLARBONE???

Lacy: he owns NICE CLOTHES???

Jake: if he can afford to eat here maybe he can afford to TIP OUT PROPERLY

Mark: this is either a rom-com or the opening act of a nervous breakdown

Austin: he’s sitting at table 6 like he hasn’t cried in the walk-in fridge twice this week

Austin: who gave him the right

And maybe they’re just curious. Maybe they’re amused, or oddly proud, or mentally placing bets on whether this ends in a kiss or a catastrophic emotional implosion. But Will can’t decide which is worse—being seen like this, peeled out of his usual context and set under a microscope, or the fact that Nico doesn’t seem to notice any of it.

Or maybe even worse—he does notice, and just doesn’t care.

Because of course Nico doesn’t flinch under scrutiny. He’s made of it. He wears mystery like a tailored coat. He walks into rooms like someone used to being observed, analyzed, mythologized. Will’s seen it—how people stare when Nico passes. Like he’s an eclipse, or a rumor with really good cheekbones.

He is Nico di Angelo . Campus legend. Occasional ghost. Source of at least four conflicting conspiracy theories and one student-run podcast.

People don’t just look at him. They watch . Like if they blink, he might vanish into mist. Like they’re not sure if he’s real, or a beautifully executed hoax. He’s a person and a performance, myth and material—and somehow, even sitting here he remains untouched by the absurdity of it all. 

He’s beautiful, Will thinks, and immediately wishes he hadn’t, because it makes his chest hurt. Of course people stare. People stare at beautiful things .

Will feels like he’s unraveling by the minute. A glitch in the matrix. A server in guest clothing. A boy who knows how to describe this duck entrée in three languages but has no idea how to keep his voice from shaking when Nico smiles at him.

And maybe that’s the worst part. Nico’s fine. Will, on the other hand, is one sideways glance from an expo away from evaporating .

He looks at the menu like it’s written in ancient Greek. And pretends not to feel the weight of his entire workplace watching him try to have a conversation with a boy he is literally in love with , in a place he’s supposed to be serving bread, not breaking it.

Nico tilts his head, eyes narrowing just slightly. “You okay?”

Will blinks, startled. “What?”

“You’ve been staring at the same line on the menu for five minutes.”

“Oh.” He swallows, throat dry. “Yeah. Just—trying to decide.”

Nico’s brow creases, subtle but unmistakable. “You always analyze menus like they’re sacred texts?”

Will laughs, or tries to. It comes out jagged and thin, like a cracked bell. “Only when they’re printed on cardstock thick enough to deflect bullets.”

That earns a smile from Nico—small, unguarded, gone too soon. But Will feels it anyway. Feels it in his chest like warmth against frost. He wants to press pause. To stay suspended in that flicker of something soft and mutual before the weight of the evening drags them under again.

But the pressure doesn’t lift. Not here. Not with candlelight glinting off silverware and eyes he can feel tracking him from every corner of the room. Not while he’s pretending to belong in a place where the butter has a backstory and the check comes tucked into an envelope like a love letter from capitalism.

Still—still—he wants to get this right. For Nico. Because Nico deserves a night that feels like choosing. A night that feels deliberate and cherished and whole. Will can see it in the way Nico watches him now—not impatient, but expectant. Hopeful.

Like he’s waiting for Will to say something real.

And Will—Will is trying. He just doesn’t know how to touch this without letting it shatter.

So instead, he looks back down at the menu he doesn’t need and says, voice quiet, “What are you thinking of getting?”

And hopes to all the gods that he sounds like a boy on a date—not one holding a thousand-dollar glass of pressure between his fingertips.

Nico’s eyes scan the menu like he’s reading a novel—genuinely engaged, lightly furrowed brow, one finger tapping thoughtfully at the corner.

“I’ve heard the fig tartlet is good,” he says. “Hazel liked it. And Leo wouldn’t shut up about the scallops—apparently they come with some kind of fennel espuma? I’m mostly curious how they’re plating it.”

Will blinks. “Espuma, right.”

“Like a foam,” Nico explains casually, like he’s describing something as simple as clouds. “But culinary. You know, from a siphon. Molecular gastronomy.”

Will nods very seriously. His understanding of espuma begins and ends with the pre-service rundown and the phrase “ don’t over-describe, they already feel weird about paying $37 for it.”

Nico flips another page. “I’m tempted by the duck. Jason says it’s one of their signature dishes. But the lamb looks good too—they’re doing it sous-vide this week, I think?”

Will nods again, this time more reflexively. He does know that. Not because he’s eaten it, but because the prep cook said “if another person sends this lamb back because they didn’t understand what sous-vide means, I’m going to jump into the Hudson.” Will has repeated the benefits of water bath precision so many times he could probably recite it in his sleep.

Nico looks thoughtful—elbow resting lightly against the table, one finger tapping the edge of the menu as if he’s sketching the dishes in his mind. He reads each description like it’s a language he already speaks, translating flavor into experience, plating into possibility. There’s a kind of artistry in it, the way he pictures food the way other people picture paintings. As if dinner is something meant to be curated.

Will sits across from him, trying to mirror the posture, the ease. Pretending to be just as engrossed in the menu. But all he’s doing is scanning for dollar signs. Not the ingredients. Not the wine pairings. Just the numbers, and which ones he might be able to survive.

He’s not looking for the best dish. He’s looking for the one that won’t make him feel like he’s bleeding out through his bank account. The ones that won’t earn him a double-take from the server or a “just water is fine” side-eye from someone who knows how to read this place like scripture.

Because Nico doesn’t know. Not really. He’s never been here. He’s going off the glow of the group chat, Hazel’s recommendations, Piper’s offhanded comments. He’s choosing based on flavor profiles and curiosity. He gets to want things.

Will? Will knows everything . He knows the weight of these plates in his hands. Knows how the foam on the scallops melts if you don’t serve them fast enough. Knows which chef likes to oversalt and which one thinks pepper is a personality. He knows the way the duck curls at the edge of the skin when it’s perfect, the way the lamb sinks under the knife when it’s been cooked sous-vide long enough. He knows the price tags, the prep schedules, the five-alarm panic when the fig tartlets crack before service and Chef declares the pastry station a war crime.

He’s tasted none of it. Not really. Unless you count the time he ate half a ruined duck leg standing over a trash can in the back alley, grease on his fingertips and adrenaline still ringing in his teeth. The fig tartlet? Shattered on the tile and passed around the kitchen like a sacred relic. It tasted like defeat and powdered sugar.

He knows this food—but only in the way a stagehand knows the monologue. Not the meaning. Just the timing. Just the cues.

Because he doesn’t sit at tables like this. He serves them.

And gods, that truth is deafening. It sits in his throat like a stone, heavy and unspoken.

Still, he nods like it’s nothing. Like he isn’t already calculating how many shifts he’d need to pick up to pay for one glass of the wine Nico hasn’t even tasted yet. “They’re… all good options,” he says, voice brittle at the edges.

Nico glances up, offers a soft little smile—warm, almost shy. “You’ve eaten here before?”

Will chokes, not on the lie, but on the panic. “Uh—no. I mean. Not really. Just… heard things. You know.”

And then, like clockwork, Austin appears.

He places the wine in front of Nico with a kind of reverence that could pass for performance art. Then he turns to Will and sets down his water with just a little too much weight. Not rude. Not obvious. Just deliberate. Just enough for Will to feel it—like a hand pressed against the back of his neck, guiding him through the discomfort.

Austin doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to.

The look he gives Will is surgical. Precise. Are you kidding me? it says. You’re pulling this routine? Here? Now?

If they were back-of-house, Austin would be roasting him in the walk-in, eating fries out of a ramekin and calling him a drama queen. If this were any other night, there would be laughter behind the espresso machine. Eye-rolls. Solidarity in stainless steel and sarcasm.

But tonight?

Will is a guest. A ghost. An imposter in a borrowed role.

And Austin is all neutral professionalism, sharp as a blade kept just out of reach.

Will avoids his gaze. He feels it anyway—the quiet, searing awareness of everything he’s pretending not to be.

He straightens the corner of his menu with slow, deliberate fingers. Pretending. Always pretending.

Across the table, Nico sips his wine, serene, unbothered. He watches Will like he’s waiting for something. Like he’s trying to find the right lens, the right light, to understand what’s flickering across Will’s face and why it keeps dimming every time someone walks past their table.

Will looks down at his hands.

He’s trying. Gods, he’s trying . To keep the illusion intact. To be charming. To be enough .

But the truth hangs in the air, sweet and acrid like burnt sugar.

He doesn’t belong here.

Nico does.

And Will—achingly aware, unbearably quiet—just hopes he can hold the center long enough not to be found out.

Nico, to his credit, looks up and offers Austin a smile. “Thank you so much.”

Polite. Direct. Sincere.

Will’s heart twists. Softly. Shamefully. Because that matters— god , it matters. Being kind to the people who have to smile when you’re rude, who refill your glass while pretending not to notice when you knock it over. It’s a kind of grace you can’t fake, not well. And Nico—without effort, without performance—has it.

There are so many ways to be cruel in a place like this. The subtler kind. The practiced kind. The kind that wears manners like a mask. Not looking someone in the eye. Speaking only to complain. Calling a grown adult boy , or you , or nothing at all. Whispering orders and shouting disappointment. Polishing charm into a weapon and wielding it like power.

But Nico doesn’t. He just says thank you. Makes eye contact. Doesn’t flinch at Austin’s apron or the folded towel slung over his shoulder like a sash of quiet servitude. He doesn’t pretend to be above anyone—doesn’t try to shrink the space between himself and the staff by acknowledging them only when it’s convenient.

It’s a green flag. Not neon or blaring, not loud or performative. Just soft. Sincere. The kind of flag you only notice when you’ve lived without them. Will knows people who would fall in love over less.

And yet— yet —his stomach knots. Not because of anything Nico’s done. But because of what this moment is .

Because no matter how kindly Nico smiles, he’s still seated while Austin stands. Still sipping wine that costs more than Will’s entire grocery list for the month. Still considering ordering duck with practiced ease while Will calculates in silence how much shame he can stomach before it starts tasting like salt.

And yes, Nico is kind. Thoughtful. Gentle in the way that matters. But kindness from above is still kindness from above .

Will has seen this dynamic before— lived it. Flipping napkins, refilling waters, standing just out of the spotlight while someone offered a gracious smile and an impossible request. Watching Lou Ellen’s period dramas, curled up on their worn couch, laughing as the aristocrats in waistcoats and pressed gloves offered scraps of grace to the people polishing their shoes. Like yes, thank you, Lord Grantham, for acknowledging your footman’s existence before sending him back downstairs to eat gruel and repress his emotions in linen trousers.

He used to laugh at it. Now it just feels familiar.

A strange kind of cruelty, he thinks—to be kind and unaware in the same breath.

Nico isn’t doing anything wrong. Not even close. But that might be what makes it worse. Will wants to be grateful. Wants to smile and mean it. Wants to believe he belongs at this table, in this restaurant, across from this boy. But the silverware feels too heavy in his hand, and every clink of porcelain reminds him: you are the one who clears the dishes, not the one who dirties them .

Austin flips to a clean page in his notepad. “Are you ready to order?”

Nico doesn’t hesitate. “I’ll start with the scallops, please. And then the duck.”

Smooth. Unapologetic. Like someone used to this rhythm, used to this ritual.

Austin nods, then turns to Will.

And Will freezes.

The menu in front of him blurs. His eyes skim the options like they’re written in code. Everything tastes like a bank statement. But he forces a nod, scanning the menu for the cheapest main course that won’t make him look like he’s ordering for a child. The pasta’s out—it’s overpriced and small. The steak is way beyond reach. The seasonal vegetarian dish is manageable, technically, if he wants to spend the rest of the week eating cereal and regret.

There is a fancy, artisanal burger and fries they serve during weekday lunch—a house-ground blend, truffle aioli, aged cheddar, the works—but that’s on the daytime menu. The weekend evening menu is a whole different ball game. It doesn’t make space for comfort food. It makes statements. It makes tasting menus. It makes Will want to slide under the table and live among the crumbs. He’s done this math before—rent, groceries, laundry, guilt. There’s an equation behind every price tag. An apology beneath every bite.

He finds the safest number. The one that won’t break him completely.

“I’ll have the risotto,” he says, trying to sound casual. “No starter.”

Austin doesn’t flinch. Just makes a quiet note, a flick of pen to paper, but Will catches the shift in his eyes—the soft, familiar flicker of recognition. Not pity. Just awareness. The kind that only exists between people who’ve both stocked shelves at midnight or cried in mop closets. It’s not cruel. It’s just real.

“Of course,” Austin says, with the same grace he uses on diners who tip in coins and criticism. Then he’s gone again—efficient, invisible, part of the room but never quite in it.

Will lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

Across the table, Nico takes another sip of wine, watching him over the rim of his glass. His expression is unreadable. Not suspicious. Not smug. Just quietly observant, like he’s trying to trace Will’s silhouette in smoke.

Will drops his gaze to the table.

He’s trying. Gods, he’s trying. To smile, to breathe, to be the version of himself that Nico might want. But the truth weighs heavy in his ribs—dull, persistent, and impossible to swallow.

He doesn’t belong here.

Not really.

But Nico? Nico was made for this. Nico shines here—like a myth walked into a candlelit dining room and sat down without asking for permission. Like he’s not even trying to impress, and somehow still does. And Will… Will is just trying not to fall apart between the linen napkins.

The silence settles between them—not the kind that hums with comfort or the closeness of people who know each other well. No, this silence is brittle. The kind that sits between them like fine china on a high shelf: too delicate to touch, too awkward to admire. Every second stretches long and thin, a quiet warning not to breathe too hard or say the wrong thing.

Nico clears his throat—softly, carefully—as if cracking the silence might shatter something delicate. He’s trying. Will knows he is. “So… how was your week? Other than the hematology trauma.”

Will startles, blinking like someone snapped their fingers in front of him. He looks up as if he's only just remembered this is a date and not some slow-motion dream he’s been wandering through, blind and out of place.

“Oh. Uh. Busy,” he says, voice brittle. “You know. Lab stuff. Work.”

The word slips out before he can stop it— work —and the moment it lands, his stomach turns. The way someone’s stomach turns in a church pew after accidentally swearing during the hymns. It feels indecent. Too revealing. Too real.

He swallows against the burn in his throat. From the kitchen, he hears Rachel’s laugh—sharp, bright, chaotic, like glitter in a blender. A second later, Lacy drifts past their table again, feather-dusting a shelf that hasn’t been touched since the Bronze Age.

“Same here,” Nico says, nodding once, his voice low. “I’ve been in the museum archives all week. Piper says it smells like dust and despair. Which… is fair.”

Will lets out a noise—meant to be a laugh, but it breaks halfway out of his chest, more breath than sound. It sticks in his throat, too dry to be human.

“It’s for that paper I was telling you about in the car,” Nico continues, gentle, deliberate. Will can feel how hard he’s working to keep the conversation alive, to pass him the thread even as Will fumbles it with both hands. “Funerary symbolism in Hellenistic art. Lots of urns. Very dramatic. Extremely…on-brand.”

Will nods, too quickly. His mouth moves before his brain catches up. “That’s… cool.”

Cool.

He wants to die. He wants to sink into the floorboards and let the centuries compress him into fossil fuel. Cool? That’s what he has to offer? Nico di Angelo, beautiful and brilliant and unspooling quiet tragedy over candlelight, and all Will can muster is cool , like a middle schooler reacting to a documentary on Roman aqueducts.

Nico’s expression doesn’t shift much. Just a flicker—barely a blink—but Will catches it. A micro-wince. The kind of quiet recalibration people make when they lower their expectations without saying it aloud.

Will feels like he’s been hit. Like he’s failing a test he didn’t realize he was taking.

He scrambles, reaching for something, anything. “I mean—it is cool. Symbolism’s interesting. Especially when it’s, like… emotional. Or—uh. Greek.”

Nico exhales, and Will can’t quite tell if it’s a laugh or a sigh, or some combination of the two—like even Nico doesn’t know whether to find him endearing or tragic.

“Greek is sort of the whole thing,” Nico says, voice dry but not unkind.

Will nods again, cheeks burning. “Right. Obviously. I just meant—yeah.”

He wants to disappear. He wants to crawl inside one of those urns and pull the lid shut behind him. He wants to be dust and despair and Hellenistically symbolic.

Instead, he picks up his water glass and tries to remember how to drink without choking.

Across from him, Nico stares down at his plate, spinning his fork between two fingers like it’s something safer to look at. He’s still here. Still trying.

Will just wishes he knew how to meet him halfway.

But Will—Will is too caught in the static of his own mind to catch them before they fall. Too lost in the press of glass and linen and the painting hanging above them like an accusation. Apollo and Hyacinthus. Light and death. Beauty and ruin. It hangs heavy as prophecy.

He can feel the staff orbiting them, satellites to the star of this impending collapse—Austin at the bar, Rachel like a storm cloud near the kitchen pass, servers passing too slowly, polishing glass that doesn’t need polishing, wiping surfaces that gleam. The weight of their curiosity settles around him like dust.

Will’s trying so hard not to ruin it, he’s forgotten how to be in it.

And the silence—gods, the silence—seeps in through the cracks like fog creeping under a door. Not violent, not loud. Just thick and low and full of unsaid things. Nico folds and unfolds the corner of his napkin, again and again, like he’s considering folding himself next. Will watches a server pour water into a glass already full, and thinks: that’s what this feels like. Too much, all at once.

And Will just sits there—hands in his lap, spine too straight, pretending this isn’t the moment where everything starts to slip from his grasp like light through open fingers.

Then—salvation. Or something like it.

The scallops arrive, delicate and absurd. Three golden disks of seared perfection, perched on clouds of pale green espuma, haloed in microgreens and intention. It looks like something a god would eat before starting a war. Beautiful. Distant. Will’s stomach turns.

“You can have some if you want,” Nico says softly, nudging the plate closer with two fingers. His voice is gentle, but the movement is cautious, too precise. Like he’s offering a truce with hands that expect to be slapped away.

Will forces a smile that feels more like a grimace. “I’m okay,” he lies, the words catching in his throat like splinters. “I—uh—I’m not really hungry yet.”

It’s not a lie. Not technically. He’s sick with panic and shame and the weight of not belonging. The idea of eating something that costs more than his monthly phone bill makes his chest cinch like a fist.

Nico pauses.

It’s small. Barely a shift. Just the fork pausing mid-air, the tension in his shoulders tightening by a degree. He doesn’t frown. He doesn’t sigh. He doesn’t pull the plate back.

He doesn’t have to.

Will sees it anyway—that subtle, familiar retreat. The silent recalibration of someone learning—again—that it’s safer not to offer too much. That even kindness has its limits. He’s seen Nico do this before, with strangers, with friends, with classmates. That moment when the doors begin to close, not out of malice, but memory.

And Will—gods, Will—panics.

Because he knows what this is. He knows the sound of a heart shutting itself in. He’s heard it before. He’s been on the other side of that door, begging to be let back in. And now, somehow, he’s the one who’s made Nico start to close it.

And he doesn’t know how to stop it.

“Do you and Jason have plans this weekend? Other than the rock climbing, I mean.” Will blurts out, far too fast, his voice just a little too bright—like someone slamming on the conversational gas pedal before the car’s even in gear.

Nico blinks at him. His fork halts midair, speared scallop hovering like it’s been caught in the act. For a second, he just stares—like Will’s asked if he and Jason moonlight as jewel thieves or lead a cult in the woods.

There’s a pause. Then another. Just long enough for Will’s brain to spiral through a rapidly flashing montage of possibilities: necromantic rituals, blood oaths, underground fight clubs, brunch.

“…We go to a pilates class,” Nico says at last, delivering it with the resigned gravity of someone confessing to a minor felony. “Saturday mornings.”

Will stares. “Wait. Seriously?”

Nico’s expression flickers—somewhere between defiance and embarrassment. “Don’t look so shocked.”

“I’m not!” Will lies, badly. “I just—okay, yes. A little. You don’t exactly scream ‘9 a.m. group core workout and mindful breathwork .’”

“I contain multitudes,” Nico mutters, low and vaguely threatening, as he slices into a carrot like it personally insulted him. “And Jason says it’s good for his spine.”

Will huffs a laugh, surprised by the warmth curling up his ribs. “Of course he does. Let me guess—he’s in the front row with his own mat, correcting the instructor’s lunges while radiating overwhelming golden retriever energy?”

Nico sighs through his nose. “He brings two extra resistance bands. For emergencies.”

“Oh my gods.”

“He also has a foam roller.”

“That’s not so bad.”

“A travel foam roller.”

Will chokes on his water. “That’s a hate crime.”

Nico shrugs, deadpan. “It’s bright orange.”

Will leans forward, propping his chin on his hand, smiling despite himself. The tension in his chest loosens fractionally, like a string finally unknotted. “You are alarmingly composed for someone who’s witnessed that level of Pilates intensity.”

Nico lifts one eyebrow. “You’re lucky I didn’t say barre class.”

“Please don’t,” Will says, pressing his lips together like he’s physically holding the laughter in. “I’m barely keeping it together as it is.”

His voice is thin with restraint, and he brings a hand to his mouth, like if he doesn't, the grin will break free on its own. His eyes are already betraying him—crinkling at the edges, bright with barely-contained amusement. He looks down at his glass like it might ground him, shoulders shaking just slightly, a breath hitching in his chest that sounds suspiciously like a laugh trying to claw its way out.

A corner of Nico’s mouth twitches—an almost-smile, real and fleeting and edged with amusement. And for a moment, Will can almost forget the weight in his stomach. Almost.

It’s not a return to comfort, not exactly. But something thaws—barely. Just enough for Nico to take another bite of his scallop without looking like he’s already halfway out the door, already preparing to vanish into shadow.

Will feels the shift like a change in barometric pressure, subtle but urgent. He latches on, careful not to grip too tight. “Are you guys going to Silena Beauregard’s Halloween party next weekend?”

Nico shrugs, eyes on his plate. “Jason’s going. Piper too, I think. They were talking about it at lunch.” A pause. “I assume the others are, but…”

“You’re not going?” Will asks, gently.

Nico stabs at the espuma like it insulted his honor. “It’s a lot of people,” he murmurs. “And I don’t… really do costumes.”

It’s quiet, but not defensive. Hesitant. Cautious in the way a hand hovers before it touches something hot. Nico’s voice holds that familiar flicker of uncertainty—like he’s still not sure what version of himself people expect to show up. Like he’s been burned by the question before.

The air around them sharpens again. Not hostile. Just watchful.

A server nearby wipes down a table that is already spotless, her movements meticulous, eyes darting over just once—long enough to clock Will’s expression—before she doubles down on polishing as though it might unlock a secret passage.

Austin is still at the bar, one arm slung across a stack of menus, chin in hand. He looks like a Renaissance painting of casual judgment. Protective, unimpressed, concerned. Like a guardian angel with a wine key in his apron.

And from the kitchen, Rachel reappears—just for a heartbeat. Her head pokes through the pass like a mythological omen, eyeliner sharp as prophecy. One arched brow speaks volumes: Get it together, Solace. Then she vanishes again, the restaurant’s resident cryptid, returned to the shadows of the line.

Will swallows. The glass of water in front of him trembles slightly as he sets it down. He feels exposed, every muscle held too tight, like he’s been holding his breath since appetizers.

Still, he presses forward. Gentler now. Softer at the edges. “Lou Ellen’s been prepping our costumes for weeks,” he says, a small smile flickering across his lips. “There’s glitter in every drawer. Fabric scraps in the fridge. I stepped on a rhinestone yesterday and thought I was going to bleed out.”

That gets a lift of Nico’s brows. “She does themed costumes?”

“Oh yeah,” Will says, relaxing—just a little. “Full production. She basically started planning before midterms. I think she’s running it like a Broadway tech week.”

Nico hums under his breath. Not quite a laugh, but the edge of one. He nudges a carrot across his plate with his fork. “What are you guys going as?”

Will leans forward, elbows on the table, and lets his smile turn sly. “You’ll have to come to the party and find out.”

It’s not a challenge. Not pressure, not expectation. Just a thread, held delicately between them. An invitation—not to the party, but to the possibility. The maybe of it all.

Nico looks up.

And for a moment, Will’s breath catches—because Nico looks at him. Really looks. And then… he smiles.

But it’s not the real one.

It’s too practiced. Too careful. Like a costume of a smile, polished at the edges, carved from good intentions. The kind he wears when he doesn’t want to disappoint someone.

Will knows the difference now. The real one steals his breath. Crinkles Nico’s eyes. Makes the air feel warmer. This one just sits there—gentle, lovely, and utterly false.

He tries not to flinch. Tries not to read too much into it. Tries not to let it sink too deep into the hollow already carved out in his chest.

But the silence that follows folds over the table like a veil. Thin, but suffocating. And it lingers.

Will sips his water to buy a second of stillness, avoiding Nico’s gaze as it drifts down again. Instead, he watches his hands—the familiar, bone-deep movements Nico doesn’t seem to notice he makes.

The silver watch on his wrist catches the candlelight. Minimalist. Elegant. Expensive. Will recognizes the brand by instinct, even as he pretends not to. Just like the faint glint of the chain under Nico’s collar—old money dressed like modesty. A kind of wealth that never has to say its name aloud.

But it’s the ring Will watches most. The one Nico wears on his right hand—silver, shaped like a skull. Small. Intricate. Sharp at the edges.

Beautiful, in the way that grief can be beautiful.

Nico twists it without thinking, rolls it beneath his thumb like it’s a worry stone. Like it’s grounding him. Like he doesn’t realize how many times he’s done it tonight.

Will wonders if he even knows he’s doing it. Or if it’s just instinct now—to fidget with the reminder of what he’s had to carry.

And Will can’t help but think: Maybe I’m one more weight. One more thing he’s already bracing to lose.

The main courses arrive just in time to drag Will out of the spiraling current he was halfway through drowning in.

Nico’s duck looks like something painted for a Renaissance still life—skin seared to a golden crisp, kissed with the kind of caramelized perfection that makes time slow down. It rests in a pool of demi-glace so glossy it catches the candlelight like lacquered silk, flanked by roasted root vegetables arranged in a careful fan, each one placed with the reverence of a chef trying to impress the gods.

Will’s risotto is quieter. Humble. A soft-spoken dish beside a crown jewel. Creamy and pale, flecked with green herbs and delicate curls of lemon zest, it smells like warmth. Like late nights and safe kitchens. Like comfort dressed in elegance’s borrowed clothes. It’s the kind of dish he’s recommended to customers a hundred times before, always with a reassuring smile and a phrase like “ simple but refined ,” knowing full well it translates to: won’t stain your shirt, won’t challenge your palate, won’t embarrass you.

Austin sets down Nico’s plate with a practiced flourish—precise, almost reverent. Will’s plate follows a second later, placed with the caution of someone handling fragile explosives. He doesn’t say a word, but he doesn’t need to. His expression says it all.

Not pity. Not humor.

Just that blank, steady look people give you when they’re watching you try to hold together a collapsing star with bare hands and a polite smile.

Will meets Austin’s eyes for half a heartbeat before looking down. His fork feels suddenly oversized, unwieldy, like it doesn’t belong to him.

And then, of course—because fate has a sense of humor—Rachel arrives.

She glides out of the kitchen like a storm front wrapped in silk, eyeliner sharp enough to draw blood, heels tapping out an ominous rhythm against the hardwood. She’s all presence and precision, trailing chaos in her wake like perfume.

“Hey, you two,” she says, sweet as citrus, resting one hand on the table and leaning in just enough to suggest both casual friendliness and the prelude to a strategic ambush. “Everything tasting okay so far?”

Will freezes mid-motion, fork hovering, pulse stalling like a record scratch.

Nico, eternally composed, offers her the kind of smile that belongs in diplomacy or disaster response. “It’s great. The scallops were amazing. Thank you.”

He’s warm. Charming, even. Genuinely kind in that quiet, startling way Will keeps forgetting about—because he’s never had to expect it from people who grew up with summer homes and imported marble countertops.

But Will sees the cracks. The tells.

Nico’s fingers haven’t stopped moving, still toying with the silver skull ring on his right hand, thumb tracing the jawline like he’s trying to wear the metal down with memory. His spine is straight, too straight, like his body doesn’t quite believe it’s allowed to relax. He’s holding his wine glass with a precision that feels rehearsed, like it’s part of a performance he’s not sure the audience deserves.

Rachel looks between them, gaze narrowing just slightly. Will can feel her attention land on him like a searchlight, soft but merciless. For a heartbeat, he’s certain she’s going to say something—something surgical and exact, because she knows him too well and has never once been afraid to call a thing what it is.

But she doesn’t.

She just hums—a sound that cuts like silk pulled taut—and gives Will a look that says, plainly: we are going to talk about this later and you are not going to enjoy it . Then she pivots, elegant and final, disappearing back into the kitchen like a blade sliding home.

Will exhales, slow and uneven, the air scraping against his ribs on the way out. He presses both palms flat to his thighs, grounding himself in the pressure. As if that will keep the room from tilting under him.

Across the table, Nico lifts his wine glass again, quiet and still composed, the not-quite smile still flickering faintly at the corner of his mouth.

He sips like someone measuring silence. Sets the glass down without a sound.

And Will—chest tight, stomach tangled into a knot of half-swallowed apologies—wonders how long they can keep pretending this is a date and not the long, slow unraveling of something that never even got the chance to begin.

Chapter 28: This Is Not A First Date, This Is A Greek Tragedy (Starring Me as Apollo, Unfortunately)

They eat in a silence that isn’t quite comfortable, but not hostile either—just thick, heavy, filled with the clink of cutlery and the occasional chime of glassware like distant bells in a fog-choked harbor. It drapes over them like mist, soft and suffocating. Every time Will dares to glance up, someone is passing their table far too slowly. A server is polishing the same spot on the countertop for the third time. Austin is still planted behind the bar, pretending to inventory the wine rack but not fooling anyone. Will can feel the eyes, subtle and sharp, orbiting him like satellites around a star about to collapse.

He tries to focus on his risotto. It’s probably good. Creamy, delicate, thoughtfully seasoned. He can’t taste it. His stomach is performing an elaborate series of gymnastic routines, and every bite turns to ash before it finishes dissolving.

Nico’s the one who breaks the silence.

“So,” he says gently, “how did you meet Lou Ellen and Cecil?”

Will looks up, caught mid-chew, heart tripping. “Oh. Uh…”

Nico tilts his head slightly. Not pressuring. Just waiting. His posture is open, patient in that maddeningly kind way that makes Will feel worse for not having it together. It’s so clear that he’s trying, extending another soft thread across the distance between them.

Will swallows, shifts in his seat. “We met during freshman orientation. We got assigned to the same campus tour group and… immediately got lost on the way to the library.”

“Lost?” Nico echoes, a ghost of amusement in his voice.

“Like, very lost,” Will says. “Like, wandered-into-the-athletic-fields-and-accidentally-started-a-fight-with-a-squirrel lost.”

Nico raises one perfect eyebrow.

“It stole Lou Ellen’s granola bar,” Will adds, deadpan.

And there it is—barely—but there: a flicker of amusement at the corner of Nico’s mouth. Not a smile, not quite, but close enough to feel like sunlight breaking through cloud.

Will exhales, latching onto that flicker like a lifeline. “Anyway. We bonded over our mutual sense of direction, or lack thereof. Then we went to a party that night—someone gave us Solo cups filled with neon poison and we ended up running from campus police because, uh… none of us were technically legal.”

“ Technically ,” Nico repeats, dry as bone.

Will points his fork at him in mock offense. “It was formative. It built character. Also maybe mild trauma.”

That earns a chuckle—quiet and rough-edged, like Nico isn’t used to laughter but still remembers how to wear it.

“And you’ve been friends ever since?” he asks.

Will nods, and for a moment, something warm flickers beneath his ribs. “Moved in together before sophomore year. Lou found the apartment. Cecil bribed the landlord with a fake Yelp review about ghost infestations. I showed up with a coffee maker and a desperate need for emotional stability.”

Nico hums, the sound low and thoughtful. “It seems like a good dynamic.”

“It is,” Will says, softer now. “They’re kind of… my people. I didn’t have a lot of those, before.”

The sentence lands heavier than he means it to. More honest. More bare. He hadn’t planned to say it, but it slips out, and then it’s there, sitting between them like a confession, too real to laugh off.

He stabs at his risotto again, as if the swirling of his fork might distract from the weight of what he’s just admitted.

Nico doesn’t respond right away. Just nods slightly, eyes dipping toward the table as his fingers fidget beneath it. Will catches the glint of silver—the skull ring spinning slowly on his hand, catching the light like a secret.

Will knows he should say something in return—ask Nico a question, offer a piece of himself back, bridge the space with something more than performance. But the fog in his brain is too thick, his mouth too dry. He can’t seem to push past the static of class panic, shame, and the impossible fact of Nico—beautiful, composed, unknowable—sitting across from him like he doesn’t notice the cracks forming in Will’s armor.

And all the while, the staff still hover at the edges of his vision, orbiting like moons around a dying star, waiting to see whether it will finally collapse.

Will is crumbling in silence.

And yet—Nico is still trying.

Will can see it now. The careful way he leans forward, just slightly, as if shrinking the distance might soften the blow. His voice, low and patient. His gaze steady, unwavering, holding Will like a lighthouse through fog. He’s reaching—gently, purposefully, like someone coaxing a frightened creature out of hiding.

And Will, for all his golden-boy shine, for all his careful words and curated smiles, has never felt so small beneath someone’s gaze. Never felt so seen. And never felt so afraid of being known.

“So,” Nico says, after a sip of wine, “one time in France, Leo almost got us arrested.”

Will blinks. “Wait—what?”

Nico lifts his fork, making a lazy circle in the air. “It was the summer after high school. We were staying at Piper’s aunt’s house outside Marseille—she wasn’t there, but she left us the keys and this… absurdly detailed binder of house rules. Seventeen pages. In cursive. Very French.”

Will forces a smile. That’s already several red flags of wealth in one sentence—private European property, handwritten instructions, familial trust.

“Anyway,” Nico goes on, “Leo got bored by day two. Obviously. So he decides the best way to entertain himself is to hotwire a moped.”

Will arches an eyebrow but says nothing.

“Jason tried to talk him out of it—responsible older brother mode fully activated—but Leo turned it into a race, and Jason folded in ten seconds. Piper and I were drinking Chablis on the terrace, watching it unfold like it was performance art. Or a war crime.”

Will huffs a breath that’s almost a laugh.

“Then Leo hits a pothole and crashes into this low decorative wall. Which, unfortunately, belonged to the neighbors.”

Nico pauses, letting the suspense hang like smoke between them. “They called the gendarmes.”

Will chokes slightly on his water.

“I swear, we weren’t doing anything technically illegal,” Nico adds, deadpan. “Just… recreationally reckless. But Piper went full my mother is internationally connected and I am descended from colonial glamour in flawless French and somehow talked us out of it. I think she might’ve offered to sponsor their nephew’s college tuition. Or donate a wing of something. I don’t know.”

Will tries to laugh again, but it comes out tight. Brittle. “Must be nice,” he says, and the words come sharper than he means them to. “To have diplomatic immunity by… association.”

Nico shrugs, half-smiling. “Leo said it was the best twenty minutes of his life. He made Jason sign the Vespa tire he stole.”

Will watches the way Nico smiles at the memory—easy, unguarded, like nothing about that summer felt heavy in his hands. There’s a warmth in his eyes, not the cold steel Will is used to seeing in the face of grief or memory, but something lighter. Buoyant. Untouchable.

And that’s what tightens Will’s chest.

Because the story is funny. Of course it is. It’s ridiculous and chaotic and so quintessentially Leo that Will can practically see it unfolding in sun-drenched frames. Piper flipping her hair while intimidating federal agents. Jason crash-landing into a rose bush. Nico sipping wine with one eyebrow raised like he’s already writing the whole thing down in Latin.

But for Will, the story doesn't feel like nostalgia. It feels like distance.

Because for them, this is just a story. A memory polished smooth by time and privilege. A mistake that could never quite become a consequence.

And Will remembers his version.

Freshman year. A dorm party, a bottle of something sweet and cheap passed between nervous hands. Cecil dared to shotgun four wine coolers and throw a traffic cone across the quad. Lou Ellen laughing too loud. Will running barefoot across wet grass, heart pounding, half-drunk and all terrified. The moment campus security turned the corner—flashlight beams, sharp voices, the taste of panic.

No Piper to speak fluent anything. No Jason to shoulder the blame. No powerful last names or diplomatic grace.

Just them. Running. Hoping that luck moved faster than punishment.

He looks at Nico now—the soft fall of his collar, the quiet gleam of his silver watch, the skull ring twisting between his fingers like a worry stone. Will has seen him fiddle with it a hundred times before, but now it feels heavier. More symbolic. A seal ring on a letter Will will never be allowed to open.

Will’s fingers curl around the edge of the table. He doesn’t mean to grip so tightly, but something in him is unraveling in silence.

It’s not Nico’s fault. Not even a little. But still, the air feels thinner now—rarified. Like Nico is seated at a table miles above sea level, and Will is the only one gasping for breath.

His skin prickles. The room tilts just slightly, as though the floor has shifted beneath him. He can feel Rachel watching from the pass, Austin at the bar pretending not to glance over. There’s a server refilling water glasses at the next table who’s been walking the same loop for twenty minutes, like proximity will save them.

Will’s heart kicks against his ribs like it’s trying to make a break for it.

It’s too much. Too far. Too obvious.

“Excuse me,” he says, and his voice cracks on the edges like porcelain. He shoves back his chair with more force than necessary. “I—I need to use the restroom.”

Nico blinks. “Oh. Sure.”

But Will’s already halfway gone, weaving through a forest of white tablecloths and flickering candles, the noise of laughter and silverware like static in his ears.

And gods, he’s burning.

He’s burning from the inside out.

The second Will rounds the corner, he doesn’t even glance toward the restroom.

His eyes lock with Austin, who’s lingering at the service station like a battlefield medic, one hand absently polishing a wineglass, the other half-raised as if ready to signal a retreat. The dining room glows behind him—flickering votives, soft jazz, the hum of people pretending they’re not being watched—but Austin’s gaze is already narrowed, knowing. Sharp. Mercilessly observant.

Will jerks his head toward the hallway closet. The one with the mop and the soda crates. The one every server has cried in during a Sunday brunch shift and emerged from changed.

Austin lifts a brow. Sets the glass down like a weapon. Nods once.

Without a word, they slip into the dark.

The door clicks shut behind them. The air inside is too warm, too still, thick with lemon cleaner and crushed mint and the unmistakable scent of hospitality fatigue. Will exhales so fast it sounds like a tire blowing. Like something inside him has finally collapsed under the pressure.

Austin leans against the door, arms crossed, apron slightly askew. He looks like he’s preparing to conduct an exorcism.

“I’m gonna guess things are going amazing out there,” he says dryly.

Will groans and drags both hands down his face. “I’m dying. Like—organ failure. Multiple systems. Shut down imminent.”

“Yeah,” Austin says, nodding with exaggerated solemnity. “I clocked that around the time you fake-laughed at the duck like it had just told a joke about World War I and looked like you were about to sob into your risotto.”

Will drops onto a crate of LaCroix like it’s a confession booth. The cardboard creaks under his weight, a low sound like surrender.

“He’s so—he’s so nice,” Will says, voice quiet and wrecked. Like even now, even in hiding, he doesn’t want anyone to hear the worst of it. “And I’m just… ruining it. Not even on purpose. Just by being there.”

Austin exhales through his nose. Doesn’t say anything for a moment. Just watches him.

“You’re not ruining it,” he says eventually.

“I am,” Will mutters. “I can’t stop spiraling. I look at him and all I see is how out of place I am. How expensive his shirt probably is. How the wine he ordered costs more than my entire grocery budget. I’m the guy who gets yelled at for folding napkins unevenly, and he’s the guy who takes people to House of Hesperides for dinner. That’s the difference.”

Austin stares at him, unimpressed. The overhead light hums above them, cold and buzzing, casting pale shadows on shelves of bitters and backup ramekins.

“You know,” he says, tone bone-dry, “when I came in tonight, I expected to pour water and judge people. Not babysit the Golden Boy while he spirals over a hot date.”

Will snorts, barely.

Austin continues, merciless. “Instead, I’m comforting you in a broom closet like some kind of therapist with a barback wage. Honestly, this feels backward.”

“You’re so annoying,” Will mutters, not looking up.

“You’re lucky I’m charming.” Then, gentler: “You like him.”

Will doesn’t answer. Just lowers his head, eyes on the floor. Nods once.

“And that’s terrifying,” Austin says, like it’s the simplest truth in the world. “Yeah. I get it.”

Will breathes out, shaky and small. The air tastes like citrus and dust and grief.

“So,” Austin says, shifting his weight, voice quieter now. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’ve got five minutes of mop-closet sanctuary before he thinks you’ve climbed out the bathroom window or ghosted him mid-duck leg. You don’t have to fix everything. Just go out there and try. Talk to him like he’s a person, not a museum exhibit. You don’t need a dissertation. You just need to show up.”

Will laughs, but it sounds more like a breath finally escaping. “You’re terrible at pep talks.”

“And you’re worse at pretending you’re fine.” Austin leans forward and claps a hand on Will’s shoulder, solid and grounding. “Take another breath. Walk back out there. And maybe—just maybe—try giving yourself a fraction of the grace you keep trying to give everyone else.”

Will blinks. His eyes sting.

But he nods.

“Okay,” he says, and it’s quiet. Fragile. But real.

Austin straightens, already halfway back into professional mode. “Good. Let’s go salvage your tragic little dinner before Rachel starts live tweeting it from the kitchen.”

He opens the door, letting the soft hallway light spill in like mercy.

Will stands slowly, runs a hand through his curls, tugs at the hem of his shirt like it might fix something broken inside him. He still feels like a scraped knee in a linen suit. But steadier. A little.

“Thanks,” he mutters.

Austin rolls his eyes. “Don’t thank me. Just survive dinner.”

Will steps back into the dining room like a soldier returning to the battlefield—shoulders squared, expression composed, hands tucked in his pockets so he doesn’t start wringing them like a Victorian governess.

He counts his steps. He counts the candles flickering on tables. He counts anything that isn’t his own pulse thudding in his throat like it wants out.

Just sit down, he tells himself. Be normal. Make eye contact. Say something about funerary urns or ancient rituals. Smile like a person who isn’t five seconds away from spontaneous combustion.

He rounds the corner—and there it is again.

The painting.

He doesn’t even need to look directly at it anymore. It pulses at the edge of his vision like a bruise that never fully faded, a wound remembered in color and canvas. Apollo and Hyacinthus , caught forever in that final, breathless moment—grief rendered in oil and gold leaf, in arms that could not save and a body that could not be saved.

Too symbolic. Too cruel. Too precise.

And yet—of course it fits.

Because Nico is across from it now, bathed in candlelight and cathedral shadow, his wine glass lit from within like a stained-glass relic. He looks unreal like this. Like a holy thing dressed in black. Like the last breath before a prayer. Like he belongs in the myth, not beside it—a boy not painted into the scene but born of it. Not the mortal dying, not the god grieving. Something older than both. Something made of silence and the sharp edge of devotion.

And Will—gods, Will can barely see the restaurant anymore. The walls melt away. The tables vanish. All that’s left is the pull of Nico’s gravity, soft and devastating and impossible to ignore.

He had always thought Nico would be the one to hurt him.
Not out of malice—Nico isn’t cruel. Nico is careful. Nico is the kind of person who holds things like they might break, who speaks like every word might land in a wound he can’t see. But Will had made his peace, long ago, with the inevitability of being left. He believed that loving Nico meant learning how to mourn him in advance. He pictured it clearly—Nico slipping away like dusk, like fog, like myth. Leaving behind silence, or ash, or nothing at all.

He thought that was the story. He thought he knew how it would end.
But this—this is worse.

Because Nico is still here. Still seated. Still trying.

Trying with every brave smile. With every small, sincere question laid gently between them like an olive branch. With every glance that says I’m here if you are.

And Will—Will, who was supposed to be the safe one—is the one coming undone. Will, who was raised to shine, who learned to make everyone feel seen, is the one dimming the light. He’s the one pulling away. The one silencing himself. The one turning something golden into something ghosted.

He thought he’d be Hyacinthus. The mortal beloved. The soft heart cracked open in someone else’s hands. But no. He’s Apollo. The god who loved too much and held too tightly . The god whose grief turned fatal. The one who didn’t mean to destroy, but did anyway.

And isn’t that just the tragedy of Will Solace? To love so carefully, so gently, so earnestly—and still scorch the earth behind him. To offer only light, and find out too late that even sunlight can blind, can blister, can burn.

His throat tightens with it—all of it. The sorrow, the shame, the unbearable knowledge that he is hurting the one person he never wanted to harm. His body rebels under the weight of it, lungs fluttering against ribs that feel too small now to contain the ruin inside him.

He steps forward, each movement slow and hollow like a funeral procession. The air presses heavy against his shoulders. Even the flicker of candlelight feels dimmed. He’s crossing something—not just the restaurant floor, but some sacred line between what could have been and what is.

There is no name for what he feels. Not fear. Not regret. Not even heartbreak. Something older. Something quieter. Like watching the first crack split through marble. Like watching the sun begin to fall.

And still—still—Nico hasn’t left. Still, he waits. Still, he stays.

A boy with eyes like afterthoughts and hands that deserve to be held. A boy Will would give anything to reach—but doesn’t know how to anymore. He straightens his spine, even as his heart folds inward like paper pulled too many times through the rain. He walks toward the table not like a man on a date, but like a penitent approaching a shrine.

And maybe—just maybe—he thinks he can still catch the sun in his hands before it slips entirely beneath the horizon. But it’s already dusk.

And Will is still the god who throws the discus.

When he reaches the table, Nico is hunched slightly forward, shoulders curled in, thumbs flying across the screen of his phone. The glow from it paints his face in cold light—blue-white and unforgiving—casting faint shadows beneath his lashes, across the sharp line of his jaw. His brow is furrowed, not deeply, but enough to hollow the space between his eyes. His mouth is a taut, unreadable line, carved with the kind of restraint that says everything louder than words.

Will freezes.

It’s instinct—animal and immediate. His pulse stutters, skips, stumbles like a record scratched mid-song. The back of his neck prickles with the heat of imagined judgment, of truths not yet spoken but already arriving.

He doesn’t know who Nico is texting.

But his mind, unkind and tireless, makes the leap for him.

Of course he’s texting them.

The Seven. The inner sanctum. The protectors. The pantheon of demigods and demigoddesses who orbit Nico like he’s their sacred flame—who would raise the earth and salt it behind them for less than this. The ones who love him with bone-deep loyalty and knives hidden in their sleeves. The ones who have never needed both sides of the story.

Will can see it—too clearly. The imaginary group chat unfurling behind Nico’s screen like a scroll of minor prophecies:

“Update: Will has glitched. He just apologized to the table salt.”

“This is worse than when Jason tried to flirt in Ancient Greek.” 

“Leo’s threatening the mechanical bull again. Someone fake an emergency. Hazel, maybe a haunting?”

Each invisible message lands soft and sharp, a paper cut to the soul. They echo in his skull, light as laughter, heavy as judgment. His imagination supplies the emojis. The sarcasm. The concern disguised as humor. The shared language of people who have known each other long enough to wield inside jokes like scalpels.

And gods—it’s not even that he thinks they’d be cruel. That’s not what terrifies him.

It’s that they’d be right. That whatever Nico types—whatever clipped summary he sends—won’t need to be embellished. That “it didn’t go well” is enough. That “ he shut down ” is enough. That “ he was different ” is enough.

Because Will is different. Here. Now. Small and awkward and vanishing inside his own skin. Not the boy he was when they first met. Not the light Nico once smiled at across the bookstore shelves.

Just another misstep. Just another mortal with trembling hands and a voice gone too quiet. Just another reason to close the door.

And Will stands there, breath caught somewhere between his ribs, watching Nico’s fingers blur across the screen like he’s writing the ending in real time. And it hurts. Quietly. Utterly. Like being written out of a myth he never deserved to be part of.

He pulls out his chair slowly, the legs scraping just slightly against the floor—too loud, too obvious, a sound that belongs to someone who doesn’t know how to belong. He sits like he’s slipping into someone else’s story, folding his limbs in with too much care, trying not to be a disruption, trying not to take up too much space. His body becomes apology. His breath, permission.

The air around Nico has changed.

It’s thinner now—brittle in that way glass gets when left too long in the cold. Not cracked yet, but on the edge of splintering. The kind of silence that hums like tension wire, quiet and humming and ready to snap.

Nico glances up, just briefly. His phone disappears into his pocket in one smooth, practiced motion, and his face—gods, his face—is a masterpiece of restraint. Still and unreadable, sculpted into something neutral and fine, like wet plaster smoothed by steady hands. Not calm, exactly—just set. Nothing breaks. Nothing bleeds. But everything waits.

Will tries to smile—something soft, something contrite, something that might pass as an olive branch if you squint. But it feels flimsy, a paper flower held out in the middle of a storm. “Sorry,” he says, aiming for levity. “Took a wrong turn on the way to the restroom. Ended up in 2012.”

The joke falls flat. A cracked bell—soundless in all the places it’s supposed to echo.

Nico exhales something that might be a laugh, soft and distant, a breath through the nose. “You okay?”

Will nods too quickly. “Yeah. Just… needed a second.”

Nico doesn’t press. Just nods once, distant but not unkind, and picks up his fork again with the slow deliberation of someone who knows exactly how much silence can weigh.

And that—that’s what undoes Will.

Because Nico isn’t angry. Not in the sharp, expressive way people usually are. He’s folding himself inward instead—soft and practiced, like someone who’s had to learn how to brace for disappointment. The way a wave learns to pull back before it crashes. The way a door learns to close quietly, without a sound.

It’s not a tantrum. It’s muscle memory.

Will watches it happen and hates himself for letting it. Because this wasn’t supposed to be a test—but it’s starting to feel like one. And he’s failing it in real time, with every missed word and half-finished smile.

And this isn’t just about Nico anymore.

It’s about the gravity that keeps him tethered to this world. The orbit of loyalty and laughter and love that surrounds him like rings around a star. The people who have made a home out of myth, who would set fire to Olympus if it meant pulling Nico out of the dark.

Piper, with her knife-edged humor and heart-shaped fury. Jason, all quiet steadiness and unwavering devotion, the kind of loyalty that never demands a spotlight but holds everything together when the sky begins to fall. Percy’s warmth, loud and clumsy and impossible not to feel. Annabeth’s brilliance—sharp as a blade, precise as a compass, always aimed at the truth. Leo’s wild, radiant chaos, a supernova in human form, burning bright enough to pull even silence into his glow. Hazel, still and strong, the eye of the storm. And Frank—gods, Frank—with hands built to protect and a soul as vast and quiet as the sea.

They are not just friends. They are a constellation. And somehow—impossibly—Will had begun to believe he might be part of it too. A satellite tucked into their orbit, allowed to glow beside them. Not one of the original myths, no—but a gentle epilogue. A promise that love could be soft, and steady, and safe.

And now he’s terrified of being the reason a star goes out.

Because they will know.

If Nico leaves this table with his shoulders a little tighter, if his voice loses its softness, if the light behind his eyes dims by even a fraction—they’ll feel it like a shift in the atmosphere. A ripple across a still lake. They won’t need explanations. They won’t want context.

They will close ranks.

Not out of cruelty. Out of instinct. Out of love. Out of the kind of fierce, bone-deep protectiveness that has always, always saved Nico when the world tried to swallow him.

They’ll lock the door behind him. And Will—Will, who tried so hard to be good, to be kind, to be careful—will be left outside with his apology clutched too tightly in his hands, like a gift no one asked for.

Because they love Nico like something sacred. Like a temple still standing after the gods have fled. They don’t ask him to shine—they just ask him to stay. And they would burn down anyone who makes him flicker.

And Will?

Will was supposed to be safe.

He was supposed to be the quiet kind of love. The kind that doesn’t demand anything but presence. The kind that steadies, that shelters, that stays.

But now he’s the reason Nico’s shoulders have squared like a shield. The reason his voice has gone quieter, colder. The reason he’s eating like it’s a task instead of a pleasure.

Will stares down at the table like it might give him an answer. His jaw locks. His spine curves inward. His body folds into itself like something trying to disappear.

He’s still here.

Still breathing. Still sitting two feet across from the boy he wanted to memorize in candlelight.

But gods—it feels like he’s already been left behind.

Nico moves through the rest of his duck like a man finishing a story he’s already lost interest in. The scallops had been curious, alive with commentary and half-smiles. The duck is rote. Muscle memory. A slow, quiet retreat behind polished manners and half-averted eyes. His gaze drifts—down, then up, then sideways—but never quite lingers on Will.

He’s still trying. That’s the worst part.

He hasn’t given up. Not yet.

But Will can feel the threads thinning, unraveling, one by one—silk pulled too tight across a chasm that’s growing wider with every word left unsaid.

Will’s own plate remains mostly untouched. The risotto, once creamy and fragrant, is now a cold, congealed ghost of itself. He’s taken maybe three bites, each one tasting less like food and more like failure. Each mouthful a reminder that he doesn’t belong here—not at this table, not in this restaurant, not beside Nico.

Austin appears like smoke at their table, summoned by tension. He’s all neutral poise, the picture of professional ease, but Will knows that look—the barely concealed horror of watching a date implode in slow motion. He clears the plates with the elegance of a man reciting a practiced script, but lingers just long enough over Will’s barely touched dish to communicate a full paragraph.

“Would either of you like to see the dessert menu?” he asks, voice smooth, practiced—just a little too loud. It cuts through the quiet like sunlight in a cathedral, unwanted and sudden.

A pause follows. Not silence—silence is too passive. This is something else. This is a breath held between them like glass. The moment tenses. Waits.

Will doesn’t move. He doesn’t dare to.

Because he can feel it—that hesitation in Nico’s shoulders, the flicker of a choice being weighed. Dessert as a lifeline. Dessert as salvage. As a last-ditch offering to remind them this was supposed to be a date. A softness, a sweetness, a maybe.

Nico tilts his head slightly, eyes trained on Will, searching. “Do you want anything?”

It’s a simple question. Gentle. Offered like a hand extended across a narrowing bridge.

Will shakes his head. “No. I’m good.”

Too quick. Too shallow. It hits the air like a paper boat dropped in a storm.

Nico studies him. His expression doesn’t shift much, but Will can see it—the smallest crease between his brows, the breath caught behind his teeth. There’s concern there, buried and blinking. A quiet ache he hasn’t found the words for yet.

“You didn’t really eat,” Nico says, soft but edged with knowing.

Will offers a half-smile that doesn’t rise past his cheeks. “I’m not feeling great,” he says. “Just… tired. Long week.”

It’s not even a lie. But it’s not the truth either. Not the kind that matters.

The words land heavy, like stone in deep water. No ripple. No echo. Just weight, sinking between them.

Nico nods slowly. But the tension doesn’t ease. His mouth is pressed into a line too tight to be casual. His gaze lingers, like he’s trying to read the fine print of Will’s body, searching for the damage written between his ribs. Like he knows something is wrong but doesn’t know where to touch it without making it worse.

Austin steps in, collecting their plates with the elegant efficiency of someone who has been through a hundred breakups, a thousand silent dinners, and once had to politely interrupt a marriage proposal to refill the water glasses. He glances down at Will’s untouched risotto and raises his eyebrows—not in judgment, but in weary camaraderie.

Will catches the look.

You owe me. Brunch shift. Tomorrow.

Will glares back without lifting his chin.

I’m quitting. I’m moving to a monastery in Vermont. You’ve never met me.

Austin smirks—just a twitch of the mouth, there and gone—and disappears toward the kitchen like a man who has earned the right to gossip.

Will exhales through his nose and presses his palms flat to his thighs, grounding himself in the pressure. The air feels thinner now. Hollow around the edges. The kind of quiet that comes right before the music stops.

He can feel the end approaching. Slow and certain, like the final note of a song he’s forgotten the words to. The check. The door. The night winding down into something that no longer looks like a date, only the ghost of one.

The silence between them isn’t brittle anymore. It’s softened, but not in a way that brings comfort. It’s the kind of silence that follows an argument never spoken aloud. The kind that settles between two people who don’t know how to hold what they’ve broken.

Will stares at the table. His eyes catch the flicker of candlelight reflected in Nico’s wineglass—fractured light in half-drunk red, shimmering like something half-remembered.

And then Nico moves.

Not abruptly. Not coldly. Just quietly. Like someone closing a book they’ve been trying to finish, knowing the ending isn’t going to change.

He leans slightly forward, his voice steady and polite as he lifts his eyes to where Austin has reappeared like a ghost summoned by gravity.

“Could we get the check, please?” he asks.

Not sharp. Not dismissive.

Just final.

Will doesn’t look up.

He doesn’t breathe.

He folds his napkin slowly, deliberately—creases clean, corners perfect. It’s a ceremony now. An offering. A last rite.

Because the check is coming.

And with it, the quiet, merciful punctuation at the end of a night that was meant to be hope and has become elegy.

A closing chapter written in candlelight and silence.

Chapter 29: I’m on a Date with Nico di Angelo and Somehow I’m the One with More Daddy Issues

Will’s stomach tightens—quietly, instinctively—as his mind begins to calculate.

It’s not conscious, not really. Just a flicker of muscle memory, a survival reflex hardwired beneath his skin. The kind of math that doesn’t require paper or pen, just quiet desperation and a heartbeat steady enough to keep count. It blooms behind his eyes like a migraine, cold and clinical, the numbers lining up like soldiers in retreat.

He knows exactly what this place costs. Of course he does. He’s memorized every line on the menu, every upcharge, every overpriced pour. He’s handed those numbers to strangers in pressed linen, recited them like liturgy while pouring wine he’ll never drink, describing dishes he only gets to taste when they’re scraped off a tray and headed for the trash.

But now— Now the total isn’t theoretical. Now it’s his.

His jaw locks, and the silent audit begins. Rent is due next week. His phone bill is already collecting dust in the unpaid tab of his brain. Groceries—he can stretch them if he’s careful. There’s rice in the cabinet. A half-jar of peanut butter. If the kitchen burns another tray of figs, maybe he can slip a few home. If Cecil flirts hard enough, he might score another pity latte and sneak some closing shift pastries into a backpack lined with napkins. The tip-out from Saturday hasn’t posted yet. If the brunch crowd wasn’t made entirely of demons in Patagonia vests, maybe it’ll be enough to cover part of this.

Maybe.

He doesn’t breathe too deep. Doesn’t look at Nico. Just stares down at the edge of the table, eyes tracing the faint grain of the wood, fingers curling in his lap like they can hold the budget together.

Because here’s the thing—he asked Nico out.

Because that’s how he was raised. Southern manners buried into him deeper than pride, deeper than fear. You offer. You show up. You open the door and pull out the chair and you pay. That was gospel. That was law. If you can’t afford the check and the tip, baby, you don’t get to sit at the table. His mother used to say it while fixing her eyeliner in the mirror, half-lipsticked and barefoot on the tile, a cigarette perched between two fingers like a punctuation mark.

And gods, she was right.

He grinds his molars like it’ll anchor him, like the tension might muffle the voice in his head that whispers failure with every pulse.

Because he’s been terrible tonight.

Awkward. Stiff. Present in body but absent in every other way that matters. Nico has been patient—so patient. Will’s barely looked him in the eye. Has spent more time staring at the kitchen pass and the host stand than at the boy he invited here. The boy he likes. The boy who showed up wearing soft black and silver and maybe something like hope. And what has Will given him in return? Silence. Stammered answers. A ghost of himself, haunting a seat that should’ve held someone worthy.

The least he can do—the absolute bare minimum—is pay for the damage. Let Nico walk away from this with one less disappointment to carry. One less thing to explain to Jason in a text full of ellipses. He’ll figure it out later. He’ll do the budgeting autopsy when he gets home—spread the numbers out like bones and hope there’s enough marrow to make it through the week. Pride and overdraft fees. Peanut butter and prayer. Whatever it takes.

But tonight? Tonight, he just needs to sign the check and vanish before Nico realizes just how much this cost him.

As Will folds his napkin with mechanical precision—corners crisp, creases sharp enough to draw blood—Nico’s phone buzzes against the table.

Once. Then again. Then again—each vibration cutting through the hush like a blade drawn too close to bone.

Will doesn’t want to look. He really, truly doesn’t. But his eyes betray him, flicking up just long enough to see the name flash across the screen: Jason. And something in Will’s chest folds in on itself, soft and breakable and punctured like a paper wing in the rain.

Another buzz.

Jason again.

Will doesn’t need to imagine the content of the texts—they write themselves behind his eyes, vivid as a confession. Probably checking in. Probably asking if Nico’s okay. Probably wondering if Will has said something cruel or gone quiet again, pulling into himself like a tide with no return. Probably texting from the bathroom of some ridiculous cowboy-themed bar, one hand holding back Leo from challenging a mechanical bull to a duel, the other furiously typing under the neon light of a sign that reads “HOWDY.”

Will can almost see it. Jason’s forehead creased in worry, mouth tight, Piper standing nearby with glitter in her hair and exasperation in her eyes. Leo halfway up a speaker system. Frank trying to pay their tab in peace. And still—still—Jason’s concern is tethered to Nico like a thread that refuses to snap, even from across the city.

Because Jason doesn’t let things go. Not when it comes to Nico.

And gods, that’s what makes it worse.

Jason, who’s dodging flying cowboy hats and chasing Leo through a honky-tonk apocalypse, still somehow knows something is wrong. Still knows that Nico is retreating. Still knows—instinctively, fiercely—that it isn’t duty this time. Not Hades. Not legacy. Not memory.

It’s Will.

And Jason already knows it.

Will can’t even be mad. Not at Jason. Not when he’s seen the way Jason watches Nico in crowded rooms—not like a guardian, but like a friend who refuses to let him disappear again. Who knows when to press, and when to wait. Who carries Nico’s freindship like it’s something sacred. Will understands. Too well. Because the gravity of Nico’s trust is not something you take lightly.

The phone buzzes again, and Will flinches like it’s a slap. This one feels different—deeper. It pulls something forward from his memory, raw and lingering. Another phone. Another night.

Percy and Annabeth’s apartment. The clink of dinner plates. The quiet hum of comfort.

And Nico’s phone—ringing, over and over, the name on the screen like a wound.

Dad.

Hazel had said gently, “ You should call him.”

But Nico hadn’t moved. Just stared. Just flinched. Just folded his fingers around the phone like he wasn’t sure if it would ring again—or explode in his hand. His jaw had locked. His shoulders had risen like a tide preparing to break.

And then he’d stood. Too fast. Too sharp.

And he’d left.

The door had closed behind him like a final breath, and Will had sat there watching, helpless, feeling the ripples of a story he wasn’t allowed to touch. That night, Nico had been dragged back into the dark by a father who never knew how to love without hurting. But tonight?

Tonight the buzzing isn’t a curse. It’s a lifeline. Jason, steady and relentless, trying to reach him. Trying to anchor him. Trying to find the thread before Nico lets go of it entirely. And the cruelest part—the most gutting truth carved into Will’s ribs—is that this time, Nico isn’t retreating because of his father.

He’s retreating because of Will.

Will, who tried. Who practiced small talk and jokes and picked a shirt that said dateable but not desperate. Who had rehearsed what to say if things went well. And what to say if they didn’t.

And yet somehow, none of that matters.

Because Nico’s phone won’t stop buzzing. And Will knows—knows—it’s because Jason sees what Will doesn’t have the courage to ask:

Are you okay?
Do you want to leave?
Is it him?

Will swallows hard. The shame tastes like copper and static, like burnt sugar clinging to the back of his teeth. His hands curl into his lap, fists pressed to denim, as if pressure might anchor him to the moment instead of letting it split him apart.

But the guilt is already settling in—heavy, thick, and ruinous.

It isn’t loud. It isn’t sharp. It isn’t angry.

It’s just there. Unmoving. Like grief. Like truth.

The weight of becoming what he swore he never would.

A closed door. A silence learned too well. A reason to retreat.

And across the table, the phone buzzes again. A flash of Jason’s name. A flicker of light. A reminder that Nico still has people who will come running when he starts to disappear.

And that tonight, Will isn’t one of them.

Austin returns like a specter summoned by dread, checkbook in hand, the flickering candlelight catching in his eyes—too knowing, too sharp. His expression is a masterclass in polite neutrality, but Will knows better. He’s worn that look himself, too many times to count. It’s the look of someone watching a slow-motion car crash while still being paid to refill the bread basket and ask if everything's tasting okay.

Will straightens instinctively, spine taut with panic, fingers already diving into his pocket like he’s reaching for a lifeline. His movements are clumsy—too fast, too loud, too desperate. His hand slips against the worn leather of his wallet, fumbling the zipper like even his fingers are ashamed of him.

“I’ve got it,” he blurts, voice too loud, slicing through the hush of the dining room like a siren. It sounds panicked. Performative. Like someone shouting into a void just to hear their own echo. “I asked you out. It’s only right—”

But Nico is already moving.

Calm. Fluid. Unbothered. Like this moment doesn’t sting, like this part of the night is already muscle memory. He reaches into his wallet and draws out a sleek black card—one of those cards. The kind that doesn’t scream wealth so much as whisper it like a prayer. The kind that slides doors open in airports and private banks and restaurants where the menu doesn’t have prices.

He sets it down without looking at the bill. Without even pretending to hesitate. The sound it makes on the table is barely audible—a soft click—but to Will, it might as well be a closing door. A final chapter. The punctuation mark on a story that was never really his.

“I made the reservation,” Nico says, his voice even and unreadable. “I picked the place.”

“But I invited you,” Will tries again, but now the words are unraveling as they leave him—loose threads, frayed logic, nothing that can be tied back together. “That’s how it’s supposed to work. That’s—”

Nico lifts an eyebrow. Not in judgment. Not in pity. Just certainty. The quiet, inevitable kind that says: This is how my world works.

Austin takes the card with the practiced grace of someone who’s seen everything but still knows when to stay silent. Will catches the flicker of something in his face as he turns toward the register—a twitch of impressed eyebrows, maybe. A glint of sympathy. A hint of apology he doesn’t say out loud.

Will glances at the check.

Shouldn’t have.

He catches the final flourish of Nico’s signature, the gliding stroke of his pen across the tip line—an amount that’s more than generous. Lavish, even. Will’s stomach turns. He doesn’t need to calculate it to know it’s probably half a shift’s worth of wages. Maybe more.

The breath leaves his lungs like something fleeing. Like even air doesn’t want to linger here.

He wants to speak. To object. To do anything but sit there and let someone else clean up the mess he made. But the card is gone. The transaction’s already humming through the machine. The moment is out of his hands.

And Nico—Nico is still. Serene. Unmoved.

Not out of cruelty. Just... familiarity. This is not indulgence. This is routine.

The same way he paid for the taxi without blinking. The same way he shows up in boots that probably cost more than Will’s grocery budget for the month. In shirts that drape like water, in chains that catch the light like secrets. Nico belongs to a different world. Not because he chose it. Just because it was always waiting for him.

But that night in the cab—there had been softness. There had been warmth. Will had walked away with Nico’s hand in his, his lips ghosting over Will’s skin like a promise. He’d gone to bed with the dizzy, golden feeling that maybe—just maybe—he was wanted.

Tonight?

Tonight Nico is paying for the damage. Quietly. Elegantly. Without fanfare or blame. And that—somehow—is worse.

Because Will—fumbling with his wallet like it’s armor, cheeks flushed, dignity bleeding out through every pore—is starting to feel like a footnote in a myth that was never meant to be about him. Like a mortal trying to play god for one night, and now the sun is rising, and the divine is slipping back into the clouds.

“Thank you,” Nico says to Austin, and his voice is polite, practiced. Devastating.

Because he still sounds like this is a date.

Not a slow, tragic farewell disguised as dinner.

Will doesn’t speak.

He can’t. Not when his lungs are a battlefield and breath feels like surrender. Not when the inside of his mouth tastes like ash and apologies.

They leave like it’s a ritual—quiet, wordless, stripped of ceremony. No romantic slant to their exit. No coat over shoulders. No glances held too long across candlelit distance. Just the scrape of chair legs, the ghost of footsteps, the echo of a night that never became what it promised to be.

Will follows Nico toward the front like a shadow, legs aching from the effort of sitting so still, so silent. Each step feels borrowed.

Rachel is waiting by the hostess stand like an oracle with winged eyeliner, arms folded like she’s been holding vigil. Her gaze flicks between them with surgical precision. She doesn’t smile.

Clovis slumps beside her like a human comma, possibly fresh from a nap in the wine cellar. There’s definitely a pastry fossilizing on his sleeve. He doesn’t notice. He might not be conscious.

“Have a great night,” Rachel says, too brightly. Her tone is sugared but the edge of it cuts like obsidian. “Thanks for joining us at the House of Hesperides.”

Will’s stomach folds in on itself. He doesn’t meet her eyes. He can’t bear it—not when she already knows everything without asking.

Clovis raises a hand in a lazy half-wave. “Later, man,” he mutters, voice glazed with sleep. “I think your risotto’s still on table twelve if you wanna finish it.”

Will, for one brief, shining moment, considers diving headfirst into oncoming traffic.

But then the doors open, and the night reaches for him like mercy.

Outside.

The world hushes. The chaos of the restaurant dims behind glass and distance, muffled into irrelevance. The street is quiet, washed in the soft yellow of tired streetlights. They glow like fading stars, unsure if they’re still needed.

A breeze slips between buildings, cool against his neck, tugging gently at the collar of his shirt, threading through his curls. The air smells like exhaust and wet pavement and something sharp, almost clean.

Will exhales.

And only then does he realize just how tightly he’d been wound. How every minute inside felt like holding his breath underwater, too still, too bright. The whole place was a snow globe—beautiful and suffocating, glass walls he couldn’t shatter, air he couldn’t swallow.

Now the night feels vast. Indifferent. Honest.

And Will?

He’s never felt smaller beneath the sky.

Nico steps a few paces from the restaurant door, the echo of their exit still humming behind them like a song that ended mid-note, unfinished. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t look back. Just slips a cigarette from his coat pocket like it’s muscle memory, something learned long ago and never truly forgotten.

The lighter flares, a kiss of gold beneath the cradle of his cheekbone—and for a second, he’s not a boy at all. He’s something older. Wilder. A god sculpted in ash and fury, all hollow light and the wreckage of restraint. The flame flickers against his face and catches the edge of his silver ring, and he looks—divine. Devastating. Not beautiful in the way Will sometimes dreams of—soft-eyed and kiss-drunk and laughing—but beautiful the way storms are. The way ruins are. The way myths are remembered after everything else has burned away.

He inhales like the world has wronged him. Exhales smoke like a prayer turned sour. It curls around him like armor, like something summoned. A ritual of silence. The slow ritual of letting go.

His black shirt pulls taut at the collarbone, catching the breath of wind that coils down the avenue. That silver chain—familiar, holy, a quiet flash at his throat—catches the lamplight for a heartbeat before vanishing again into shadow. And the cigarette—pale and glowing like a warning—is held between two fingers like a weapon that doesn’t need to be drawn to be dangerous.

There’s no softness left in his mouth. No carefulness in his eyes. Gone is the boy from the dinner table—the one who asked how Will’s week was, who offered bites of scallop with a tilt of his head and patience strung through every question.

This version is sharper. Burned down. Still smoldering.

His gaze flicks upward, and it cuts. Not cruelly. Not even cold. Just—precisely. Like he’s looking at a puzzle that once fit and now refuses to. Like Will has become an answer that no longer makes sense.

And Will can’t blame him.

Because out here, under the honest light of a streetlamp, there’s no performance left to maintain. No servers watching from behind polished menus. No glossy illusion of romance to keep alive through careful conversation and half-finished wine. Here, Nico can finally lay down the weight of pleasantries. He can let the fury breathe.

It’s not loud. It doesn’t have to be.

It hums in the air between them. A static ache. A silent indictment.

And Will—gods—he wants to close the distance. Wants to reach out and say the things he couldn’t say inside. To ask for another chance. To tell Nico he was never the problem, only the gravity. The thing that pulled too hard on Will’s ribcage and left him breathless.

But Will’s feet are rooted. And his tongue is heavy with everything he didn’t say. Shame settles over his shoulders like a second coat.

So he watches.

Silent. Struck.

Looking at Nico like he’s watching a constellation collapse.

Not a boy, not really. Not anymore.

But a myth carved in smoke and fury and half-spoken forgiveness. A story that should have ended differently. A god with eyes like open flame.

Like Pallas Athene, Will thinks, with the terrible shining eyes. That same impossible strength. That same unblinking, unrelenting clarity.

And Will?

Will doesn’t know if he’s the battlefield or the broken weapon left behind.

But he knows—gods, he knows—he lit the first match. He spilled the first silence. He started the war.

And Nico?

Nico is what happens after.

He wants to say something. Anything.

The apology rises like a tide in his throat—bitter and hot and far too late. He wants to explain. To unspool every wrong turn into something salvageable. To take Nico’s hand and whisper I didn’t mean to break this. I didn’t mean for it to go this way. I just—

But before he can gather the courage, before he can even take a full breath—

Nico’s phone rings.

The sound splits the night like a blade through silk—sharp, precise, merciless. Too loud for the hush between them. Too sudden to ignore. He doesn’t flinch. Just lowers the cigarette from his lips, exhales a slow breath of smoke that ghosts around him like fog rolling off the sea, and glances down at the screen. Will doesn’t need to ask who it is. He doesn’t need to see the name glowing there like a lighthouse in the dark.

He already knows.

Jason.

And this time, Nico answers.

His voice is soft, almost reluctant, dipping low as he turns slightly away. Not enough to be rude—just enough to draw a line. Enough to leave Will in the margins, just outside the frame. A ghost at the edge of his own story.

Will stands still, heart caged behind his ribs like something wild and wounded.

He doesn’t want to listen.

But he does.

Because Nico’s voice, for all its careful quiet, still carries like wind through bare branches. He hears his own name. Quiet. Not sharp. Not cruel. But enough to hollow him out from the inside.

The words fall like raindrops on cold stone.

“…yeah, I don’t know. It just—didn’t go the way I thought.”

Will stares at the pavement, at the spiderweb cracks in the sidewalk, at the pebbles trapped in concrete like fossilized stars. He pictures shrinking small enough to vanish between them. To disappear cleanly.

Another pause.

“…no, he’s still here.”

Still here . The words sting, somehow. Like they weren’t expected. Like they shouldn’t be true.

The cigarette crackles faintly as Nico flicks ash into the quiet. The ember glows like the last heartbeat of a dying star.

Then: a sigh. Long. Bone-deep.

“—no, I’m not mad,” Nico murmurs. But Will hears it—beneath the calm. That delicate thread of something else. Not anger. Not quite. Just the ache of confusion, disappointment, the quiet sting of trying and not knowing where it went wrong.

“It’s just…” Nico’s voice falters. Hesitates. Then lowers again, heavy as dusk. “I don’t know. He shut down.”

The words land like an arrow through silk. Clean. Devastating.

Will’s throat tightens. His lungs go still. He turns slightly, pretending to study the bus schedule like it might offer instructions on how to un-ruin a night. How to un-bruise someone’s trust. He can’t look at Nico. Not now. Not when he’s imagining the way Nico’s mouth pulls tight at the corners, the way his eyes narrow like he’s trying not to feel too much.

“Maybe it was too much,” Nico adds. “Too fast.”

Another silence follows. Then a short laugh—small, bitter, brittle. The kind that doesn’t light a room, only proves the lights were off to begin with.

“…no, I’m not going to make a thing out of it,” Nico says. “I just… wanted it to be good.”

And it hits Will like a second blow. Because it’s not cruel. It’s not cold. It’s just honest. It’s just pain. Soft and naked and trying not to sound like either. He doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath until his chest aches with the effort of it. And even then, he doesn’t let it go. Because now he knows what it feels like to be spoken about in the past tense. To be the thing someone had hoped for. To be the moment that didn’t go the way they thought.

He’s never wanted to disappear so badly.

Not in middle school, when he threw up in bio class in front of the girl he was trying to impress. Not during finals week, sleep-deprived and trembling over a half-blank exam. Not even the night he left Texas, too proud to cry and too scared to admit he was hoping someone would stop him.

This is worse.

Because this is personal.

This is Nico—his Nico—on the phone with the person who knows him best, who’s seen him through fire and silence and sorrow, quietly admitting that Will Solace is a disappointment. A misfire. A mistake dressed in too much hope.

Another half-built bridge that didn’t hold.

Another boy who promised to stay—and didn’t.

A god, radiant and reaching, with hands too bright, too clumsy to hold anything fragile without cracking it open.

Will’s name shouldn’t sound like that. Not on Nico’s tongue. Not like regret. Like something that bruises on the way out.

He closes his eyes. Breath shallow. Shoulders rigid with restraint.

The streetlight above hums softly, gold and ghostly, bleeding warmth down the sidewalk like the memory of touch. It coats the pavement in soft shadows—too tender for the grief blooming in his chest.

And he thinks—
of Apollo, all light and brilliance, doomed from the start. The god who could see the future and still walked straight into his own heartbreak.

Of Hyacinthus, laughing under the sun, beautiful and mortal and bright. A boy made of spring and promise, felled mid-moment by a gesture meant in love.

A discus, flung carelessly. A game, turned tragedy. A god who forgot how powerful he was.

He thinks of blood staining the grass. Of Apollo’s hands shaking as he cradled what he couldn’t save. Of the flower that grew in the aftermath—petals soft and curling, spelling out grief in language only gods could read. A final apology. Fragile. Immortal.

Too little. Too late.

He thinks of myths told in past tense. Of love stories set in marble and smoke. Of divine intentions turned devastating. Of how tragedy always photographs well. How paintings immortalize the moment after the mistake.

How even now, somewhere behind him, Nico stands still in the night—another Hyacinthus. Still and waiting. Fractured under the weight of a sun he trusted. Will’s eyes burn, but he doesn’t open them. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe too deep. Because he’s afraid the next inhale might break him.

And somewhere, beneath all of it—in the silence that hums louder than any apology—he wonders if it’s already too late.

If the discus has already struck. If the flower has already begun to bloom.

Nico hangs up.

He doesn’t look at Will right away. Just lifts the cigarette to his lips again, slow and deliberate, like it’s a ritual he’s done a hundred times before and still hasn’t found comfort in. He inhales—sharp and quiet—and then exhales smoke like he’s trying to rid his lungs of something heavier than ash. The ember at the tip burns low and furious, a sullen little flame pulsing with all the things he hasn’t said.

The smoke curls around his face like a veil, like armor, like the last fragile shield between him and a world that’s already taken too much.

The smell hits Will a second later—bitter and metallic, sharp as regret. It clings to everything: to his clothes, his hair, the hollows between his ribs. Like sorrow given scent.

For a moment, they’re just two silhouettes beneath the hum of a streetlamp. A single cigarette burning between them, casting small red light across the wreckage.

Then Nico speaks.

Quiet. Even. Not unkind, but not soft either. His voice is ironed flat—creased with effort, but smoothed over all the same.

“I’ll get the car to take you home.”

It’s not an offer. Not really a question. Just a sentence placed gently on the table between them like a folded goodbye. Too restrained to be intimacy. Too precise to be anything but mercy.

Will’s heart stumbles in his chest, knocks hard against his ribs.

“No,” he says—too fast, too rough. The word lurches out of him like something half-choked, raw and clumsy. “I’ll walk.”

Nico’s eyebrows lift. Not dramatically—just enough to register. A flicker across his expression like a match trying to catch flame, then vanishing before Will can name it. Surprise, maybe. Hurt. The echo of something closing.

“You sure?” Nico asks.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t reach for him. His voice stays steady, but Will hears it—the subtle recalibration. The quiet retreat. Like he’s already folding the memory of Will away, wrapping it in cool linen, preparing for distance.

Will nods. “Yeah. It’s not far.”

It is. But the truth doesn’t matter anymore. Not in this moment.

Because he can’t do it—not again. Not the soft click of the car door, the hushed interior like a chapel, the driver silent and unseen. Not sitting beside Nico with the weight of silence pressing into every crevice, pretending he doesn’t notice the difference between their worlds.

Not the seats that smell like wealth. Not the card that was swiped without flinching. Not the taste of risotto he couldn’t afford. Not the reminder that Nico never has to check the price of wine.

He can’t sit beside him like it doesn’t cost him something. Like it isn’t carving him out from the inside.

Because it costs everything. Because it means everything.

Nico doesn’t argue. Just nods once, slow as dusk. And flicks the ash from his cigarette with a movement too practiced, too careful—like a soldier laying down arms. Not surrender, not exactly. Just weariness. Just the final motion of someone who’s already starting to let go.

But Will sees it. Even in the shadows.

The way Nico’s eyes drift just to the side of his face, refusing contact. The way his mouth is drawn too tightly, like he’s biting words back before they betray him.

Will opens his mouth.

Closes it again.

The apology withers before it can take shape—dies on his tongue, all heavy vowels and brittle silence. He wants to say something. Anything. To stitch one more word into the space between them and hope it might hold. But all that comes is air and ache.

And smoke.

And the sound of nothing.

“I’ll see you around,” he says instead.

The words scrape his throat on the way out, fraying at the edges—thin as thread, frailer than hope. It’s a terrible thing to say. Small. Hollow. The kind of thing you toss to a stranger in a convenience store parking lot, not to someone you once imagined tasting in moonlight. Not to someone you wanted to keep.

Nico doesn’t answer. Just nods. Once. Barely. Like a door closing without sound.

And that’s it.

Will turns before the shame can sink its claws in. Before it can drag him back by the collar and force something real out of him. His footsteps whisper against the pavement—too soft, too careful. His shadow stretches behind him in the lamplight, long and spindly and thin with regret, like something unraveling.

He doesn’t look back. He can’t.

Because if he does—if he turns even an inch—he’s afraid he’ll break. That he’ll see Nico looking at him, and all of it will come spilling out: the apology, the explanation, the truth. Too late. Too messy. Too much. He’s terrified he’ll meet Nico’s eyes and see everything unspoken still waiting there.

And worse: he’s terrified he won’t.

But gods, it goes against everything in him. Because Will Solace has always believed that love is looking back.

He did, once—at Elysium Books, when he led Nico through the stacks, all dust and quiet myth. He’d looked over his shoulder just to be sure Nico was still there. Just to be sure the dark hadn’t swallowed him. And Nico had smiled like it meant something. Like it mattered.

Because love is looking back. That’s the whole story, isn’t it?

Orpheus, leading Eurydice out of the underworld, knowing the rule, breaking it anyway. Turning around, just to be sure. Losing her all over again for the sin of loving too much. For wanting to see her face in the light.

Will doesn’t look back.

Because he’s not brave enough to be Orpheus. Not tonight.

Because right now, the shame weighs more than the love. The self-loathing screams louder than the longing. The embarrassment burns hotter than every sunlit moment that came before this one.

So he walks.

And still—he knows. Nico hasn’t moved.
Still beneath the streetlamp. Still smoke curling from his fingers like a sentence unfinished. Still wearing that silver ring, that black shirt, that look of someone who tried. Who wanted something soft and holy and human.

And Will?

Will disappears into the night like a coward dressed in daylight. Like a boy who was supposed to be golden, and still managed to ruin everything he touched. Like someone who swore he’d be different. Who said he wouldn’t leave.

And now he’s walking away.

Just like his father did.

Not with malice. Not with noise. But with the slow, hollow quiet of a man who never learned how to stay. No door slamming. No lightning strike. Just absence, like a tide pulling out to sea.

His back is rigid. His heart is folded in on itself. His hands—guilt-bruised and empty—don’t know how to reach anymore. Everything he loves keeps slipping through the cracks like sunlight, like water, like time.

Because maybe this is the legacy no one warned him about.

Not the music. Not the magic. Not the sunshine in his blood.

Of all the things his mother ever promised his father carried in his bones, maybe the only thing Will inherited was this:

The leaving.

The quiet exit. The ache of absence. The cruel talent of vanishing without a sound.

And gods— gods , isn’t that the bitterest irony of all?

To love like the sun.
And still leave like a ghost in the night.

Chapter 30: Turns Out Running Away Doesn’t Count as Cardio, Now I’m Trauma Dumping on the Sunrise Because My Dad Is a Metaphor and I’m Not Okay About It

Notes:

Hi everyone! First off, thank you SO much for all the comments on the last few chapters—I’ve been working my way through them slowly because I genuinely want to respond to each one with the thought and love they deserve. You’ve all shared such incredible, insightful reactions and theories, and it honestly means the world. I’m blown away every time I open my inbox.

Second, I’m sorry. Like genuinely. Deeply. For the emotional destruction I have wrought. I didn’t mean for this arc to become the Great Angst Block of 2025, but once I started writing about the wealth and class disparities between Will and Nico, I couldn’t ignore it. It’s been a theme woven throughout the fic already, and I knew if I didn’t dig into it on their first date, it would feel dishonest.

There’s been a real mix of responses—some of you are fully team Will and want to wrap him in a weighted blanket, some of you are ready to stage an intervention and tell him to Get It Together. Others have pointed out that Nico probably should’ve checked in more about the restaurant choice and budget, and you’re all completely right! The goal was to build a conflict that feels real, where you can understand where each of them is coming from, even when it hurts. And oof—it hurts.

I did seriously consider letting their first date be soft and happy. I really did. But if you want the payoff to feel earned, you have to put your characters through it first (I’m sorry again. I love them too).

As a peace offering: the next two chapters were originally one (I was ambitious), but the word count spiraled so hard I had to split them. These parts bring back some of the fun and chaos—as a reward for making it through the emotional trench warfare of rooftop brooding and voice memos that go unsent.

And finally, by popular request, here are some song recs I’ve been listening to while writing. Some of these are Will-coded, some Nico-coded, and some are both depending on which lyrics hit hardest. Not every lyric is a perfect fit, but the vibes are there:

Gold Rush – Taylor Swift
Champagne Problems – Taylor Swift
Cornelia Street – Taylor Swift
My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys – Taylor Swift
Midnight Rain – Taylor Swift
All I Wanted – Paramore
The Only Exception – Paramore
Decode – Paramore
Right Where You Left Me – Taylor Swift
Rose-Colored Boy – Paramore
Everlong – Foo Fighters
True Blue – Madonna
Like a Prayer – Madonna
Uptown Girl – Billy Joel
Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call – Bleachers
Two Ghosts – Harry Styles
Hits Different – Taylor Swift
The Great War – Taylor Swift
If This Was a Movie – Taylor Swift
Back to December – Taylor Swift

(can u tell i rlly like taylor swift??)

Will wakes to light bleeding through the blinds—thin and merciless, pale as regret. It spills across his sheets like milk left out too long, or secrets cracked open in the dark. Quietly damning. He blinks once, then again. His lashes stick together with sleep and salt, the ache behind his eyes pulsing like a bruise that doesn’t know when to quit. His body feels sodden with something more than exhaustion. Not grief, not exactly. Grief is sharp, cinematic, reserved for funerals and climaxes. This is heavier. Duller. The dense, aching shame that settles in your bones when you know you disappointed someone who didn’t deserve it.

His limbs are slow, sunken. Like he spent the night sleeping underwater, dragging all his guilt down with him. His mouth is dry. His skull hums—not with pain, but with pressure, the throb of a hangover made entirely of silence and self-loathing. No wine. Just everything he didn’t say.

He turns toward the wall, away from the light.

Shadows stretch long over the posters taped to the paint, edges curling from years of humidity and cheap adhesive. A faded anatomy chart with coffee stains blooming across the liver. A thrift store postcard from Vermont—moose in sunglasses, captioned I’m Horny for Nature. A glittery sticker Lou Ellen slapped over the light switch sophomore year: Shine Bright, Bitch . It’s peeling now, the sparkle worn thin. It used to make him laugh. This morning, it looks like mockery in rhinestones.

The apartment is still. That particular kind of stillness that means you’re alone—not peacefully, not luxuriously, but quietly. Hollow. Like something’s been scooped out of the space and hasn’t returned yet. And for a moment, Will lies there in it—motionless, throat tight, lungs too small for the air he’s trying to breathe.

He doesn’t know when Lou or Cecil got home—if they got home at all. Their beds were empty when he stumbled in, and no light glowed beneath their doors while he curled himself around the scarf like a lifeline.

Not even his own scarf. Nico’s.

Still laced with the faint scent of cologne and October wind. Still clinging to something delicate—something that smelled like maybe. Maybe safety. Maybe softness. Maybe a version of the night that hadn’t ended with Will choking on silence.

He cried into it until the shaking stopped. Until his breath evened out enough to pass for sleep.

Half of him is grateful for the emptiness. Grateful he doesn’t have to explain last night in words. Doesn’t have to say I panicked in the middle of what was meant to be the best date of my life . Doesn’t want to admit that he ruined risotto and quiet candlelight and the rare, tentative curve of Nico’s smile by flinching away from something that looked too much like being loved.

But the other half—the quieter, needier half—is aching for a safe place to collapse. For Lou Ellen’s gospel truths delivered between sips of neon Gatorade. For Cecil’s chaotic warmth and trail of crumbs and casual touch. For someone to shove a stale croissant into his hands and say, You don’t have to talk. Just chew.

For someone to make it okay, even if only for a minute.

His chest feels like an empty drawer. His ribs too loose, his skin too tight—nothing about him fits quite right this morning, like his body forgot how to hold itself together overnight. He exhales—shaky, uneven. Like maybe if he breathes hard enough, he can push the night out of his lungs. But it clings. Smoke without fire. Guilt without closure.

Outside, the sun climbs higher. Indifferent. The city stirs, stretching into motion, uncaring. And Will?

Will just sits there, staring at the wall, Nico’s scarf still tangled in his hands like an apology he doesn’t know how to send. A relic. A prayer. A wound that hasn’t scabbed over. The day hasn’t even started, and already he feels like he’s limping through it. Already, he’s in survival mode. Already, he’s losing. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until stars spark behind his lids—brief, bright, meaningless. The kind of pain that doesn’t give answers, only distractions.

Eventually, he moves. Barely. He pads out of his room in the same clothes he cried himself to sleep in, scarf clutched like a lifeline. He forces himself through the motions of a shower, lets the water pound against the back of his neck like it might wash away the ache. When he emerges, it’s in sweats that feel too soft, too clean. The fleece lining is warm, but not his warmth. Not Nico’s arms. Not the heat of someone who chose you, even when you couldn’t choose yourself.

He tosses his clothes from the night before into the laundry bin without ceremony. The navy shirt—carefully chosen, ironed flat, something Lou Ellen helped him pick out in a fit of optimism—goes in last. He buries it beneath dirty socks like it might suffocate under the weight. Like maybe if he can’t see it, it won’t hurt.

When he makes his way to the living room, the air is thick with the scent of cheap body spray and shame—something vaguely citrusy and deeply offensive clinging to the walls like the memory of bad decisions. Glitter sparkles across the hardwood like crime scene residue. A half-eaten burrito sits on the windowsill, slowly hardening into a monument of the night no one has the energy to remember properly.

The apartment is too quiet. That particular kind of hush that only ever follows two things: natural disasters and hangovers.

But it’s the cowboy memorabilia that really stops him.

It’s… everywhere.

A ten-gallon hat rests jauntily atop the lamp like it’s won a duel for dominance. A plastic sheriff’s badge is duct-taped to the fridge, slightly askew but clearly placed with conviction. A feather boa has been braided— braided —into a neon-pink lasso and draped lovingly across the couch cushions like an offering to the gods of poor taste.

And on the bathroom door, in what might be the pièce de résistance: a novelty “Wanted” poster. Grainy photo, flash-burned and chaotic, featuring Cecil mid-stumble with pupils the size of dinner plates. His alleged crimes are listed as Boot Theft & Line Dancing Without a Permit .

Will stares.

Blinks once.

Yeah. That definitely wasn’t there last night.

Which means: they’re home. Somewhere. Probably entombed under piles of Goodwill denim and glitter, nursing hangovers and the kind of moral injury that only comes from discovering a cowboy hat in your bed the next morning. They are, presumably, still alive, even if it’s only technically. He considers calling out. Something simple, like Are you alive? or Why is there a lasso on the couch? But even that feels too loud, too real. Like pressing on a bruise that’s still blooming under the surface.

So he steps over a single boot—still housing a glittery sock, abandoned mid-rebellion—and heads for the kitchen on autopilot. He doesn’t bother to check if the coffee machine is still functioning after whatever apocalypse occurred in here. If it isn’t, he might just lie down on the floor and join the burrito in fossilization.

At least the burrito doesn’t have feelings.

The coffee maker groans to life, sputtering steam like it deeply resents being awake. Will gets it. Sympathy in the form of machinery. He pulls a chipped mug from the cabinet— World’s Okayest Pre-Med Student —and waits while the machine wheezes out something that smells like survival and tastes, hopefully, like absolution. He unwraps a protein bar, stares at it like it might have answers, then sets it down untouched.

His stomach twists—not with hunger, but with something heavier. That low, familiar churn of dread and guilt, layered thick over last night’s silence. It coils in his gut like bad news. Like regret left out in the cold. He exhales, long and quiet, shoulders sagging as he leans against the counter. The coffee is warm between his hands, but it doesn’t reach his chest, doesn’t touch the place where the wound is.

Because he doesn’t know how Nico’s doing.

And that—not the glitter on the floor, not the cowboy hat slouched over the lamp, not the leftover perfume of chaos still lingering in the air—that’s what cuts the deepest.

He hasn’t texted. Can’t bring himself to.

Every message ends in digital limbo, ghosted by his own doubt. Hey sits beside I’m sorry, sits beside I didn’t know how to stay —all of them blinking at him like they’re daring him to hit send. His thumb hovers over the button like it might trigger an avalanche. Because what do you say to the boy you walked away from?

The boy who tried—and gods, he tried—to meet you in the middle, soft and brave and a little bit shy. The boy who laid something vulnerable on the table between them and said ‘ Here, take it,’ and Will didn’t even have the courage to reach back, he just let the silence swallow it whole.

Will presses his thumbs into the bridge of his nose until stars bloom behind his eyelids—brief and blinding and useless. His breath catches in his throat, shallow and sharp, and he thinks—again, for what must be the hundredth time—of Nico’s face beneath the streetlamp. The guilt rolls over him again, steady and brutal—waves against ribs, pressure against lungs, cresting higher each time he thinks maybe, just maybe, he can breathe.

He should’ve stayed. Gods, he knows that. He should’ve said something—anything. I’m overwhelmed. I’m embarrassed. This is where I work. I want to be enough for you and I don’t know how.

But he hadn’t.

Because Will wasn’t raised to accept help. He was raised to endure. To scrape by. To fold napkins with military precision and fake a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s not used to luxury, to being on the receiving end of things. He’s used to serving. To surviving. And sitting across from Nico last night—so composed, so kind, so quietly beautiful in candlelight—it hadn’t felt like a date. It felt like trespassing. Like Will had snuck into someone else’s life and didn’t know which fork to use. And when that panic took hold? When the weight of not belonging pressed down so hard he could barely sit upright?

He chose the thing he’s always chosen when he doesn’t know what else to do.

He ran.

It’s what he’s always done. What he was taught to do without ever being taught. Not in words, but in the silences between them—between the neighbors who crossed the street and themselves when he walked by, between the teachers who looked too long at his last name and not long enough at him, between the Sunday sermons that dripped with heat and sin and warnings that sounded like prophecy.

Will ran the second he got the chance. Left Austin like it might set fire to his heels if he lingered. Left behind the long, blistering summers and the dry air that always felt like it had judgment baked into it. Left the dusty sidewalks and the stares and the way everyone seemed to know everything about you—even the parts you hadn’t figured out for yourself. 

It started early. Before he knew what to call it, before he had the words for shame or softness or why the silence in his aunt’s kitchen made his skin itch. Bisexual wasn’t a word people used in his neighborhood unless it came with a punchline or a prayer. His classmates whispered like he couldn’t hear them—too pretty, too soft, too much like the father who vanished before he was born. Raised under ceilings that sagged with heat and expectation, Will learned quickly that being loved and being accepted weren’t the same thing. That softness was a flaw, that boys didn’t cry, that kindness had to come second to control. He learned to fold himself small. Not because it made him safer—but because it made him tolerable.

His uncle once looked him dead in the eyes and said, “ Don’t let people get the wrong idea about you.”

Will hadn’t known what idea that was. But the shame bloomed anyway, rooted deep, flowered fast. By ten, he had learned the choreography: straighten your spine. Bite your tongue. Smile, but not too much. Sit still. Speak less. Be useful. Be invisible. Be better.

But never be yourself.

Because the truth was, he was never going to be what they wanted. He was the boy who cried when the barn cat went missing, who sang harmonies under his breath without realizing, who liked stars more than sports and books more than boys with fists for hands, and boys more than girls full stop. He was softness wrapped in skin, and in Texas— in that family —that was the wrong kind of dangerous.

His mother was the only one in his family who never made him feel like a mistake.She loved him fiercely, recklessly, with the kind of wildfire devotion that scared everyone else. Naomi Solace didn’t beg for space. She carved it out. She wore heartbreak like a badge and raised her son with country songs, coffee kisses, and promises she never once broke.

But Will wasn’t like her. Not really.

She was sunburnt rebellion and unapologetic laugh lines. She’d been onstage more times than Will could count—six strings in her hands, tragedy in her lyrics, war in her grin. She made noise. She belonged to noise. Will was dusk-colored silence. He was polite apologies and perfect attendance. He folded laundry when he was nervous and memorized stars because they didn’t talk back. He was careful in ways his mother never needed to be. Quiet in ways she never could be.

He wasn’t a spark. He wasn’t a song.

He was the gap between verses. The silence after the show.

And yet, people talked about Naomi Solace in voices dipped in honey and venom, they said she was too wild, too loud, too proud of the boy she raised alone. Sang about heartbreak on Saturday nights and showed up to church Sunday morning in a sundress and last night’s eyeliner, dragging her son behind her like a ghost she refused to apologize for. The judgment in Austin didn’t shout—it whispered. It smiled too tightly. It passed down judgment like heirlooms: laced into casserole dishes and church bulletins and family photos that Will was always just off-center in. No one had to say it aloud. They just let it hang in the air: your mother should’ve known better. Should’ve married him. Should’ve hidden the proof.

Will was the proof , his father was the problem, his mother was the one who was punished. 

He thinks of the  cryptic stories Naomi Solace sometimes let slip after a glass too much of honey bourbon—how his father was a summer afternoon in a storm cellar town, how his smile could break hearts or heal them, how his voice could make a bar fall silent.

“He was sunlight,” she’d say, eyes misted but unfocused. “The kind you don’t look at too long or you’ll go blind.”

Will never got a name. Never got answers. Just metaphors, handed down like heirlooms he never asked for. Just fragments. Hints.

He was brilliant . He was dazzling . He is gone .

Will used to imagine him like a comet—blazing through the sky and leaving wreckage in his wake. People like that don’t stay. They don’t know how. And maybe that’s what scares him. Maybe that’s the part that lives in him too. Because gods, he’s tired of running. Tired of flinching when people try to love him. But the only blueprint he ever had was disappearance. Radiance followed by absence. Gold and fire and then nothing at all.

College in New York was supposed to be the great escape. A blank page. A new name, a new city, a new Will Solace who didn’t cry in gym class or pretend to only like girls just enough to be left alone. Here, he could be someone else—no one would know about the trailer park years, about the Christmases paid for in tips and pity, about the peanut butter dinners and the way his mother played to half-empty rooms like they were full of stars.

He worked for everything. Every cent, every grade, every scraped-together tuition form and under-the-table job. He didn’t want handouts. Didn’t want pity. He just wanted to build something real. Something that was his.

But last night—with Nico across the table and wealth woven into everything he touched, from the cut of his collar to the wine he didn’t think twice about ordering—Will felt that old panic crawl back into his throat. The city was supposed to save him. But the truth is, it only gave him more mirrors. More angles to see all the ways he still doesn’t measure up, all the ways he doesn’t deserve the kind of love Nico might have been ready to offer him. 

Somewhere deep in his chest, somewhere tangled in the roots of his upbringing, Will still believes he has to earn love, that to be worthy, he has to give something back. That if someone offers him gentleness, he must match it with something equal—or refuse it altogether. He still thinks love is a test, weight you hold perfectly still until your arms give out, and by then it’s too late; still thinks if someone sees too much, they’ll flinch, they’ll flee.

Which is the worst part. Because he’s always told himself that love is staying, that showing up, holding on, not leaving when it gets hard—that’s what makes it real. He believed it, preached it, clung to it like a compass, a truth stitched into the lining of his heart.

Because that’s the kind of love his mom gave him. Even when they were broke. Even when she was on the road, chasing stages that barely paid, playing sets in smoky bars with names like Dusty’s and The Broken Note , she always called. Always came home. Always left notes tucked under his pillow or scrawled on napkins in his lunchbox:

Be good. I love you more than the moon. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re too soft. That’s where the light gets in.

And when she couldn’t be there—when the tour van was halfway to Arizona and the tips from her last diner shift couldn’t stretch far enough to cover a sitter—Lee Fletcher stepped in. The boy from four houses down. Tall, bright-eyed, sharp as lightning and twice as fast. Too clever for their town. Too kind to ever act like it.

Lee, who felt more like a brother than any blood relation ever had, and more like a father than the promise of sunbeams and melody ever could be. Will clung to him like gravity. Not because Lee asked for it—but because he never let go.

He loved NASA documentaries and Star Wars marathons, and he let Will stay up long past bedtime to watch meteor showers from the roof, narrating constellations with the reverence of someone introducing old friends. Orion, Cassiopeia, Andromeda—each a myth, a map, a piece of something sacred. Each one stitched into Will’s memory with Lee’s voice beside it.

Lee, who would spread his high school biology homework across the kitchen table and never once shooed away the eight-year-old peering over his shoulder. Who answered every question—What’s a mitochondria? Why does blood look red under the skin? Can you see atoms with a microscope?—with sugar packets and spilled juice, with metaphors about galaxies and cells, with patience that felt like love.

And when Will was nine and crying behind the neighbor’s shed—his shirt ripped, his pride torn worse—after the older boys had knocked him down and spat every insult they could think of (too soft, too weird, no dad, no wonder), it was Lee who found him. Lee who pulled those boys off with nothing but fists and fury, even though he was outnumbered and barely fifteen himself.

Lee, who knelt in the dirt beside Will afterward, wiped the blood from his lip with the hem of his own shirt, and said, “ You don’t ever have to change for them, you hear me? They’re not brave enough to be soft. And not having a father doesn’t make you any less worth loving.”

And gods, he meant it. Every word. Not in the performative way adults sometimes say things, but like a promise sealed in starlight. Like a vow made under a sky full of names.

Lee who stayed. Who always stayed. Who chose him, time and time again. Who made staying look easy, even when life wasn’t. That’s what Will thought love was. What he’s always hoped to find—someone who would stay the way they did. Someone who wouldn’t need to be convinced to choose him, who would just… choose him.

And now? Now he’s ruined it.

Because when it counted, he didn’t stay. When the boy he wanted—wants—offered him something quiet and real and terrifying, Will ran like someone with nothing left to believe in, like a hypocrite, like a ghost in his own story.

Now the apartment is too quiet. His coffee tastes like ash. The silence is unbearable—thick and echoing, like it’s trying to make space for the apology he never gave.

He grabs a pen without thinking, tugging open the drawer near the microwave—the one that sticks halfway and squeals like it’s protesting the burden of memory. It’s their junk drawer, unofficially. The Bermuda Triangle of the apartment. The place where things go to die, or wait to be useful again.

Inside, chaos.

A cracked measuring tape curled like a sleeping snake. A lone AA battery with a warning label half-peeled off. Three different kinds of glue, none of them usable. A birthday card from Lou Ellen’s cousin signed You go, Glen Coco! in glitter pen. One sock with a hole in the heel and a bottle cap taped to it (why? no one knows). A MetroCard with exactly 37 cents on it. A spare charger held together with electrical tape and prayer.

And in the corner, beneath a stack of expired coupons for a bodega that shut down six months ago—an old takeout menu from Lotus Garden of Olympus , their favorite Greek-Chinese fusion place. (Lou Ellen swears the sesame spanakopita changed her life.)

Will flips it over. Grabs the nearest pen—chewed, blue, missing its cap—and scribbles in uneven, crooked lines:

gone to the roof — will

He tugs Nico’s scarf tighter around his neck—too soft, too warm, too kind. The kind of thing you only buy if you’ve never worried about heat being a luxury. And then he climbs the stairs to the roof, mug in hand. Each step echoes in the stairwell like a heartbeat out of rhythm.

Outside, the morning air is sharp enough to draw blood. A late October chill, not yet winter but already mean about it—cutting through Will’s sweatshirt like it’s searching for soft places to hurt. The city stretches out below him, still half-asleep, caught in that in-between hush where the night hasn’t quite let go and the day hasn’t fully arrived.

The sun has started its slow crawl over Harlem, casting syrupy gold across the buildings like it’s trying to make the world forgive itself for waking up. Rooftops blaze in warm light—burnished brick and rusted railings turned suddenly radiant. Smoke curls soft and lazy from chimneys two blocks over, touched pink at the edges like a blessing.

It should be beautiful. It is beautiful. But it feels like a lie.

Because beneath the glow, the neighborhood still wears its bones on the outside. Cracked sidewalks littered with bottle caps and soggy takeout menus. A busted streetlamp flickering like a dying star. A row of corner stores with metal grates halfway down and hand-written signs that say Back in 10 even though everyone knows no one’s coming back. Laundry lines strung like prayer flags between buildings. A graffiti mural peeling at the corners—Hazel would call it urban decay, Lou Ellen calls it texture.

Will just calls it home.

And yet, this morning, it feels impossibly far from wherever Nico comes from. All he can see is the chasm between them—how Nico walks through life with money stitched into the seams of his shirt, with generational safety like a birthright, with no idea what it’s like to lie awake counting shifts and swallowing pride. Will was raised on late notices and lukewarm casseroles, on judgment served with sweet tea and secondhand shoes. He was raised thinking love was a thing you earned by shrinking.

He lowers himself onto the ledge like someone bracing for impact. The brick is cold beneath him, biting through his sweats, grounding. He pulls the scarf tighter around his jaw, the fabric soft and far too clean for this rooftop, and presses his coffee mug to his chest like it might shield him from something. He watches the skyline shift. The sun climbs higher, slow and reverent, gilding the city like a cathedral. Fire escapes gleam. Pigeons wheel through the air like confetti. The river in the distance catches the light and throws it back like a dare.

It all looks like something out of a movie—honey-lit rooftops, golden haze curling over the skyline, the city stretching into morning like it’s never known grief. And Will feels like a deleted scene. Left on the cutting room floor. Too quiet, too raw, too out of place to make the final cut.

Because how can the world look so holy when he feels like a ghost? How can the city glitter like that when every inch of him feels cracked and aching? How dare the sun rise like this is any other morning, like he didn’t walk away from someone he wanted to stay for?

He closes his eyes. But there’s no peace in the quiet. Only memory, sharp-edged and merciless.

Only Nico.

And the heavy, gnawing ache of not knowing if he’s just ruined the one good thing he didn’t think he’d ever get to have. The sound of Nico’s voice on the phone—low, cracking at the edges like ice underfoot. The flicker of confusion in his eyes when Will said I’ll walk. The painting, looming like a prophecy. Will grits his teeth. His guilt tastes metallic, like he’s bitten down on a forkful of grief.

The sky is shifting—washes of molten color bleeding into the rooftops, gilding fire escapes and pigeons and water towers like the gods forgot which city they were trying to bless. It should be a comfort, a clean start. Instead, it feels like mockery. The city stretches below him, restless and radiant, like it didn’t hold its breath last night while he fell apart in silence. Like it doesn’t know he’s still unraveling—too much and not enough, all at once, stitched together by shame and sleep deprivation and one long thread of quiet regret.

He should text Nico.

Say something. Anything.

Something real. Something that bleeds.

But the words won’t come. They sit heavy in his chest, unmoving, unsayable. His fingers hover over the screen, frozen. Stupid. Shaking. And he doesn’t know what scares him more— That Nico will answer. Or that he won’t. The phone in his lap might as well be an anchor. Screen smudged. Thumbs aching. A graveyard of half-finished drafts. Each message vanishes like breath on glass. Brief. Fragile. Gone before it can matter.

His thumbs hover, motionless, trapped in the no-man’s-land between courage and collapse. Every word feels like a risk. Every silence, a sentence. The quiet presses in—thick and tender, like hands trying to soothe him and strangle him all at once. It clings to his skin, seeps into his lungs. Forgiving, maybe. But unbearable all the same.

He pulls the scarf tighter. Not because he’s cold—he isn’t. The air is brisk, yes, but it’s not the wind that’s got him shivering. It’s memory . It’s the feel of something left behind. The fabric still holds warmth, or he imagines it does. A ghost of touch. A breath of cologne. A single thread of something kind. He clings to it like it might remember Nico’s hands better than he does—like it might still carry proof that last night wasn’t just ruin and retreat. 

That somewhere in all of it, there was softness. That somewhere in all of it, there is still something worth saving. He wants a do-over. A magic fix. A sentence clean enough to rewind time, un-bruise the moment, make Nico laugh again. 

But instead he sits.

Up here, above a world that doesn’t know he’s broken. Watching Harlem wake beneath the sharp bite of late October. Watching the light creep across cracked pavement and graffiti and brick walls still sweating last night’s heat. Watching the sky paint itself gold, like hope could be something simple.

And he thinks: Maybe I’m not strong enough to be loved the way I want.

Maybe he’s only strong enough to chase it. To ruin it. To leave.

And when the silence starts to eat through him like rust—slow, inevitable, corrosive—Will does the only reckless thing left within reach.

He opens Instagram.

The algorithm, ever ruthless, smells heartbreak like blood in the water. Within seconds, he’s drowning in curated chaos: nine accounts, dozens of stories, carousels stitched together like crime scenes. The Seven. Lou Ellen. Cecil. All of them posting with the enthusiasm of people who will never fear tomorrow’s consequences.

@hexandthecity
A carousel of increasingly cursed images:

• Piper mid-mechanical bull, hair flying, eyes glowing.
• Leo lying face-down on a hay bale like he’s been shot in an 1800s duel.
  Caption: “RIP cowboy slay.”
• Jason in a ten-gallon hat, jaw clenched, eyes dead. He’s holding a corndog and a very real knife.
  Caption: “ten seconds from a headline.”

 

@cecil.camera.roll

• A shaky vertical story of Jason fireman-carrying Leo out of the bar while Piper yells something incomprehensible in the background.
  Caption: “cowboy down. he challenged the moon to a duel. the moon won.”
• A photo of Leo in the ER, grinning deliriously in a glitter-pink cast and cowboy hat, holding a burrito in one hand and giving a peace sign with the other. Lou Ellen is feeding him tortilla chips like he’s a wounded soldier.
  Caption: “he broke his wrist. we’re so proud.”

 

@annarchitect
A single, terrifyingly elegant mirror selfie:

• Annabeth: flawless. Glossy lips. Blue denim jacket and perfectly fitted orange t-shirt. Not a single strand of hair out of place.
• Percy: kissing her cheek, half out of frame, wearing a cowboy hat and no shirt.
• Piper: blurry in the background, triumphantly stuffing toilet paper into her purse.
  Caption: “yeehaw. never again.”

 

@franklybuff

• Two blurry selfies with Hazel: one with a half-eaten churro, one where their heads are cut off.
  Caption: “vibes uncertain but powerful.”
• A hauntingly crisp photo of a possum on the sidewalk, eyes glowing.
  Caption: “he was at the party spiritually.”
• A picture of Frank holding Leo like a bridal bouquet outside the ER.
  Caption: “my roman burden 🫡”

 

@levesque.lode

• A six-second video of Piper standing on the DJ booth, shrieking, “This is for Annabeth’s thesis!” before launching herself into Leo’s arms. Leo does not catch her.
  Caption: “5.8/10, decent arc, poor landing.”
• A carousel of blurry saloon mirror selfies: Hazel’s gold eyeliner smudged, her necklace glowing in flash.
• Slide 3: Hazel staring solemnly into a tray of fries.
  Caption: “found god in a basket of curly fries.”
• A moody photo of a cracked geode on a sticky bar counter.
  Caption: “even the rocks are tired.”

 

@piperafterdark

• A black-and-white shot of a spilled drink on the dusty saloon floor.
  Caption: “tell the saloon I loved her.”
• A short clip of her applying lip gloss in a bathroom stall while a fight breaks out outside.
  Caption: “if she dies she dies 💅”
• A story poll titled “Should I ride the bull again or text my ex?”
  Options: “YEEHAW” / “YEE-NAW”

 

@valdeztechtonic
A carousel of personal catastrophe, lovingly curated like a museum exhibit on hubris:

• Slide 1: An x-ray of his wrist, bones looking like a dropped game of Jenga.
  Caption: “now accepting bionic enhancement recs.”
• Slide 2: A blurry photo of Leo mid-air, mid-being thrown from the mechanical bull—arms flailing, hat in orbit, pure chaos in motion.
  Caption: “photos taken moments before disaster.”
• Slide 3: His hospital bracelet: Leo Valdez, M, Mechanically Doomed.
• Slide 4: A mirror selfie in a paper gown and cowboy boots, flipping off the camera with his uninjured hand.
  Caption: “don’t worry. the cast is glitter pink 💖🤠”
• Slide 5: A video clip of him trying to leave the hospital and getting stuck in the revolving door.
  Caption: “i am once again being punished for my crimes (vibes).”

Story Highlights:

• A boomerang of Lou Ellen duct-taping rhinestones to his cast.
• A poll asking, “should i sue the bull or marry it?” (60% "marry")
• A close-up of hospital pudding.
  Caption: “cowboy cuisine.”

 

@percy.waves
Pure, distilled chaos. A story highlight titled “rootin’ n tootin’” includes:

• A slow-mo video of Annabeth throwing a barstool offscreen.
  Caption: “she’s beauty. she’s grace (she will punch you in the face).”
• A grainy shot of Jason in a fake mustache doing finger guns with grim intensity.
• A screenshot of a mid-party Yelp review left by Piper:
  “No functioning doors. Five stars.”
• A final selfie of Percy and Frank in plastic sheriff badges, grinning like lunatics.
  Caption: “the law.”

Will stares at it all, thumbing through the digital wreckage like an archaeologist documenting the fall of Rome. He scrolls with the numb precision of someone trying not to think. Not to feel. Just to disappear into the noise.

And yet—even in the noise, the difference is there. The contrast. The divide.

Because these are their finstas . The private accounts. The ones Will still sometimes can’t believe he has access to—like being handed the key to a velvet-curtained backroom he didn’t know existed. Their public Instagrams are museum-perfect: artful candids and golden-hour lighting, matching aesthetics and expensive cocktails balanced on marble counters. Even Leo—chaos incarnate—manages to keep his main grid weirdly chic, full of avant-garde inventions and perfectly filtered messes. Polished. Controlled. The kind of curated imperfection that only comes with money and time.

But here, on their private accounts, they’re... real. Messy. Deranged. Shotgunning beers in cowboy boots, duct-taping glitter to Leo’s cast, stealing toilet paper from themed bars. Leo tries to lasso a cop car “ for science. ” Frank wins a mechanical bull contest entirely by accident. Piper gets into a heated debate with the DJ about cowboy hat semiotics and somehow scores a free round of drinks. Jason line dances with terrifying precision. Hazel trades someone’s actual boots for a geode.

It’s hilarious. It’s human. It’s also a little heartbreaking.

Because the cowboy thing? The boots, the bull, the whole yeehaw spectacle—they wouldn’t post it on their mains. Not really. Not when their digital lives are all minimalism and elegance and New York sophistication. The rodeo stays private. Tucked into the corners of their chaos, where it can’t be mistaken for anything earnest.

Because they think it’s funny. Because for them, it’s a costume. Not something they lived. Not something they ran from.

Will scrolls faster. Like maybe if he moves quickly enough, he won’t have to feel the sting of recognition—the echo of dust and sweat and long Texas summers, of secondhand boots and dollar store belt buckles and nights where the cowboy hat wasn’t a joke, it was just... life. Leo’s from Texas too, but it’s not the same Texas—theirs is heat and industry, oil rigs and invention, Hephaestus Industries stamped like a birthright across the skyline. His kind of fire builds empires. Will’s just burns.

He’s not mad at them. Not really. They’re not cruel, and he’s just extra sensitive this morning. They just don’t get it. And maybe they never will.

But against his better judgment he keeps scrolling,  somewhere between the fourth hospital photo and the second shot of glittery nachos, he realizes what’s missing.

Jason disappears halfway through the night, judging from the timestamps right around the time Will had walked away.

And Nico?

Nico’s not in a single post. Not a single glimpse. No blurry background cameos. No drink in hand. No glare aimed at the DJ booth. Will stares at the screen, chest tightening. Because it’s not just that he left Nico on a sidewalk under a too-poetic sky. It’s that after that, Jason must have left to find him, and he didn’t bring him back to the noise, or the chaos, or the glitter. Not to the people who love him. He took him home. 

And Will—wrapped in his scarf, surrounded by fading sunlight and empty coffee and too many unspoken words—feels it like a faultline beneath his ribs.

Chapter 31: Nico Won’t Call Me Back So I Put On Gold Eyeliner, Become a God, and Spiral in HD

They emerge like cryptids at sunrise.

The roof door creaks open with all the melodrama of a horror movie, and then—Lou Ellen and Cecil, staggering into the morning light like cursed creatures returned from the underworld. Lou Ellen is swaddled in what might once have been a Halloween-themed fleece blanket but now looks like it’s survived a small war. Cecil wears sunglasses the size of his existential regret and a cowboy hat that definitely didn’t belong to him yesterday.

They both recoil as sunlight hits them, hissing like vampires mid-smite.

“Gods,” Lou Ellen rasps, pulling her blanket tighter around her shoulders like a shield. “The sun is so aggressive.”

“We’re being punished,” Cecil agrees, cracking open a blue Gatorade with the reverence of someone anointing themselves. Half the cap falls into his lap. He doesn’t flinch. “This is divine retribution.”

They collapse beside Will in a chorus of exhausted groans and chip-bag rustles. Lou Ellen shakes glitter out of her hair like it’s sand from a battlefield. Cecil stares out across the skyline with narrowed eyes, as if the buildings personally betrayed him.

No one speaks at first.

Just the sound of wind, labored breathing, and the collective throb of hangover and heartbreak.

The sight almost makes Will laugh.

Almost.

Instead, he just stares into the depths of his coffee, Nico’s scarf still looped around his neck like penance, and lets the silence settle around them like dust.

He doesn’t want to be the one to break it. Doesn’t want to test his voice and realize it’s still raw from everything he never said.

Lou Ellen finally peers at him over the rim of her sunglasses. Her voice is soft, cautious. “You look like shit.”

Will hums without looking up. “So do you.”

Cecil, solemn as a priest, offers him a bag of chips. “We brought offerings.”

Will takes one. Doesn’t eat it. Just holds it in his palm, crumbs catching the sunlight, while Harlem stretches out below them and the weight in his chest doesn’t move at all.

Lou Ellen groans and collapses onto the concrete, one arm flung dramatically across her eyes like a silent film star mourning the death of glamour. “Okay,” she croaks—voice shredded from screaming over last night’s music—“you go first. Date debrief. Full rundown. Start with the greeting, end with the kiss. Don’t leave out a single swoon-worthy detail.”

Will hesitates. His fingers curl tighter around his coffee cup. It’s lukewarm now, weighty in his hands, but the scarf around his neck still holds its warmth—like memory. Like guilt.

“I…” He swallows, gaze drifting toward the skyline, where the city is still soft with morning. “Can you—can you go first? Tell me about your night.”

Cecil, mid-sip of Gatorade, nods like a judge accepting testimony. “Only fair. Our chaos was of the people, for the people.”

Lou Ellen grins—wide, unrepentant, her teeth still faintly stained purple from whatever violently sugared cocktail she consumed last night. “Where to begin.”

And then: the descent into madness.

Apparently the night kicked off with themed shots at a bar called Yeehaw & Order (“ We didn’t name it,” Lou Ellen says quickly, “we barely survived it” ), followed by Cecil and Leo challenging a mechanical bull to “trial by combat,” which ended with Leo getting launched headfirst into a jukebox.

“He yelled ‘for Sparta’ ,” Cecil clarifies, brushing chip dust from his hoodie. “Completely unprompted.”

Next came the ER. Percy livestreamed the waiting room like a war correspondent. Hazel somehow charmed the triage nurse into skipping them ahead in the queue. Leo insisted someone autograph the X-ray. There’s photo evidence: Leo flashing a peace sign with one wrist in a brand new cast, the other wrapped protectively around a burrito.

“Piper spoon-fed him salsa,” Lou Ellen adds. “Said it was a spiritual experience.”

“Annabeth tried to flirt her way into stealing the cast saw,” Cecil says. “We had to leave. Quickly.”

“Frank carried Leo out like a wounded soldier,” Lou finishes. “Then tripped over a traffic cone and almost became one himself.”

Will exhales a laugh—quiet, almost real.

“Gods,” he murmurs. “Sounds like a saga.”

“It was,” Lou Ellen says proudly. “We lived. We laughed. We yee’d our last haw.”

Then Cecil stretches with a groan, his sunglasses slipping down his nose. “Oh—right. Jason left early. Totally boring. Didn’t even stick around for Leo’s dramatic reading of the urgent care brochure.”

Will’s head jerks slightly. “He left?”

“Yeah.” Lou shrugs, still wrapped in her blanket like a hungover oracle. “Said he needed air, or something?Maybe he just hates country music.”

Cecil snorts. “Coward.”

Will exhales—a breath too slow to be casual, too careful to be steady.

They don’t know.

Or maybe they do and they’re choosing not to say it. Maybe Jason told them everything, and they’ve decided to play dumb out of love, out of mercy. Or maybe the Seven have closed ranks. Locked the gates. Held the story between them like something sacred.

Will doesn’t know which would be worse.

But he’s grateful. Grateful for the silence. Grateful for the reprieve. Grateful for the illusion of normalcy—for the chance to sit in the sun and pretend, just for a moment, that the night didn’t fold him in half and leave him there, unfinished.

Lou Ellen props herself up on one elbow, glitter catching in the curve of her cheekbone. “Alright,” she says, softer now. “Your turn, Solace. Spill.”

Will presses his fingers to the rim of his mug. The coffee’s long since gone cold. The ceramic is just a vessel now—holding nothing, containing everything.

Nico’s scarf is still warm against his skin.

He opens his mouth.

And has no idea where to begin.

Will doesn’t mean to cry.

It starts low—somewhere behind his ribs, where guilt lives. A tremor he’s been ignoring since the check hit the table, since he stood on a Manhattan sidewalk and said I’ll see you around like it wasn’t the cruelest thing he could have done. Since he turned his back.

He blinks once. Then again. And then the tears are there—hot and silent, slipping down his cheeks like they’ve been waiting for hours.

“Will,” Lou Ellen says softly. No teasing now. No glitter in her voice, just concern.

Cecil sits up straighter, his blanket rustling around him like startled wings. “Hey. Hey, what—?”

“I’m fine,” Will rasps, voice frayed from sleep and silence and crying into a scarf that didn’t belong to him. He presses the heel of his palm to one eye, like pressure might plug the breach.

“I’m—gods—I’m fine. ”

“You’re crying,” Lou says, not as an accusation, but like a hand reaching through fog. She doesn’t touch him—just rests her fingers against the edge of the crate he’s perched on. A quiet offering. A promise: I’m here.

“I’m—” Will tries. Fails. His breath stutters. His shoulders curl in like paper under flame. “It was just—it was bad, okay?”

Cecil glances at Lou, then peels off his sunglasses. “Bad like awkward? Bad like… you spilled something, or—?”

“Bad like I left,” Will says, and the word lands hard between them. “I left him. I just—I couldn’t sit there one more second pretending it was okay. Pretending I was okay.”

He swallows. “The restaurant—it’s where I work. That’s the part no one told him. That it wasn’t just fancy, it was mine. My job. My name on the shift roster. My coworkers watching from the bar while I sat there like a guest in someone else’s life.”

His voice cracks, but he keeps going. “I knew I couldn’t afford anything on that menu. I knew the bread alone cost more than my groceries. And then Nico—he paid. Didn’t even blink. And I just—” He laughs, sharp and breathless. “It felt like being gutted and saved at the same time. That bill’s gonna cover the rest of my week. And I still walked out.”

He looks down, Nico’s scarf tangled in his fingers. “He was kind. So fucking kind. And I was a coward. I left before he could see how small I felt.”

There’s a beat of silence after Will speaks. A sharp, breathless pause that settles in his chest like glass dust.

Then Lou Ellen exhales, low and steady, and shifts closer on the roof, her glitter-smudged blanket pooling around her legs. “Gods, Will,” she murmurs. “That’s not being a coward…that’s—it’s okay to be scared.”

Cecil doesn’t say anything right away. Just offers Will the rest of his Gatorade, no words, no pressure—just a quiet gesture like he’s handing over a lifeline. Will takes it with a shaking hand.

“I get it,” Lou says, after a moment. “That feeling. Like you have to make yourself small to fit in. Like everyone else was handed an instruction manual you missed.” She leans her head back against the concrete. “I used to steal dance shoes from the lost and found at school. Couldn’t afford the real ones. Just brushed them off and pretended like they were mine. I was so scared someone would notice—say something. Like it would shatter the illusion and I’d have to admit I didn’t belong.”

Cecil snorts, but it’s soft. Not mocking—just tired. “I used to tell people my dad was just ‘on a trip’ when I was little. Like some eternal business man of mystery. Truth is, he just bailed. One day he was there. The next, just a post-it on the fridge and a rent bill he didn’t pay.” He shrugs. “I spent years pretending that didn’t mess me up.”

Will stares down at the scarf in his lap, fingers threading through the wool. “I didn’t want him to see that part of me. The kid who still counts coins before buying cereal. The server who can’t afford the food he’s carrying to someone else’s table.”

“They don’t get it,” Lou says quietly. “The Seven. Not really. They’re not cruel, just… built different. Like they grew up in palaces disguised as camp cabins.”

“Yeah,” Cecil says. “It’s like—they’re our friends now, right? And they’re great. They are. But sometimes I forget they’re basically demigod socialites. I mean, Percy’s got a literal family estate. Jason has a trust fund and a jawline that looks like it’s been federally approved.”

Will huffs a weak laugh, the sound brittle but real.

“And they never mean to rub it in,” Lou continues, “but then Piper will mention some film producer she grew up with, or Annabeth says something about renovating her lake house, and it just—hits. Like oh. Right. We’re not from the same world. Not even close.”

“I think the moment for me was when Leo asked if I wanted to go skiing in Aspen over winter break,” Cecil adds dryly. “I didn’t know to explain that I’ll be working overtime just to afford winter.”

They lapse into silence, but it’s a warm one now. Shared. Held.

Will doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Just lets himself exist between them, in the cushion of their presence, in the comfort of being understood. He presses the coffee mug to his lips, lets the bitterness anchor him.

“I just wanted to be enough,” he says eventually, the words barely above a whisper.

“You are,” Lou Ellen says, without hesitation.

“Yeah,” Cecil echoes. “You are, Solace. Even when you don’t feel it. Especially then.” He pauses, then adds, quieter but firmer, “And maybe it’s not too late to fix this. Nico and the Seven… they don’t get it. Not really. But that’s not all on them. We’ve never explained it—what it’s like growing up without a safety net, without a silver spoon, without knowing if the power’s going to stay on through the month.”

He nudges Will’s shoulder, gently. “Nico might have money in his blood, but he’s not cruel. He’s not unreachable. You just have to let him in. Show him your side of the story. Let him see that you didn’t leave to hurt him—you left because you were hurting, too. Because you didn’t know how to stay.”

Cecil leans back, voice softer now. “It doesn’t have to end like this.”

Will doesn’t cry. Not quite. But something inside him eases, just a little.

Like maybe, even in the fallout, he’s not alone in the wreckage.

***

The week that follows is slow-motion torture.

At work, the roasting starts the moment Will walks in—and Mark and Sherman are leading the charge like it’s open mic night at Will’s expense.

“Damn, Solace,” Mark crows on Monday, tossing a wine key into the air. “Didn’t know we were a venue for tragic romance now.”

Sherman grins, lining up napkins at the bar like they’re troops in formation. “Or that the boy prince of the undead was into waitstaff. You got a Yelp review yet? Stars deducted for emotional damage?”

“Do you think he even knew?” Mark adds. “Like—was it a surprise? Were you like, ta-da, this is my turf, enjoy your overpriced scallops while I die inside?”

Will tries to laugh. It scrapes out wrong, brittle at the edges.

“Hey,” Austin says, quieter than usual as he drops off a stack of menus. “Ease up, would you?”

But even Austin can’t resist a little grin, a low murmur in Will’s direction as they pass on the floor. “Didn’t know we were seating royalty now. You gonna ask Nico to tip next time, or just kiss his shoes?”

This time, the laugh catches in Will’s throat entirely. He doesn’t try again.

Because it’s not just teasing—it’s knowledge. Every single one of them knew it was him. Of course they did. The second Nico di Angelo walked through the door, the entire staff practically vibrated with recognition. Everyone knew the Seven, even if Nico had only been in the restaurant once before and didn’t stay long enough for his drink order to arrive. Their reputation walked in ahead of them.

And then they saw the way Will shut down. The way he left. The way he didn’t come in for his next shift and looked haunted when he finally did.

They all put two and two together, and no one’s let it go since.

Even so, it’s not cruelty—not really. It’s amusement. Morbid curiosity. The kind of fascinated schadenfreude people reserve for when one of their own accidentally brushes against a higher stratosphere of living.

And still, every time someone laughs, Will’s gut knots tighter.

Because he has to keep pretending. Pretending it wasn’t real. That it didn’t matter. That Nico hadn’t looked at him across candlelight like he was something worth choosing—and Will hadn’t flinched like it was a trick.

On Thursday, Rachel corners him during break, half a cigarette dangling from her fingers, her braid falling loose down one shoulder.

“You look like hell,” she says—not unkindly.

“Thanks.”

She exhales smoke out the side of her mouth. “Want some actual advice?”

Will doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t walk away either.

Rachel stubs out the cigarette. “They don’t mean it. The guys. Mark. Sherman. They’re just jealous they’ll never get invited into a world like that—even as a plus-one.”

Will shrugs. “I wasn’t invited in. I just… snuck in the back door. And then panicked and bolted.”

Rachel gives him a look. One of those sharp, soft ones that cuts anyway.

“You think I don’t know what that feels like?” she says. “I grew up with people like them. Brunches at the club. Summer in the Hamptons. Horse names instead of pet names. You think I work here because I have to?”

“I don’t know,” Will says quietly.

“I don’t. Not really. I could go back. Smile pretty. Marry well. Paint on the weekends like a hobby instead of a need. But I wanted a life that was mine.” She glances out the alley door, then back at him. “Still, I know how that world works. How it sees people like us. Even when they like us.”

Will swallows. “What do I do?”

Rachel shrugs, but it’s the kind of shrug that says everything. “Tell the truth. If he’s worth it, he’ll understand. And if he doesn’t? At least you won’t be the one pretending anymore.”

She walks away before he can thank her.

And Will stands there, surrounded by the sound of prep and laughter and cutlery, wondering if it’s already too late.

The worst part?

He finally worked up the nerve to text Nico. Not once. Not even just three times, really.

The first one was short— Hey, can we talk? —typed and deleted and retyped with shaking hands. It sat unsent for ten minutes before he finally hit send.

The second came hours later, after the silence started to feel like a verdict: I’m sorry. I owe you an explanation. Please call me when you can.

By the third, he was unraveling. It was longer. Rambling. Half apology, half panic, all bleeding at the edges. He typed out a version of the truth—how he didn’t know how to sit across from someone so kind and not feel like a fraud—but deleted most of it before hitting send. That’s not a conversation for texts. That’s not a conversation for anything less than face-to-face, where tone and expression and silence can say all the things words fall short of.

Then he called.

And called again.

Left a voicemail the second time, his voice hoarse with unslept nights: “ Nico, it’s me. I—just call me back. Please. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just—I didn’t know what to do.”

The call logs on his phone are a quiet confession. The texts, a graveyard. No read receipts. No typing bubble. Just silence. Cold and final.

Not even rejection—just absence.

And that’s worse. Because it means Nico made a choice. Not to yell. Not to ask for answers. Just to vanish again, and this time, Will doesn’t know if he’s coming back.

Hazel finds him in the quad between classes on Monday, her curls pulled back in a high ponytail, cheeks flushed from the cold, gold chain glittering at her throat. She looks happy. Or at least lighter than usual, the tension that normally tightens her posture melted into something easier. Something almost content.

“He’s in L.A,” she says, like it’s good news.

Will blinks. “What?”

“Nico,” she clarifies. “He went home. Just for a little while. Our dad and Persephone are on some kind of extended cruise-slash-spiritual-retreat, and Nico said it was time to sort out a few things while they were gone.”

She says it with cautious hope, like it’s a step toward healing. Like it’s a gift.

Will’s stomach twists.

Because he knows the truth. Or at least enough of it. Nico didn’t go home for closure. Nico went home because Will made this city feel unbearable. Because Will handed him silence where softness should’ve been, walked out with pride where vulnerability should’ve lived.

And gods, Nico never said he hated L.A.—not outright.

But Will could hear it in his voice. In the way he talked about the city like it was a mausoleum dressed up in sunlight. In the way he flinched when his father’s name came up. In the way the word home always sounded like a foreign language on his tongue. He left Nico standing in the middle of something fragile—and now Nico’s across the country again, a ghost in a city he hates.

Even Jason doesn’t seem to know the truth. And that might be the only thing keeping Will upright.

He corners Will after class on Wednesday, blue eyes storm-dark, jaw tight enough to crack. There’s no preamble—no friendly lead-in, no gentle build.

“What the hell happened?” he demands, voice low but sharp enough to cut. “He won’t talk to me. He won’t talk to anyone. And don’t tell me you don’t know why, Solace, because I know you do.”

Will flinches. He doesn’t mean to—but the guilt is already so close to the surface that it leaks out in reflex. “Jason,” he starts, voice cracking. “I—”

“I left the bar early that night, after I called him. He told me enough for me to know that things go well, but not the full story, and there has to be one,” Jason barrels on, like he’s been waiting days to get this out. “I found him drinking alone. Nico. Drinking. Alone. At some dive on 113th, looking like he’d been dragged through hell and back and didn’t care if it happened again. You want to explain that?”

Will’s breath catches. “I didn’t—he didn’t—” He swallows. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

Jason’s shoulders stay tense, every inch of him a soldier mid-battle. “Then what did you mean to do?” he snaps. “Because whatever it was, it messed him up, and not in a small way.”

That undoes something in Will. His voice is thin when he answers, barely more than a whisper. “I know.”

Jason goes still.

Will lifts his gaze, and whatever Jason sees in his face must register—because some of the fury slips out of him like a slow exhale. Will looks wrecked. Hollowed out and fraying at the edges.

“I’m trying,” Will says, almost pleading now. “I’ve tried calling. Texting. I don’t even know if he’s seen any of it. I want to explain, but I have to talk to him first. It has to be me. Not you. Not Hazel. Me.”

Jason doesn’t speak for a long beat.

And then, finally, his jaw unclenches just enough to say, “He wouldn’t tell me what happened. Just kept saying he needed space. Kept shutting down. I thought he was pissed at me for trying to ask.”

“No,” Will says, quiet. “He’s not. He’s just…”

“Gone,” Jason finishes. His voice is flat. Tired. “I don’t know when he’s coming back.”

That lands like a bruise. Because Will had been clinging—desperately, childishly—to the hope that Nico’s silence was temporary. That he just needed time.

Now it feels like time is running out.

Jason stares at him a second longer, and Will wonders if he’s about to tell him off again. But instead, he just shakes his head. “Fix it,” he says. Not a threat. Not a request. A mission. A quest. 

Will nods once, barely able to breathe.

Jason walks away. And Will just stands there, stunned in the quiet, wondering if he’s already too late.

The rest of the Seven act like nothing happened. Percy and Annabeth are still deeply in love and unreasonably smug about it—holding hands under tables, finishing each other’s sentences, making everyone else feel like third wheels in group settings whether or not they’re actually present. Percy wears his "Camp Olympus Alumni" hoodie like it’s a personality trait. Annabeth has started calling Will “Doctor Solace” in passing, which should be intimidating but somehow just makes him feel like a lab rat in a very elegant experiment.

Piper is chaos incarnate. She keeps sending unhinged memes in the group chat—half of them niche literary references, the other half inside jokes that no one but her and Leo understand. Her latest is a blurry photo of a cowboy boot in a fountain with the caption: “Love is dead. Yeehaw.” Will isn’t even sure if it’s from the party or some postmodern metaphor. He doesn’t ask.

Leo FaceTimes Lou Ellen from biomechanics lab to show off his still-healing wrist. “The glitter caught fire,” he announces proudly. “That’s not a metaphor. There was actual combustion. Also, the goggles melted.”

Hazel, somehow unbothered by the noise, has locked herself into a project involving crushed velvet, ethically-sourced bones, and “light necromancy, but make it art.” She says it’s for her advanced sculpture class. No one questions this.

Frank remains confused but supportive. He helps Hazel lug home a duffel bag of moss one afternoon and simply says, “This is fine.” He says that a lot, actually.

They’re all... normal. Warm. Chaotic. Kind.

Which means they don’t know.

Will’s spiral—the version where Nico told them everything in the group chat, where they all traded concerned glances at brunch and took turns comforting him while forwarding Will’s messages to each other like screenshots of failure—that was just anxiety. Fiction. A very vivid emotional fanfiction written by his own brain.

Because when they ask how the date went—and they do, constantly—it’s with waggling eyebrows and smirks and exaggerated interest.

“So,” Piper says, elbowing him in the ribs during lunch one day. “Did he kiss you under the moonlight or what?”

Will chokes slightly on his sandwich. “Uh. It was… nice.”

Hazel beams. “ I knew it. ”

Leo practically does a victory lap around the table. “You’re welcome, by the way. I’ve been dropping hints for weeks . Subtlety is an art form.”

Annabeth, sipping her overpriced iced coffee like the goddess of urban matchmaking, nods approvingly. “We chose well. You two have complementary trauma. That’s rare.”

Will tries to smile. “Thanks?”

Jason, notably silent, just watches him over the rim of his coffee cup. Will doesn’t meet his gaze.

The others, meanwhile, fall over themselves congratulating each other for their expert meddling. They pat themselves on the back for the timing, the nudging, the “totally casual” mentions of Will’s favorite books and Nico’s alleged fondness for brooding boys in thrifted sweaters.

“We hyped it up just the right amount!” Percy says proudly, like they’d orchestrated the whole thing with a spreadsheet and divine intervention.

And Will sits there, nodding, letting them believe it.

Letting them believe it worked.

Because what’s he supposed to say? Actually, I panicked, ghosted your cryptic gay bestie, and now he’s fled the state like a Victorian widow returning to her ancestral estate.

Instead, he keeps it vague. Cryptic. Polite.

They all take it as a good sign.

Apparently, being tight-lipped makes him seem respectful. Gentlemanly. The kind of guy who doesn’t kiss and tell, which is apparently enough to earn high praise from this group of disaster socialites.

Will just wants to bang his head against the nearest table. Because if they hadn’t meddled—if they hadn’t hyped the restaurant so much, if they hadn’t cornered Nico one too many times with “just go, trust us” —none of this would’ve happened. None of it.

He wouldn’t have been seated at a table in his own workplace. Wouldn’t have watched his coworkers whisper behind menus. Wouldn’t have spiraled so hard over the price of risotto that he forgot how to speak. Wouldn’t have walked out on someone who mattered.

But he doesn’t tell them any of that.

He just sips his coffee and lets them believe this is still a love story.

And through it all, the campus buzzes with anticipation. Silena Beauregard’s Halloween party is coming, and it’s already the stuff of legend. She’s made flyers. There’s a spreadsheet. Rumor has it her balcony is being transformed into a haunted garden with dry ice fog and actual ivy-draped statues. Someone swore they saw a delivery of pumpkins arrive by town car.

Will can’t walk across campus without overhearing it. “You going to Silena’s?” “What are you wearing?” “Connor Stoll said he’s going as Sexy Frankenstein, I can’t.”

The Seven are, of course, planning to show up in full mythological chaos. Not that they’d ever call it that. It’s all just a coincidence, they’d claim. Aesthetic choices. Inside jokes. Nothing to do with the gods their lives seem to echo in uncanny, uncomfortable ways.

Annabeth has been crafting her costume like it’s an architectural thesis—some kind of Athena-inspired war goddess getup that involves metallic leather, precision braiding, and an arm cuff that could probably kill a man. It’s tactical and terrifying. She’s already threatened to take out a frat boy with it if he hits on her while she’s trying to drink.

Percy’s apparently going as a very drenched sailor, which feels on-brand in a way that makes Will want to roll his eyes. Something about seaweed, rope, and dramatic dripping. Leo swears he caught him testing water-resistant eyeliner.

Leo, of course, has promised to make his entire costume out of scrap metal, duct tape, and hubris. So far, it involves flaming suspenders, a repurposed welding mask, and a shoulder cannon made from an espresso machine. No one is surprised.

Hazel’s is pure drama: a romantic mashup of Renaissance courtier and haunted museum exhibit, complete with gold leaf accents, antique lace, and ethically-sourced bones, and glittering gemstones. She looks like she wandered out of a gilded tomb and decided to crash the party.

Piper’s teased hers on her private Instagram already—dramatic makeup, torn chiffon, and what appears to be a dagger made of roses. The caption was just one word: "Ruin."

Jason’s costume remains a closely guarded secret, though he’s been spotted Googling Roman armor and muttering about historical accuracy. Will suspects something gladiatorial is coming.

Frank’s working on something involving bear claws and tactical gear, which somehow fits perfectly. No one has the heart to ask for clarification. He just nods solemnly when asked, like it all makes sense in his head.

Watching them plan, post, and bicker in the group chat, Will can’t help but wonder if Nico will show up. Before the date—before the disaster—he’d said he wasn’t sure. Not a no, but definitely not a yes. Nico had looked almost curious when the party came up at dinner, like he wanted to go but didn’t know how to say it. Like the idea of attending still felt like stepping off a ledge.

But that was before. Before Will ran, before the silence stretched and solidified. Now Nico hasn’t even come back to the city, hasn’t returned a single text or call. Why would he show up to a Halloween party thrown by someone he barely knows, surrounded by the same friends who accidentally sent him to a restaurant that made Will implode?

Will wants to hope. But hope feels like a costume too. Something you wear because you want to believe it’s real. And Nico? Nico hasn’t said a word.

Meanwhile, in the trio’s apartment, things have devolved into glitter and glue sticks. The kitchen table is a war zone of fabric scraps and thread, rhinestones scattered like battlefield debris, hot glue strings clinging to everything like spiderwebs of theatrical ambition. Lou Ellen has declared Halloween their “ holy theatre holiday ” and seized control of the apartment with the force of divine intervention.

It started as a joke. Her theatre troupe is mounting a dramatic retelling of The Iliad , and she’s been deep in Greek myth lately—annotating ancient texts in gel pen and making everyone refer to her as “Hecate, Mother of Witches.” One night over boxed wine and aggressively salted popcorn, she forced Will and Cecil to take a “Which Greek God Are You?” quiz she found on a suspicious-looking website called “Divine Vibes.”

Lou Ellen got Hecate, obviously. Shadowy magic, chaotic bisexuality, unrelenting power in dramatic eyeliner. “She’s literally me,” she said, and meant it.

Cecil got Hermes, which made sense in a way that was almost too on-the-nose: a schemer with a golden grin and a backpack full of legally dubious IDs. He immediately dug a pair of thrifted golden winged sneakers out of the closet and started bedazzling a fanny pack. “I’m going to tape secret messages inside it,” he announced, grinning. “And illegal snacks. You know. Like the gods intended.”

Will, tragically, got Apollo.

He hadn’t even finished the quiz before Lou Ellen was sketching. “It’s fate,” she declared, flourishing her pencil like a wand. “You’re tragic and golden and annoying about it. Own it.”

“Tragic and golden,” Cecil repeated, nodding solemnly. “I’m putting that on your tombstone.”

Lou Ellen’s vision for the costume was painfully detailed: gold laurel crown, sun-patterned embroidery, a chiton-inspired shirt that glowed under stage lights (thanks to glow-in-the-dark thread), and a cape lined in soft fleece and glittering stars—because “you’re ruled by the sun but always looking at the stars, it’s like, deeply poetic.”

Will didn’t have the heart to argue.

He hasn’t told them about the painting at the restaurant. About how it stopped him mid-breath, sunlit brushstrokes and oil-slick brightness, a figure in gold standing alone in a sea of darkness. He hasn’t told them how it made his stomach twist. How it reminded him, too perfectly, of the version of Apollo that people forget about—the god of healing who can’t fix himself, the poet whose words never save him in time.

Lou Ellen, in her chaos, was too close to the truth without even knowing it.

“You’re a healer,” she said, pinning the last pieces of fabric to the dress form. “But also a disaster. You love too hard and talk too much and carry grief like it’s part of your wardrobe. Classic Apollo.”

Will didn’t say anything. Just sat there, half-wrapped in a golden tunic, glitter on his cheekbone, feeling like a joke carved out of something sacred.

Lou Ellen is in her element. She sews like a woman possessed, quoting myth and making TikToks of her progress (“Watch me turn my roommate into the god of heartbreak and photogenic trauma”). She’s even hand-beading miniature suns onto the hem of Will’s cloak.

“Because you burn everything you touch,” she says, cheerfully, and doesn’t notice the way Will flinches.

Cecil, for his part, leans fully into the chaos of Hermes. He wears his costume every night in the apartment just to “break it in.” He’s added miniature scrolls tucked into his fanny pack (“prophecies,” he claims) and has started referring to their delivery pizza as “sacred offerings.”

Will can’t help but smile sometimes, even when his chest aches. Their chaos is a kind of shelter. And Halloween, it turns out, is a good excuse to be a little unhinged. To dress your wounds in glitter and call it costume. To be something mythic, even if only for a night.

And if his version of Apollo is a little too quiet, a little too sad-eyed, if his laurel crown feels more like a burden than a prize—well. That’s part of the myth too.

Will knows he’s going to have to face it all eventually—the silence, the waiting, the wondering if Nico’s ever going to speak to him again. But for now, he just tries to survive each day without cracking open completely.

It’s a delicate balance.

One missed call away from collapse.

One costume party away from disaster.

Chapter 32: This Party Has Skeleton Hands, Glitter Smoke, and A Vibe So Suspicious I’m Convinced I’m The Sacrifice

Notes:

This chapter is my massive thank you to all of you who’ve stuck with me through the Great Angst Block™. I know the last few updates were like getting emotionally slapped with a velvet glove dipped in lemon juice, and I really appreciate everyone who read, commented, theorized, cried, screamed, or gently threatened me.

This chapter isn't the resolution—not yet—but it's the beginning of it. The dam has cracked. The secrets are nearly out. The balcony has been emotionally obliterated.

And while Will is still spiraling (as he does), I wanted to give you the chaos of the Seven, the disaster trio in full unhinged mode, and the cursed beauty of a Halloween party hosted by Silena Beauregard as a reward for enduring all the heartbreak. This is the breath before the storm clears. This is glitter over bruises. This is everyone screaming the lyrics to Kiss Me Thru The Phone while Will internally combusts.

Thank you for being here, truly. You're the best and weirdest little cult I could ask for. <3

The hallway is already vibrating with bass when the trio reaches Silena Beauregard’s apartment, the beat thrumming like a second heartbeat through the floorboards. Will’s jacket clings too tightly over the satin tunic Lou Ellen stitched for him, sweat prickling at the back of his neck. His eyeliner—delicately gold-lined and Apollo-themed—has smudged from the subway humidity. The laurel crown tilts, half-wilted, a golden halo gone slightly crooked.

The moment the door swings open, they are swallowed whole by curated madness.

Silena has—of course—outdone herself.

The apartment looks like Midsommar and Hereditary threw a joint birthday party in a spirit realm, sponsored by Pinterest and a high-functioning sense of doom. Cobwebs stretch across ceiling beams in pale pink glitter, catching the candlelight like spider silk dipped in blush. Candles burn low in antique holders, their wax dripping like blood down tarnished brass. On the coffee table, a dismembered mannequin hand offers vodka Jell-O shots with a chilling sort of grace.

The kitchen is fogged with dry ice vapor, tumbling over the counter like breath from a crypt. From the corner, a vintage record player loops a slowed-down version of ABBA’s Voulez-Vous , the lyrics warped into something ghostly and unhinged. It feels like disco in purgatory.

Gauze and black velvet hang from the walls, draping doorways like funeral shrouds. The balcony has been transformed into a haunted garden: overgrown ivy knotted with plastic bones, jack-o’-lanterns carved with faces too lifelike to be comfortable, mouths open in eternal screams. A motion-sensor skeleton in a flower crown lunges at passersby with bone-cracking shrieks, its tiara askew like a dethroned prom queen.

Will stands frozen on the threshold for half a second too long, the fog catching in his throat, the light bending strangely around him like it knows he doesn’t quite belong.

Lou Ellen, glittering and unbothered, surges forward with a cackle of glee. “Finally. A party with taste.”

She’s dressed as Hecate—black velvet cloak, silver chains, theatrical eyeliner sharp enough to curse with. Her dress billows with every step, covered in constellations that glow under UV light. She looks like a goth seer in a high school production of Hadestown , and she is thriving.

Cecil has gone full Hermes: winged sneakers, gold-tinted sunglasses, and a stolen USPS mailbag slung across his chest like bandolier. He’s already palming miniature candy bars from the hallway bowl with the casual finesse of a career thief.

And Will—poor Will—is Apollo, or at least the most depressed version of him imaginable. Lou Ellen forced him into gold-detailed robes that shimmer under the party lights, and she braided glitter into his hair, proclaiming it “solar justice.” He’s carrying a (very real, very heavy) lyre that Cecil hot-glued rhinestones to during their pregame, and the golden cuffs at his wrists jingle like shackles.

He is radiant. He is exhausted. He is quietly falling apart inside a glittering toga.

His fingers twitch toward his phone for the hundredth time that night. No notifications. No calls. Not even a pity text from Nico saying Happy Halloween, sorry I ghosted you, even if you deserved it.

“Smile, sunshine,” Lou Ellen whispers, elbowing him gently. “You’re the god of light. At least try to pretend you aren’t rotting inside.”

Will gives her a smile that’s all teeth and tragedy.

The music gets louder. Somewhere in the kitchen, someone screams—possibly in joy, possibly in agony. A half-inflated unicorn floats through the crowd, wearing a witch hat and trailing confetti.

Will keeps breathing.

The party swirls around him like a kaleidoscope spun too fast. Strobe lights flicker off cheap plastic bones and overpriced wine. People move in a blur of color and sweat and synthetic wigs. His feet ache. His smile aches more.

He doesn’t know if Nico will be here tonight. At dinner, during the date, Nico had said maybe —not yes , not no , just a breathless pause and a shrug that already felt like departure.

Now, a week and a heartbreak later, Will doubts Nico will even come back to the city—let alone show up at a party thrown by people who don't know what happened, attended by people who still think their meddling worked, who still think the silence between them is just the sound of something beginning.

Will stares into the pulsing dark and tries not to think about the alternative—that it was an ending.

That Nico di Angelo, quiet and precise and unknowably beautiful, took him to a restaurant and opened a door. And Will, terrified and ashamed and furious at himself, had slammed it shut. And now he's here, dressed like a sun god, pretending not to feel the cold.

Thankfully, Silena has provided enough booze to sink a Roman fleet.

And Lou Ellen and Cecil flank him like bodyguards of fun. “Tonight is for dancing,” Lou declares, linking arms with him and Cecil. “And cocktails. And chaos. You can cry after. ”

The first people they run into are Silena and Clarisse—iconic, intimidating, and somehow glowing in opposite frequencies of gorgeous.

Clarisse is all brass and blade and don't-touch-me energy. Her armor gleams like she polished it with pure spite, the bronze breastplate catching flashes of candlelight as she moves through the crowd like a soldier disguised as a storm. Her spear—yes, an actual spear—is strapped to her hip in a manner that suggests someone will regret asking if it’s real. Her hair is pulled back into a brutal braid, tight and sleek and efficient, not a strand out of place. She looks like she’s been summoned from an ancient battlefield and given a Red Bull.

Silena, by contrast, is spun sugar and divine chaos. She floats beside Clarisse in layers of rose-gold satin, the gown cinched perfectly at the waist, skirts trailing like spilled champagne. Her tiara sparkles beneath the apartment’s pulsing lights, and glitter dusts her collarbones like stardust kissed her goodnight. She’s wearing heart-shaped earrings and a sly little smile that could launch a thousand ships—or at least disarm a dozen enemies. She looks like the final boss of a fairy tale, if the boss offered you a drink and told you your aura was off.

Together, they’re devastating.

A walking contradiction that shouldn’t work and yet does—so well it’s unfair.

“Knights and princesses, huh?” Cecil grins, already two drinks deep and entirely too confident. “Very butch of you, Clarisse.”

Clarisse doesn’t miss a beat. “I wanted to be the princess.”

Silena giggles, warm and soft and borderline dangerous. She twirls once, skirts catching the air like a curtain rising on Act II. “She did. I won.”

Will half-expects roses to bloom in her wake.

Clarisse rolls her eyes like she’s used to losing gracefully and doesn’t mind the view. “She threatened to cry. You ever seen Silena cry? It’s like kicking a baby deer. You feel like a war criminal.”

“Oh, hush,” Silena says, batting her lashes. “You just didn’t want to wear heels.”

“She said I didn’t have the calves for them.”

“I was helping you.”

“You were judging me.”

“I was lovingly correcting your false confidence.”

“Same thing!”

Their bickering is affectionate, flirtatious, a little bit dangerous in the way that only comes from being in love and entirely aware of your combined power. Silena adjusts the strap of Clarisse’s armor with featherlight fingers. Clarisse lets her. Clarisse tugs a loose curl away from Silena’s lip gloss. Silena preens.

Will watches them for a beat too long, chest aching a little in that too-full, too-empty kind of way. They’re everything he wants to believe in—hard and soft, blood and glitter, fight and feeling. And gods, they make it look so easy.

From the kitchen, a crash, a shriek, and an unholy amount of laughter erupts—followed immediately by the arrival of the Stoll brothers, who burst into the hallway like a prank made flesh.

Travis is dressed as a frat boy vampire, which is to say: he’s wearing a backwards cap, fake fangs, a blood-stained toga, and exactly zero shame. “Bro,” he announces, raising a Solo cup like it’s a holy relic, “I vant to chug your beer.”

“No different from real life,” Katie Gardner mutters from behind him, with the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who has survived every group project with both brothers and lived to complain about it.

Connor, not to be outdone, is in full scarecrow mode—plaid shirt unbuttoned halfway, jeans slashed for effect, straw sticking out of places straw absolutely should not be. There’s a stick of hay tangled in his earring and at least three rogue sequins glued to his neck. Red paint—hopefully paint—smears down his arms in chaotic streaks like he lost a knife fight with a bottle of ketchup.

They are glittering. Glowing. Gleeful.

“I told you not to wrestle in the bathtub,” Katie hisses, yanking hay out of Connor’s collar like it personally offends her.

“I think she loves us,” Connor stage-whispers to Will, wide-eyed and entirely unrepentant.

“Unfortunately,” Katie snaps. “And against my will. And someday, when I finally do snap, it’s gonna be one of you. And I won’t feel bad.”

Katie herself is a chaotic triumph of garden witch energy—her costume clearly made in a flurry of last-minute spite and too much glitter glue. Green shimmer streaks down her arms. There are flowers Sharpie-tattooed across her collarbones, half of them already smudged like they’ve been through a war. Her skirt is layered with vines (real? fake? sentient?) and her sandals leave tiny trails of soil wherever she walks. She radiates rage and bioluminescence.

“I will bury you alive,” she threatens again, adjusting a flower crown that keeps slipping. “And you will fertilize my goddamn garden.”

“Spooky szn,” Travis sings under his breath. Connor joins in. Will considers grabbing a drink just so he can pour it directly into his eyes.

And then Charles Beckendorf appears—like an actual adult summoned by the power of Too Much.

He’s wearing a mechanic’s jumpsuit, the sleeves rolled to the elbows to reveal soot-smeared forearms. There’s a flaming plastic wrench slung casually over one shoulder and a pair of LED goggles pushed back on his head that blink slowly like a warning sign. His cheeks are streaked with fake ash that only seems to make him look hotter, which feels rude, honestly. The room temperature rises at least two degrees.

“Hey,” he rumbles, voice low and pleasant, like someone who absolutely knows how to fix your car and ruin your life. He offers them a tray of drinks shaped like a bubbling cauldron. “Welcome to hell.”

Lou Ellen takes something blue and hissing. Cecil grabs two shots and starts explaining how one is “for past Cecil, who got us here, and one is for future Cecil, who’s gonna need it. ”

Will sips something neon and bitter and fluorescently green—probably absinthe, probably a health hazard—and tries, truly tries, to forget that Nico di Angelo is halfway across the country and still not calling.

He doesn’t succeed.

But for one sparkling, cursed, gloriously over-the-top minute, he’s distracted. Surrounded by noise and magic and half-feral demigods in costume, bathed in strobelight and bad decisions, Will feels something ease in his chest. Not peace. Not joy. But the shadow of relief, the ghost of something like belonging. A breath caught between heartbeats. The pain is still there. But for the moment, it has company.

“So,” Clarisse says, swirling her drink like she’s about to cross-examine someone in court, “how exactly did you three end up in the Inner Circle of The Campus Cryptids?”

The cauldron punch sloshes in her cup like it might combust. Her spear sheath swings at her side with threatening rhythm, gleaming every time she turns beneath the flicker of the LED jack-o’-lanterns. Her armor clinks softly when she cocks her hip.

“We’ve been calling you the Demi-Goddamn Elite,” Travis adds. “You’re like the mystery members of the cult. Who let you in?”

Cecil blinks. “We passed the vibe check?”

Lou Ellen throws a glittered arm over Will’s shoulder, smudging gold eyeshadow on his collar. “I bribed Leo with sour gummy worms,” she deadpans, then turns to Will. “You did that thing where you looked all golden and tortured. People love a Greek tragedy.”

The words slide under Will’s skin like the edge of a dull blade. He offers a weak smile that tastes like citrus and irony.

Charles raises an eyebrow, clearly amused. He’s holding the bubbling drink tray like it’s a science experiment halfway through meltdown. “But seriously. You guys are, like, friends now? With them?”

The music from the next room thrums beneath the floorboards, bass low and menacing, like the pulse of a monster with too many teeth. Laughter ricochets off the stained-glass lampshade above the table, casting fractured color across the peeling wallpaper.

“They’re always together now,” Connor adds, not quite whispering. “Like, all eleven of them. Have you noticed that? Like, they appear in a line. It’s terrifying.”

He gestures grandly with a hay-stuffed hand, straw trailing behind him like breadcrumbs to chaos. His scarecrow hat is cocked too far left and is somehow covered in glitter and a bandaid.

Katie nods, sipping her drink like it’s tea brewed in vengeance. “Someone said they have matching bank accounts. Like, one for ‘fancy dinner fund .’”

There’s a wilted flower tucked behind her ear and a smear of green glitter on her cheekbone that makes her look vaguely radioactive.

“They’re rich?” Cecil says innocently. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Will nearly chokes on his cursed neon cocktail. The liquid fizzes in his throat like it wants to start a fight.

Around them, the party roars to life—cobwebs glitter under strobe lights, the skeleton on the balcony shrieks at some poor soul, and someone in the corner is reenacting a séance with a Ouija board made from tarot cards and Silena’s Sephora receipt.

Will holds his drink tighter, the plastic cup warping slightly under his grip.

“Anyway,” Silena cuts in, tossing her hair over one glittery shoulder, “they’re all here somewhere. I saw Hazel earlier—she’s haunting the balcony, I think—and I definitely heard Leo and Percy trying to hotwire my blender. They’re scattered. Like a very attractive storm.”

A record scratches in the distance. Someone screams—not in fear, but in what sounds suspiciously like karaoke.

Clarisse groans. “I told you to bolt that thing down.”

“They don’t need bolts. They have opinions and wine coolers,” Silena sighs, dreamy and exasperated in equal measure.

A crash echoes from the kitchen. Someone shouts, “THE RITUAL IS WORKING,” followed by Leo’s unmistakable cackle and the whir of machinery that absolutely should not be running without supervision.

“I swear to God, if they turn my NutriBullet into a smoke machine,” Silena mutters, already pulling a rhinestone-draped flask from the folds of her gown.

“Too late,” says Katie leaning behind a curtain of fake cobwebs to catch a glimpse of the kitchen. “There’s steam coming out of the spice cabinet.”

“Last time they did this, Leo said he was making ‘soup for the soul ’ and nearly set off the fire alarm,” Cecil says flatly. 

“You’re lucky this place is rent controlled,” Clarisse huffs. 

“It’s a cursed apartment, babe,” Silena coos, linking her arm through Clarisse’s. “That’s part of the charm.”

Clarisse just grunts and sips her drink like it personally betrayed her. A disembodied skeleton hand falls off the bookshelf behind them with a dull thud.

The party roars on around them—laughing, clinking glasses, a collective descent into glitter-soaked chaos—but Will barely registers any of it. He blinks at the smoke now curling beneath the kitchen door and wonders—not for the first time—if maybe he’s hallucinating all of this. If the fog in his lungs and the heat behind his eyes are less Halloween ambiance and more the slow burn of panic, creeping in like rot beneath the floorboards.

They’re here.

Will’s heart stutters. An inhale caught sideways. Something fragile knocking loose in his chest.

They’re here.

He’s here?

It hits him like a sucker punch, all breath and no sound. Nico might be somewhere in this apartment—right now. Close enough to touch. Close enough to not want to. The thought flares through him like a lit match in dry grass. He almost asks. The question teeters at the edge of his mouth like a dare: Is Nico with them?

But it stays there. Sharp. Desperate. Untouched.

He swallows it down with a gulp of too-sweet liquor, the kind that coats your throat in sugar and regret. The kind that tastes like a mistake in progress. His face slips into something practiced. Neutral. Curious, not invested. Calm, not collapsing.

It’s muscle memory now—how to hide the shaking. How to arrange his features like they don’t ache.

He shifts his gaze instead to Silena, radiant and poised in her rhinestone tiara, watching them like a benevolent queen in a kingdom of cobwebs and chaos. She smiles at him, soft and knowing.

Will smiles back, and it feels like lying with his whole body.

“Honestly,” Silena says, leaning in like they’re exchanging state secrets instead of gossip, “you need to tell me everything. Do they do blood oaths? Is there a secret group chat? Does Jason really meditate or is that just a lie to make him seem hot and mysterious?”

From somewhere near the fog-drenched kitchen, someone screams—high-pitched and delighted. A blender explodes. The lights flicker dramatically, as if summoned by theatrical tension.

“I heard Piper knows a senator,” Connor chimes in, ducking a flying paper bat with an ease that implies practice.

“I heard Percy got a yacht from a fan,” Katie adds, dry as salt. Her fake flower crown is wilting with aggression.

“I heard Annabeth built the yacht,” Travis says, unbothered, sipping neon punch out of a skull-shaped goblet.

Will rubs a hand over his face like he might scrub himself out of the conversation. “Why do you all know so much about them?”

“Because they’re fascinating,” Silena says, eyes wide and sincere. “They’re like if the cast of The Iliad got enrolled at NYU and started a brunch club.”

Behind her, a motion-sensor ghost shrieks and sprays confetti when someone stumbles too close.

“Plus,” Charles Beckendorf adds, appearing beside a haunted ficus with a drink in each hand, “we’ve seen you three with them now. That’s new. And deeply confusing. I mean, no offense, you’re all great, but… how did it happen?”

Lou Ellen grins, glitter on her cheeks and hecate curls bouncing with mischief. “Fate. Chaos. A reimagining of Macbeth.”

“Leo broke three drones in the robotics lab,” Cecil adds, adjusting the winged sandals of his Hermes costume. “And now we’re legally friends.”

“And Will,” Lou Ellen continues, clapping a hand on his shoulder with all the flair of a game show host revealing a prize. “Well. Will fell in love.”

Will nearly drops his drink. The plastic goblet clinks against his laurel crown as he whips his head around.

Clarisse whistles, low and impressed. “That fast, huh?”

“Shut up,” Will mutters, ears already turning red. Somewhere across the room, a fog machine belches dramatically, drowning a table of carved pumpkins in thick mist.

Katie narrows her eyes, calculating. “Wait. So, which one of the Seven? Piper? Hazel?”

Silena gasps, clutches her pearls—or rather, the rhinestone necklace that’s pretending to be pearls. “Jason? It’s Jason, isn’t it?”

“Stop,” Will groans. “No comment.”

That, of course, is the biggest mistake he could make.

“Oh my gods,” Connor breathes. “It’s Annabeth.”

“It’s not Annabeth,” Will snaps—too fast, too defensive.

There’s a beat of silence. Then a collective, victorious gasp.

“Now we have to know,” Silena says, practically vibrating. Behind her, a skeleton DJ drops a remix of Thriller like it’s the climax of a horror opera.

Lou Ellen just sips her drink like a smug little gremlin, her tiara twinkling. “It’s classified information.”

Will, meanwhile, is spiraling. Not in theory. In real-time, right there in the glow of orange string lights and LED candles that flicker like they’re about to expose him.

Because if Nico is really here—somewhere in this swirling carnival of glitter and fog, fake blood and flirtation—then Will doesn’t know what he’ll do. Run? Cry? Confess everything in the bathroom line and ruin someone’s eyeliner? He glances around. Every costume blurs. The party pulses. A jack-o’-lantern grins at him from the mantle like it knows. His heart stumbles. Catches.

He could be here.

And gods, Will hopes—terrified and quiet and raw—that if Nico is here, maybe he hasn’t vanished completely.

Not yet.

The conversation’s just teetering on the edge of something unbearable—Will’s cheeks aflame, Silena mid-theory about a love triangle between him, Jason, and a cursed chalice—when chaos rears its perfectly coiffed head.

From the direction of the kitchen—already suspiciously smoky—Piper, Percy, and Leo materialize like a fashionable hurricane. Not arriving. No. They've been here. Wreaking quiet havoc in corners, sipping from glowing drinks, moving like agents of chaos through fog and fake cobwebs. And now they’re converging on the conversation with all the subtlety of a stage dive.

They’re all unfairly attractive. Criminally so.

Piper looks like a fallen god sculpted out of contradiction—beauty and violence stitched together in silk. Her costume is a masterclass in chaos and allure: rose-pink chiffon drapes off one shoulder, soft and sheer like a vow whispered through smoke, but it’s cinched at the waist with leather dyed the color of dried blood. Glitter kisses the hollows of her collarbones, catching the light with every turn. Her cheeks are streaked with something that could be warpaint or wine, and her mouth is glossed the color of a battlefield sunset. Strapped to one thigh is a dagger carved like a rose—delicate, deadly. She glows like a love spell gone wrong. Like Aphrodite mid-rage.

Percy—Gods, Percy. He’s not wet, but he looks it. Someone (Annabeth, probably, with surgical precision) has highlighted his collarbones and jaw with iridescent shimmer, painting him in sea-glass and moonlight. His shirt is half-unbuttoned, revealing just enough chest to spark a scandal, and his storm-colored eyeliner somehow makes his eyes look more like crashing waves. He gleams like sea-foam under a spotlight, like the tragic lead in a luxury cologne ad: Stormbreaker. For men who emerge from oceans and don’t text back. There’s saltwater in his swagger, the smell of wind in his wake. Even the smoke from the kitchen seems to part for him.

And Leo is... Leo. A holy menace in fingerless gloves, his signature chaos barely contained beneath a bronze chest plate strapped over a ripped "Bulls on Parade" tee. His toolbelt glows like a relic stolen from Olympus and modified for vibes. His cast is still glitter-pink—loud, proud, cursed—and now covered in Sharpie scrawls like Hot Boy Fall , Screw You, Newton , and one indecipherable drawing that might be a pigeon riding a flaming wheel. His wings twitch behind him, jittery with Red Bull and something deeply mythological. He is the god of machines and mid-party accidents, and he looks like he was born to be worshipped and escorted out of bars.

They don’t walk into the conversation—they descend, like divine calamity. Glowing, pulsing, magnetic. The party doesn’t stop for them—but it shifts. Tilts. Like the universe knows its favorites have entered the scene.

“Bro!,” Leo announces, skidding to a stop in front of Lou Ellen. “We’ve entered the activation stage.”

Cecil gasps. “Oh my gods. Is the pigeon in the nest?”

“The goose has landed,” Percy intones solemnly, saluting with a Solo cup he’s definitely already lost once tonight.

“Operation Eros Rising is officially go,” Piper stage-whispers, locking eyes with Lou Ellen like she’s passing along state secrets.

Will stares at them all, blinking slowly. “What is happening.”

“Nothing!” Leo chirps, too loudly. “Just party stuff!”

“Festivities!” Piper adds brightly, sipping from a drink that is visibly smoking .

Percy slings a casual arm around Will’s shoulders and says, far too casually, “Heard you’re in loooove.”

Will flinches like he’s been physically struck. “Who told you that?” he hisses.

“Gods, he’s like a deer,” Leo says, voice reverent. “A golden, tragic deer caught in the headlights of romantic ruin.”

Silena nearly drops her drink from cackling. Clarisse stares at them like she’s calculating how many of them she could take in a fight.

Will can’t even focus on the teasing—because something’s off. Their eyes keep flicking toward each other. Their smiles are too smug. And Leo’s wings are twitching in a pattern that feels suspiciously like Morse code. Cecil and Lou Ellen say nothing. Which, in itself, says everything.

Something’s happening.

And Will—buzzing with dread, high on nerves, suffocating in costume makeup and want—doesn’t know what.

Leo salutes. “Good luck, soldier.”

Piper winks. “Looking tragic as hell, Solace. I approve.”

Percy boops Will’s slipping laurel crown back into place with a finger. “Try not to combust.”

Then they disappear, melting into the party fog and strobe lights and very real flames flickering in jack-o’-lanterns. Will stands there, glitter-stunned and breathless. Something is definitely happening. And he is absolutely not ready.

Silena waves them off like a benevolent, glitter-drenched deity. “Drinks are in the kitchen. Potion table’s fully stocked. If you don’t emerge in thirty minutes with at least two cursed cocktails and a new life philosophy, I’ve failed you as a host.”

The trio moves deeper into the apartment—past smoke machines and skeletons and a somehow-still-functioning fog-choked charcuterie board—until they reach the kitchen. Which looks like a crime scene, and not the metaphorical kind.

The fridge is open, glowing like a portal to the underworld. The sink is full of dry ice and rose petals. There are three Solo cups stacked in the shape of a pyramid and one fourth cup balancing precariously on top, crowned with a tiny plastic skeleton hand giving the finger. Half a bottle of black vodka sits sideways in a bowl of candy corn. A blender is cracked in two. Someone has graffitied the backsplash in what looks like edible glitter gel: HEPHAESTUS LIVES.

There’s a scorch mark on the counter.

Definitely Leo’s handiwork.

And in the center of it all, like mythological still-life: Annabeth, Hazel, and Frank.

Annabeth looks like she’s about to lead a war and write a thesis about it. Her costume is Athena-core perfection—silver and bronze armor accents layered over a crisp white tunic, a golden owl pin glinting at her shoulder like a seal of academic approval. Her hair is twisted into a braid so intricate it looks like a battle strategy in itself, every strand pinned into place with the kind of ruthless precision that could only belong to a girl who color-codes her tabs and keeps a dagger in her backpack. There’s something deeply academic about the whole look—like she could eviscerate you with a citation and then file the paperwork in triplicate.

Hazel is all ethereal opulence, the kind of beauty you’d only see in cursed oil paintings or dreams too old to wake from. Her gown is a rich velvet—deep garnet and gold thread twining through the fabric like veins of something ancient. Scattered across the bodice and hem are gemstones and precious metals: raw garnets like crystallized blood, shards of smoky quartz, tiny fragments of opal glinting like spilled moonlight. Her dark curls spill beneath a circlet of golden leaves and delicate bone fragments, as if Persephone (the goddess, not her step-mom) handed her the crown personally and told her to raise hell with it. Her gloves shimmer faintly with glittering dust—pyrite and mica and something unnamable—and her bronze eyeliner makes her eyes glow like there’s something otherworldly burning just behind them. She looks like she could curse you or crown you, and you wouldn’t dare ask which.

And Frank—sweet, massive Frank—is a quiet kind of chaos. He’s wearing camouflage pants and a black tactical vest, but it’s layered over with absurdity: a pair of soft bear ears perched on his head like they belong there, a smudge of black face paint on his nose, and a badge on his chest that simply reads: Forest Security. There are twigs stuck in the strap of his vest, like he wandered out of a woodland fairy tale by accident. He looks like he could protect a national park and your feelings at the same time, and maybe rescue a kitten while reciting the periodic table.

They’re a terrifying trio of elegance, academia, and unexpected softness—and Will, glitter in his curls and heartbreak in his chest, is too exhausted to keep pretending he doesn’t feel like a background character in someone else’s myth.

The three of them are deep in a hushed, intense conversation—something about historical burial rites and cultural appropriation in horror aesthetics (Hazel’s eyes are blazing; Annabeth is making emphatic hand gestures; Frank keeps nodding seriously)—when the trio walks in and shatters the vibe entirely.

Lou Ellen immediately grabs a plastic cup from the kitchen counter and sniffs it like a suspicious witch testing for poison—brows furrowed, eyes narrowed, her whole posture one of theatrical suspicion. The drink glows faintly red in the light from a fake jack-o’-lantern someone duct-taped to the fridge.

“What are we debating,” she asks, tilting her head like a curious cat, “and how cursed is this drink?”

Annabeth doesn’t miss a beat. She’s leaned one hip against the counter, arms crossed, gaze sharp and faintly amused like a commander watching her troops bicker over rations. “How cursed do you want it to be?”

Cecil, naturally, is already double-fisting two different mystery concoctions—one purple and one disturbingly clear. He looks unbothered, unhinged, and delighted all at once.

“I’ll take one haunted, one holy,” he declares, raising both cups like sacred offerings to the gods of bad decisions.

From across the dimly lit kitchen, Hazel turns toward them. The candles flicker gold against her cheeks as she meets Will’s eyes, her smile soft and steady—just a little too steady.

“Hey, you made it,” she says, voice low, deliberate. “That’s… good.”

Will manages a nod. Swallows around the tightness in his throat. Hazel’s kindness has always felt like gold leaf pressed over old bruises—warm, beautiful, almost unbearable. Too much and not enough, all at once.

Before he can speak, Frank materializes beside them like a benevolent grizzly bear in a tactical vest, holding out a tray of tiny glow-in-the-dark shot glasses shaped like skulls. “You’re just in time.”

“For what?” Will asks, voice catching on the question like it’s too big for his lungs.

But Hazel’s already turned, graceful and unreadable, facing Lou Ellen and Cecil again with a look that’s all secrets and sparkle.

“You two ready?”

Lou Ellen raises one perfectly penciled eyebrow, a smirk blooming across her face. “You know we were born ready.”

Annabeth doesn’t say a word—just tilts her head, mouth curled into a smirk sharp enough to slice through academic peer review. There’s something feral and regal in the way she moves, like a lioness in glitter eyeliner.

“Phase two, then,” she says.

Cecil taps his skull glass against Lou Ellen’s like they’re sealing a dark bargain at midnight under a cursed moon.

“Phase two initiated.”

Will stares. Blinks. His drink—something vaguely neon and probably radioactive—sloshes in his cup.

“What are you talking about?” he says, already regretting the question.

Annabeth gives him a look of pure mock-innocence. “Oh, you’ll see.”

Hazel just winks. Frank busies himself sipping from a skull glass that looks comically tiny in his massive hand. A fog machine hisses under the counter, casting wisps of mist through the air like a cue from the universe itself.

Will glances around at their faces—smirking, mysterious, sparkling with mischief—and feels the floor tilt slightly beneath him.

The party rages on like it’s been summoned by Dionysus himself. Somewhere between shots of unidentifiable neon liquid and a skull-shaped bowl of questionable punch, Will starts to feel… light. Tipsy. Untethered. The music is vibrating through his bones, some remix of 2000s nostalgia spun by a guy in the corner who may or may not be wearing elf ears. Silena’s apartment pulses with fog and heat and glitter. The disaster trio—Lou Ellen, Cecil, and Will—drift through the crowd like a triumvirate of barely-contained disasters.

Somehow, they all converge in the living room. Hazel and Frank materialize from opposite ends of the party with drinks in hand. Annabeth appears like a summoned specter of war and academia. Leo, Piper, and Percy are already mid-performance, passionately belting Kiss Me Through the Phone like it’s a hymn.

Piper has one hand raised like she’s invoking something, spinning in a circle of chiffon and glitter and chaos. Percy’s voice cracks on the chorus but it doesn’t matter—he’s radiant, grinning like he knows the sea loves him. And Leo? Leo’s screaming “Soulja Boy Tell Em” with the fervor of a man performing an exorcism.

Will blinks slowly. He is not okay. Everyone else, however, is having the time of their lives.

Somewhere behind him, someone yells “TAKE A SHOT IF YOU’VE EVER HAD A GOD COMPLEX,” and half the room raises their drinks.

Will still can’t shake the feeling that he’s being moved around the board like a chess piece. Like the gods—or worse, his friends—are plotting a romantic coup and he’s the last to know. He scans the room, trying to ground himself, and lands on:

Michael Yew, from hematology lab, leaning against the wall in a lab coat covered in fake blood, sipping a drink from a beaker and looking just as annoyed as he always does. A nametag reads: Dr. Yew, Licensed to Kill the Vibe.

Chiara Benvenuti, dressed as a femme fatale pirate with a corset and enough eyeliner to summon Poseidon, is mid-argument with Damien White, who’s inexplicably dressed as a fallen angel in combat boots and eyeliner wings sharp enough to injure. Will watches Chiara slap Damien across the chest—then promptly make out with him like the slap was foreplay.

Paolo Montez is in a toga bedazzled with rhinestones and glittering shamrocks, his hair slicked back, golden sandals on his feet. He’s standing on a coffee table, shouting dramatic pronouncements into a plunger like it’s a microphone. Beside him, Katie Gardner, in her moss-covered gown-and-flower-crown combo that screams “feral Earth deity,” is actively rearranging the furniture just to inconvenience the Stoll brothers. She moves a lamp two inches to the left and grins with evil satisfaction. Paolo throws flower petals in her honor.

Meanwhile, the Stoll brothers, now glistening with more glitter than skin, are trying to reprogram the fog machine to spell out SPOOKY BITCHES in Morse code.

Will takes it all in. The flickering lights. The mess of limbs and laughter. The perfume of too many scented candles and spilled cider. Piper is now giving a toast with a stolen skull goblet, declaring, “To chaos! And kissing! And extremely poor decisions with beautiful people!”

Frank is dancing—sort of. He’s doing his best imitation of a bear trying not to knock over a houseplant while Hazel guides him through the beat with deadly grace. Annabeth is yelling something about “centrifugal force” over the music while spinning Percy in a circle like she’s proving a theorem.

Lou Ellen is trying to climb the bookshelf. “It’s for the vibes,” she says when Leo grabs her ankle. “The haunted ones.”

“Just don’t knock over the cauldron,” Leo warns, looking entirely unserious. “That’s Phase Three.”

“Phase what?” Will asks sharply.

“Nothing,” says Piper, far too fast. She smiles. It’s the kind of smile that has been legally classified as suspicious in at least five states. “Drink your potion, Solace.”

Will blinks at his cup.

Cecil saunters up beside him, radiating innocence. “You’re having fun, right?”

Will eyes him. “Why?”

“No reason,” Cecil says with the cadence of someone who definitely has reasons. “It’s just… nice. Seeing everyone here. Together. Like the stars aligned.”

“Did you align them?” Will asks, a little too sharply.

“Who, me?” Cecil blinks. “I’m just a humble messenger god. I deliver vibes. I don’t orchestrate fate.”

“Uh-huh.”

A few feet away, Annabeth leans into Piper and murmurs, “Is it too early to initiate?”

“Not if the lighting is this good,” Piper replies, angling her face toward the chandeliers like she’s starring in a cursed music video.

Hazel passes Lou Ellen a cup, exchanging a loaded glance. “Everything’s ready. We’re just waiting on our final variable.”

“Who?” Lou Ellen asks, but her grin says she already knows.

Hazel just tilts her head meaningfully toward the front door.

Will—glitter on his sleeves, laurel crown slipping, body buzzing with half-drunken dread—feels the twist of something ancient and impossible in his chest.

Yeah. Something is definitely up.

And gods help him, he’s not sure he wants to stop it.

Leo’s phone buzzes.

He glances at the screen, eyes lighting up with a wild sort of purpose. 

“Bathroom,” he announces. “Emergency.”

Will blinks. “Are you—good?”

Leo’s already moving. “Come with me.”

“I—why?”

“It’s a vibe check.”

Will sighs. “Leo—”

“No time for questions, Sunboy, the moon is on the rise.”

Before Will can escape, Leo grabs his wrist with his uninjured hand and drags him through the swirling mass of costumes and flashing lights like they’re on a quest through hell. People cheer as they pass, someone slaps Will on the back and says “long live the crown,” and Will has never felt less in control of his life.

Silena’s bathroom is, of course, a fever dream.

The walls are painted a dusky blush, draped in silk and pearls, with a backlit mirror shaped like a rose. A constellation of perfume bottles gleam like offerings on the marble counter. There are floating candles in the sink, spiderwebs bedazzled with rhinestones, and a skeleton in a feather boa lounging in the claw-foot tub. A jar labeled “Witch’s Tears” holds Q-tips. There is, inexplicably, a fog machine going under the sink.

Will stares. “This is… an altar.”

“It’s beautiful,” Leo says reverently. “I feel like I’m about to summon a demon or get proposed to.”

Will leans against the door. “So, what’s the emergency? Did you actually need to pee, or—”

Leo waves him off, rummaging through a sparkly makeup bag that absolutely doesn’t belong to him. “Nah. I just needed to top up my eyeliner.”

He applies it in the mirror with practiced flair, tongue sticking out slightly in concentration. The glitter on his cheeks catches the light like stardust. He hums something vaguely resembling “Kiss Me Thru the Phone.”

Will watches, arms crossed. “You dragged me away from a chaotic crowd of cryptids and flirtation for eyeliner. ”

Leo shrugs, eyeliner wand between his teeth. “You looked like you needed a break.”

Will doesn’t respond. He just closes his eyes for a second and breathes in the faint scent of rosewater and mischief.

When they emerge a few minutes later—Leo refreshed and glowing like a dangerous cherub—they find the party even louder, even brighter, and somehow even more unhinged.

And Jason has arrived.

He stands near the living room doorway like a newly-minted king of the gods and emotional repression—tall, impossibly broad, bathed in the flicker of fairy lights and fake flame. Roman armor gleams silver across his chest, etched with thunderbolts and laurel leaves so detailed they look forged rather than store-bought. The purple cape trailing from one shoulder flutters slightly in the breeze from the open balcony like a warning, like a prophecy. His golden laurel crown catches the light as he moves—subtle, regal, a little unfair.

His hair is artfully tousled, his jaw sharp enough to make Will's eye twitch, and he wears the kind of effortless authority that makes drunk frat boys part like the Red Sea. There’s war in the set of his shoulders, but something gentler in the eyes—blue and searching and just a little tired, like he’s already bracing for whatever chaos the night is holding back.

The air shifts around him like recognition. Like storms rolling in. Like Olympus just dropped a favored son at Silena Beauregard’s door and dared anyone to blink first.

He’s scanning the room.

And Will? Will suddenly forgets how to stand still. Because if Jason’s here…

The night’s not done with him yet.

Chapter 33: An Angel Appears on the Balcony and I Immediately Start Confessing My Sins Like It’s Sunday Mass

“It’s group photo time!” Piper crows, brandishing her skull goblet like a scepter. “To the balcony, my cursed children!”

There’s a collective groan and rustle of movement as the chaos shifts direction, dragged in Piper’s wake like a tide pulled by the moon. Will tries to resist, anchoring himself to the coffee table with the desperation of a man on the edge. But Lou Ellen loops an arm through his with iron determination, Cecil places a dramatic hand on his back like they’re walking him to the gallows, and suddenly, he’s moving.

The air on the balcony hits him like an incantation—cool and perfumed with decay and gardenias. The space has been transformed into something that should not exist in a Brooklyn apartment, something halfway between Persephone’s underworld garden and a haunted wedding venue.

Velvet vines wrap around rusted wrought iron railings, their leaves dusted with glitter and ash. Paper flowers bloom from cracks in the concrete, dark red and moonlight white, with glimmering resin skulls nestled at their centers. There are bones tucked into planters, tiny animal vertebrae strung up like fairy lights. Jack-o’-lanterns grin through tangled ivy, their faces carved into twisted sonnets of ecstasy and horror. Candles drip black wax onto silver trays, and fog rolls across the floor like spilled silk, lit from beneath with a sickly blue glow.

Someone has hung a swing from the ceiling beams, draped in gauze and fake blood. A stuffed crow perches above it, wearing a tiara.

Will wants to scream.

The group is already jostling into position, tipsy and laughing, limbs flung over shoulders, faces flushed with sugar and sin. Piper corrals them like a war general, yelling about angles and “smolder or perish.” Frank nearly knocks over a candelabra. Annabeth hisses at Leo for blinking too much. Lou Ellen climbs onto a planter box to strike a pose like a Grecian gargoyle. And Will—gods, Will—just wants it over with. He pastes on a smile that tastes like wine and regret, lifts his chin, squares his shoulders—

And freezes.

Because from the far end of the balcony, where the ivy hangs thicker and the shadows cling like smoke, someone steps forward.

Nico.

Leaning against the far railing—half-shrouded in ivy and smoke and the kind of silence that silences everything else—Nico di Angelo stands like a vision conjured from the edge of a dream. Not cloaked in black, as Will has always known him. Not shadow-wrapped and sharp-edged and dressed like grief.

But in white.

Startling, impossible white.

A loose, flowing button-down—open at the collar, sleeves rolled to the elbow—clings to him like sea foam caught on marble. His jeans, pale-washed and frayed at the knees, shimmer faintly under the party lights, like they’ve been dusted with frost. There’s a silver chain at his throat, simple and elegant, and beneath the gentle curve of his jaw, a ghost of glitter gleams like stardust pressed into skin.

Above it all, resting just off-kilter in the dark curls of his hair, is a delicate white halo—thin and glinting faintly, as though spun from the same light that gilds the edges of clouds at sunrise. It glows faintly in the haunted garden shadows, casting a soft ring of luminescence around him, more suggestion than spectacle. Like the idea of grace. Like a memory of faith.

But it’s the wings that stop Will’s breath.

Feathered, snow-pale, and slightly unfurled. Not plastic costume wings from a Spirit Halloween clearance bin—these look handmade, deliberate, like they were sewn from the lining of clouds. They arch behind him like he could take flight at any second. Like he remembers heaven and still hasn’t decided whether to forgive it.

And gods, isn’t it all a little too poetic?

Nico di Angelo. The boy from the City of Angels. From L.A., where the sun is cruel and nothing is sacred and love is something you lose if you look too long. Nico, who came to Will’s bookstore that day like a ghost looking for a lighthouse. Nico, who once whispered that he couldn’t breathe there. Who left, without saying why.

And now he’s back.

Not hidden in shadows, but radiant in moonlight. Not mourning-black, but heaven-white.

And oh gods, the contrast.

His dark hair curls wild at the edges of his too-bright costume, halo resting just crooked like a crown he didn’t mean to wear. His lashes cast shadows under his eyes, rimmed in the subtlest smudge of charcoal eyeliner—just enough to make him look even more mythic, like a relic unearthed from a temple ruin. His eyes—Gods, his eyes—look darker than Will remembers, twin eclipses framed by soft shimmer and sleeplessness.

Will knows without needing to ask that Piper had a hand in this.

There’s a glamour to it. Not fakery, but intention. Reverence. She painted him like a portrait and let the cracks show. The glitter across his cheekbones. The warm undertones in the white. The halo that should look silly but instead just makes him look… untouchable. The way the whole look balances divinity with defiance.

Nico doesn’t look like someone dressed for Halloween. He looks like something risen from a prayer. Or a poem. Or the kind of dream you don’t dare write down in case it disappears.

And Will?

Will stands there, crown askew, glitter on his cuffs, tipsy on liquor and longing and something too tender to name—and he thinks: He came back.

For this cursed balcony. For this haunted garden of broken vines and jack-o’-lanterns with screaming faces. For a group photo they’ll all laugh at tomorrow and treasure for years.

He came back.

And Will doesn’t know what to do with the hope that unfurls inside him like wings of its own.

For one impossible second, Nico doesn’t see him.

He’s looking out over the city, cigarette smoldering between his fingers, gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the balcony rail—on the glitter-stained ivy, on the skyline veiled in fog, on nothing and everything at once. The halo tilts gently in his hair like it’s been forgotten there. His wings twitch faintly in the wind.

But then—

He turns.

Their eyes meet.

And the air shifts.

Not with warmth. Not with wonder. But with something cold and cutting. Something brittle. A silent shatter.

Nico’s entire posture tightens like a bow pulled taut. That small, almost relaxed lean against the railing snaps into something sharpened, braced. The cigarette lifts to his lips with too-smooth precision. His jaw locks. His shoulders rise, just slightly—but enough to make him look suddenly taller. More carved than clothed.

And his eyes.

Gods, his eyes.

They’re not empty. They’re not indifferent. They are furious. Cold and clear and gleaming like obsidian under moonlight. Not wild, not lost—but focused. Controlled. Ice disguised as poise.

He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t waver. He holds Will’s gaze with the same quiet venom that ruins kingdoms. And then, without breaking eye contact, he exhales a long plume of smoke.

It curls from his mouth like a curse. Like a warning. Like a boundary drawn in ash and breath and every inch of space between them.

Will feels it hit his lungs before it even touches the air.

He opens his mouth. Just to say his name. Just to whisper, “Nico—”

But that’s as far as he gets.

Nico slices his gaze away—quick, deliberate, dismissive—and turns on the others.

“You said he wouldn’t be here.”

His voice is sharp steel wrapped in velvet. Too soft to be a shout. Too loud to be anything but a snarl. It hits the Seven like a whip crack.

Jason’s spine snaps straight. Piper freezes mid-turn, caught in the act of adjusting the group photo backdrop. Annabeth’s grip tightens around her drink, knuckles pale against glass. Percy opens his mouth like he’s about to make a joke—then closes it again, too slow to be casual.

No one answers.

Because they know.

Because of course they told him that. Of course they promised he wouldn’t be here.

And Will—Will sees it now, clear as candlelight reflected in broken glass.

This wasn’t coincidence. This wasn’t fate. This was planned.

He turns his gaze on Lou Ellen and Cecil, who suddenly find something very interesting in the fake spiderwebs draped over the balcony railing. And the Seven—gods, the Seven look guilty in different shades: Jason stiff with guilt and loyalty, Piper biting her lip, Percy offering nothing but awkward silence. Even Annabeth, composed and calculating as always, won’t meet Will’s eyes.

Will’s stomach twists.

Because if Nico only came tonight under the assurance that Will wouldn’t be here—then the others knew. They knew something had gone wrong. They knew what Will had done.

Which means—

Hazel steps forward, soft and radiant in her haunted goddess regalia, her voice quiet as candle smoke. “He wouldn’t tell us what happened,” she says gently, her hand brushing Will’s elbow. “But… Jason cracked. Eventually.”

Will’s throat constricts. He doesn’t know whether to be furious or grateful.

Hazel’s expression is gentle, kind, but unmistakably serious. “We didn’t want to interfere. At first. But Nico was hurting. And so were you.”

“They all saw it,” Jason says roughly, stepping up beside her. “Even when Nico wouldn’t talk about it. Even when he shut me out.”

Will stares at him, heart hammering.

Percy clears his throat. “We figured… if he was that mad, but still wouldn’t spill, then it had to be complicated.”

“And you,” Annabeth adds, her voice calm but firm, “you were walking around like someone stole your entire constellation. We put it together.”

“We weren’t going to just sit around and let you both implode,” Piper says, folding her arms. “So we did something.”

Will blinks, the words barely registering.

Cecil raises his hand from where he’s draped across the railing like a particularly smug gargoyle. “You can thank us later.”

“Preferably after you kiss,” Lou Ellen adds, grinning like a matchmaker mid–evil scheme.

Will opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.

Because he gets it now. The meddling. The chaos. The cryptic glances and the whispered conversations and the strange, fated choreography of the night—it was all them. The Seven. Lou Ellen and Cecil. All of them.

They didn’t just attend a party.

They orchestrated a reckoning.

And now Nico is here. Because they swore he wouldn’t see Will. Because they knew if he thought there was even a chance of running into him, he wouldn’t have come at all.

Nico flicks ash into a jack-o’-lantern’s open grin. He still doesn’t look at Will.

And Will—glittering, crown crooked, his heart thudding like a war drum under haunted lights—just stands there, aching with the knowledge that Nico didn’t come back for him.

He came in spite of him.

And now?

Now he’s here. And nothing can be undone.

Nico exhales smoke like it’s venom. His voice is low—dangerous, deliberate.

“You want to know what happened?”

No one breathes.

Nico’s voice isn’t raised. It’s low, steady. Controlled in the way a blade is controlled—sharp, deliberate, meant to cut clean. His eyes don’t move to Will. They fix somewhere just past his shoulder, like if he looks directly at him, he’ll lose the grip he has on his anger.

“I thought it was going well, the date,” he says, almost absently. “I thought it was… good. He looked nervous, sure, but I figured that was normal. It was a date . And he was still laughing. Talking. Blushing every time I looked at him too long.” His mouth twists. “It felt like something. Like we were getting somewhere.”

Will winces. It feels like Nico’s slicing him open with memory. Word by word.

“Until we got to the restaurant,” Nico continues, voice thinner now, fraying at the edges, “and it was like someone flipped a switch. Like I’d stepped into the wrong version of the date and no one told me. He went quiet. Completely shut down. Wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t look at me. Every time I tried to ask him what was wrong, he’d just smile—like it was mechanical. Like it was for someone else.”

Nico pauses. His hand curls tighter around the cigarette, now burned down to the filter. The smoke curls upward, thin and angry.

“Then he said he had to use the bathroom. And he disappeared. For ten minutes. I thought he’d ditched me. I sat at the table alone, waiting.” He finally looks at Will. And the look is a punch to the ribs. “Do you have any idea what that felt like?”

Will sways. Glitter catches the light on his sleeves like dust from a crumbling star.

“When he finally came back,” Nico says, quieter now, “he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Wouldn’t say anything..”

He exhales through his nose like it’s the only thing keeping him grounded. His jaw flexes once. Twice.

“We left the restaurant, and I thought… I thought maybe he was overwhelmed. So I gave him a minute. I stepped away to answer a call from Jason—just a check-in. I was gone for maybe two minutes. And when I came back—” Nico swallows, his voice suddenly hoarse. “I told him I’d get the car. Said I’d take him home. I was trying. I didn’t want it to end like that. I didn’t know what I’d done, but I wanted to fix it.”

His eyes are sharp again now, glassy with fury, but steady. He looks right at Will. No mercy in the stare. Just hurt, hardened into something sharp.

“And he just said he’d walk. Wouldn’t even let me call him a ride. He said “I’ll see you around” and walked away from me like—like I was a stranger. Like the whole night hadn’t meant anything.”

Nico’s hand trembles as he drags it through his hair. The halo tilts slightly, absurd in its innocence.

“I stood there,” he continues, “on the sidewalk Trying to figure out what I said, what I did, what part of me was too much. Again .”

Will can’t speak. Can’t move. His throat is full of ash and regret and everything he never said.

And Nico, lit by jack-o’-lantern grins and the ghostly halo crowning his dark curls, looks every bit the angel his name promised—and nothing like forgiveness.

The silence that follows is worse than shouting. It hums. It vibrates. It crackles like a cursed wire.

Then:

“You what?” Piper hisses, stepping forward like she’s about to turn her rose-dagger from accessory to weapon. Her eyes flash, glitter catching the light like warning signs. “Tell me you didn’t actually leave him in the middle of the street. Please. Lie to me.”

“You left?” Jason’s voice is a rasp, disbelief cutting through it. “You just—left him? Nico told me things didn’t go the way he expected, but he didn’t tell me that. He said you were quiet. He didn’t say you disappeared. Gods, Will, if I’d known I’d have—” He cuts himself off, fists clenched. The Roman armor glints like it’s ready for battle.

Hazel gasps, her gloved hand flying to her mouth, the tiny bones in her crown catching the candlelight. “Will,” she breathes, hurt and confusion mingling in her voice. “He went back to L.A. after that. I thought things were finally going to be okay between him and our dad but he went back because of you…. ”

Annabeth’s already shaking her head, her whole body radiating strategic disappointment. Her expression is razor-sharp—like she’s running battlefield calculations in real time and none of the outcomes favor Will. “You didn’t even say goodbye?” she says, incredulous. “You let him stand there thinking he did something wrong?”

Percy, somehow both shirtless and morally outraged, raises his hands like he needs the gods to witness his reaction. “Okay, I know I clown a lot, but even I wouldn’t do that. And I once ghosted someone by kayaking away during spring break.”

“You’re lucky this balcony has a railing,” Frank mutters darkly, arms crossed over his Forest Security vest. From anyone else, it might’ve been a joke. From Frank, it sounds like the last warning before a bear mauling.

Even Leo looks genuinely disappointed. “Bro,” he says slowly, like the word tastes wrong in his mouth. “Seriously? You bailed on him like it was a bad Tinder date and not, y’know, Nico ? Nico, who doesn’t date, who doesn’t let anyone in.”

Will tries to say something, but nothing comes out. The whole world feels like it’s tipped on its axis. The smoke from Nico’s cigarette still lingers in the air, curling around Will’s lungs like a noose.

And the Seven?

They look like gods now—furious ones. Crowned in glitter and wrath, their devotion to Nico is a cathedral of anger. Not just because he was hurt—but because he let himself be open . Because for once, he tried .

And Will?

Will broke that.

Will wants to disappear. Or combust. Or fall to his knees in this haunted garden and let the motion-sensor skeleton drag him into the underworld it clearly came from. Anything would be better than standing here—exposed, trembling, drowning in the glow of fairy lights and failure.

He’s lit like a warning flare under the flickering strings of pumpkin bulbs—highlighter catching on his cheekbones, shame etched into every glitter-dusted line of him. His laurel crown sits askew, a crooked halo for a boy who doesn’t deserve one.

He opens his mouth, desperate to speak, to explain, to beg —but the words clog his throat like gravel and ash.

“I—” he begins, voice fragile.

“Don’t,” Nico says, and the word slices through the air like a guillotine.

Will flinches. Actually flinches.

“Don’t you dare give me an excuse for why you couldn’t just tell me what was wrong.” Nico’s voice is low, even, but it carries the weight of a thousand buried things. It vibrates through the bones of the balcony, through the marrow of Will’s ribs. “You looked me in the eye. You smiled. You let me believe it meant something. And then you walked away like I was a stranger. Like I was a mistake.”

The glow-in-the-dark shot glasses on the table nearby rattle. A ghost wind whispers through the ivy. Somewhere, a jack-o’-lantern flickers out.

“I let my guard down for you,” Nico says, quieter now—but the quiet is more dangerous than the fury. It’s the silence before the fault line breaks. “I let myself hope.”

Will thinks of the scarf. The way Nico’s fingers brushed his. The way his voice had softened like candlewax, melting between them. He thinks of the warmth that bloomed in his chest when Nico smiled across the table.

And then he looks at him now—draped in white, halo glowing like irony, wings tucked in tight like a shield—and wonders if the angel costume was meant to be a joke, or a prophecy. Di Angelo. The City of Angels. And yet he looks like he fell just to remind Will what grace used to look like.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Will whispers, barely audible.

But Nico hears him. Of course he does.

“That doesn’t mean you didn’t,” he says, and it lands like a blade to the ribs. Not thrown. Given. Handed over like a gift. Like truth.

And Will breaks on the inside. Quietly. Completely.

Cecil leans over to Lou Ellen, stage-whispers, “So… when do we launch the reconciliation arc? Is now the big kiss or do we need a montage first?”

Lou smacks his arm without looking. “Not now, dumbass.”

“I’m just saying,” Cecil mutters, sipping dramatically from a skull-shaped cup. “The tension is peaking. We’re mid-spiral. Feels very act two climax. Could use a dramatic rain scene, but I’ll settle for some emotionally repressed yelling.”

Lou glares. “One more word and I’m shoving you into the haunted fog machine.”

Will stares at the balcony railing, at the way the fog curls over its edge like smoke from a sacrificial flame, and wonders—not for the first time tonight—how far the drop is. Probably not enough to kill him. But maybe enough to crack something open. Enough to make a point, if not a clean escape.

The silence around him is a chorus of judgment, humming like electricity just beneath the skin. Jason stands taut, like his hands are itching to shake sense into him. Percy’s expression is wounded in that rare, quiet way—like someone who thought this kind of betrayal was beneath you, and now has to rearrange what he believed. Annabeth’s jaw is clenched, eyes sharp and clinical, already cataloguing this moment in some inner thesis titled Why You Don’t Trust People Who Say They’re Fine . Hazel looks like grief and fury braided together, soft features drawn tight, as if she’s mourning not just Nico’s heartbreak, but the fact that she didn’t see it coming. Piper polishes her dagger with a slowness so deliberate it feels symbolic, each stroke of cloth against blade a silent sermon on retribution.

And Nico—gods, Nico is everything Will feared he’d become.

Not broken, not begging, not wounded in the soft, vulnerable way Will had imagined when guilt made him sentimental. No—he’s fire-forged and ice-tempered, cloaked in white and cruelty, his eyes diamond-hard and burning beneath that too-perfect halo. There’s rage there, yes, but the deeper ache is worse—disappointment that glitters like frost, the kind of hurt that turns into legend. A wound sealed too soon, scarred over with silence and cigarette smoke.

Will, golden and tired beneath the laurel crown Lou Ellen pinned into his hair, his costume already wrinkled with guilt, his makeup smudged with the hands he’s been wringing all night, presses a hand to his temple and sighs like someone ancient. Like someone who knows the sun doesn’t always warm—sometimes it blinds, sometimes it burns.

“Okay,” Will mutters, voice low and frayed. “Yeah. This is going great .”

The fog machine beneath the balcony lets out a long, mournful hiss—like even the artificial atmosphere has decided to weigh in.

From inside, Rihanna’s Disturbia crackles to life, bass-heavy and pulsing like a heartbeat too fast to be healthy. The motion-sensor skeleton near the front door jolts upright and begins to twerk with mechanical enthusiasm, its bony hips rattling against a bowl of candy corn.

No one laughs.

Not yet.

Not when the air feels thick with unsaid things and Nico’s silence gleams sharper than any blade.

A beat of silence stretches—taut and trembling—before Lou Ellen finally throws herself into the conversational volcano like the dramatic theatre major she is.

“Okay,” she snaps, stepping forward like she’s about to deliver a monologue on a cursed stage. “This is getting a little murderery .”

Cecil follows close behind, still holding his glow-in-the-dark shot glass like a gavel. “Right? Are we at the part where you guys storm the castle and put Will’s head on a spike? Because we might be skipping some crucial narrative beats here.”

Annabeth turns slowly. “I beg your pardon?”

Jason looks like he’s barely resisting the urge to tackle them both. “You knew. You knew what happened and you didn’t tell us?”

Piper crosses her arms, the rose-dagger at her thigh catching the light like a warning. “You let us think he didn’t hurt Nico that badly.”

Lou Ellen raises both hands, the picture of theatrical exasperation. “Because he didn’t . Not like you think.”

“Yeah,” Cecil adds, jabbing a finger toward the Seven like he’s accusing them in a court of law. “You’re all acting like Will curb-stomped his heart in Times Square. But maybe— maybe —some of this flaming wreckage is your fault.”

There’s a collective intake of breath.

Even Nico turns slightly at that, cigarette poised at his lips, gaze sharpening. He doesn’t speak—just exhales a ribbon of smoke like a loaded gun, watching, waiting.

Frank frowns. “What are you talking about?”

Lou Ellen glares at him. “I’m talking about you . All of you. Your meddling. Your hype. Your goddamn restaurant recommendation!”

Percy blinks. “Wait. We caused this?”

“What does that mean?” Jason demands, staring Will down. “What the hell happened on that date?”

Will, who has been slowly coming apart like a paper doll in the rain, opens his mouth—only for Cecil to beat him to it.

“Oh, you’re gonna love this,” he says. “Buckle up, it’s a ride.”

Will swallows hard, throat dry like he’s been breathing smoke instead of air. The air around him is too warm, too tight—like the balcony itself is shrinking. The party thrums behind them, a distorted heartbeat made of bass and laughter and flickering lights. And Nico’s eyes—gods, Nico’s eyes—fix on him with the weight of judgment, fury, confusion, betrayal, all sharpened to a single point.

He feels it land like a blade.

“I had lunch with Percy, Annabeth, and Leo the day of the date,” Will says, voice low and rough. He doesn’t look at anyone.

“I know,” Nico cuts in, sharp as cracked bone. His tone is clipped, glacial, a blade pulled clean from its sheath. “You told me. I didn’t realize it was a strategy meeting. A summit to decide how best to make a fool out of me.”

Will flinches. But he keeps going, breath catching somewhere between regret and resolve.

“They told me,” he says, “that they’ve been meddling, trying to push us together this whole time. And they also told me that you wouldn’t give them any details about where you were taking me. Nothing. Gods, I wish you had said something.”

The silence that follows is taut, stretched tight like a bowstring. The only sound is the hiss of the fog machine and the distant, distorted echo of synth-pop spilling through the windows.

Will turns to Nico—slowly, carefully, like one wrong movement might collapse the world beneath their feet.

“You chose that restaurant,” he says, hoarse, “because they talked it up. The Seven. They said it was romantic. Said it was perfect. And you trusted them.”

Nico blinks. Something in his face falters—not the anger, not yet, but the certainty behind it. His brow knits. Confusion, dawning like stormlight through cracks in thunderclouds.

“Yeah,” he says slowly. “I mean—yeah. They wouldn’t shut up about it. Leo said it had ‘ambiance that could seduce a saint.’”

Will’s mouth twitches into something like a smile. It’s all teeth. It doesn’t touch his eyes.

And then he turns to the rest of them.

Percy. Annabeth. Leo. Piper. Hazel. Frank. Jason.

Will meets each of their gazes in turn, glitter still catching faintly in the light like stardust smeared across his skin.

“That restaurant,” he says quietly, but the words land like stone. “The one Nico took me to? It was the House of Hesperides.”

It hits like thunder rolling over a canyon.

Silence cascades down the group like a breaking wave. There is no laughter now, no chaotic buzz, just a beat of stillness thick with realization. The lights seem too bright. The air too thin.

Percy’s mouth opens and doesn’t close. Leo recoils like he’s just remembered the punchline to a tragic joke. Piper mutters, “Oh, gods,” under her breath, guilt settling on her like a shroud. Frank looks like he’s been struck across the face. Hazel covers her mouth, her eyes wide and horrified. Annabeth just… freezes. Like she’s buffering. Like she’s solving an equation she didn’t know she was part of.

Nico’s head turns toward them slowly. The anger doesn’t return—not yet. What blooms instead is cold. Cold enough to burn. Cold enough to crack stone.

His voice, when it comes, is soft. Deadly.

“What,” he says, “is going on?”

No one breathes. No one answers.

So he says it again—each word sharp as shattered glass.

“Can someone explain what the fuck is happening here?”

And Will—glittering and gutted, a god in golden costume and fractured grace—just stares at the fog curling over the balcony floor. Wonders if it’s thick enough to disappear into.

Wonders if it would hurt less than the look on Nico’s face.

The air shifts. Tension cracks.

And then suddenly—everyone is speaking at once.

“We didn’t know it was that restaurant—” Percy blurts, stepping forward like he can physically fix this.

“I just said it was romantic, okay?” Leo yelps. “Ambiance! I didn’t know he would take you there on a date or that it was a whole thing —”

“I told him they had good wine pairings,” Annabeth cuts in sharply, voice strained. “That’s not the same as sending him into emotional collapse , for the record—”

“I just wanted someone to fall in love at my favorite place!” Piper wails, hands in her hair. “Is that such a crime?!”

Hazel lifts her hands. “I just told him the scallops were good!”

“I told him the bathrooms were clean,” Frank offers helplessly.

Nico’s eyebrows shoot upward in cold disbelief.

“Helpful,” he deadpans.

“Okay, wait, wait —” Jason interjects, brow furrowed, stepping between Nico and Leo like a referee at a very glittery war. “We didn’t know it would turn into a meltdown. We were just trying to help—”

“By sending me into a five-star emotional landmine?” Will snaps, eyes wide.

“No one said go there to destroy his soul, ” Annabeth hisses, exasperated. “It was just… aesthetic recommendations!”

“ I was trying to create a moment! ” Piper shouts, still dramatically distressed.

“You created a trauma flashback,” Lou Ellen mutters.

“I thought we were being romantic meddling geniuses! ” Leo insists, gesturing wildly with his glitter-pink cast.

“You were being idiots ,” Cecil mutters.

“Everyone shut up,” Nico says.

But no one hears him. Or maybe they do and choose not to listen, because the spiral has already begun—overlapping justifications, defensive flailing, a whirlwind of friendship and guilt and really terrible communication.

From the center of it, Nico stares—shoulders stiff, halo tilting slightly askew, cigarette burning down between his fingers like a fuse.

He still doesn’t know the truth.

Not yet.

And Will watches him through the fog and fairy lights, through the tangled mess of love and ruin that the Seven have made—and knows the worst is still coming.

Nico’s voice cuts through the chaos like a blade.

“Someone explain,” he says again, sharp and low and deadly still. “Right now.”

The party seems to shrink around them, noise dimming, fog curling close like breath on a mirror. Everyone falls silent.

Will’s heartbeat thrums in his ears like a war drum. He’s never hated the sound of his own name more.

“I—” he starts, then stops. His throat is dry. His lungs feel too small. There’s no dignified way to say this, no version that doesn’t sting.

But Nico is looking at him.

So he says, “I work there.”

The words drop like lead into the center of the group. No one breathes.

Nico blinks. “What?”

Will swallows hard. “At the restaurant. House of Hesperides. I’ve worked there for the last two years.”

Nico recoils like he’s been slapped.

Will presses on, the truth unraveling now, brittle and jagged and years too heavy. “The Seven kept trying to drag you there. Kept trying to make something happen. Another 'accidental' run-in with me. They were trying to stage a moment.”

“And you never told me?” Nico asks, voice raw.

“I couldn’t,” Will says, hoarse. “I couldn’t tell you while we were there.” His voice starts to crack. “I was supposed to be working that night,” Will says, barely above a whisper. “I switched shifts last minute—for our date. And instead I ended up sitting at one of the most expensive tables in the place, in clothes I picked out like armor, trying to impress you, trying to pass for something I’m not. And the whole time I couldn’t even look at the menu without doing the math in my head.”

He laughs, bitter and breathless. “You want to know why I barely ate? Because every item on that menu cost more than three nights of dinner in a normal week for me. Because I was already calculating which meals I could skip next week to make rent.”

His eyes flick to Nico’s, then away again.

“And you—” His voice hitches, softens, turns small. “You were so kind. So steady. So perfectly composed across the table like you belonged there. Because you do belong there. You’ve always belonged in places like that. And then the bill came. And you just—paid it. Like it was nothing. Like it wasn’t the number I’d been dreading the whole night. And I just sat there thinking, I’m never going to be enough for this. For you. ”

Nico doesn’t speak.

No one does.

Will, glowing faintly in the garden lights—gold against the dark, cracked open and shining in the worst way—presses a trembling hand to his chest, as if trying to hold the words in. But they pour out anyway.

“I’ve been calculating rent since I was thirteen. Scraping together change. Telling my mom I wasn’t hungry so she could eat. Counting shifts on my fingers and hoping it’d be enough. I know the price of heat in February. I know what it costs to keep the lights on until payday. I know how to smile through shame.”

His voice wavers. “You… don’t.”

He swallows. Forces the words out, one by one.

“You come from old money and Italian villas and family names that open doors. You come from polished dinnerware and generational wealth and summer homes with gates. From a world where money is inherited, not earned. From legacy.”

Will’s breath shudders out of him.

He breaks off again. When he speaks, it’s almost a whisper. 

“I come from nothing, Nico.” 

The fog machine hisses beneath the balcony, like punctuation.

“I come from knockoff cereal. From shoes two sizes too small because they were on sale. From birthday presents that were just the electricity staying on another month. From a mother who loved me more than anything and a childhood full of tip jars and side hustles and guilt. I come from empty pantries and eviction threats and playing grown-up before I even hit puberty. And all I’ve ever known is survival.”

The fog machine hisses beneath the balcony like it knows what’s coming.

“I grew up believing love had to be earned. That it only came when you were easy to carry. That being soft made you disposable. I thought if I was small enough, quiet enough, good enough, maybe someone would stay.”

His voice breaks completely.

“And sitting across from you—in that place—with all my coworkers watching, and my skin prickling, and my pride choking me—I couldn’t breathe, Nico. I couldn’t breathe. ”

He stops. Breathes. Looks up.

“I panicked. I ran. Not because of you, not really. Because of me. Because I didn’t know how to exist in a place where I didn’t belong, with someone who seemed so far out of reach I felt like a ghost just sitting there. Because I was scared.”

His gaze finds Nico’s, eyes brimming, voice barely audible.

“And I didn’t want you to see how scared I was.”

The silence is heavy now. The kind that hurts. That hums in your teeth and burrows under your skin.

Nico’s face is unreadable—marble carved into something divine. There’s a tremor in his hand where the cigarette burns low between his fingers, the smoke curling up like a warning or a prayer. He exhales slow, steady. Like he’s bracing himself against the wind.

The Seven are silent behind him, caught somewhere between guilt and awe and the kind of sorrow that makes you stare at your shoes. Percy’s mouth opens and closes. Hazel looks like she’s been crying quietly for the last five minutes. Annabeth’s expression is sharp-edged and mournful—like she’s cataloguing the moment, filing it away under What We Should’ve Seen Sooner . Piper’s arms are crossed, but her eyes are soft now. Leo looks like he’s aged a decade in real time, and Frank’s hand is on Hazel’s back, grounding them both. Even Jason, stone-still and golden, has gone pale around the mouth.

There’s pity there.

Will hates it.

But there’s understanding too. And shame. And maybe something like grief.

Nico’s voice, when it finally breaks through, is soft. Raw. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

He still doesn’t look angry. Just… tired. And that’s worse.

Will’s heart lurches. “I didn’t want you to see me differently.”

Nico frowns, cigarette now forgotten between his fingers.

“I didn’t want you to feel sorry for me,” Will says, trying to steady his breath, but it shakes anyway. “I didn’t want you to look at me and see a charity case. Or some tragic sob story. Or worse— less. ”

“You’re not less,” Nico says immediately. Sharply. Like it offends him. Like the very idea physically hurts.

“I know,” Will says, and gods, he wishes that were always true. “I mean—I’m trying to know. But that night, sitting there with you? All I could think was how different we are. How I’ve been trying to survive since I was a kid and you—you’ve got estates and staff and a trust fund , Nico. You have a last name people care about. I didn’t even have a headboard until college.”

Nico's expression cracks, just slightly. Something flickers behind his eyes. “I didn’t choose any of that.”

“I know,” Will says again. Softer now. “But I still felt like I was trespassing in your world. Like I was waiting for someone to ask me to leave. And I couldn’t let you see that. Not when I wanted so badly for you to see me . Not the scared kid doing math in his head. Not the server who couldn’t afford his own napkin. Just… Will. Someone who was trying. Someone who was enough.”

The words sit heavy between them, all sharp edges and bleeding hope.

Nico looks at him for a long, unbearable moment. Then he says, quietly, “I would’ve gone anywhere with you.”

Will’s breath stutters.

Nico steps forward, voice still gentle, but firmer now. “You know that, right? I would’ve walked the streets. Gotten hot dogs and soda. Sat on a stoop somewhere. I just wanted to be with you . That was the point. Not the food. Not the place. You.”

Will feels it like a punch. Like a hand, too—held out across the dark.

His eyes sting. “I know that now,” he whispers. “I know. I was scared and proud and stupid and I—” He breaks off, breath hitching. “I ruined it. I ruined something that mattered because I didn’t want to be seen the way I’ve always seen myself.”

He meets Nico’s gaze—open and wrecked and utterly sincere.

“I’m sorry. I am . I would take it back if I could. I’d tell you everything that night. I’d meet you where you were. I’d stay. And if you can’t forgive me, if I lost the chance to try again—I’ll understand.”

The smoke from Nico’s forgotten cigarette unfurls between them in delicate spirals, glowing ember-bright at the tip like a dying star.

The garden lights stutter, catching on fog and silver dust, casting shadows that stretch too long.

And for one suspended heartbeat, the world forgets to breathe.

Before Nico can speak—before Will can break any further—the balcony door slams open.

“Let me at him!” Katie Gardner shrieks from somewhere inside, her voice ragged with fury and vengeance. A beat later, the unmistakable clatter of a plastic chair being hurled echoes through the apartment like a war drum.

“You started it!” Connor Stoll bellows, face flushed and triumphant, glitter smeared across his cheek like battle paint, a feather boa hanging from one arm like a trophy.

“You sparkled the houseplants,” Katie hisses back, brandishing what appears to be a spray bottle labeled Repent! in aggressive Sharpie, nozzle aimed with sniper precision.

Travis, already ducking behind an overturned side table with a bag of popcorn, shouts, “They were thirsty for drama!”

“I will bury you in ethically-sourced compost,” Katie snarls, lunging forward like a wrathful nymph of horticulture.

Silena bursts into view, a shimmer of rhinestones and chiffon, arms straining beneath a sloshing punch bowl shaped like a cauldron. “Children, please!” she pleads, voice fraying at the edges. “We talked about indoor chaos!”

Clarisse, halfway across the room and still in partial armor, is trying to wrestle the spritz bottle away from Katie with the grim determination of someone trained in hand-to-hand combat.

Michael Yew is perched cross-legged on the kitchen counter like a gremlin deity of violence, clapping rhythmically and chanting, “Let. Them. Fight. Let. Them. Fight.”

Charles Beckendorf, caught in the crossfire with a haunted expression and a broken jack-o’-lantern wedged between his hands, looks like a man one cracked gourd away from surrender. “This is not what Demeter would’ve wanted,” he mutters, ducking as glitter explodes across the air like confetti at a particularly cursed funeral.

“Oh yes it is,” snarls Katie.

The smoke machine under the counter hisses again, ghostlike, curling around their ankles like a theatrical exclamation point.

On the balcony, Nico blinks.

So does Will.

Then, slowly, their eyes meet—like maybe the world hasn’t ended after all. Or maybe it just got tired and decided to take five.

And then—like a tide pulling back before the crash—Jason’s expression hardens. The warmth drains from his face, leaving something cold and resolute in its place. “Okay,” he says, voice low and iron-edged. “No. This is getting out of hand.”

He turns to the rest of the Seven, and the shift in him is instant and unmistakable: shoulders squared, spine drawn straight, that calm, commanding stillness of someone who’s carried too much and learned not to drop any of it. “We need to give them space.”

Piper opens her mouth—half-protest, half-apology—but then her eyes land on Nico: stiff, silent, still shrouded in white and shadow, cigarette ash trembling at the tip of his fingers. She swallows whatever argument she had. Her voice comes quieter than usual, almost reverent. “We didn’t mean to cause all this. We just… wanted it to work. We thought we were helping.”

“Yeah,” Leo mutters, his usual spark dimmed, one hand curling at the back of his neck. “Didn’t know it’d go full Greek tragedy on us.”

Hazel steps close to Nico, so gently it barely stirs the air between them. Her fingers brush his wrist—hesitant, hopeful—and then fall away. “I’m sorry,” she says softly. “I should’ve known something was wrong. You don’t disappear like that unless something’s cracked.”

Annabeth, ever the strategist, scans them both like she’s searching for a missing variable, something she missed in the equation. Her shoulders sag. “We messed up,” she admits, eyes shadowed with guilt. “We overstepped. We’re sorry. Really.”

Frank doesn’t speak right away. Just walks past, warm and solid and quiet, and squeezes Will’s shoulder—like it’s an anchor, like it’s a benediction. “Good luck,” he murmurs, and somehow, those two words carry more weight than any of the rest.

Then Lou Ellen and Cecil step forward. Lou doesn’t say anything. She just walks up and pulls Will into her arms, fierce and full of something like defiance, like love wrapped in armor. She hugs him so hard he makes a small, startled wheeze.

Cecil, ever theatrical, presses a glittery kiss to Will’s cheek like he’s marking him for glory or doom. “You’ve got this, Solace,” he whispers. Then, grinning faintly: “Just don’t fuck it up worse.”

Will lets out a breath that sounds almost like a laugh and not at all like relief. “Thanks,” he mutters, voice frayed. “That’s… deeply reassuring.”

And then—mercifully, miraculously—they turn away.

One by one, they’re swallowed back into the noise and color, into the chaos and candlelight and echoes of someone yelling from the kitchen: “Not the haunted fondue set!”

The balcony door clicks shut behind them like the drawing of a curtain. The world exhales.

And suddenly, it’s just the two of them. Will and Nico. Nothing but fog and distance and the sharp, white hush of tension waiting to break.

The haunted garden flickers gold and violet around them, lanterns swinging in the breeze like ghost-lights. Smoke coils from the cigarette, curling between them like a question that no one knows how to ask.

Will’s crown is slipping again, thorns of gold pressing uneven against his temple. His costume glows faintly beneath the party lights—sun-drenched fabric over trembling bones. His heart pounds in his chest, thunderous and traitorous.

He turns to Nico.

And the silence stretches long and wide between them, fragile as spun glass.

There’s nowhere left to run. Nowhere left to hide.

Just the truth. And the boy he might lose to it.

Chapter 34: In My Defense, His Tragic Past Made Him Really Kissable. Featuring: One Angel, One Apology, and a Concerning Amount of Smoke Machine Fog

The door clicks shut behind the last of them with the finality of a gavel. A hush follows in its wake—thick, waiting. The fog coils low around their ankles like smoke from some ancient altar, curling and clinging, as if the night itself is holding its breath. Above them, the haunted garden flickers gold and violet in the shadows—too beautiful, too cursed—like Olympus tried to throw a Halloween party and forgot that mortals might bleed in the aftermath.

Will doesn’t move.

He stands beneath the weight of it all—guilt, glitter, candlelight, silence—his chest rising and falling in shallow breaths that don’t seem to reach his lungs. The gold laurel crown tugs gently at his curls, slipping sideways. His throat feels lined with ash, the kind that gets into your lungs and never really leaves. He can’t meet Nico’s eyes. He can barely meet the night.

Nico leans back against the wrought iron railing like he’s settling into disappointment. His arms cross over his chest—armor or habit, Will isn’t sure—and the pale rustle of his wings is soft but unmistakable, feathers catching the light like frost. The white of his costume glows against the dark, painfully pure. His halo—glowing, ridiculous, holy—tilts like it might fall if this conversation tips one degree further.

He looks away.

“You really thought I’d look down on you,” Nico says. Not a question. Just fact. Just judgment dressed up as truth and left to hang in the air between them like smoke.

Will flinches like the words have weight.

“I didn’t mean—”

“You thought I’d judge you,” Nico continues, and his voice has gone softer now, but it only makes the blade sharper. “That I’d think you were… what? Embarrassing? Poor? Not enough?” He lets out a laugh—bitter, quiet, carved from something older than sarcasm. “Gods. You must think I’m exactly like them.”

Will flinches again, and this time it’s worse, because there’s nowhere left to hide.

“No,” he says, too quickly, too breathlessly. “No, I don’t. That’s not what—Nico, I know you’re not like them. I do. You’re—gods, you’re nothing like them.”

But Nico’s gaze snaps to him then, sharp and cold and glittering with all the pain Will had tried so hard not to cause. His eyes are bright with the kind of anger that feels more like heartbreak, and he speaks like the words are smoke curling from a wound.

“Then why did you assume I’d be just another rich asshole who’d sneer at your apartment or your job or the fact that you couldn’t pay for the wine?”

The question lands like impact. Like gravity suddenly remembered him. Will’s mouth opens, but the words taste too big. Too brittle.

He swallows hard. It doesn’t help.

“Because I’ve never had someone like you look at me the way you did,” he admits, and now his voice cracks again, splintering under its own honesty. “Not with kindness. Not with interest. Not without expecting something back.”

The sentence drags at him—dragging memory, dragging shame.

“And when you paid that bill—so casually, like it was nothing—I just…” He shakes his head, curls falling over his eyes. “I panicked.”

He breathes in sharply. Steadies himself.

“It wasn’t about you. It was about every other time someone with money has looked at me like I was something to pity. Something to rescue. Something small.”

The silence that follows is brutal. Taut as a stretched wire, delicate as glass about to give.

And Nico’s expression shifts—barely—but enough. Enough that Will sees it: the edge of anger curling back, revealing something worse. Something softer.

Hurt, deep and bone-level, blooming like a bruise beneath his ribs.

“I’ve lived in that world my whole life, Will,” Nico says, voice low—steady in the way falling things are steady, in the way old wounds stop bleeding but still ache when it rains. “I didn’t ask for it. I don’t even like it. I’ve spent most of my life trying to stay out of those houses, those rooms, those conversations where people sip wine that costs more than someone’s rent and talk about charity like it’s a photo op.”

The fog moves slowly between them now, curling like breath in cold air. It wraps around their ankles like something alive, like memory, like warning. Will’s golden costume catches the haunted garden light—gold and violet and trembling. The crown on his head tilts again, like it’s tired of pretending.

Will nods, slow and aching.

“I know. I do. I swear, I know you’re not like that. But when you come from nothing, like I did… it gets hard to believe anyone from that world could ever see you without… without seeing your lack.”

The words fall into the space between them like coins into a well—deep, ringing, swallowed by the dark. They’re sharp in the way truth always is, cutting not with malice, but with memory.

“I’m not used to people like you being kind,” Will says, and his voice is barely more than air, barely strong enough to carry the words across the garden.

“And I’m too used to people like you assuming I’m cruel,” Nico says, just as quiet. But his voice holds something under it—a tremor, a softness, a hurt that’s been hiding beneath ice. “But I thought you might be different.”

They stare at each other. Time halts around them.

The haunted garden flickers again, casting Nico’s wings in pale firelight. His white costume glows like moonlight on bone, his halo glinting like some ironic crown. The fog drifts higher, curling around their shoulders like breath held too long.

Will’s voice cracks, gentle now. “You were the first person I wanted to impress so badly I forgot how to breathe.”

Nico blinks once. Then again. His throat moves—slow, deliberate—like he’s trying to swallow something back down before it breaks him open.

“That’s stupid,” he mutters.

Will half-laughs, tired and wrecked. “Yeah. But it’s true.”

Nico exhales smoke like it might carry some of the weight with it. He leans back against the railing, the angel wings on his back shifting slightly in the breeze, stark and white against the night. Will watches him, unsure if he should speak or stay silent, if anything he says could possibly be enough.

And then Nico says, quiet and without looking at him, “You think I belong in that world.”

The words float out soft as breath but land like stones.

Will blinks. “What?”

“That restaurant. The clothes. The car service.” Nico’s voice isn’t angry—just tired. Worn thin around the edges like a well-read page or a song played too often. “The world of pretentious, old money brats who've never had to work for anything.”

“That’s not—” Will begins, startled.

But Nico cuts him off, not harshly, just firmly. The kind of interruption that doesn’t seek to wound, only to be heard. “It’s okay. You’re not the first. You’re not entirely wrong either. I have never had to work like you have. Everything I have is by birthright, legacy. But honestly… sometimes I do feel like an imposter in it, too. I know I’m not who my father wanted me to be. Not first. That was always Bianca, my sister.”

Will goes still. The name lands between them like a lit candle in a dark room—gentle, glowing, untouchable.

“My mother died a few days after I was born,” Nico continues, voice leveled out again, soft and even like he’s walking across ice that hasn’t cracked yet. “She was from an old Italian family. Powerful. Rich in the kind of way that seeps into bone. Everything I know about her comes from her side of the family, the ones I stayed with when I was younger.”

A breeze stirs the fog, curls of it rising like breath from the earth. Smoke from Nico’s long-forgotten cigarette dances with it—ghosts twining through ghosts.

“My father never talks about her,” he says. “He barely even says her name.”

The silence that follows is not empty. It hums.

“And when Bianca died—” His voice falters, and for a second Will sees it all: not the angry, glittering, cigarette-smoking boy with a halo askew and wings folded tight, but the child he once was. Small. Shattered. Still waiting for someone to fix what broke. “It broke something in him. She was supposed to take over the family business. The legacy. Not me. I was never meant to be the one.”

The wings at Nico’s back shiver in the breeze, soft feathers catching the violet light.

“And now—now he acts like I’m just the next best thing. Like he has to make do with me.”

It isn’t self-pity, Will realizes. It’s fact. Heavy and unmoving, the kind of truth that settles in the chest like grief. Nico doesn’t say it for sympathy. He says it because it’s true.

Because it always has been.

“Bianca was everything to me,” he says simply.

The words don’t echo, but they settle. Deep. Heavy. Ancient.

“She was… kind. Fierce. The only person who really understood what it meant to grow up in our house—how quiet it was. How cold. How formal everything felt, like you were always performing.”

Will stays silent, the thud of his heart louder than the bassline thrum from inside. He doesn’t dare move, doesn’t dare interrupt the unspooling of something sacred.

“She used to sneak into my room at night and tell me stories. About the stars, about monsters, about escape. She was the first person who ever told me it was okay to be different. That I didn’t need to be like our father.” Nico’s voice tightens, but he doesn’t stop. “And then she was gone.”

The garden shimmers around them—gold and violet cast over jack-o’-lanterns and ivy, over fog that curls slow as breath. Somewhere inside, the world spins on: laughter, bass, motion, a glittering reminder that time doesn’t pause for pain. That grief is always something you carry alone, even in a crowd.

“It was a camp tradition,” Nico says, quieter now. “Last night of the summer, the older campers would sneak down to the lake. Swim in the dark. It wasn’t sanctioned, but it was tradition. Thalia Grace was there, Jason’s older sister. Zoe Nightshade. And Percy, because even though he wasn't one of the older campers , he was still always in the centre of everything.”

Will’s breath stutters in his chest, sharp and invisible.

“I wasn’t invited,” Nico continues. “I was too young. Bianca said she’d be back before dawn.” A pause, brittle and unbearable. “She wasn’t.”

The air feels colder suddenly. Like the night itself is holding its breath.

Will watches Nico’s hands—still as stone at his sides, elegant and deceptively composed. But his voice is starting to splinter. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just cracked down the middle, like something valuable held too long under pressure.

“She drowned,” Nico says. “Percy was there. He’s this incredible swimmer, everyone knows that. And I—” He cuts himself off, jaw tightening until the line of it could cut glass. “I hated him. For not saving her. For being the one who came back when she didn’t. For surviving. Even though it wasn’t fair.”

Fog curls around Nico’s boots like it’s trying to climb up and wrap around him, obscure the pain etched into the curve of his shoulders, the ghost in his throat.

“And I already had feelings for him,” Nico says. “I thought it was just admiration at first. The way he looked at people. The way people looked at him. But yeah. I liked him. Loved him in some sad, impossible way. Which made the grief and the guilt even worse.”

His voice drops to a whisper, a confession without altar.

“How do you mourn your sister and crave the boy who didn’t save her in the same breath?”

The question hangs there between them, raw and unanswerable.

And Will—aching, reverent, helpless in his golden costume and crooked crown—feels something inside him crack open too.

Will doesn’t have an answer. Just the ache in his ribs, the press of a truth too big for words.

Nico doesn’t expect one.

“And then Hazel arrived,” he says, his voice quieter now, like memory has drawn him into a darker room inside himself. “Her mother died. My father took her in. Brought her to L.A. to live with us.”

“You didn’t know about her?” Will whispers, almost afraid to breathe.

“No,” Nico says, flat and unflinching. “Not until the car pulled up outside.”

The fog curls tighter around them, like even the air is leaning in.

“She was born eleven months after me,” Nico continues. “My father decided the best way to deal with my mother’s death was to fall into the arms of another woman on a business trip to New Orleans.” He says it with the smooth, practiced bitterness of someone who’s rehearsed the line a hundred times. “I didn’t know she existed until she stepped into the house that still smelled like Bianca. She was this… wide-eyed stranger with curls and questions and no idea who I was.”

The halo above his head flickers faintly as he speaks, casting him in flickering shadow and light. A boy made of smoke and ash and inheritance.

There’s no anger in his voice now. No sharp edges. Just the flat weight of grief left too long in the attic. Dusted off only when it hurts too much to ignore.

“I was awful to her, at first,” he says. “I thought—what kind of man fathers a second child and doesn’t tell anyone? I thought Hazel was the replacement. I thought she was proof that my father was already trying to forget Bianca. To fill the space she left behind.” He draws in a breath like it might steady him, but it trembles on the way out. “And I couldn’t let that happen.”

Will’s chest tightens around the silence that follows, breath caught somewhere between sorrow and reverence.

“But now?” he asks, voice raw.

“I love her,” Nico says softly. “Like I didn’t think I’d be able to love anyone again. She’s my sister. Not just by blood—but in all the ways that matter. She helped me breathe again. Helped me find my way back to camp. Back to myself. But it took time.”

He says it like a confession. Or a promise.

Will stays quiet. The garden shifts and shivers around them. The fog presses closer, as if to bear witness.

Nico isn’t done.

“So yeah,” he says, eyes tilted toward the dark sky above them like it might hold a softer truth than the one between them. “Sometimes I spend my father’s money just to spite him. I wear the expensive shit. I let him pay for my tuition. I book dinners I know he’d scoff at. Because if I’m going to be his disappointment, I might as well enjoy it.”

His halo glows faintly as he speaks, pale against the inky night. The wind stirs his white shirt, rustles the soft beat of his wings, and Will wants—achingly—to reach for him. To thread his fingers through the space between them and say something that could unburn this bridge. But all he can do is stand still, every part of him aching with the urge to hold on.

“I don’t blame you for thinking I’m part of that world,” Nico adds, and now his voice is lower, raw at the edges. “Sometimes I think I am, too. But it’s never really fit. It’s just... armor.”

He exhales slowly, smoke curling from his lips like a secret, and when his eyes finally meet Will’s again—gods, it guts him. Because the pain there isn’t loud. It’s quiet. Deep. The kind of hurt that’s learned how to keep itself contained.

“Everything about my life is someone else’s idea of legacy,” Nico says, almost like he’s confessing it to the night itself. “But none of it feels like mine.”

The garden flickers in gold and violet, shadows dancing behind them like ghosts come to listen. Somewhere in the distance, the party thrums on. Laughter. Music. The faint pulse of joy they’ve been too far from for too long.

But here on the balcony, there’s only this: two boys in costume, glittering like contradictions beneath a haunted sky. Both of them haunted in different ways. Both of them learning that hurt doesn’t cancel out hurt. That pain doesn’t make space—it makes mirrors.

Nico’s eyes flick back to the skyline, like the truth might be easier to bear if it’s spoken to glass and distance instead of someone who might flinch beneath it. The halo above his head glints faintly in the garden lights, casting pale rings against his dark hair—ironic, unearthly, like some god had a twisted sense of humor and made him divine just to make the fall hurt more.

His voice, when it comes, is quiet. Measured. Like he’s walking barefoot across a tightrope strung between past and present, every step a memory that might give way.

Will nods, throat tight, the weight of everything hanging between them like fog thickening before a storm. Nico’s costume—too white, too clean—glows softly in the violet light, angelic in a way that feels cruel. A boy dressed like a blessing, sculpted from grief and ash and inheritance. A boy who has never belonged to himself.

“I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by silence, Will,” Nico says. “Silence around my mother. Silence around Bianca. Around my feelings. Around Hazel, and Percy, and my father’s stupid empire of urns and heirlooms. So when you didn’t speak—when you ran—I didn’t just feel abandoned. I felt erased.”

The words land like thunder, soft but shattering.

Will steps forward instinctively, the distance between them shrinking like a wound finally beginning to close. He doesn’t touch him—not yet—but the ache in his chest grows sharp and urgent, the kind that says I should have never let you go.

Will doesn’t speak, not at first. He just closes the space between them until they’re standing shoulder to shoulder, breathing the same bruised air. The fog stirs at their ankles like it, too, has been waiting for this moment to soften.

“I didn’t want to erase you,” he says finally, his voice no louder than a breath, no steadier than a prayer. “I ran because I didn’t think I was enough. But I’ve never wanted to make you feel small, or unseen. Gods, Nico, you’re the only thing I haven’t been able to look away from.”

Nico blinks slowly, the glow of the halo catching in his lashes. He doesn’t move—but he doesn’t pull away either.

There’s a pause, long and aching.

“I hated feeling like I scared you,” Nico says, quieter now, not angry—just hollowed out. “I’ve spent so long building walls people wouldn’t try to climb, and you—” his voice catches, “—you were the first one I wanted to let in. And when you left, I thought I’d been stupid for hoping.”

Will’s heart cracks open. He lifts a hand—carefully, so carefully—and brushes his fingers against Nico’s sleeve, a touch so tentative it could be mistaken for breeze.

“You weren’t stupid,” he says. “You were brave.”

And then, like gravity has finally given its blessing, Nico leans in.

Not much. Just enough that their foreheads almost touch, breath mingling. The garden lights flicker gently behind them, gold catching in the curve of Nico’s cheekbone, white fabric glowing like myth. There’s still tension between them, but it’s changed shape now—no longer a battlefield, but a bridge.

Will’s fingers find Nico’s hand, and this time, Nico doesn’t flinch. He threads their fingers together like it’s instinct.

“You scare me,” Will says softly. “Because you make me want to stay. To try. To believe someone could actually want me back.”

“I do,” Nico says, and it’s not dramatic. Not even emphatic. Just true. It hums between them like a heartbeat. “I want you. Even when you’re terrified. Even when you fuck up.”

Will exhales, a trembling thing. “And I want you. Even when you’re wearing angel wings and looking like a divine punishment.”

Nico’s laugh breaks the heaviness like sunlight through ash. It’s small. But it’s real.

“Don’t get used to it,” he mutters, cheeks pinking just slightly. “This is definitely Piper’s fault.”

Will smiles, then, full and aching. “I think I might owe Piper a thank you.”

There’s still so much to talk about—so much hurt to untangle. But for now, for this single, fleeting breath of a moment, the weight eases. They lean into each other like the world might be willing to hold them both. Two boys lit in fog and ruin, forgiven in candlelight. Angels and cowards. Survivors and almosts.

And maybe, just maybe, something new beginning.

They stand like that for a moment—still joined by the hand, still close enough to share breath and silence—until the fog curls past them again, and the sound of distant party chaos drifts through the balcony door.

Nico sighs, low and dry. “Gods. Our friends are menaces.”

Will lets out a laugh that’s more exhale than sound. “You think?”

“They plotted this entire night like it was a Greek tragedy.” Nico lifts his free hand and gestures to the cursed balcony garden. “And we’re apparently the leads.”

“I feel like someone should’ve warned me before I walked into Act Three.”

“Piper definitely tried to cast me,” Nico mutters. “Told me I had the ‘face of a man with secrets. ’ I assumed she was trying to flirt.”

Will huffs a small, amazed laugh. “That does sound like her.”

There’s a pause. Then Nico, with uncharacteristic sheepishness, adds, “I dragged Jason and Leo to that Macbeth play because I knew Lou Ellen was your friend, and I thought you might be there. That’s the only reason I sat through three hours of plaid and death and a fog machine that gave me a migraine.”

Will turns to look at him fully, eyebrows raised. “You came to a cursed student production of Scottish tragedy for me, I knew it.”

Nico shrugs. “What can I say. I was in my hopeless romantic era.”

Will squeezes his hand, eyes soft. “So you’re saying the haunted dagger was your love language.”

“I’m saying I suffered for you.”

Will’s smile breaks wide and brilliant.

“And the bookstore?” he asks. “You really were just ‘passing by’ all those times you dropped in?”

Nico rolls his eyes, though there’s the faintest flush on his cheeks. “Annabeth found a copy of the staff rota lying on a trolley, she brought it to dinner like it was the holy grail. I might have memorised it.”

Will groans, delighted and embarrassed. “Gods, and I thought I was the one being obvious.”

“You were,” Nico says immediately. “You are. Everyone knew.”

Will covers his face with their joined hands. “Cecil and Lou Ellen have been making fun of me since freshman year. Every time you walked into a room I apparently looked like someone had just summoned Aphrodite herself.”

Nico hums. “To be fair, I was usually brooding in a corner with a black coffee. It’s an aesthetic.”

“It’s unfair is what it is,” Will mutters. “You—just exist. And my brain goes blank.”

Nico leans in, voice a little softer now. “So all those times I caught you staring…”

“Unintentional,” Will lies.

“Sure.”

Will meets his gaze, cheeks flushed. “Okay. Maybe a little intentional.”

They both laugh this time, low and quiet, wrapped in the strange safety that comes after the storm—after the confessions, the grief, the fire and wreckage. It’s easier to smile now. To breathe. To be close without flinching.

“Gods,” Will says, pressing their foreheads together with a carefulness that feels like reverence. “They’ve all been playing matchmaker for months, haven’t they?”

Nico nods solemnly. “Piper threatened to throw me off the roof if I didn’t at least talk to you.”

Will grins. “Cecil drew a flowchart.”

Nico looks mildly horrified. “Of what?”

“Possible scenarios in which we finally get our shit together. There were diagrams.”

“I kind of want to see it.”

“You don’t.”

They laugh again, the kind that leaves them leaning into each other like it’s inevitable.

And maybe it is.

Nico shifts just enough to look at Will more fully, their hands still twined, their foreheads nearly touching.

“So,” he says, tone light now, teasing like wind through chimes, “you’ve really had a crush on me since freshman year?”

Will groans immediately. “Don’t say it like that.”

Nico tilts his head. “Like what? ‘Crush’? ‘Freshman year’? ‘On me’?”

Will tries to hide behind his hand. “Gods, kill me.”

Nico only grins—small, rare, real. “That’s a long time to suffer in silence.”

“I didn’t suffer in silence,” Will mutters. “I suffered with Lou Ellen and Cecil narrating every look I ever gave you like it was a nature documentary.”

“I’m flattered,” Nico says, still quietly laughing. “Truly. All that time and you never said anything?”

Will looks up at him, eyes golden in the haunted garden light. “Would you have believed me if I had?”

Nico hesitates, then shrugs. “Probably not.”

There’s a beat—then Nico ducks his head slightly, the halo casting a pale glow across his dark curls. “But I did start liking you last winter.”

Will blinks. “Wait, what?”

Nico nods, suddenly fascinated by the laces on Will’s boots. “It was snowing. You were on the quad. You and Lou Ellen and Cecil were having this chaotic snowball fight, screaming like children. Everyone else was grumbling about the cold and finals and their seasonal depression, and you were out there—glowing.”

Will’s breath catches.

“You were laughing,” Nico goes on, soft now, almost shy. “Hair sticking to your face. Your nose was red. Lou hit you in the ear with a snowball and you yelled like it was a personal attack. And even though everything around you was white and cold and bitter and bland… you were still the sun.”

Will stares at him, mouth parted, stunned speechless.

“You always have been,” Nico says. “Even when I didn’t want to admit it. Even when I told myself I’d never—” He stops. Swallows. “Well. You know.”

Will’s heart stumbles a beat.

“You saw me,” he says quietly, “then?”

Nico nods. “I did.”

Will laughs—soft, startled. “I thought you didn’t even know I existed.”

“Oh, I knew,” Nico says, giving his hand a gentle squeeze. “It was hard to miss the golden boy who kept making the air feel warmer whenever he walked in.”

Will’s cheeks flush. “You’re… you’re kind of good at this.”

“What, flirting?”

“No, emotionally devastating confessions disguised as compliments.”

Nico smirks. “Must be the wings.”

Will leans in, forehead brushing Nico’s again. “It’s definitely the wings.”

Will laughs under his breath, still blushing, still not quite looking at Nico straight on. “I can’t believe you saw me like that. In the snow.”

“You were hard to miss,” Nico says with a shrug, like it’s not still echoing in his chest every time he thinks about it. “You’re loud when you’re happy.”

Will smiles—crooked and private—and he feels something flutter traitorously in his chest.

“And for what it’s worth,” Nico adds, lips curling slightly, “you’re not the only one who got teased for harboring a years-long crush.”

Will arches an eyebrow. “No?”

Nico shakes his head, expression dry. “The rest of the Seven figured it out in about two weeks. Jason said I started glaring at people more than usual whenever they flirted with you, and that’s when he knew.”

Will lets out a strangled sound. “Gods.”

“Piper called it before I even admitted it to myself,” Nico continues, clearly enjoying this now. “Hazel made a collage about it in her sketchbook. Annabeth tried to make a list of ‘Signs Nico di Angelo Has a Crush.’ It was deeply embarrassing.”

Will snorts, covering his face. “Oh my gods, was that why they kept calling me ‘sunshine’ every time I walked past?”

“Yeah,” Nico says, grinning now. “That wasn’t subtle. I told them all to stop, obviously.”

“They didn’t.”

“No. They did not.”

Will lowers his hand and gives Nico a look that’s half fond, half accusatory. “And the first party this year? The one where I spilled my drink on you and wanted to die?”

Nico chuckles softly. “They dragged me there because they heard you were coming. Percy told me he’d buy me dinner if I managed to have a conversation with you.”

“Oh my gods.”

“I didn’t get dinner, by the way. I got doused in cheap rum and cranberry juice.”

Will winces. “That wasn’t my finest moment.”

“I didn’t mind,” Nico says, softer again. “You looked so horrified. But then we talked, and it was the first time you looked at me like I wasn’t terrifying.”

“I never thought you were terrifying,” Will murmurs. “Just... sharp around the edges. Like a star.”

Nico breathes in sharply, caught off guard. Then he shakes his head, smile pulling at the corners of his mouth again. “You’re ridiculous.”

“You like that about me,” Will says.

Nico considers it, tilting his head. The halo catches the garden lights again, faint and glowing like a promise.

“I do.”

Nico is standing so close now that Will can see every fleck of color in his eyes—molten, shifting, unknowable. The soft light from the haunted garden plays against the planes of his face, casting him in gold and shadow, like something sacred, like something stolen from myth.

Will feels dizzy with it.

And yet—he doesn’t feel nervous anymore.

Not like before. Not the breathless, panicked fluttering of what if he doesn’t like me back?

Because now he knows. Nico did like him back. Still does, if the glint in his eyes and the subtle upward twitch of his mouth mean anything.

“Do you always show up to parties dressed as the literal embodiment of temptation?” Will asks, voice low, teasing.

Nico’s smile curves slow and deliberate. “Only when I’m trying to seduce someone.”

Will’s breath hitches, but he covers it with a grin. “That so?”

Nico shrugs, wings rustling faintly behind him. “You tell me.”

There’s something electric in the space between them now—no longer brittle, no longer uncertain. Just charged. Waiting.

Will lets his gaze drop to Nico’s mouth for a second too long and thinks, Gods, I want to kiss him.

He wants to kiss him so badly it hurts. He wants to taste whatever cigarette smoke and mint and haunted house vodka Nico’s lips might hold.

But—

Is it too much?

The night’s held so much already. Confessions and grief and anger and the ache of too many ghosts. Maybe a kiss is too much weight to add to it all.

But Nico’s standing there in all white, halo still just a little off-center, watching Will like he’s waiting.

And then—without fully realizing he’s doing it—Will reaches out, gentle and deliberate, fingers brushing the fabric of Nico’s sleeve. Just that. Just enough to feel him.

Nico doesn’t flinch. In fact, he leans ever so slightly into the contact.

His voice, when he speaks, is soft as starlight. “You’re not nervous anymore.”

Will shakes his head, eyes still on where their hands almost touch. “Not about you.”

“Good,” Nico murmurs. “I like this version of you.”

Will looks up, and their eyes catch like kindling.

He’s so close. So painfully beautiful. And Will is still trembling inside with all the maybe and almost of it—but his body knows what it wants. What it’s been wanting since freshman year.

He just doesn’t know if Nico wants it too. Not yet . Not here .

So instead, he smiles—slow and golden and utterly himself—and says, “Tell me something else you haven’t told anyone.”

Nico arches an eyebrow. “You’re greedy.”

“I’m curious.”

“I’m dangerous.”

Will’s grin widens. “You’re flirting.”

Nico tilts his head, eyes glittering. “Maybe.”

Nico tilts his head just slightly, the halo above him catching the haunted garden lights, painting him in silver and divinity. He studies Will for a long moment—long enough that the quiet becomes weighty, suspended like a held breath between them.

And then, with a voice like dusk and thunder, he says, “I’ve never wanted to kiss someone as much as I want to kiss you right now.”

Will’s breath vanishes. Like it’s been stolen from his lungs and tucked between Nico’s fingers, curled there with every other impossible thing.

The moment stretches—so full of tension it could tear.

Nico doesn’t move. Doesn’t reach.

He just waits .

And gods, Will—

He steps forward like it’s instinct, like gravity. Like he’s been orbiting Nico di Angelo for years and didn’t even know it until now. His hand rises, barely there, brushing Nico’s jaw with trembling reverence.

“You can,” Will whispers, voice barely more than breath. “If you still want to.”

Nico doesn’t answer. Not with words.

He leans in slow, slower than anything has ever moved in Will’s life, like he’s still asking permission even now. Like he’s letting Will say no, even though the universe is already tilting toward yes .

And then—

Their lips meet.

Soft at first. Careful. A question suspended in breath and silence.

But the second Will exhales—truly exhales—like he’s been underwater this whole time and only now breaching the surface, something shifts. His hand slips to the back of Nico’s neck, thumb brushing the delicate ridge of his spine, and Nico lets out a sound—small, involuntary—that lights Will up from the inside.

The kiss deepens like a wave crashing over both of them.

It’s not perfect. It’s not practiced.

It’s messy, a little wild. Desperate.

But gods, it’s theirs.

It tastes like everything unspoken, everything afraid to be said out loud—grief and yearning, apology and promise. Smoke and starlight. Sunshine and shadow.

Nico’s fingers fist in the gold-trimmed front of Will’s costume, knuckles white, dragging him closer like he’s terrified Will might vanish again. Like if he doesn’t hold on tight enough, Will might dissolve into sunlight and slip between his fingers.

Will clings back. One hand tangled in Nico’s hair—dark and glitter-streaked, soft under his fingertips—the other at Nico’s waist, thumb pressing against warm skin just beneath the hem of his shirt. He kisses Nico like he’s starved for it. Like this is something holy, and he’s long since stopped believing in anything except this moment.

Nico is the one who breaks the breathless stillness, pressing forward, backing Will into the ivy-draped wall of the balcony. The fog curls at their feet like it’s blessing the altar, and the jack-o’-lanterns glow like votives around them.

Will gasps into Nico’s mouth when his back hits the wall, and Nico kisses down the corner of his mouth, the edge of his jaw, like he’s been dreaming of this, like he needs to map every inch of him with his teeth.

Will’s knees nearly give. His fingers clutch at Nico’s shirt, helpless. Dazzled.

“You’re really bad at not making me fall for you,” he breathes, dizzy with want.

Nico smiles against his throat—sharp, smug, almost feral. “Then stop resisting.”

Will tilts his head down and kisses him again like that’s the only answer he needs. Like maybe if they kiss long enough, hard enough, everything that’s ever broken will stitch itself back together.

Will doesn’t remember the exact moment he stopped thinking and just let himself feel.

Maybe it was when Nico kissed him like he wanted to carve the moment into stone.

Maybe it was when he felt the tremble in Nico’s hands and realized it matched the quake in his own.

Or maybe it’s now—when Will runs his palms down Nico’s arms, feeling lean muscle shift beneath the soft fabric of his sleeves, strength curled into every line of him—and blurts, breathlessly, “Okay, those Pilates classes are clearly working.”

Nico huffs a laugh against Will’s mouth, teeth grazing his bottom lip like a promise and a warning. “You’re an idiot,” he whispers, and then kisses him again—fiercer this time, rough around the edges, like he’s been waiting too long to hold back.

Will doesn’t stand a chance.

Nico’s hands are in his hair now, tugging gently but with intent, pulling his face up just enough to bare the long line of his throat. Will gasps, spine arching, and Nico takes that as invitation, pressing kisses down his neck—open-mouthed, hot, dizzying—until Will is clinging to him like gravity’s stopped working altogether.

“I’ve thought about this, dreamt about this,” Nico murmurs against his pulse, voice gone ragged, reverent. “So many times, Solace. You have no idea.”

Will shudders, fingers curling into Nico’s shirt like he might disintegrate otherwise. “Gods,” he whispers. “Say that again.”

Nico bites his collarbone instead, not hard enough to hurt, just enough to brand.

Their bodies are flush now, heat blooming in every place they touch. Nico’s hands are greedy, insistent—gripping Will’s hips, sliding under the hem of his costume top, fingers skating across bare skin like he’s trying to memorize him by touch alone. Will’s own hands have found their way to Nico’s chest, splayed flat, feeling the steady thrum of his heartbeat, the rise and fall of breath that falters every time their lips part and crash again.

Nico makes a sound—low and guttural—when Will sinks his teeth lightly into his lower lip, and it lights Will up like kindling catching fire.

And gods, Nico.

He’s a vision—an angel torn straight from some fevered myth, lips bitten red, hair mussed where Will’s fingers have raked through it. His shirt is rumpled and open at the collar, revealing flashes of collarbone that Will wants to kiss until Nico forgets every language he’s ever learned. The white of his costume should make him look holy, untouchable. But the way the fabric clings to his flushed skin, the glint of the silver chain at his throat, the tilt of his askew halo—now tangled in his curls like a crown of sacrilege—it’s everything but holy.

He looks like lust incarnate. Like a sin waiting to happen.

Will’s breath stutters—catches somewhere between a gasp and a prayer—as Nico presses in, slow and deliberate, until their thighs align like puzzle pieces found at last. The contact sends a shiver through him, electric and excruciating. That low, aching heat in Will’s stomach sharpens, coils tighter, becomes something molten. Something dangerous.

Every brush of skin, every shift of fabric, is a spark striking against flint. A whisper of combustion. Will feels it everywhere—in his fingertips, in the hollow of his spine, in the blood thrumming behind his ears like war drums.

And then Nico looks at him.

Gods.

Those eyes—dark as obsidian, storm-lit, full of heat and hunger—pin him in place. Hooded and heavy, but soft underneath, impossibly so, like candlelight flickering behind cathedral glass. There’s something in them that devastates Will. Something that says I want and I’ll take and I’ll stay, if you let me.

It steals the breath from his lungs.

Nico’s gaze drags down to Will’s lips and lingers there, and Will swears the world tilts. The air around them thickens, hums with the gravity of almost. He’s never felt so tethered to a single moment. Never felt so close to unraveling.

They don’t hear the door creak open.

They don’t hear the shuffle of boots and heels on tile, or the whisper of chiffon and armor brushing past the threshold.

What they do hear—cutting clean through the slow burn of their kiss—is a shriek.

“Finally!” Piper cries, her voice echoing like a firework, loud enough to shake the plastic skeleton on its hook. “Took you long enough!”

Will flinches like he’s been tasered. Nico groans into his shoulder.

“Oh my gods,” Leo cackles, eyes wide with glee as he staggers forward in his glittering cast. “They’re attached. Look at that grip. That’s not romance—that’s clinging for dear life.”

Percy stumbles in behind him, clutching a slice of haunted pizza. “We were gone ten minutes,” he mutters, eyes fixed on the scene like it’s a wildlife documentary. “And this is what we come back to? Tongue on the balcony?”

Jason stares at the sky like it personally betrayed him. “I’m going to need bleach for my brain.”

“I—I’m not looking!” Hazel squeaks, shielding her eyes with one gloved hand while blindly searching for Frank with the other. “Nico, I’m your sister. I shouldn’t have to witness this.”

Frank pats her head like one does a small, deeply confused woodland creature. “I mean, I guess we are happy for them?”

“I told you!” Piper gasps, hands clasped over her heart like she’s officiating. “The balcony is magic. I’m a genius.”

Behind her, Annabeth sighs like she’s aged five years and glares at the tinsel-draped skeleton still twerking in the wind. “I knew this party would end in somebody making out or catching fire. Should’ve bet money.”

Will and Nico stumble apart—but not far apart, still dazed, Nico’s collar rumpled and wings slightly askew, Will’s laurel crown hanging sideways like a halo on holiday. They’re both flushed, breathless, slightly wrecked.

Will opens his mouth to explain. To apologize. To melt into the ground and become one with the cobwebs.

Lou Ellen collapses dramatically onto a patio chair. “And you all doubted our matchmaking skills.”

Cecil raises his solo cup in salute. “Mission very accomplished.”

Hazel, still half-peeking through her fingers, edges toward the door. “Is it safe now? Are they—like—done?”

“They’re never going to be done,” Piper mutters, sipping from a skull-shaped cocktail glass. “Look at them. That’s not a kiss, that’s a binding ritual.”

Annabeth points at the both of them with her drink. “If this implodes, we’re drawing battle lines. No one gets to be Switzerland.”

Leo’s already pulling out his phone. “Do you think it’s too soon to update the group chat name to ‘Sunshine and Doom’?”

Jason covers his face with one hand and mutters, “I hate all of you.”

Nico, deadpan, tugs his shirt back into place. “We were having a moment.”

“And we were giving you space,” Percy counters, chewing his crust. “It’s not our fault you were basically at third base not the balcony.”

Will makes a sound somewhere between a sigh and a whimper. “Can the floor open up and swallow me, please?”

Cecil pats his shoulder. “Sorry, no. This balcony is structurally sound. I checked.”

“You’re all menaces,” Nico says dryly.

“You love us,” Piper beams.

“Unfortunately,” Nico mutters, before glancing sideways at Will.

Despite the interruption, despite the mortifying exposure, they’re still close. Still radiant in the flickering light. And as the others bicker and laugh and continue being the disasters they are, Will reaches for Nico’s hand again.

Annabeth, ever the strategist, claps her hands once and declares, “Alright. Emotional crisis averted. Kiss secured. Now let’s go appreciate the sheer effort Silena put into themed snacks and weaponized centerpieces.”

Piper grins, looping her arm through Hazel’s. “We earned this party. Let’s go make questionable decisions under mood lighting.”

Percy sighs in exaggerated relief. “Thank the gods. I was worried the haunted fondue would go uneaten.”

Leo, already halfway through the door, yells back, “Dibs on the skull-shaped brownies and emotional recovery karaoke!”

Even Jason cracks a smile before he slips back into the apartment. “Let’s go pretend we’re normal college students again.”

Will barely has time to breathe before Nico’s lips are on his again—urgent, consuming, the kind of kiss that feels like it’s chasing down every second they lost. Will groans softly into it, hands dragging over Nico’s waist, up his spine, like he could memorize him by touch alone.

When they finally pull apart, Will’s breathing hard, forehead resting against Nico’s, grinning like a man who’s just discovered sunlight. “You know,” he murmurs, voice warm and teasing, “you said you used to dream about this.”

Nico groans immediately and buries his face in Will’s chest, wings shuddering with embarrassment. “I hate myself.”

“No, no, no—absolutely not,” Will says, laughing as he presses a kiss to the top of Nico’s head. “You don’t get to say something that devastatingly hot and not elaborate.”

Nico mutters something that sounds like a curse in Italian.

Will tilts his head, delighted. “What was that?”

“I said I fantasized about kissing you in the stacks at the bookstore,” Nico grits out. “Okay? Like, aggressively. Against the mythology section.”

Will nearly chokes. “Oh my gods.”

“You wore those stupid, ugly cargo shorts one shift,” Nico hisses into his shirt. “And this horrible green sweater. And I stood there for ten minutes pretending to look at Homer while mentally undressing you.”

Will’s jaw drops. “The green sweater? Nico, that sweater had a hole in the armpit!”

“Didn’t matter,” Nico mumbles. “You bent down to shelve something and I saw the curve of your back and lost all cognitive function.”

Will’s laugh is wrecked and giddy, his cheeks flushed pink. “You fantasized about me while reading The Iliad?”

“I’m gay, European, dramatic, and repressed,” Nico groans. “It was inevitable.”

They’re both breathless now, clinging to each other in the cool haunted air, halo crooked, gold leaf glittering faintly in Nico’s hair.

Will presses a kiss to his jaw. “You’re ridiculous. And also—you have no idea how hard it is not to drag you back into the garden and ruin your angel costume.”

Nico hums, eyes fluttering half-closed. “Who said I want you to resist?”

They kiss again—hungry and soft and maddeningly slow—and it’s not until the door creaks open behind them with a very pointed, “Are you two done yet?” from Cecil, that they break apart, panting and laughing.

“Coming!” Will calls, lacing their fingers together as they step into the warmth and noise of the party, Nico glowing beside him like sin dressed in white.

The door swings open, and the noise swallows them whole—laughter like champagne fizz, music pulsing like a second heartbeat, the scent of wax and smoke and spilled cider thick in the air. Will steps forward first, still dazed, still reeling, like he’s just survived a storm and come out sun-drenched on the other side. Nico follows, quiet and watchful, their hands brushing once, then clasping like gravity demands it.

The party spins around them—Cecil chasing Leo with a glow stick sword, Piper reapplying lipstick in a cracked mirror, Silena dramatically announcing a tarot reading in the haunted corner. Somewhere, Frank is dancing with a jack-o’-lantern, and Lou Ellen is using a fog machine as a microphone.

But Will only sees Nico.

Nico, still aglow in white and shadow, lips red from kissing, halo askew, wings fluttering like breath. Nico, who stood in a garden made of ghosts and told the truth. Who cracked his chest open like a mausoleum door and let Will step inside.

And Will—touched by sunlight and ruin, glittering in gold and shame and love—knows, suddenly and certainly, that this is what survival looks like. Not quiet. Not clean. But chaotic and real and burning at the edges.

He squeezes Nico’s hand.

And somewhere between the haunted balcony garden and the warmth of the dance floor, somewhere between heartbreak and forgiveness, they begin again.

Together.

Notes:

To everyone who’s stuck with this fic through the angst, the pain, the haunted garden tension, and the glow-in-the-dark shot glasses—thank you. Truly. From the depths of my dramatic, slow-burn loving heart.

I know things between Will and Nico are far from over. There are still conversations to be had, boundaries to be built, soft spaces to be created where they can learn to feel safe with one another. They need to learn how to hold their feelings without letting them explode—or vanish in a cloud of cigarette smoke and glitter.

But this kiss… this felt like the right moment. (Well. I hope it was the right moment. We might be 201,097 words into this emotional epic, but a tiny voice in my head was still like, “Wait… is it too soon for them to kiss??” The slow burn author’s eternal curse.)

Anyway, I hope it made your heart flutter. Or cry. Or both.

And don’t worry—the story isn’t over yet. We’re only just arriving at Halloween, and my current plan is to take us all the way to New Year’s Eve. So there’s still so much more to come: more chaos, more party catastrophes, more over-involved friends, more healing, and most importantly—Will and Nico learning how to be together. How to be soft and whole and real with each other.

Thank you again for reading. Truly. You’re the reason I keep going. <3

Chapter 35: Spoiler: The Real Horror Was Breakfast with the Friends Who Treat My Love Life Like a Group Project (Also, Nico Di Angelo Holds My Hand and I Momentarily Transcend This Mortal Plane)

Notes:

hello again, besties. it’s been a while! life has been doing its thing (read: work deadlines, social plans, and the relentless spring of time), so editing took a little longer than usual. these two chapters were technically one once upon a time, but it got too long because apparently I cannot write a brief breakfast scene without accidentally including 14 characters, 7 subplots, and at least one moment of emotional devastation.

so! we’ve now got two chapters:

chaotic breakfast with nico, the seven, and the disaster trio (ft. syrup, sarcasm, and hand-holding)

a softer, quieter rooftop moment for solangelo, heavily inspired by “All I’ve Ever Known” from Hadestown—which, yes, is now on the fic playlist. (no, it’s not foreshadowing anything bad. let the gays have nice things!)

these chapters needed a lot of revision (the first drafts were basically held together with vibes and comma splices), and honestly I’m still not fully happy with them—but at some point you just have to let the pigeons fly.

thank you so much for all the love on previous chapters—the kudos, the comments, the unhinged screaming, the emotional analysis essays—I’ve read and adored every single one, and I am working my way through replies! I appreciate you all more than I can say. thank you for being here, truly.

Brooklyn smells like glitter, fog, and decisions no one regrets quite yet.

The sun is only beginning to scrape the skyline, throwing everything into bruised lavender light. It’s the kind of morning that feels more like an afterimage—soft and half-real. The city hums faintly beneath them as the group staggers out of Silena Beauregard’s building like survivors of some beautiful disaster.

Will is still wearing his golden laurel crown, crooked and clinging for dear life. His cloak is damp at the hem and glittered with party fallout. Nico walks beside him, angelic in ruined white, halo tilted like it, too, had a long night. His wings rustle faintly with every step, more myth than costume. They're not touching. But every breath between them crackles.

Behind them: absolute chaos.

Percy is giving Leo a piggyback ride because Leo claims his legs are "purely decorative now" and he is “no longer burdened by mortal locomotion.” Percy looks like he regrets every life decision that led to this moment, especially when Leo starts narrating their journey like it’s a National Geographic special on migratory drama queens.

“I’m ascending,” Leo announces. “Carry me to Elysium, son of Poseidon.”

“You weigh like, negative pounds,” Percy grunts. “And somehow still too much.”

Piper is wearing sunglasses that definitely belong to someone else—possibly Silena, possibly a minor god—and sipping coffee she absolutely did not pay for. She’s also stolen someone’s scarf, has glitter in her eyebrows, and is reapplying lip gloss like a woman unbothered by the laws of man or Olympus.

Annabeth is stalking ahead like she’s planning a lawsuit against the gods and everyone who ever tried to make her socialize. Her hair is still in a perfect braid. Her eyeliner is sharp enough to gut a monster. She’s muttering something under her breath that sounds suspiciously like Ancient Greek curses aimed at Leo.

Jason looks like a Roman statue that’s been dragged through a rave. There’s confetti in his armor. One of his contact lenses is missing. He’s still somehow regal, in a “this preator just survived a club brawl and wants to speak to the Senate ” kind of way.

Frank is eating a granola bar with the quiet focus of a man surviving wartime. His tactical vest is now partially zipped over a t-shirt that says “Bear With Me.” No one knows where he got it. He does not remember acquiring it. He’s too busy trying to calculate how many hours of sleep it will take to forget the previous twelve.

Hazel, barefoot and dreamy, is singing a hymn to the sunrise in Latin and doesn’t remember learning it. She’s twirling in slow circles, her velvet and gold costume flaring like a spell. There’s a single vine wrapped around her ankle. It is unclear if it’s a decoration or if it grew there during the party.

Cecil is still in full Hermes regalia, half of it stolen from a window display. He’s wearing aviators over his regular glasses, his cape is dragging through the gutter, and he’s juggling three travel mugs of mystery liquid while quoting Shakespeare in increasingly unhinged voices.

Lou Ellen is cradling a jack-o’-lantern like a baby and muttering something about performance art. She’s insisting it represents “the cyclical decay of capitalism” and also maybe “Halloween as a construct.” One of her boots is missing. She refuses to elaborate.

Will is pretty sure none of them are legally allowed to be out in public.

But it’s early morning in New York, and for once, the city is quiet enough to hold them gently. And Nico—beside him, quiet and bright in his angel costume, dark curls tousled from sleep-deprivation and divine chaos—smiles the smallest smile.

Will thinks: Maybe I survived this night just to see that.

“I’m dying,” Leo moans from Percy’s back. “Leave me here. Tell the autopsy guy I died fabulous.”

“You’re fine,” Percy says, breathless. “You’re barely bleeding.”

“I think the glitter’s in my bloodstream,” Leo whispers.

Nico doesn’t look back. “Then die quietly.”

Will stifles a smile.

They find a 24-hour diner glowing like a liminal beacon between last night and the rest of their lives—its neon sign flickering faintly in the pale, uncaring light of dawn. The menus are sticky, the linoleum floors hum underfoot, and the fluorescent bulbs overhead cast everyone in a strange half-mortal glow, like they’ve just crawled out of the underworld and decided to order pancakes.

The hostess takes one look at them—all wings and glitter and supernatural exhaustion—and doesn’t even flinch. “Back booth,” she says, tossing down a pile of menus without breaking eye contact. “Try not to burn anything.”

They collapse into the booth like falling stars. Limbs tangle. Someone’s costume cape ends up in the syrup. Jason nearly decapitates Percy with his laurel crown, and Leo is trying to teach Hazel how to stack the little creamers into a tower “for structural enrichment .” Piper steals three sets of cutlery. Annabeth looks like she’s debating legal action against the syrup dispenser.

Will ends up next to Nico—of course he does—and their knees bump under the table.

Neither of them moves.

The diner is warm in the way old sweaters are warm—threadbare and stained, but comforting despite itself. It smells like syrup and coffee grounds and the holy aftermath of something survived. Somewhere behind the counter, a coffee pot wheezes like it’s mourning a life it never lived. Someone—almost definitely Lou Ellen—marches up to the dusty jukebox and feeds it five crumpled dollars. There’s a pause, a clicking sound, and then:

Take a Chance on Me by ABBA.

Nobody objects. Not even Annabeth. It just feels right.

Piper immediately sings along in falsetto. Frank quietly weeps into a biscuit. Cecil does dramatic jazz hands from his seat. Percy harmonizes off-key with Nico’s wings still shedding glitter on his shoulder. Leo tries to climb onto the table to dance and is physically restrained by Jason and a bottle of Tabasco.

And Will—

Will just watches Nico in the soft, unnatural light.

The shadows under Nico’s eyes are smudged, but not from lack of sleep—more like something left behind by old ghosts and long nights. The white of his costume glows like moonlight caught in cloth. His halo, askew now, catches the overhead glare and turns gold around the edges. He looks like something holy left behind at a rave.

Will’s heart aches so tenderly it’s a kind of song. He wants to press his thumb to the inside of Nico’s wrist and memorize the rhythm of him. He wants to laugh again, kiss again, be young and stupid and safe in this moment, even just for a while.

And Nico—gods, Nico is smiling.

It’s small. Secretive. Like it’s only meant for Will, carved into the corner of his mouth by something soft and blooming.

Outside, the city breathes. Inside, their friends are a swirling storm of joy and powdered sugar. And in the back booth of a diner that smells like melted dreams and bad coffee, Will thinks:  This is what it feels like to be alive.

“I’m hallucinating,” Jason mutters, peering down at his laminated menu like it’s a cursed manuscript. “It says this omelet has eight kinds of cheese.”

“I’m hallucinating that you’re here,” Piper tells him, not looking up as she butter-knifes a jelly packet onto a pancake with precise chaos. “Go back to your Roman mystery cave.”

Jason sighs, flips the menu over like it might have a saner back. “Why would you need eight kinds of cheese?”

“Why would you need a laurel crown and a turtleneck?” she fires back sweetly.

Frank, slumped between them like a man who’s seen too much, rubs a hand over his face. “I just want toast. I want toast and silence and maybe, like, two hours in a forest.”

“Relatable,” Hazel says dreamily, her head resting on the edge of the table as she hums what sounds suspiciously like a Gregorian chant.

Across from them, Leo’s poking at his glitter-pink cast with a straw, his eyebrows furrowed in serious thought. “Do you think if I cut this open, I could store snacks in it?”

“Do you think,” Annabeth replies, her tone dry enough to drain the Hudson, “that you should ever say words again?”

Leo grins. “You love me.”

Annabeth takes a slow sip of her coffee without breaking eye contact. “I love silence.”

Cecil is sipping orange juice out of a plastic skull someone definitely brought from the party. He swirls the juice like it’s an aged wine and sighs, “Is this the breakfast of champions? Feels like it.”

Lou Ellen clinks her chipped diner mug of aggressively burnt coffee against his plastic skull. “To whatever that night was.”

“Chaos,” says Percy.

“Performance art,” Hazel adds.

“Felony-adjacent,” Annabeth mutters.

“Magical,” says Will softly, eyes never leaving Nico.

Nico—still glowing faintly in white, still beautiful in that sharp, haunted way—just raises an eyebrow. “You’re all deranged.”

“And yet,” Cecil says, pointing at him with a butter knife, “here you are.”

Nico shrugs. “I make poor choices.”

Will bumps their knees under the table again, just lightly, and Nico doesn’t move away.

Lou Ellen lifts her coffee again and says solemnly, “To poor choices, eight-cheese omelets, and kissing the boy you’ve been in love with since freshman year.”

Will nearly chokes on his water.

Leo hoots. Percy raises both eyebrows. Nico smirks.

The jukebox changes tracks again. Something old and syrupy swells into the air, soft and slow.

Will glances at Nico. He’s staring down his black coffee like it’s a ghost from his past. There’s a smear of glitter on his jaw, catching the light like a secret. His white shirt is unbuttoned at the collar, rumpled and soft, sleeves rolled to the elbow with the kind of unintentional grace that makes Will feel like he’s dying. His halo is tilted askew, tangled a little in his hair, as if the divine got drunk and decided not to fix it. He’s beautiful in the way abandoned churches are—soft light, holy shadows.

He looks like a saint painted by a sleep-deprived Renaissance artist. All holy bones and sharp shadows and unspoken prayers.

And Will—damp, smudged, glittering faintly like a mirage in his rumpled golden laurel crown—thinks: I am so, so screwed.

“You’re staring,” Lou Ellen whispers beside Will, biting into a piece of tragically burnt toast like it’s vindication made tangible. Her lipstick is smudged and there’s a sticker of Medusa on her cheek. Her grin is merciless.

“I’m not,” Will mutters, even though his chin is still tilted slightly toward Nico like a sunflower caught in the sun’s gravity.

“You are.”

“Shut up.”

Cecil, still in his Hermes costume—now slightly disheveled and proudly stained with syrup—leans halfway across the table like he’s about to announce a royal engagement. His glittery orange juice sloshes dangerously. “So… the balcony, huh?”

Will kicks him under the table, hard enough to rattle the salt shaker. Nico doesn’t even flinch. He just lifts one elegant eyebrow, eyes dark with sleep and amusement, and sips his black coffee with the air of someone who has survived both war and worse—group teasing. There’s golden glitter stuck to the cuff of his sleeve. It might be Will’s.

“Is this our slow-burn payoff?” Piper asks, eyes gleaming with chaotic delight from behind her stolen sunglasses. “Because I’ve been emotionally invested since sophomore year and I demand dividends.”

“You’re all delusional,” Nico mutters into his mug.

“Cute,” Percy says brightly. “But delusional.”

Jason, draped across his menu like he’s been drafted into brunch by divine command, doesn’t even blink. “Annabeth told me it would happen at Halloween,” he says, totally deadpan. “She made a chart.”

Annabeth—dark circles under her eyes, hair perfect, sipping her espresso like a war general—does not look up. “It was a very good chart.”

Hazel just smiles into her pancakes, ethereal and sleepy, like the universe has finally hit play on a long-paused song. “I think it’s sweet.”

Frank nods solemnly, like this moment was foretold in some quiet prophecy carved into stone. “Long overdue.”

Leo whistles through his teeth and claps once. “Okay, but I did predict the haunted garden kiss. Just want that on record.”

“You also predicted Will would fall into the punch bowl,” Cecil adds without looking up from his orange juice.

“Manifesting doesn’t always mean accuracy,” Leo says, solemn. His glitter-pink cast thunks gently on the table as he gestures wildly. “The vision was correct, the timeline was blurry.”

Lou Ellen raises her eyebrows. “I knew it was serious when Will almost dropped a tray of cupcakes for the Medical Society bake sale because Nico walked past him in the library wearing Tom Ford cologne and a black trench coat. Second week of freshman year, by the way.”

Will groans into his hands. “Can I please die now.”

Piper slouches dramatically in her booth seat. “I knew it was serious when Nico went to the Macbeth play,” she says, swirling her spoon through the remains of her yogurt parfait. “That’s gay commitment. That’s war.”

“I only went for the violence,” Nico lies with the practiced elegance of someone who has spent years perfecting the art of emotional dodge.

“You stayed for the boy,” Hazel sing-songs, soft and smug.

“Oh my gods,” Will whispers into his hands. His ears are a color that would make sunrise jealous.

Annabeth glances up finally, eyes sharp with memory. “Percy once told me Nico went quiet for a full minute because Will was leaning on a bookshelf in Elysium Books.”

Percy beams like this is his contribution to the oral history. “He looked like a tragic vampire trying to choose a poetry collection. It was beautiful.”

Cecil is openly weeping with laughter now, head thrown back against the booth. “This is so good for my soul. I feel healed.”

Nico just shakes his head slowly, half amused, half exasperated, like a man who regrets nothing but pretends to. “You’re all insufferable.”

And yet—he doesn’t stop smiling.

Will catches that flicker of a grin and feels it settle warm and electric behind his ribs. Nico’s knee is still pressed against his, steady and sure. Under the diner’s flickering lights, among the chaos and caffeine and relentless teasing, Will dares to let himself feel the quiet thrum of something good.

Something that feels suspiciously like joy.

Will exhales. He’s still tired. Still overwhelmed. Still unsure of what tomorrow looks like.

But Nico’s knee is still touching his.

And neither of them has moved.

And somehow, in the sticky red booth beneath a flickering Open sign, surrounded by burnt toast, borrowed sunglasses, and the disastrous, wonderful people who’ve stitched themselves into his life like constellations—Will Solace lets himself believe it might just be okay. Will leans back in the booth, eyes still on the half-empty coffee cup in front of him, still faintly humming with the aftershock of whatever just bloomed in his chest. Nico sits beside him like some fallen myth, quiet and gleaming, letting the chaos churn around them without letting it touch him. Not really.

“You know,” Will says finally, voice pitched just loud enough to rise above the din of Piper and Leo bickering about whether or not it’s technically a crime to steal individual ketchup packets, “I hate to say it—gods, I really hate to say it—but…”

Lou Ellen leans forward with a feral gleam in her eye, like a villain who’s just heard the final lock click into place. “Do it. Say it.”

Will sighs, long-suffering and theatrical. “You were all right.”

The table erupts. Not with grace. Not with dignity. But with a cacophony of triumphant shrieks, howling laughter, and someone—Cecil, probably—trying to stand on the booth to deliver an acceptance speech. Annabeth offers a quiet but victorious fist pump from behind her coffee cup. Jason doesn’t say anything, but the smirk on his face is loud enough on its own. It’s the look of a man who has been smug in silence for months and is finally getting paid.

“Oh, we know,” Percy says, grinning like the ocean gave him permission to be the most annoying creature alive. “We’re always right.”

Will rolls his eyes so hard it’s a miracle they don’t fall out of his skull. He jabs a thumb toward Nico like he’s filing a formal complaint. “But I swear to Olympus, if any of you ever give him a restaurant recommendation again—”

“Especially one over two dollar signs,” Nico adds, deadpan, not even botheringto look up from his coffee.

“—I will rain fury down upon you,” Will continues, stabbing a finger at the group like he’s delivering divine judgment. “You’ll wish you’d stayed at that ridiculous summer camp with the horseback fencing and wine tasting training. And let’s not even start on the whole ‘let’s corral Will and Nico onto the balcony for a dramatic redemption arc’ thing.”

Piper snorts into her drink. “You say that like it wasn’t a five-star plan.”

“I was the bait,” Nico says, the edge of a smirk tugging at his lips. “You used me like a honey trap.”

“We prefer the term divine intervention,” Lou Ellen offers, toasting him with a stolen sugar packet.

“Matchmaking by committee,” Frank says solemnly, raising his orange juice like he’s officiating the whole scene.

Leo leans back with both hands behind his head, glitter trailing from his sleeves like a collapsing disco ball. “It’s not our fault fate needs good stage direction.”

Will gestures broadly, eyes wide, voice flat. “This. This is what I get. This is my life now.”

But then Nico glances over, catching his eye with that impossible mix of amusement and something softer—something dangerous in its depth. His halo, long since crooked, gleams in the fluorescent light like an accidental miracle. Their knees bump again under the table, and this time Nico doesn’t just stay still—he lets his hand drift low, brushing against Will’s fingers.

“Yeah,” Nico murmurs, the corner of his mouth curving. “But you’re not exactly complaining.”

And Will—heart full, hands shaking, stomach fluttering like it’s seen the future—meets his gaze. The diner, for one impossible moment, is golden. Syrup-sweet and sugar-lit. The air thrums with old music and bad decisions and something that feels like falling in love, over and over again.

“No,” he says quietly. “I’m really not.”

Nico hums, content in a way that still feels new. Like he’s testing the taste of peace on his tongue. Then, after a beat, he turns to the group and says with unnerving calm, “But seriously—next time you manipulate my entire schedule and personal life, I’d like to be consulted.”

Hazel lifts her fork like a gavel, graceful and terrifying. “Duly noted.”

“Noted,” Annabeth echoes, entirely unrepentant.

“Noted and ignored,” Leo says, sipping from a cup filled with three different sodas.

Will groans, tipping his head back against the booth like the gods have cursed him personally. “You people are the worst.”

The booth is too small for the amount of chaos crammed into it: Annabeth is reorganizing the sugar packets by hue, Percy is trying to steal everyone’s toast, Piper is arguing with a waiter about the ethics of artificial maple, and Leo is insisting that if you mix all the sodas together, it counts as hydration.

Will watches it all unfold with the slow, stunned serenity of someone still half-asleep and wholly in love.

Nico is beside him—shoulder pressed to his, foot hooked around his ankle under the table like an anchor. His eyes are shadowed but bright, and when he glances over, there’s something in his expression that knocks the breath from Will’s lungs: amusement, affection, a thousand unspoken things stitched into a single look.

Their hands brush. Again .

And this time, Nico doesn’t just stay still.

He reaches.

Fingers brushing, then settling. A quiet claim beneath the clatter of forks and the rising volume of Leo’s soda monologue.

For one suspended moment, the diner turns golden.

Not the gold of gods or grandeur, but something softer. Syrup-slick and sunlight-warm. Laughter echoing off tiled walls. Scrambled eggs and too much caffeine. Glitter in the corners of Nico’s eyes.

A love that doesn’t ask to be perfect. Only chosen.

Will lets himself smile. Lets his fingers twine with Nico’s, heart humming like a hymn.

And when the teasing starts again—Hazel’s deadly fork, Annabeth’s dry retorts, Cecil dramatically recounting the horrors of bathtub sleep—he doesn’t protest. Not really. He tips his head back like the gods have cursed him personally, but his hand never leaves Nico’s.

Because this is it.

This is the aftermath. This is the beginning.

Not peaceful. Not quiet. But loud and strange and entirely theirs. And Will—golden-hearted, sleep-deprived, utterly doomed—wouldn’t have it any other way.

Chapter 36: I Learn What Safety Feels Like, Nico di Angelo Falls Asleep in My Arms, and a Pigeon Almost Destroys My Moment with the Love of My Life

Notes:

welcome to the rooftop chapter—aka sunlight: the paid actor (he’s booked and busy today) and manhattan: surprise main character. i truly don’t know how to write scenes without relying on pathetic fallacy and the emotional architecture of the city. the skyline has more emotional range than most of my exes.

like i said in the last author's note, this chapter is very soft, very solangelo, and very inspired by “All I’ve Ever Known” from Hadestown, which has officially joined the ever-growing playlist for this fic. speaking of which—I’ve been adding so many songs to the playlist that I’ve started spiraling about how I can share it without fully doxxing myself, because my spotify is tied to my Real Name™ and I’m like 90% sure it’s also still linked to my high school facebook account (terrifying).

i am considering making a separate spotify account just for fanfic playlists—if that’s something you’d be interested in, let me know and I’ll see what I can do! (alternatively: if you’re okay with me just describing songs in dramatic, emotionally unstable terms in the meantime, I’m your girl.)

as always, thank you for reading and for all your comments, kudos, and general chaotic love. you make posting this fic feel like yelling into a very gay, very supportive void. I’m working my way through replying to everything and I appreciate every single message more than I can say <3

The sun is properly up by the time they emerge from the diner—bleary-eyed, over-caffeinated, and still faintly smelling of fog machine residue and existential breakthroughs. The city greets them with typical New York indifference. Pigeons scatter. A taxi honks. A man on the corner is juggling churros and screaming about Mercury being in retrograde.

The subway, naturally, is their chariot of choice—because nothing says mythic descent from divine chaos quite like the 4 train at sunrise.

They descend into the station like a post-apocalyptic theatre troupe: glitter-smudged, mascara-streaked, draped in cloaks and laurels and defiant hangovers. The platform smells like old gum and older decisions. Someone’s playing “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” on a harmonica three cars down. It feels correct.

Will stands beside Nico beneath the flickering fluorescent lights of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue–Barclays station, cloak stretched over one shoulder, hair in disarray. Nico—still wearing white, somehow even more rumpled now, with glitter clinging like ash to his collarbones—leans against a column as though the earth is trying to tip him over and he’s not inclined to resist.

Lou Ellen is still cradling the jack-o’-lantern like a fragile prophecy. Leo’s cast now features a Hello Kitty Band-Aid and several new Sharpie inscriptions. Piper has acquired a fresh pair of sunglasses (no one asks how) and is nursing a Red Bull like it’s ambrosia. Cecil is arguing with a pigeon.

“I want to die,” Jason mutters, pressing his knuckles into his temple like the train is screaming in Morse code.

“Death is too merciful,” Annabeth replies flatly. “I want to subpoena the sun.”

“You want to sue your hangover?” Percy asks, yawning.

“I want to sue everything,” she says, staring into her iced coffee like it’s a divination bowl. “Starting with Poseidon and ending with the MTA.”

Hazel is humming something delicate and definitely not English under her breath, eyes half-closed, head tilted against Frank’s shoulder. He’s carrying her boots like they’re sacred relics, hoodie pulled over his head, looking like the most loyal bodyguard a haunted princess could ask for.

Cecil, ever committed to poor choices, is attempting pull-ups on the subway pole.

“I give him ten seconds before he faceplants,” Will says.

“Five,” Nico murmurs, not looking up. Will can feel the warmth of him even in the cold morning air.

At the next stop, a mariachi band gets on. Piper tips them with a lipstick tube and murmurs, “We dance now, or we perish.”

Somewhere between Nevins Street and Canal, everyone dissolves into uncontrollable laughter. The train groans as it crosses into Manhattan, lurching like it, too, is hungover. Despite the chaos and the judgmental lighting, Will feels a strange kind of clarity—like the universe is still wobbly, but maybe not against him anymore.

Then comes the first goodbye.

“Upper West Side gang,” Percy says at 72nd Street, tugging Annabeth toward the doors. “Time to disappear into gentrified domesticity.”

“You live in a luxury building with a rooftop herb garden,” Leo calls after him. “Don’t act like you understand the struggle.”

“They’re hydroponic,” Annabeth corrects, too tired to elaborate. She’s already checking emails on her phone.

The doors shut behind them, and the car feels a little less crowded. The scent of sea salt and ambition lingers.

Next stop: Madison Avenue–Franklin’s neighborhood. Hazel tugs Frank’s sleeve with dreamy determination.

“I’m getting pancakes,” she tells the group. “And possibly reborn.”

“Tell Nico not to kill anyone!” she chirps as the doors slide open.

“I make no promises,” Nico says, but the corners of his mouth tug up—soft, private.

Then it’s Lexington and 59th, where Piper and Leo tumble out mid-discussion about a chaos-themed food truck that exclusively sells grilled cheese, performance art, and emotional instability.

“It’s just a grill and a fog machine,” Leo insists. “Artisanal uncertainty!”

Piper throws a kiss over her shoulder. “Call us when the inevitable happens!”

Then they’re gone.

It’s quieter now. A lull in the madness.

86th rolls around.

Jason looks up at the subway map, nudges Nico. “We’re next. You coming?”

Nico doesn’t answer at first. He stays still, anchored by something heavier than exhaustion. His gaze shifts to Will—slow, uncertain, searching. And Will, still leaning against the silver pole, still wrapped in his golden cape like armor he’s almost ready to shed, meets his eyes.

It’s a silent conversation. One they’ve gotten better at having lately, all glances and gravity and things too delicate for words.

Nico’s brow lifts in question—barely. The smallest furrow. A silent, should I?

Will shifts his weight, thumb brushing the hem of his sleeve, lips parting like he might speak—but doesn’t. He’s too afraid of saying the wrong thing, of asking the wrong way. He doesn’t want to presume. Doesn’t want Nico to think there’s an expectation, that coming home with him means anything more than stay with me a little longer.

But gods, he wants him to.

He wants him to see the scarf still waiting on the back of his desk chair. The couch cushion still ingrained with the tension from where they sat together as Will drunkenly invited him to bed. The half-read mythology book on the coffee table with a dried flower tucked inside the pages like a secret. He wants Nico in the space he calls home—not because it’s perfect, but because it’s real. Because it’s his.

And then—Nico shakes his head and turns back to Jason.

“I’ll be home soon, don’t wait up,” he says quietly, voice low but steady.

And Will feels it like a sunbeam through his ribs.

Jason just nods, unreadable but somehow approving, and disappears up the escalator with the kind of aura that suggests his apartment has marble countertops and a doorman who’s seen too much.

The train rocks again, and then it’s just the trio and Nico—hurtling toward Harlem, toward the part of the city that smells like old bookstores and corner bodegas and late-night dreams stitched together with duct tape and stubborn hope. Lou Ellen is asleep on Cecil’s shoulder. Cecil is trying to draw eyeliner on her without waking her. Will and Nico sit pressed close, not touching, but glowing quietly like a constellation only visible before dawn.

“Home soon,” Will murmurs.

“Yeah,” Nico says, and it sounds like something deeper than geography.

And when they finally emerge into the Harlem light—faded, fragile, and hopeful—Will thinks that maybe, just maybe, he’s found his way home too. The morning smells like concrete and corner-store coffee, exhaust and the last ghost of October bonfires. The sun has climbed higher, but it’s still pale and cautious—like the sky isn’t quite sure how to start the day either.

Their building rises out of the block like it’s holding its breath, old brick and crooked windows and a fire escape that screams with every step. Inside, the air is warm and lived-in—laundry detergent, burnt toast, old floorboards that groan in greeting.

Will unlocks the door, and Lou Ellen immediately announces, “I’m dying here,” before collapsing face-first onto the couch. Cecil throws himself on top of her with less ceremony and more chaos.

“Do not wake us,” Cecil groans, already halfway gone. “Unless it’s the apocalypse or brunch.”

“I thought brunch was the apocalypse,” Lou mutters, face smushed into a throw pillow.

Will shakes his head and tosses a blanket over both of them, murmuring, “You’re insufferable.”

“We’re art,” Cecil corrects, and then promptly starts snoring.

Will and Nico are the only ones still standing. The apartment hums with soft silence now—socks on hardwood, kettle clicks, the subtle creak of old walls settling into morning. Will rummages through the basket by the coat rack and pulls out a hoodie for himself, then hesitates.

He reaches deeper and finds one of his favorites—soft from too many washes, navy blue with a faded sunburst design—and tosses it to Nico.

“Here,” he says. “Take this one.”

Nico catches it, surprised. “Won’t you miss it?”

Will shrugs, trying to seem casual even though his heart is thudding. “It’ll look better on you.”

Nico raises an eyebrow, amused, but his fingers curl around the fabric like it’s something precious.

“Bold of you to assume I’ll give it back,” he says.

“It’s a loan,” Will says. “With optional lifelong extension.”

Nico slips it on without a word, movements still sleepy, still a little clumsy from the cold and the weight of the morning. The hoodie—Will’s oldest, softest one—hangs off him in that careless way that shouldn’t be allowed to make Will feel the way it does. He doesn’t say anything about how the sleeves swallow Nico’s hands or how the hem brushes mid-thigh like something stolen. He doesn’t comment on the collar slouching off one shoulder, revealing the sharp line of collarbone beneath pale skin, the constellation of fading glitter that’s somehow even more distracting in daylight.

But gods, he sees it.

All of it.

And it does something to him. Something warm and aching and sharp at the edges. It hits him low and deep—like hunger, like heat, like a promise wrapped in cotton and static electricity. The sight of Nico in his clothes shouldn’t feel like a revelation, but it does.  Because there’s something about it—intimate, unspoken. Like a mark. Like Nico chose softness, chose warmth, chose him —and draped himself in it like it belonged.

Will swallows hard, suddenly aware of every nerve in his body. He watches the way Nico adjusts the sleeves, the way the fabric folds over his wrists, the way his hair falls messily across his face. There’s a possessive flutter in Will’s chest that he doesn’t want to examine too closely, something that wants to press a hand to Nico’s hip and say mine —not out loud, not cruel, just quietly. Just to see how it feels in the air.

He wonders, with a rush of heat, what it would be like to kiss him now—hoodie and all. To push the fabric off one shoulder and press his mouth to that collarbone, feel the shiver chase down Nico’s spine. To let his hands slip beneath the hem, just a little, just to feel skin and heartbeat and proof.

But he doesn’t.

He just stands there, pretending he’s not staring, pretending the warmth in his cheeks is from the sunrise and not the boy wrapped in his hoodie like he was always meant to be there.

And still—something in him glows. And aches. And wants.

“There’s one of Cecil’s sweatshirts in there too,” Nico points out, tugging at the hem. “The one that says ‘Hell Was Full So I Came Back .’”

Will smirks. “Yeah, but I figured this was the more romantic option.”

Nico rolls his eyes—but he doesn’t take it off, then he glances toward the window. “Roof?”

Will nods. “Yeah.”

They climb the narrow stairwell in silence. Up past the water-stained walls and chipped banisters. Up past the humming buzz of city life just beginning to stir. And then—out into the sky. The rooftop is nothing special. A few battered lawn chairs, an old milk crate someone’s been using as a table, a string of fairy lights that only work on one end. But the view is spectacular. The city stretches out beneath them—impossibly vast, impossibly alive. Rooftops like teeth. Water towers like forgotten gods.

Nico steps to the edge, wind tugging at the hem of his sweatshirt, halo long gone, but something celestial still lingering in the slope of his shoulders. Will follows, hoodie pulled up, hands tucked into his sleeves.

For a long moment, they just breathe.

There’s a kind of peace here, suspended above the chaos. The sun catches the glitter still clinging to their skin. Will watches it glint like constellations across Nico’s jaw and collarbone, and thinks he’s never seen anything more unreal and more alive.

“Thanks,” Nico says suddenly, softly. “For… breakfast. And letting me crash your apartment. And not running away this time.”

Will exhales. “Not planning on it.”

They stand like that, shoulder to shoulder, the sky slowly stretching open above them. And for once, there’s no pressure to speak. Just the quiet understanding that some things—this city, this rooftop, this feeling—don’t need explaining.

The roof is still and blue-grey in the soft hush of morning. The skyline glimmers gold at the edges, like the sun is taking its time waking up. Below, Harlem stirs with distant traffic and the occasional bark of a dog, but up here, it’s quiet. Gentle. Like the city is letting them catch their breath.

Will and Nico sink into the worn couch by the chimney stack, limbs clumsy from exhaustion and nerves. The cushions dip beneath them, lopsided and familiar, and for a long moment neither of them knows what to do with their hands, their knees, their racing thoughts.

Will rubs the back of his neck. Nico stares at the horizon like it might give him answers.

Eventually, Will breaks the silence, his voice barely above the hush of the wind. “You know… you talk about your mom like she’s made of myth. The kind of myth that never got a chance to end right.”

The words hang there for a beat—soft, reverent, aching.

Nico doesn’t speak, but something in his posture shifts. His arms uncross. His jaw unclenches. It’s not an answer, but it’s not resistance either.

“I’m sorry you never got to know her,” Will continues, gentler now, like stepping through a holy space. “And I’m sorry she never got to know you.”

Nico exhales, and it sounds like surrender.

“She was extraordinary,” he says, finally. “At least, that’s what they say. Her family used to tell me stories about her like she was a cathedral. Tall and impossible and carved from marble.” He pauses, voice threading thin. “I believed them. I still do, I think.”

He swallows, eyes fixed on some faraway star. Will shifts closer, the cold metal of the rooftop couch creaking beneath them, his knee brushing Nico’s with a kind of quiet intention.

“And Bianca…” Will says softly.

“She was the best part of my childhood,” Nico answers, almost before the sentence finishes. His voice doesn’t tremble, but it’s not steady either. “She made it feel like the house had a heartbeat. Like I wasn’t just some ghost walking through hallways too big for me.”

Will doesn’t try to fill the silence. He just reaches out—fingers tentative, open—and takes Nico’s hand, lacing them together like he’s stitching something back into place. Warmth passes between them, as real and fragile as breath.

“I wish I could’ve met her,” Will murmurs. “I hope she would’ve liked me.”

That pulls a huff of air from Nico. Almost a laugh, quiet and sharp around the edges. He shakes his head, just slightly, and looks down at their joined hands like the sight steadies him.

“She would’ve grilled you first,” he says. “Asked if your intentions were honorable, if you could hold a conversation at a formal dinner, if you knew all the moons of Pluto by name and myth.”

Will smiles. “Yes to two of those, you’ll need to teach me about dinner party appropriate conversation.”

Nico glances at him, something warmer blooming in his expression. “But yes,” he says. “I think she would’ve liked you.”

They fall into silence again, softer this time. The wind ghosts past, lifting the edge of Nico’s hoodie where Will’s hand still rests against his back.

Will watches him for a moment—this boy in a borrowed sweatshirt and a smear of glitter, sharp in some ways, soft in others. “You don’t have to talk about them if it’s too much,” he offers.

Nico shakes his head. “It’s not too much. Not right now.”

Will gives a small, grateful smile. “Good. Because I want to understand. Not just the parts you let people see, but the ones you try to hide. The grief. The guilt. The weight.”

“You already see too much,” Nico says, but he squeezes Will’s hand a little tighter. “And I think I’m okay with that.”

They sit in the quiet for a long time, fingers loosely laced, shoulders brushing. The sun rises higher behind them, warm across the backs of their necks, casting the rooftop in that hazy early-morning gold that makes even rusted vents and chipped concrete look holy. But beneath it—beneath the quiet, beneath the promise of something healing—there’s still hesitation. A pause they don’t quite know how to fill.

Will clears his throat. “So… are we supposed to do something now?”

Nico looks over, one eyebrow raised. “Like what?”

Will shrugs, helpless in that way he sometimes is—like he’s trying to laugh before the silence can swallow him. “I don’t know. We yelled. We cried. We trauma dumped like champs. Feels like we should… kiss again? Or define the relationship? Or make pancakes?”

Nico’s mouth twitches, the ghost of a smile passing through. “I hate pancakes.”

Will gasps, hand over his heart like he’s been mortally wounded. “Okay, wow. This might be a dealbreaker.”

“You’re so dramatic.”

“Says the boy who showed up to a party in angel wings and tried to smite me with his eyes.”

Nico hums, eyes half-lidded now, voice gone soft around the edges. “You deserved it.”

Will doesn’t disagree. He just grins, quick and crooked, but then lets it fall away into the quiet that follows.

It’s not an uncomfortable silence. Just uncertain. A soft static buzz beneath their ribs. Like neither of them knows how to step from the wreckage of what they were into the warmth of what they might be.

Eventually, Will moves first.

He lifts his arm, hesitant and unsure, the motion half-invitation, half-question. Nico looks at him for a beat too long—long enough that Will starts to wish he could pull the gesture back—but then he nods, slow and deliberate, and leans in.They fold into each other with the quiet grace of something inevitable. Like they’ve done this before in some other life. Like gravity’s been pulling them toward this moment all along.

Will curls his arm around Nico’s shoulders, his fingertips grazing the edge of fabric and skin. Nico tucks his legs up and rests his head against Will’s chest, the weight of him a kind of benediction. The angle is awkward. The couch is too short for limbs like his. Will’s leg is already falling asleep.

None of it matters.

Will closes his eyes, breath catching for a second against Nico’s hair.

This—this feeling, this stillness, this boy curled into his side—feels like the kind of thing he didn’t know how to want until it was offered. Like safety with a heartbeat. Like the morning after a storm.

The closeness matters. The warmth. The safety.

Will exhales slowly, like the breath had been caught somewhere beneath his ribs all along, like he’s been bracing for something—impact, rejection, gravity. But nothing comes. Only stillness. Only the quiet weight of Nico pressed against him, lean and tense and real.

His fingers move in gentle loops across Nico’s forearm, slow and reverent, sketching circles and half-formed constellations, the vague outline of a sun that never quite rises. He doesn’t know what he’s drawing—only that touching Nico like this feels like spelling a language he’s never been taught but somehow already knows.

“I don’t want to be the guy who runs,” he says, the words catching slightly in the back of his throat, raw and too honest.

Nico shifts beside him, just enough that his cheek brushes Will’s collarbone. “You have impressive stamina for someone who runs that fast,” he murmurs, slurred with sleep, but there's a thread of humor underneath.

Will huffs a laugh, low and warm in his chest. “I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

Their voices dissolve into the hush of morning. Around them, the rooftop holds its breath. A soft breeze ghosts over Will’s skin, lifting the edge of Nico’s hoodie where his hand rests. The air smells like city dust and something faintly sweet—maybe someone baking a few floors down, maybe the trace of cologne clinging to Nico’s neckline. He inhales it like a prayer.

Below, the city murmurs with the first signs of life—distant sirens, birdsong tangled in power lines, a bus sighing to a stop somewhere around the corner. But none of it touches them here, wrapped in this strange sanctuary of old lawn chairs and flickering fairy lights. The world has narrowed to this boy in his arms, the way Nico’s breath rises and falls in time with his own. The warmth where their knees touch. The truth of closeness, shy and stubborn, like spring pushing through frost.

“We’re going to mess up again,” Nico says eventually, voice barely more than a breath. “Probably spectacularly.”

“Definitely spectacularly,” Will agrees, and he feels it—that tiny hitch in Nico’s breath, the almost-laugh against his shirt. “But we’ll talk. Next time. We won’t just shut down and disappear.”

Nico nods, slow and certain. “No more running.”

Will bends his head, brushing a kiss to the top of Nico’s curls. He lingers there for a second, his lips resting in the space where apology and affection meet. “No more hiding.”

The promise isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be. It hums between them like a heartbeat, like a lullaby, like the soft gold glow creeping across the rooftop as morning unfurls itself over the city.

Will holds him a little tighter. His palm settles against the curve of Nico’s back, and he feels it— the weight of him. How solid he is. How real. The way he fits against Will’s side like the shape of a missing thing finally returned. His ribs ache from the pressure of holding him, but he doesn’t move. He wants to memorize this. The slope of Nico’s shoulders. The warmth seeping into his hoodie. The way the silence doesn’t hurt anymore.

“I didn’t know I was lonely until I wasn’t,” Will says, almost to himself.

Nico stirs, just enough to lift his head. His eyes are shadowed with sleep, rimmed in glitter, half-lidded and impossibly dark. “And now?”

Will meets his gaze and feels like the wind has left his lungs. He smiles, uneven and aching. “I still don’t know what I’m doing,” he admits. “But I want to do it with you. Even the hard parts. Especially the hard parts.”

Nico doesn’t look away. He watches Will like he’s afraid he’ll vanish if he blinks, like he’s trying to remember the shape of this moment in case it ever slips away. There’s so much fear in his eyes—and hope, and wonder, and something soft that looks a lot like trust.

“Okay,” he whispers, and it’s not just agreement. It’s a leap.

Will shifts, just enough to press their foreheads together. His eyes flutter shut. Nico’s breath fans across his cheek, warm and steady. The space between them crackles with something electric and unbearably gentle.

“We’ll get it wrong sometimes,” Will murmurs. “But we’ll get it wrong together.”

And there it is—that impossible, flickering thing neither of them dared name until now.

Hope.

Not bold. Not perfect. But present. A fragile tether strung between two hearts still learning how to beat at the same tempo.

They fall asleep like that—tangled together on a lopsided rooftop couch, under a sky slowly brightening with the promise of something new.

Nico drifts first. His breath evens out, the tension in his shoulders dissolving like sugar in warm water. One minute he’s awake—barely, eyes fluttering shut with every blink—and the next, he’s surrendered. Head tucked beneath Will’s jaw, curls soft against his throat, one hand curled against Will’s chest like an anchor. He’s warm and solid, all sharp edges turned smooth in sleep. For once, he doesn’t look like he’s preparing for battle. He just looks... peaceful.

Will stays awake a little longer, watching the light creep across the city’s skin. Morning stretches like a cat over the rooftops, slow and golden and unbothered. The sun catches on the edge of Nico’s lashes, painting shadows across his cheekbones. There’s a faint shimmer still clinging to his skin from the party—specks of glitter across his jaw, a single fleck near his temple like a fallen star that forgot where it was meant to go.

He wants to memorize this. Not in some abstract, poetic way—though it is poetic, because of course it is, of course this is how it happens, with Nico di Angelo asleep in his arms and the skyline spread out like an altar—but in a very real, human way. He wants to remember the exact weight of him, the exact heat, the way his fingers twitched once before they went still. The soft exhale against Will’s neck, steady and unafraid.

He hadn’t planned for this. None of it. Not the glitter or the rooftop or the way his heart feels like it’s finally beating at the right tempo. Not the way Nico feels like something sacred and ordinary all at once, a boy and a myth and a beginning.

The concrete beneath the couch is cold. His hoodie is bunched up uncomfortably behind his back. He’s pretty sure his foot has fallen asleep, and his neck is going to be sore when he wakes up. And still—he wouldn’t move if the world was ending.

A pigeon flutters somewhere behind them, landing with a disgruntled flap of wings on the rusted lip of the stairwell. Will side-eyes it with quiet dread. He thinks, Please, for the love of all the gods and monsters, do not shit on me while I’m having a moment.

The pigeon coos, unconcerned.

Will sighs. He leans his head back, lets it rest lightly against the chimney stack. The city breathes around them. Somewhere far below, someone is yelling about bagels.

His arms tighten slightly around Nico, instinctively. He lets his eyes fall shut, just for a moment. Just to rest.

And then the moment stretches, folds itself into something heavier, something slower. The kind of sleep that only comes when you’re finally safe. The couch creaks beneath them. The fairy lights blink out with the sunrise.

The sky turns gold. And they sleep.

Above them, the morning unfurls like a blessing—slow and soft, stitched with light. The city keeps breathing, endless and indifferent, but up here, on this crooked rooftop with rusted railings and flickering lights, time dares to pause.

There is no resolution in the air, no neat bow tied around the aching things they've shared. Just two boys tangled in each other, half-lost and half-found, cradled in the arms of something fragile and unnamed. The kind of quiet that follows the storm—not peace, exactly, but possibility.

Birdsong lilts through the static hum of Harlem waking up. Warmth spills across the concrete. Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm wails and then silences, as if the world itself is choosing not to interrupt.

And still they sleep—wrapped in hoodie fabric and old grief, new hope tucked between their ribs like a second heartbeat.

The skyline stretches endless before them, bathed in the soft promise of becoming.

Morning turns to afternoon, and they are still here.

Still holding on. Still choosing each other.

Notes:

(Adding these notes a bit later today because chaos, as always.)

I finally made the playlists! You can find all the links on my Tumblr—@sarcasmandships—and I’ll add them here too, but I’m directing you there first because I am currently spiraling about where to take certain aspects of Will and Nico’s relationship… and by “certain aspects,” I do mean the spicy kind (🌶️🌶️🌶️).

I’d genuinely love some input on the timing and pacing of That Particular Development. Like, is it too soon? Should we build more tension first? Or should they just go for it already??

(Also important note: there will be no smut in the main fic. I’ll be posting any explicit content as clearly marked outtakes, because I know this fandom spans a wide range of ages, and not everyone is here for that kind of content.)

No pressure at all, but if you’re enjoying this fic and want to help shape some of what comes next, come hang out on Tumblr! I’ll be posting polls, progress updates, and sneak peeks—and honestly, after 200k+ words of this story, I feel like you’ve earned the right to weigh in on a few things. And don’t worry, not everything I ask for opinions on will be smut related that’s just my dilemma atm.

So yeah—if that sounds fun, give me a follow over at @sarcasmandships. I’d love to have you there.

And here are the Spotify links, there is a post on tumblr that explains them a bit better so check that out:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4B8PQFkg6dX1OWQWhyr2jM?si=-QJNMak3SE67ucOT-kvgLQ&pi=vWFZbEuCSSyMH

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/48b1xZbZdpbIZhDb7ngtkT?si=RoHnhNmIR2eQurtzFer0og&pi=yTmoH4-nS6e9a

 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/64VplVtIsxWqwFyf3wmCLJ?si=tBywEXbBSNOPQvzZ6MtzIg&pi=GS26hsNQTF6TK

Chapter 37: Operation: Impress Nico di Angelo Is Going Great—If You Ignore the Smoke, the Screaming, and the Alexa Speaking in Tongues

Notes:

I really, really hope you guys enjoy these next two chapters (and the other chapter's on this date when they drop)—they mean a lot to me. This is the first date re-do, the one where things finally go right. No angst. No spiraling. Just soft, hopeful vibes and Will Solace actually getting a chance to breathe, to show up for Nico the way he’s wanted to all along.

This time, it’s Will’s turf. He’s in his own space, doing things his way, and for once he’s not stumbling through someone else’s world trying to keep up. Even if he’s totally out of his depth with the Italian cooking, he’s also… not. Because the boy studied. He learned. He poured himself into every part of this—just for Nico.

There’s no looming miscommunication, no pressure, no external chaos (well, other than Leo possibly electrocuting himself offscreen). Just two boys trying—really trying—to meet each other in the middle.

 

Thank you for sticking around this far. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

The apartment smells like garlic, candle wax, and something vaguely electrical—like a socket plotting revenge.

Chiara Benevenuti is standing at the stove like she’s preparing for battle, wooden spoon in one hand, an imported can of San Marzano tomatoes in the other, and the unwavering intensity of someone defending national honor. She glares at the pot like it personally insulted her grandmother. Will is trying very hard to follow instructions and not commit culinary war crimes.

“This is not a recipe,” she says, with the same tone Annabeth uses when people confuse Roman and Greek architecture. “This is art. You don’t just throw garlic in hot oil like some kind of American. There is structure. Emotion. Depth.”

Will glances at the sauce and tries not to laugh. “You sound like a religious zealot.”

“Good. Religion has rules.”

It’s been a week since the Halloween party. In theory, Will and Nico have been seeing each other—if “seeing each other” means stolen library kisses between classes, elbow-to-elbow lunches with the Seven and the other two members of the disaster trio, and quick glances across crowded lecture halls that say I miss you more fluently than words ever could. They haven’t talked about what the kiss meant. They haven’t needed to.

But Will’s still working two jobs. Studying. Running on empty and pride. And while the teasing at the restaurant has finally calmed down—mostly thanks to Austin loudly announcing to the entire kitchen staff that Will “finally kissed his hot, rich, goth boyfriend” in the middle of the pre-dinner service rundown—that’s not the reason he hasn’t seen Nico properly. It’s not even fear. Not really. Even though sometimes it flares hot in his throat, a panic he can’t name. Because the truth is: he’s not running this time.

He’s preparing.

Which is why Chiara is currently in his apartment, lecturing him about olive oil viscosity while Lou Ellen and Piper furiously clean the living room like the fate of love depends on spotless baseboards. She’d only agreed to help after he rescued her from a stats-induced breakdown last week, and though he doesn’t have much to trade, Will Solace has always known how to barter brains for survival.

“This place looks like teenage boys live here,” Piper mutters, yanking open a window to let out the smell of something Leo accidentally burned two minutes after he arrived. “We need ambiance. Scented ambiance.”

“Can I just say,” Lou Ellen says, pulling three half-melted candles from a drawer like she’s summoning ancient relics, “the fact that you are cooking for him is literally historic. Like, museum plaque, oral tradition, queer folklore material.”

Will groans and turns back to the sauce, which is bubbling suspiciously. “Can we not make it a thing?”

“Oh, honey.” Piper lights a candle with a lighter that probably came from Leo’s toolkit. “It’s already a thing.”

Speaking of Leo: he and Cecil are currently taking turns poking at the kitchen light fixture with a screwdriver and a vaguely cursed-looking gadget Leo insists is “just a small voltage amplifier.”

“We’re enhancing the vibe,” Leo says, balancing precariously on a chair.

“We’re definitely violating at least three parts of the lease,” Cecil mutters, holding the chair steady.

There’s a loud snap, and the lights flicker. Will yells, “Please don’t burn the apartment down before I kiss him again!”

“Again?” Chiara says, dramatically over-stirring the sauce. “You’ve kissed once. That barely counts. You think one kiss entitles you to cook like a Tuscan nonna? Please.”

Will wipes his hands on a towel and breathes in. It smells like tomato and garlic and scorched plastic. But it also smells like home. Or something trying really hard to become one.

He looks around the room—at Lou Ellen rearranging throw pillows, Piper lighting a fourth candle with her fingers crossed, Leo pulling a glowing cable from the wall like a mad scientist, Cecil holding a fire extinguisher just in case, and Chiara, furious and brilliant, whispering to the sauce in Italian like it’s a child she’s trying to raise right.

And he thinks, Nico is going to walk into this chaos and I hope to God he knows it’s all for him.

“Okay,” Will says, heart pounding. “What’s next?”

Chiara narrows her eyes. “Now we boil the pasta.”

“How much salt?”

She smirks. “Enough to make Poseidon wince.”

He grins and reaches for the salt. He has no idea how this night is going to go. But he knows he’s not afraid of it anymore

An hour later and the apartment has entered what Lou Ellen solemnly calls Defcon Flirt.

Every surface is being scrubbed within an inch of its life. The scent of lemon-scented cleaner mixes violently with the garlic simmering on the stove. Chiara has taken over the kitchen like a general preparing for battle. She’s wielding a wooden spoon like a weapon and swearing in such florid Italian that Will feels both educated and vaguely insulted.

“No, no, no!” she snaps, catching him about to add pre-ground pepper. “What is this, pepe di supermercato? You want to kiss a boy with powdered shame on your hands?”

“I didn’t realize pepper had a class system,” Will mutters.

“Everything in Italy has a class system.”

She moves around the kitchen with the command of someone born in a restaurant and raised on righteous culinary vengeance. The sauce is now a living being she is taming into submission. Every few seconds she throws out a new regional hot take—about how Venetian food is too sweet, how Romans overuse cheese, how Neapolitans have opinions but no standards. Will is mostly just trying not to burn the bread.

“Real Italian cuisine is about balance,” Chiara says, waving olive oil like a wand. “You can’t just throw things together and call it passion. It’s like dating. You need patience. Timing. A well-executed base.”

Will stirs the sauce dutifully. “Are we still talking about food?”

Chiara ignores him. She’s begun arranging basil leaves on the counter like tarot cards. “You’re cooking for Nico di Angelo. You need to understand what that means. He has suffered enough. Do not feed him bland pasta, or I will personally resurrect Mussolini just to let him kill you and Leo.”

“Hey!” Leo yells from the living room, where he and Cecil are hunched over a pile of wires and blinking LED strips. “I said we could make a robot that stirs pasta, not that we should !”

“You even think about automating my heritage and I’ll beat you with a rolling pin.”

Cecil looks up from the exposed circuit board he’s using as a coaster. “She’s really protective of carbs, huh?”

Piper, crouched on a stool and wrestling with a tangled string of fairy lights, adds without looking up, “She’s right. You two are dangerous. The last time you ‘upgraded’ the thermostat, my apartment got stuck at 91 degrees for three days.”

“That was a feature,” Leo insists. “It was good for our circulation.”

“They did the same here. It was good for my hair frizzing into a sentient cloud,” Lou Ellen says, emerging from the hallway with an armful of mismatched pillowcases. “Where is the aesthetic? Where is the mood?”

Will glances around at the chaos—Cecil perched on the back of the couch with what might be a soldering iron, Leo wiring the light switch to a remote-controlled dimmer, Piper trying to make dried eucalyptus look romantic, and Chiara muttering about the fall of the Roman Empire while she adjusts the heat.

His chest aches in a way he’s trying not to name. It feels like home in here—loud and bright and alive. And he thinks: Please let this work. Please let tonight be different.

Lou Ellen starts pulling books off the shelves, stacking them artfully beside candles. “I’m going for brooding intellectual with a soft side. Think: haunted library chic. Think: Nico.”

Will rubs the back of his neck, shifting his weight like he might back out of his own apartment. “You guys really don’t have to do all this—”

“Of course we do,” Piper cuts in, barely looking up as she arranges cutlery on the coffee table with the precision of someone building a shrine. The flickering candlelight catches on the curve of her cheek. “You’re in love. That’s a team sport now.”

“I am not—”

“Please,” Lou Ellen says, emerging from the kitchen and tossing a dish towel over the back of a chair like she’s throwing down a gauntlet. “You spiral when he takes too long to type ‘okay.’ You are fully in love and absolutely losing your mind about it.”

Will opens his mouth to argue, but Chiara slaps his hand away from the sauce with the wooden spoon before he can get a word out.

“You’re not stirring correctly,” she declares, peering into the pot like it’s personally offended her. “Your stirring lacks soul. Have you ever even loved someone so much it made you sick?”

Will stares at her, utterly deadpan. “Literally right now.”

Chiara nods once, satisfied. “Good. Channel that.”

Piper lights another candle—vanilla and cedar this time—and steps back to survey the room like she’s staging a scene in a romantic indie film.

“Okay, this is working,” she says. “This is a vibe. I believe in this pasta.”

Leo, crouched near the breaker panel with a screwdriver and zero fear of death, tosses a switch. The overhead light dims abruptly, then flickers twice before settling into something warm and moody.

“And now ,” he says, grinning like he’s just reanimated Frankenstein’s monster, “it’s a date.”

The room hums with chaotic warmth. The kind of anticipation that tastes like tomato and salt and maybe, just maybe, something worth holding onto. Will stares down at the sauce—his hands shaking just a little—as Chiara adds a handful of basil like a benediction.

He hesitates, unwilling to leave the others unsupervised for more than a minute, but knowing he has to trade the kitchen battlefield for the far more terrifying task of making himself presentable.

Will escapes to the bathroom like a man fleeing battle, shutting the door on garlic fumes, conflicting candle scents, and what sounded suspiciously like Leo saying, “What if the Alexa could flambé?”

The steam rises quickly as he steps into the shower. For a few moments, the water drowns everything out—the pounding in his chest, the soft thrum of nerves in his stomach, the realization that this is his chance to make up for everything he broke on their first date at the restaurant. This is different. This feels like something real. This feels like somewhere he belongs, and maybe somewhere where Nico could slot into, like he was always meant to be beside him amidst the chaos and the beginning of an electrical fire. 

He leans his forehead against the tile and exhales slowly.

Just a few weeks ago, he was in this same shower, scrubbing off glitter and secondhand shame after vomiting and almost kissing Nico in the same hour. He’d overthought every second of that night—agonized over what Nico must’ve thought, what he knew Nico thought. That he was a mess. That he wasn’t ready. That he didn’t belong.

Tonight, though, the mess is externalized—candle wax in the carpet, Leo nearly electrocuting himself, Chiara threatening culinary homicide—and somehow that makes it easier. The mess is shared. The pressure is still there, thick and clinging, but there’s something steadier under it now.

He steps out, towel around his waist, and pads barefoot into the bedroom. His closet is already open, which means someone—probably Piper—has preemptively rifled through his wardrobe like a judgmental raccoon.

“Do not wear that black turtleneck,” Piper calls from the kitchen. “You are not Nico.”

“Try the burgundy button-down,” Lou Ellen suggests. “You look like a wholesome bi professor in it. A man who reads queer theory and knows how to make soup.”

“Or the white tee and leather jacket,” Cecil shouts. “Gay Grease reboot. I’d watch.”

Will sighs and tugs a hanger down. The burgundy button down is out of the question, it does make him look like a professor but not in a good way. The navy button-down is nice. He wore it to his last date attempt—with a blazer, pressed slacks, shoes that pinched his heels. He had tried to match Nico’s quiet elegance, his impossible cool. And maybe that had been part of the problem. He hadn’t felt like himself. He’d felt like someone worthy of Nico, instead of just… Will.

He flips past the button-down and reaches for something else—his favorite faded jeans, soft from years of wear. A green sweater that fits just right across his chest and shoulders. It’s slightly cropped, but not aggressively so. He doesn’t need to show off. He just wants to feel good.

The hole in the armpit has since been stitched up by Lou Ellen—it’s not the best darning he’s ever seen, but it holds. And Will remembers, vividly, how Nico admitted—flushed and defensive and entirely too honest—that this exact sweater had ruined him. That he'd stood in the bookstore, staring at The Iliad, pretending to read while mentally undressing Will in that horrible green knit and cargo shorts.

So maybe it’s a little ridiculous. Maybe it’s a little on the nose. But Will pulls the sweater on anyway, smoothing it down like armor, like offering. Because if Nico saw him once and wanted him—messy, mismatched, utterly unaware—then maybe showing up as himself is enough. Maybe more than enough.

 

He runs his fingers through his damp curls, pushing them back from his face, though a few spring stubbornly forward again—golden and sun-lightened at the tips, still damp from his shower. He glances at his reflection in the mirror and pauses.

He looks… good.

Not in a flashy, movie-poster kind of way. But in a way that makes his chest pull tight with something like pride. His skin is warm from the shower, sun-kissed and freckled, the flush on his cheeks still lingering. The green sweater hugs his shoulders in just the right way, worn soft from too many washes, framing the blue of his eyes like an afterthought.

He looks a little flushed. A little soft around the edges. A little like someone in love.

He looks like himself.

And for once— for once —that feels like enough.

He exhales slowly, tugs the sweater down at the hem, and straightens up. His heart is hammering. His hands are steady.

“Okay,” he calls out, opening the bedroom door. “I’m ready—”

The chaos is, somehow, worse.

Cecil is balanced precariously on the kitchen counter, one socked foot planted in the fruit bowl as he holds a flashlight in place while Leo fiddles with the overhead fixture. The light now glows a suspicious shade of purple—less romantic and more underwater rave, but no one seems willing to address it.

Piper, unfazed, has replaced all the mismatched kitchen towels with red linen napkins she produced from her tote bag like a magician. “For atmosphere,” she said. “And dignity.” She’s currently fluffing the throw pillows on the couch like they’re auditioning for a lifestyle blog.

Chiara is at the stove, grating Parmigiano-Reggiano with the precision of a woman performing open heart surgery. She’s murmuring in rapid Italian under her breath, eyes narrowed in reverence at the sauce like it might respond to her spiritual devotion.

Lou Ellen stands back to admire her candle placements, striking a match with the flair of someone setting the mood and summoning a minor god. The last candle flickers to life just as Will steps out of the hallway, sweater adjusted, curls slightly damp, hands stuffed awkwardly in his pockets.

They all turn to look at him.

The room stills for a beat—then erupts.

“Okay but damn, ” Piper says, clapping her hands together like she’s just witnessed a coronation. “You look like a Studio Ghibli boy in love.”

“I second that,” Lou Ellen adds, sweeping in to straighten his collar unnecessarily. “Soft, glowy, a little tragic. Nico’s gonna die.”

“Do not say ‘die’ while I’m garnishing this sauce,” Chiara snaps, never looking up. “This is sacred. We are infusing it with love, not death.”

“Wait,” Leo calls from the couch. “Is this a hot casual vibe? Because if so, I approve. Very ‘boyfriend you accidentally fall in love with.’”

“That’s literally the goal,” Lou Ellen says. “He already fell. We’re just trying to make sure he lands.”

Will rubs the back of his neck, cheeks flushed pink, eyes darting toward the ground like the compliments might physically knock him over. His voice is quiet. “Do you think… he’ll like it?”

Cecil hops down from the counter with a dramatic little bounce and—shockingly—drops the bravado for just a second. He steps forward, hands in his hoodie pocket, and gives Will a small, sincere smile.

“He already does.”

Will swallows, throat tight. He doesn’t say thank you, but it’s there—in the way he exhales, the way he presses a hand to his heart like he’s steadying something inside himself that’s just now beginning to bloom.

And around him, the apartment pulses with warmth and light and chaos and friendship. It smells like garlic and candle wax and cheap red wine. The overhead glow is slightly too purple, the candles are a fire hazard, and someone’s definitely going to trip on the rug.

But somehow—somehow—it’s perfect.

Will exhales and turns back to the room, surveying the chaos one last time: the candles are lit and mercifully not flickering like they want to summon a demon; the fairy lights Leo rigged haven’t shorted out (yet); the pasta is warming in the oven. The apartment looks like the ghost of a Pinterest board possessed it—half romance, half accidental science fair—but it works. It feels alive.

And it’s time to clear out the chaos.

“All right,” Will says, clapping his hands. “Eviction time. Everybody out.”

A chorus of groans erupts around the room like he’s just banned fun itself.

“Eviction?!” Lou Ellen gasps, hand to chest. “After all we’ve done for you? This is how you repay us? With betrayal and banishment?”

“I lit a candle with intention,” Piper adds dramatically. “That’s basically witchcraft. You can’t just kick us out mid-spell.”

Cecil flops across the arm of the couch. “We built this home with our blood, sweat, and highly illegal wiring, and you’re just tossing us aside for love? Disgusting.”

Leo raises a hand, eyes wide. “Wait, are you about to get laid?”

Will pinches the bridge of his nose. “Oh my gods. I don’t know, maybe. No I’m not—okay, first of all, no. Second of all, even if I was, you’re all going to Percy and Annabeth’s. For pizza. And movies. And probably a long discussion about whether Alien is a feminist masterpiece.”

“Oh right,” Piper says, suddenly far too casual. “We did agree to that.”

“Yeah,” Lou Ellen adds, standing up and dusting off her pants. “I wanna see if Annabeth’s wine fridge still hates Leo.”

“It doesn’t hate me,” Leo mutters. “It’s just… not compatible with genius.”

“It literally locked you inside the pantry.”

“I was investigating.”

Will waves a hand toward the door. “Shoo. Go. Be chaotic elsewhere.”

Chiara, who’s been calmly packing up her supplies into a very chic reusable tote, steps over and looks at Will with rare seriousness.

“You did good, Solace,” she says. “If this date doesn’t go well, it’s not the pasta’s fault.”

Will smiles, warm and grateful. “Thanks. For everything. I owe you, big time.”

She shrugs. “Just help me pass stats and don’t date anyone who thinks pineapple belongs on pizza.”

“Noted.”

He walks her to the door, and the rest begin trickling out—Piper tossing him a final wink, Leo carrying what appears to be a piece of the old light fixture, Cecil mumbling something about grabbing his backup switchblade, and Lou Ellen blowing him a kiss before whispering, “Don’t forget to breathe.”

The door closes behind them with a satisfying click.

And for the first time all day, the apartment is quiet.

No Leo shouting about wires. No clatter of cutlery. No chaotic commentary from Piper about napkin aesthetics. Just the warm flicker of candlelight, the soft hum of the city outside the window, and the rich, slow bloom of garlic and tomato hanging in the air like a promise.

Will exhales. He’s alone. The table is set. The pasta smells amazing. The wine glasses catch the glow of the fairy lights like tiny constellations. Everything looks— romantic. Or at least his best attempt at it.

He glances at the clock again. Nico will be here any minute.

His palms are sweating. His heart is doing something erratic and embarrassing.

He wipes his hands on his jeans and takes one last look around the apartment, scanning for imperfections like a soldier before battle. The rug is slightly crooked. One of the candles is leaning like it’s about to defect. His sweater has a wrinkle on the hem and he knows Nico won’t care, but that doesn’t stop the surge of nerves from rising sharp and fast in his chest.

He wants this to go well.
He needs this to go well.
Because he’s trying this time. Trying not to hide, not to panic, not to run from what he wants.

He presses his hands against his thighs, grounding himself. Tries to breathe past the tight flutter of hope that keeps catching behind his ribs.

And then—

The knock.

Soft. Measured. Almost like an afterthought.

But it hits Will like thunder.

He startles, then freezes. For one wild second, he considers sprinting back into the kitchen to stir something that doesn’t need stirring.

Instead, he checks the mirror in the hall—just once. Just to make sure he doesn’t look like someone who’s been nervously pacing for the last four minutes (he does). He smooths his hair. Forces himself to stand still.

And then—

He opens the door.

Chapter 38: Nico di Angelo Likes My Cooking (?!), So Naturally I Accidentally Flirt in Two Languages, and Forget How to Function

Notes:

Also, incase anyone missed it, I finally made Spotify playlists for this fic, the links are at the end of chapter 36 and also on my tumblr @sarcasmandships

Nico is standing there in a long black coat, the collar turned up against the wind like a shield. The hallway light behind him casts a faint halo at his shoulders, rain-slick and cinematic. His hair is damp from the drizzle—curls dark and curling slightly at the ends, clinging to his forehead in a way that feels both accidental and devastating.

He looks like he walked out of a dream Will’s never admitted to having. Sharp cheekbones, rain-polished boots, eyes like secrets, and a mouth Will suddenly can’t stop looking at. And the worst part—the best part—is that he doesn’t even seem to know. Doesn’t realize he’s standing there like a poem half-unwritten, like he’s something beautiful that just happened.

Will’s breath catches. It lodges somewhere low in his chest—an ache sharp and sudden, like gravity has shifted sideways inside him and he’s only just remembered how to stand.

“Hey,” he says, voice softer than he means it to be. Almost shy. Almost reverent.

Nico’s gaze flicks past him, into the apartment, where the warm haze of candlelight flickers against walls scrubbed clean for this exact moment. He blinks once. Then again. The rain in his hair glistens like spilled starlight.

And Will watches the change unfold—slow and unguarded. The slight parting of Nico’s lips. The breath he forgets to let go. The widening of his eyes, just a fraction, before he pulls it all back behind his practiced stillness.

“You… lit candles,” Nico says, and it’s not quite a question. More like disbelief wrapped in static.

Will leans against the doorframe, casual only in posture. Inside, his heart is a drumbeat out of rhythm, too loud, too fast, like it’s trying to break its way free just to reach him. “I did. And I made dinner.”

“You made dinner,” Nico repeats, slow and stunned, as if he’s translating it from another language. As if the idea itself is too delicate to hold all at once. “For me.”

Will smiles, crooked and nervous, and steps back, the door swinging open wider behind him. “Come in. Before the pasta goes cold and Chiara rises from the shadows to smite me with her wooden spoon.”

Nico hesitates for a beat before stepping over the threshold. The door shuts behind him with a quiet click. The apartment smells like tomatoes and fresh basil, the lighting soft and warm. Nico takes it all in: the clean living room, the table set for two, the candles flickering like someone planned them that way. His shoulders stay tense, but Will watches his expression crack—just barely. Something gentle flickers in his eyes, too quiet to name.

“You didn’t tell me this was a date,” Nico says, and it sounds like both an accusation and a defense. Like the words came too fast to soften first.

Will shrugs, trying to play it cool, though his hands still tremble faintly at his sides. “I figured it was my turn. To do it right.”

The silence that follows stretches wide, threaded through with candlelight and the low hum of the city beyond the window.

“You didn’t have to do all this,” Nico says. His tone is flat, but not unkind—more like it’s been smoothed down from something sharper. Like he doesn’t quite know how to carry this kind of softness without dropping it. Without breaking it.

Will studies him—the way Nico’s still clutching his coat tight at the collar, like it’s a shield. The tension in his shoulders. The sharpness in his voice that doesn’t match his eyes. Nico looks like someone standing on the threshold of a home he doesn’t believe he’s allowed to enter, even though the door has always been open. Even though the lights are on and the table is set and someone is waiting for him inside.

“I know I didn’t have to,” Will says, quietly. “I wanted to.”

And that does it.

Nico blinks, slow—like the words need a moment to reach him fully. Like no one’s ever said them quite that way before. The smallest, most helpless smile tugs at the corner of his mouth before he bites it back, like it's something dangerous, like it's something sacred.

He shrugs off his coat and drapes it over the back of a chair, movements careful and precise. The guarded grace of someone who’s used to being too much or not enough, and never quite landing in the middle. But Will sees it anyway—the way Nico’s fingers hesitate on the fabric. The way his eyes flick across the room, wide and searching, cataloging everything: the candlelight, the linen napkins, the pasta, the quiet invitation of the moment.

Like he’s trying to memorize it. Like he’ll replay it later, in the dark, when it’s safe to believe he was wanted.

And Will lets him. Says nothing. Just stands there, heart full and steady, letting Nico look. Letting him be here. Letting him stay.

Will gestures toward the table, where the candlelight pools like honey across the plates and silverware. “You hungry?”

Nico raises an eyebrow, shrugging out of his own wariness inch by inch. “That depends. Did you actually cook, or did you just let Chiara threaten your cookware into submission?”

Will grins, the expression easy and warm and a little proud. “A little of both.”

He steps around the table and pulls out a chair for Nico, the legs scraping softly against the floor. It’s a small gesture, maybe even a little old-fashioned, but there’s something in the way he does it—gentle, deliberate—that makes it feel like more.

Nico rolls his eyes, but there’s no real bite to it. It’s theatrical, familiar—an attempt at indifference that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He sits, fluid and careful, like he’s not sure whether he’s allowed to fully relax. Will watches the way Nico’s fingers rest lightly on the edge of the table, like he’s bracing himself. Like part of him still expects the room to vanish, or the moment to sour.

But it doesn’t. The candles still burn low and golden. The pasta still fills the air with warmth and garlic. And Will is still here—heart stuttering, hands shaking just a little—trying his best to show Nico he’s worth setting the table for.

And just like that, the date begins. Quiet. Careful. But real. Something tender blooms between them—not rushed, not forced. Just two boys sitting at a table, under candlelight, daring to believe they might be allowed to have this. Even if neither of them can say it out loud just yet.

Will fidgets with the edge of his napkin as Nico settles into the chair across from him. The lighting makes Nico look unreal—sharp cheekbones casting soft shadows, eyes catching the flicker of candlelight like reflections off a dark canal. Will swallows and forces himself to breathe.

“So,” he says, entirely too loudly, “this is all… Chiara’s fault.”

Nico lifts an eyebrow, equal parts amused and wary. “I suspected.”

“I mean—okay. Not fault. But like. She’s been training me. All week. Actual culinary bootcamp. I haven’t studied this hard since I had to take the MCAT.”

He gestures toward the table as he talks, plates still covered for the reveal. Nico watches him with that infuriatingly unreadable expression—the one that looks bored but is actually focused, the one that makes Will want to say too much just to provoke something.

Will exhales, already spiraling. “So I told her I wanted to cook for you and she went absolutely feral. Like. She took it as a personal challenge. Started quizzing me on regional ingredients like she was preparing me for Top Chef: Italy. I think she threatened to sue me if I used store-brand parmesan.”

Nico lets out a breath—soft, amused. The barest curve of his mouth. But Will sees it. Catches it like a spark to kindling. His breath hitches, and that’s all the encouragement he needs to keep going, tumbling over his words before the silence can catch up.

“Anyway, since you’re from Venice—well, not from Venice, but that’s where your family’s from, right?—she decided we had to go all in. So tonight’s all Venetian dishes. She helped me prep cicchetti —like those little appetizers? There’s sarde in saor , and some crostini with baccalà mantecato —oh, that’s like this whipped salted cod thing? Sounds weird but it’s actually amazing—”

Nico steps away from the table, quietly moving toward the counter. He picks up the wine bottle and uncorks it in one smooth motion, practiced and unthinking. There’s something elegant about the way he does it, like it’s muscle memory, like he’s done this in a hundred rooms just like this—and yet never one quite like this.

Will doesn’t notice. Or maybe he does, but he can’t afford to stop. The words keep spilling out.

“—and then there’s bigoli in salsa for the pasta course, which is like this anchovy-onion sauce thing that smells way better than it sounds—Chiara made me caramelize onions for an hour. An hour. No shortcuts. Which I respect and also fear. And I got the pasta fresh from her uncle’s restaurant in Little Italy because apparently dried pasta was, quote, ‘not an option.’”

He laughs, nervous, scratching the back of his neck. His curls are already starting to frizz from the heat of the kitchen and nerves.

“I also learned that Venetian cuisine is really different from southern Italian food? Like more seafood and spices, less tomato? Chiara went on a whole rant about trade routes and the spice road and how Venice used to be this epicenter of culture and commerce and it actually kind of made me wish I took more history.”

Nico pours the wine in silence—two glasses, Malbec, deep red and rich enough to stain. He moves slowly, deliberately. His face is unreadable, but there’s a softness at the edges now. Something loosening. Something fragile.

He returns and sets one glass in front of Will, the brush of his fingers just barely grazing Will’s. Maybe by accident. Maybe not. The contact is enough to make Will’s breath catch.

Just for a second.

But then the spiral continues.

“—and apparently the bellinis we all drink at brunch are also from Venice? Well I don’t drink them, I don’t even eat brunch, but I serve them to people at the restaurant. I didn’t make those because, it’s dinner, and I figured you’d rather wine. I know you’re supposed to drink white wine with seafood, Chiara tried to insist, but you always drink red, and Piper said it was more romantic and I panicked and agreed, so… here we are.”

Will pauses to breathe. Then the meaning of his own words catches up with him.

And he freezes. Horrified.

“Not that I was trying to make this, like, overly romantic—well, okay, I was—but not, like, pressure-y romantic, just… soft? Date-y? Cozy -romantic, not proposal -romantic, you know?”

He looks at Nico—truly looks at him, finally—and Nico is just standing there, wine in hand, watching him like he can’t quite believe Will is real. There’s something unreadable in his eyes, but not cold. Not guarded.

Something almost overwhelmed.

Something like awe.

And Will, flushed and anxious and utterly sincere, wonders if he might’ve actually done something right.

He stops talking. Finally. Realizing too late that he’s said everything except the one thing he actually wants to say, which is: I care about you. I thought about you. I wanted to get this right.

He risks a glance up.

Nico is watching him.

Not blinking. Not smirking. Just watching , with this impossible expression—something still and warm, like sunlight caught on dark water. His eyes are wide, unguarded in a way Will almost never sees, like whatever armor he usually wears has slipped, unnoticed. He looks at Will like he’s something delicate. Like he doesn’t understand how someone could be this kind to him , and yet here Will is, glowing soft in candlelight and tripping over words for no other reason than wanting to make him feel wanted.

His fingers curl slightly around the stem of his wineglass, knuckles white, like he's grounding himself. His shoulders don’t drop exactly, but something in them settles. And Will can tell—can feel —that Nico is doing the math in real time. Not just about the dinner or the effort or the food, but about what it all means. About what it would cost someone to care this much, and what it means that Will did it anyway.

Will braces for teasing. A crooked smirk. A deflection. A sarcastic “you talk too much” or a muttered “you’re such a dork.” Something that lets Nico shove this moment back into a shape he knows how to hold.

But it doesn’t come.

Nico just sits down slowly, quiet and measured, like the chair might vanish if he moves too fast. He takes a sip of wine—not rushed, not performative, just steady—and sets the glass down with care.

Then, with his eyes still locked on Will, voice low and sincere, he murmurs, “ Grazie. ”

Will’s chest pulls tight. Something about the way Nico says it—so simple, so soft—makes the room feel smaller. Closer. Like the air has thickened between them.

And for a second, Will thinks, if he says my name like that, I might actually kiss him across this table.

Nico doesn’t say thank you lightly. Doesn’t give softness easily. When it does come, it’s usually in fragments—slipped through a crack he didn’t mean to leave open. But now his voice is low, reverent. And he’s looking not quite at Will, but somewhere just below his collarbone, like eye contact might unravel him completely.

“You didn’t have to do all this,” he says again, quieter this time. “But… you did.”

Will nods, slow. His throat feels tight, breath caught somewhere between awe and disbelief. “Yeah,” he says softly. “I did.”

The space between them stills.

Candlelight trembles on the tabletop—liquid gold caught in glass, in silverware, in the shine of Nico’s curls. The air feels dense with unspoken things. Not heavy, exactly, but full. Like the whole night is leaning in, listening.

Will’s hands are still sweating. His heart hasn’t stopped its anxious rhythm. But for once, none of that matters. Because even if Nico won’t say it out loud—not yet—Will knows.

He sees it in the way Nico’s fingers trace the edge of his plate, slow and distracted, like he’s grounding himself. In the subtle shift of his shoulders, the loosening that wasn’t there when he walked in. In the way he breathes— truly breathes —like he’s not waiting for the moment to collapse under him.

Like part of him is beginning to believe this is real.

They eat slowly. Carefully. As if chewing too fast might scare the feeling away. The food is warm, the wine richer with every sip, but it’s the quiet that wraps around them like velvet. The quiet of two people realizing they’ve been starving for something they didn’t know they could ask for.

The cicchetti is light, salty, rich—layers of flavor that melt on the tongue, chased by sips of red wine and candlelight. Will watches Nico’s face like a prayer as he takes the first bite. It’s the most nerve-wracking thing he’s ever done: more than the MCATs, more than telling Austin he kissed Nico, more than the kiss itself.

Nico chews thoughtfully, eyes narrowed in critical silence.

Will can’t breathe.

Then, finally, Nico swallows, sets down his fork, and says, “Okay. I hate to admit it.”

Will leans forward.

“But this is… really good.”

A beat.

Then another.

And Will glows. Like a match caught flame. His whole face lifts, boyish and bright. He leans back, letting out a breathless laugh. “Oh thank God. I was about to have a heart attack.”

“You still might,” Nico mutters, reaching for the next bite. “This crostino has anchovy. That’s a loaded risk.”

“Chiara said I wasn’t allowed to be scared of anchovies or love,” Will says, deadpan. “Guess which one I’m still struggling with.”

Nico lets out a soft, surprised huff of laughter. It’s small but real, like a gift. And something shifts between them. The room softens. Time stretches. They make it through most of the meal like that—teasing, tasting, refilling their glasses. The pasta is earthy and tender, tangled with caramelized onions and a whisper of salt from the sea. Nico twirls the pasta on his fork like he’s done it a thousand times before—because he has.

“Venice was the first place I ever felt…” He pauses, searching. “Rooted. I guess.”

Will blinks. “You lived there for a while when you were younger, right?”

Nico nods, eyes lowered. “Yeah, Bianca and I did. After our mom died. My father didn’t want to raise us himself, so he sent us to stay with our mother’s family. They were from Venice. Old money. Older expectations.”

He doesn’t sound bitter—just distant, like he’s talking about someone else’s life.

“But they weren’t cruel,” Nico adds. “Not to me. Not to Bianca. Just… traditional. Formal. The house was enormous. Empty-feeling. Always quiet, but filled with little things—glass from Murano, silk from Florence, food from every region. They took us all over Italy, actually. Rome, Naples, Lake Como. Always staying in these stone villas or old hotels with too much lace and not enough warmth.”

Will listens, completely still.

It should sound like a fairytale—summer homes on lakes, priceless art, heirloom linens, entire cities passed through like postcards. But it doesn’t. Not the way Nico says it. His voice is too measured. Too careful.

Will thinks of his own apartment—small and noisy, cracked windows and crooked shelves. The scent of garlic still lingering in the corners, the clutter of shared living, the noise of people who stay . He thinks of Nico walking through marble hallways in shoes that didn’t echo quite right, learning to make himself smaller in places built to impress.

For the first time, Will realizes that money solves a lot of problems, but not the ones that matter most. Not loneliness. Not silence. Not the ache of being surrounded by everything except the thing you actually need.

“But Venice,” Nico says, a little softer, “was the only place that felt like it could hold a ghost. It’s all water and silence and shadows. The kind of city you can disappear into without anyone noticing you were there. I liked that. I liked the stillness.”

Will swallows hard. His chest tightens with something equal parts sorrow and tenderness.

“You were just a kid.”

“I was,” Nico agrees. “But I didn’t feel like one.”

There’s a pause. The wine lingers on both their tongues—dark and dry, tinged with something earthy and old. The silence between them doesn’t stretch awkwardly this time. It curls in on itself, tender and weighted, like it’s protecting something fragile.

Nico’s gaze drops to his glass, fingers trailing the rim in slow, absent circles—like he’s sketching something invisible, or trying to trace the shape of a memory he can’t quite hold onto.

“I think you would’ve liked it,” he says, voice quieter now. “Venice. You’re a quiet observer. You pay attention to small things. You’d notice the mosaics other people walk over.”

Will's breath catches, just slightly.

He knows Nico’s talking about Venice. About art and shadows and silence. But part of Will wonders if it’s something else, too— someone else. If maybe Nico is talking about himself, in that quiet, sideways way he does when the feelings are too sharp to name directly. About being something intricate and overlooked. Something fractured, but carefully placed. Something most people walk past without ever really seeing.

Will thinks about how he looks at Nico—how he really looks. The pauses he’s learned to wait through. The silences that say more than words. The way Nico pulls away sometimes, like he's expecting to be broken before he can be held.

Will has never seen mosaic work in person, but he imagines it now—shards of color laid in deliberate patterns, sharp edges catching the light just right. Beautiful, but only if you look closely. Only if you stop.

His voice is barely a breath. “Take me someday?”

Nico looks up. And for a second—just a second—he doesn’t guard it. Doesn’t flinch or deflect or fold in on himself. His eyes are open and clear and still.

“Maybe I will,” he says. And then, almost to himself, like it slips out before he can decide otherwise: “Sei già un sogno, ma potrei abituarmi ad averti qui..”

Will blinks, the words washing over him like warm rain. “Okay, that was either very sweet or deeply insulting.”

Nico smirks, lifting his glass with the slow grace of someone who knows exactly what he’s doing. “I guess you’ll never know.”

But Will is already squinting, tilting his head like he’s trying to solve a puzzle he almost understands. “Wait—sogno means dream, right? I took Spanish in high school. I’m not fluent or anything, but I can guess stuff… sueño is dream in Spanish. That has to be it.”

Nico doesn’t answer, but the glint in his eye says, maybe.

Will presses on, brow furrowed in concentration. “ Potrei sounds like podría, which is like ‘I could’ in Spanish? And averti —I don’t know, but qui is basically aquí. So—‘you’re a dream… but I could something-something here’?”

He looks up, a little breathless, half-hopeful and half-stunned that he’s managed to get it right. “Did I… did I just translate that?”

Nico’s smile flickers—softer now, more real. “More or less,” he murmurs, “I said, you’re already a dream but I could get used to having you here. It sounds better in Italian.”

Will exhales, and something warm unfurls in his chest—slow and golden. It’s not just the words. It’s the fact that Nico said them. It’s the way they fit into this night, this room, this moment like they were always meant to be spoken aloud. It’s that Nico wants him here. Wants him close. Wants him to stay.

“You’re flirting,” Will says, trying for indignation, but his voice betrays him—weaker than he means it to be. A little breathless. A little gone.

Nico shrugs one shoulder, the movement effortless, almost lazy, like he doesn’t have to try. Like he already knows the effect he’s having. “Maybe.”

Will gapes at him, one hand still cradling his wine glass, the other useless in his lap. “You are. You’re flirting in Italian. You’re weaponizing language. You know I don’t speak Italian—”

“You speak Spanish,” Nico counters, deadpan. “That’s close enough.”

Will huffs, dramatically. “I barely speak Spanish. I only remember what stuck from high school and whatever Leo babbles en espãnol when he’s drunk. Besides, that is not how this works.”

Nico leans back in his chair with the kind of languid grace that should be illegal, legs crossed at the ankle, wine glass poised at his lips like punctuation. He watches Will over the rim of it—unblinking, amused, devastating. The candlelight dances along his cheekbones, pools in the hollow of his throat, and Will is suddenly, wildly aware of how easy it would be to tip forward and kiss him across the table.

He looks like a secret. Like something ancient and private and full of meaning. Like a story Will hasn’t finished reading but already doesn’t want to end.

“It’s how I work,” Nico says, and it’s too casual to be harmless.

Will stares, pulse fluttering at the base of his throat, the wine a low burn in his chest. The moment thickens around them—warm, heady, suspended. The soft scratch of the candle’s wick. The distant sounds of the city filtering through the window. The ache of wanting something he’s already halfway inside of.

Nico isn’t even trying to be seductive. That’s the worst part. He’s just being. And Will is completely, hopelessly ruined by it.

The silence simmers. Slow. Charged.

And Will thinks, If he says one more word in Italian, I might actually kiss him across this table.

They move through the courses slowly, savoring each bite. The food is good—really good—and Will can hardly believe he made any part of it. But more than that, it’s the quiet between them that feels nourishing. The kind that doesn’t demand to be filled, but still gets filled anyway, piece by piece.

Will twirls a bite of bigoli around his fork and says, “So, wait. You traveled all over Italy with your mom’s family?”

Nico nods, setting his glass down. “Yeah. They didn’t want us to rot in one house, even if it was a nice one. My grandfather was big on… legacy. Showing us our roots. Bianca loved it. She liked dressing up, playing the part. I think she made friends everywhere we went.”

“And you?”

Nico shrugs, eyes flicking briefly toward the candle flame. “I liked the history. The structure. Old buildings that had survived things. Places where the air felt ancient. I used to imagine the stones could remember us.”

Will smiles, soft. “That’s such a you thing to say.”

“I know,” Nico mutters, almost embarrassed, and the faint pink blooming at the tips of his ears gives him away.

“I’ve never even left the U.S.,” Will says. “Not even for a vacation. Never had the time. Or the money. Or the passport, honestly.”

Nico doesn’t speak right away, but his gaze lingers. It’s not pity—just quiet understanding. Like he’s seeing the edges of something he hadn’t known to look for.

“I want to go,” Will continues. “Someday. Not just to visit but to know places. To walk down a street and recognize the sound of the language and not feel like an outsider. I want to understand the way you talk about it.”

Something shifts in Nico’s expression—his shoulders easing, his mouth twitching like he’s holding back something too sincere. “You’re doing a pretty good job already.”

Will flushes, startled by how much that means to him, and reaches for his wine glass to give his hands something to do.

Nico leans back slightly in his chair, his smile wry. “After Italy, we went to Greece. For a while. My father’s side.”

“Oh?” Will says, curious now, head tilted.

Nico exhales like he’s bracing for impact. “Messy. Predictable. Like a family reunion written by Euripides.”

Will grins, delighted. “That bad?”

“You have no idea,” Nico mutters, sipping his wine. “My father’s brothers can’t be in the same room without resurrecting some ancient rivalry.”

He sets the glass down with a soft clink and leans back in his chair, fingers curled loosely around the stem. “The oldest one, he runs a massive energy conglomerate that claims to be all about green innovation, but also owns half the regional airlines in the Mediterranean and regularly gets into PR scandals about emissions.”

Nico exhales through his nose, then lifts his glass again, like it’s helping him survive the conversation.

“He still holds a grudge because the middle brother inherited the family villa in Santorini—which sounds romantic, but it’s basically a crumbling temple with salt damage, and they’ve been fighting about who should pay to restore it for years. And the middle brother, he controls a global shipping empire that’s constantly at war with another company run by Percy’s dad. Like, they’ve sabotaged each other’s docks before. There was a whole thing with a freighter and a sea turtle rescue foundation that almost made the news until someone buried it in a tax scandal.”

Will snorts softly, but Nico doesn’t break stride.

“Anyways, he married five times to secure international business deals and then fell in love with a sculptor he insists is just his roommate, even though they share a dog and matching rings.”

“Wow,” Will says, wide-eyed, fork halfway to his mouth and forgotten. “So like… actual Greek tragedy stuff.”

“Exactly,” Nico replies, deadpan. “Everyone’s always dressed like they’re about to attend a funeral or throw a dinner party for a dictator. There are marble busts of themselves in the hallways. And my father just sits there at the end of the table, saying nothing, like he’s the only sane one. Which he isn’t.”

Will laughs—sharp, startled, real. He sets his fork down completely, leans into the warmth of the room, the softness of candlelight flickering along the edges of Nico’s cheekbones.

“Oh my god,” he says, shaking his head. “And I thought my extended family was dramatic.”

“Yours didn’t try to poison each other at a wedding.”

Will nearly chokes on his wine. “Are you kidding? ”

“Nope,” Nico says, popping the ‘p’ like a match being struck. “Someone tampered with the wine. One of my cousins passed out in a fountain. The rest of us just kept eating.”

“That’s insane.”

“It’s tradition.”

Will can’t stop smiling, even as his mind spins trying to map Nico’s words into something he understands. The absurd elegance of it—the busts and blackmail and poisoned wine—it’s like a soap opera set in an old cathedral. He thinks about his own family back in Austin, his mother’s side, loud and sun-warmed and tangled in small-town gossip, stubbornness, and prejudice. Naomi showing up late to barbecues in floor-length leather and sunglasses, talking about ex-boyfriends and tour buses like it’s Sunday scripture. Aunts who fought over pie recipes, cousins who tried to outsing each other at Christmas.

But there’s this other half he doesn’t know—his dad’s side, a blank space in the family tree. And he wonders, not for the first time, if there’s that kind of operatic chaos there too. Not the kind you outgrow, but the kind that clings to your bones and follows you across continents.

He leans forward, chin propped in one hand, watching Nico through the haze of wine and golden light. There’s something almost sacred about how he talks—measured and sharp, and yet full of myth. His eyes shadowed, his mouth turned slightly downward, but his presence burning bright.

“You know, most people don’t say that kind of thing with so much fondness.”

“I didn’t say it was fond,” Nico says, but his voice has gone soft again, the edges worn down like sea glass. “It’s just… part of me. The drama. The silence. The cities that crumble and rebuild.”

Will looks at him for a long moment, the world narrowing to the quiet weight of those words. His pasta’s gone cold, but he doesn’t care. There’s something ancient in the way Nico sits—something aching and alive and quietly magnificent.

“You talk like a poem,” he says, before he can stop himself.

Nico blinks. “That’s ridiculous.”

“No,” Will says, smiling, heart climbing somewhere into his throat. “It’s true. Like some ancient poet who accidentally got reborn as a hot goth guy.”

Nico rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling now—faint and dangerous, the kind of smile that feels like standing too close to a candle. Will watches the way it curves at the corner of his mouth, softens the line of his jaw, makes him look unfairly, unreasonably good.

And Will—heart thudding, wine warm in his chest—thinks he could sit at this table forever. Just listening. Just watching. Just being here, in the quiet drama of Nico’s world, invited in.

“ Ti piacciono i poeti belli, eh? ”

The words fall easy from Nico’s lips, low and melodic. Italian, again. Romantic by default, weaponized by intention.

Will blinks. “Okay, no fair—Spanish didn’t cover that.”

Nico leans back in his chair, tilting his wineglass just enough for the light to catch it. His gaze is steady, unreadable. “You don’t need to understand,” he says. “You just need to listen.”

There’s something in his voice—like a challenge, like a promise. Like an invitation made with hands tucked behind his back, just daring Will to step closer.

And Will, suddenly breathless—suddenly aware of the shape of his own want, sharp and aching and impossibly close—doesn’t look away.

There’s something about the way Nico’s watching him. Steady. Focused. Like he’s not just saying a line, but offering something . A test. A promise. A door left ajar.

Will swallows, pulse thudding in his throat. The air between them feels electric, too warm, too still. “Say it again,” he murmurs, and his voice comes out low—wrecked, reverent.

Nico raises his glass in a small, deliberate toast. The smirk is gone now, dissolved into something quieter. His mouth is soft, serious. His eyes don’t waver.

“Ti piacciono i poeti belli,” he repeats, barely above a whisper.

Will swears he feels it. Not just in his chest, but lower. Like the words trace down his spine and settle in the pit of his stomach, warm and dizzying. Nico’s Italian is too smooth, too deliberate. Too devastating. It hits like a secret pressed to the skin.

Will still doesn’t know what it means. Not exactly.

But he knows it’s about him. And Nico. About them. He knows it’s not just a line, but a moment—held out like a ribbon between them. Still, he tries to make an educated guess. 

Ti —you. That part’s easy.

Piacciono … Will hesitates. It doesn’t sound like gustar in Spanish, but the structure of it is similar enough that he thinks he gets the gist—the way it flips the subject and the object, how it never quite says you like but instead they please you. Weird, backwards grammar that always confused him, but he gets the shape of it, and makes an educated guess based on the context of what else he can translate. Piacciono . Like. Probably.

Poeti —that one’s obvious. Poets. Practically the same in English, just softened around the edges.

And belli … beautiful. He knows that, too. From songs, from movies, from whispered compliments in scenes where two people fall in love under a foreign sky. It’s close enough to bello in Spanish, close enough to English that it lands easy. Sweet and dangerous.

You like beautiful poets.

Will swallows hard.

Yeah. Yeah, he does.

Will exhales slowly, like the meaning might burn if he breathes too fast.

He doesn’t say I love you.

He doesn’t say please do that again.

But every inch of his body is saying it for him.

The candlelight flickers, catching in Nico’s curls, in the sharp line of his jaw, in the curve of his mouth like it’s poetry all its own. He looks devastating and unbothered, like he has no idea he just shattered something fundamental inside Will—or worse, like he does .

And Will, stunned and aching and entirely undone, thinks: If he whispers in Italian again, I am going to lose every last coherent thought I’ve ever had.

He licks his lips, heart racing, and before he can talk himself out of it, he says—voice low and uneven:

“Sí… mucho.”

Nico blinks.

Just once.

But something shifts. It’s subtle, barely there, like a current passing beneath still water. His posture goes rigid, like the words have caught him off guard—not just surprised him, but struck him. The stem of his wineglass dips slightly in his hand, forgotten. His eyes—already dark in the candlelight—go darker still, sharpening with something Will can’t quite name. Something hot and unreadable.

Will’s breath stumbles in his chest.

Nico is staring. Not with amusement, not with condescension, but with a kind of alert, focused intensity. Like a match just got struck behind his ribs and he’s deciding whether or not to let it catch.

Will flushes immediately. “Sorry, that was—I don’t know why I said it like that—my Spanish is so rusty, I just—”

But Nico cuts him off, his voice quieter now. Slower. Like each word is chosen with care. “That means… ‘Yes, very much.’”

Will nods, swallowing hard. “Yeah. I figured you’d understand. Kinda close, right?”

He tries to play it off, but the room feels too warm. The air too dense. The wine too sweet in his mouth. He can’t stop looking at Nico—at the way his gaze hasn’t dropped, hasn’t wavered. There’s a flush creeping up the side of Nico’s neck now, high and sharp beneath his collar, and his jaw is tight like he’s holding something back.

Will’s mind is buzzing—half Spanish, half Italian, all want.

And still, Nico doesn’t look away.

Will, still flushed from his Spanish gamble, watches the way Nico’s expression lingers—quiet, unguarded, and just a little stunned. Like he hadn’t expected Will to say it. Or mean it. Or hit him so precisely in a place he thought no one could reach.

“You’re really smart,” Nico says suddenly, like the words have been sitting on his tongue all night, waiting for permission.

Will looks up, half-laughing, one eyebrow raised. “You say that like it’s surprising.”

Nico shrugs, but the corner of his mouth twitches like he’s trying not to smile. “You’ve spent the past month crashing your bike into bushes, knocking over entire displays at the bookstore, and spilling your coffee like it personally offended you.”

Will groans, dragging a hand down his face, half-hiding behind it. “Okay, yeah, but only when you’re around. That was a crush-induced coordination failure.”

“Was it?” Nico asks, voice low, teasing. “Tragic.”

Will narrows his eyes, but the grin tugging at his mouth gives him away. “You’re making fun of me.”

“A little.” Nico sips his wine, gaze never quite leaving Will’s. But the smile that plays at his lips softens as it settles. “But I’m joking. I know how smart you are.”

Will tilts his head, curiosity blooming behind his flushed cheeks. “Oh yeah?”

“I’ve been watching you study in the library for months,” Nico says, tone deceptively casual, like the admission doesn’t make something curl tight between them. “Back when I was still pretending I didn’t have a crush on you.”

Will blinks, stunned. His stomach does something dangerous. “You—what?”

Nico doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t deflect. He just looks at him, gaze sharper now, more deliberate—like he’s letting Will see a version of him no one else gets. “I might’ve asked around.”

“Asked around?” Will echoes, smile crooked with disbelief. “Like, asked who?”

Nico shrugs again, maddeningly cryptic. “Not me, personally. But I have my ways.”

Will stares at him across the flickering table, heart stuttering in his chest. “That is terrifying and also weirdly flattering.”

Nico hums, swirling the wine in his glass, the candlelight catching along the rim like it’s drawn to him. He doesn’t look at Will as he speaks—like the words are fragile, like speaking them too directly might give away too much.

“Everyone said the same thing,” he says softly. “That you were kind. That you made people feel seen in ways they didn’t know they needed. That you listened—to everything, even the silence. And that you were brilliant. Not just smart, not just good at school. Brilliant in the way that makes people stop and pay attention, even if they don't know why.”

He pauses, thumb tracing the stem of his glass, the movement slow, thoughtful.

“I’d see you in the library,” he continues, almost too quiet. “Head down. Surrounded by books, by other students. People were always asking for your help—stats, chemistry, bio, whatever it was. And you always gave it. Patient. Clear. Like it came easy to you.”

Will doesn’t speak, frozen in place.

“I used to get jealous,” Nico says, voice low, almost matter-of-fact—but Will can hear the weight in it, the truth layered beneath the calm. His eyes stay fixed on the wine, as if looking at Will might undo his resolve. “Not just because they were talking to you. But because you were giving them your mind.”

He swirls the wine once, slow and deliberate, like it helps him pace the confession.

“You were always so generous with it. Explaining things in a way that made people feel smart for asking. Making them laugh, even while they panicked over their midterms. And I’d sit there in the corner, pretending to read while watching you give all that attention—all that brightness—to someone else.”

He pauses, a slight clench in his jaw.

“And I hadn’t even worked up the nerve to say hello. I didn’t even know what I would’ve said. I just knew I wanted to be the one you looked at like that. The one you leaned in toward, the one you smiled at when they finally got the answer.”

He takes a sip of wine, throat moving with it, and when he speaks again, his voice is quieter—softer, but edged with something raw.

“It wasn’t just jealousy. It was envy. Of their access to you. Of how easy it was for them to have something I wanted like hell and couldn’t even touch.”

He finally meets Will’s gaze, and the look in his eyes is steady. Unapologetic. Something honest and a little unguarded, like a door left ajar.

“You made it look effortless. Like knowledge was something you carried without ever needing to show it off.”

Will exhales, heart lodged somewhere between awe and disbelief, the wine forgotten in his hand; breath catching in a place between laughter and something softer. Something deeper and more fragile.

“Yeah, well,” he murmurs, smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, “only when I’m not walking into walls.”

Nico smiles again, this time without hesitation. Open and real. “You were trying so hard not to look at me, you didn’t even see the shelves.”

Will laughs, shaking his head as he runs a hand through his hair. “I swear, I’m not usually that much of a disaster.”

“I know,” Nico says quietly. “That’s why it was so charming.”

There’s a pause—soft, charged, golden. The kind of moment that stretches and glows at the edges. Will doesn’t know who moves first. Maybe they don’t move at all. Maybe it’s just gravity finally catching up to them.

But when Nico’s hand brushes his—slow, deliberate, like a quiet promise—Will doesn’t pull away.

He smiles instead.

And just like that, he forgets how to breathe.

Notes:

i have so much i want to say about the research i did for this chapter but ao3 endnotes only let me add 5000 characters so check out my tumblr if you're interested in my romance language based spiralling, but all you really need to know is that i did an ungodly amount of research for this chapter and i fucking hope the Italian is correct

Chapter 39: Leo Valdez Absolutely Should Not Be Allowed Back Into European Territory, But Now I’m Making Out With Nico Di Angelo On My Couch So I No Longer Have The Capacity To Care About His International Crimes

They’ve cleared the plates, dessert untouched for now, wine glasses full again and catching the candlelight in flickers of red and gold. The table between them feels smaller than it did an hour ago. Will leans back in his chair, the last trace of bigoli still lingering warm and rich on his tongue. His limbs are heavy with comfort, his cheeks flushed—not just from the wine, though the wine helps—but from this: Nico, relaxed in a way Will has only ever seen in glimpses, the sharp edges of his usual quiet shaved down into something gentler. Like sea glass, worn soft by time and tide.

“You’ve been to so many places,” Will says, propping his chin on his hand again, elbow on the table. His fingers toy idly with the base of his wine glass. “Did you ever go back after you left Italy? Like, recently?”

Nico hums, swirling the dark wine in his glass. The motion is slow, unhurried, hypnotic. “Yeah. A couple of times. Two summers ago, actually. We—me, the Seven—did a whole Europe trip. It was… chaotic.”

Will’s eyes brighten, his lips parting as he leans in, the candlelight catching in the curve of his smile. “You never told me about this!”

“There’s a reason,” Nico says dryly, but there’s a curl of amusement tucked into the corners of his mouth, a smile that’s half-truth, half dare. His fingers tap against the stem of his glass. “We made it through five countries in two and a half weeks and only got banned from two museums, which is honestly impressive considering Leo tried to rewire a subway car in Rome.”

Will chokes on a laugh, catching himself on the edge of the table. “He what?”

“He thought he could ‘optimize’ the route,” Nico says, deadpan. “Accidentally shut down half the line. Annabeth nearly strangled him with her own belt.”

Will is wheezing now, one hand pressed to his chest as he laughs, full-bodied and luminous. “Please tell me there are photos.”

“There are legal liabilities,” Nico says smoothly, taking another sip, lips brushing the glass like a secret. “But Paris was worse, honestly.”

“Oh no.”

“We almost got into a fistfight with an influencer at the Louvre. Piper swears she wasn’t the one who started it, but someone called her ‘mid’ in front of the Winged Victory and it was over.”

Will’s shoulders shake, his breath catching as he leans forward, close enough now to brush Nico’s knee beneath the table. “This is the greatest story I’ve ever heard.”

Nico smiles—real and unguarded this time, a rare, flickering thing—and there’s something else in his eyes now too. Something fond. Something open. “Croatia was gorgeous. Leo tried to climb a medieval fort, slipped, and fell into a fish market. A tourist thought he was part of a street performance.”

“I’m going to pass out.”

“Portugal was better,” Nico continues, watching him through lowered lashes, almost lazy with wine and warmth. “We stayed in this cliffside Airbnb in the Algarve. Leo made the mistake of challenging Percy to a swim race in the open ocean. He lost. Dramatically.”

“He should lose dramatically,” Will says, grinning. “Percy is half seal.”

“Rome was a blur. Annabeth dragged us to every ruin she could find. We spent three days listening to her complain about inaccurate informational plaques. Jason tried to break into the Vatican archives.”

“Why?”

“‘To see what secrets they’re hiding.’” Nico shrugs, his shoulders moving in one elegant, languid roll. “He swears it was academic curiosity, but he also had a trench coat and sunglasses, so…”

Will is breathless from laughing now, his eyes crinkled at the corners, his hand resting on the table near Nico’s, fingers curling inward. “God, I wish I could’ve been there.”

Nico looks at him then, really looks, his wine glass tilted just slightly in his hand. “Maybe next time.”

There’s a moment—soft, suspended, echoing.

Will doesn’t breathe. Not right away. The candlelight dances in Nico’s eyes, and for a second, Will feels like the room narrows to just this: the glint of silver, the brush of knees beneath the table, the faint pink curve of Nico’s mouth. It’s too much and not enough. It’s everything.

Then Will grins, letting the tension dissolve into something gentler. “Okay, where else?”

Nico’s expression shifts—affection and exasperation in equal measure. “Greece was my domain. I warned them. I warned them not to stir anything up, but of course they did. Jason picked a fight with a mythological history professor who said Hades was just a ‘metaphor for wealth inequality,’ and Hazel spent twenty minutes trying to commune with spirits in a temple ruin and ended up summoning a goat.”

“A goat?”

“A very angry goat. Jason and I named it Coach Hedge, after our pilates instructor. He’s brutal.”

Will laughs again, reaching for the bottle and refilling Nico’s glass now, his movements a little clumsy with wine and wonder. “This was a long trip.”

Something flickers in Nico’s expression—still amused, but shadowed now too. His gaze drops, lashes fanning dark against his cheek.

“Ah,” he says, very quietly. “Then there was Albania.” 

Will pauses, wine mid-pour. “What happened in Albania?”

Nico swirls his glass again. Takes a long, measured sip.

“We’ve made a pact,” he says at last. “We don’t talk about Albania.”

“Oh come on—”

Nico just shakes his head, a sly, dangerous smile curling across his lips like smoke. “Some things are best left buried.”

“Is this one of those moments where I find out you’re all part of an ancient secret society and Leo blew up a castle or something?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”

Will stares at him, utterly besotted. “I swear to the Gods, if this ends up in a Netflix documentary…”

“You won’t hear it from me.”

They sit there, grinning across the flickering candlelight like conspirators in a secret Will hasn’t learned yet but already wants to keep. Nico’s shoulders are loose, his frame unguarded, the wine casting a soft bloom of color across his cheekbones—subtle, like a blush pulled from a dream.

He looks—Will thinks—happy.

Not in any loud or performative way, but in the kind that lives quietly in the corners of a smile. The kind that feels rare, like finding sunlight in winter.

And gods, Will wants to etch this moment into memory—Nico, wine glass cradled in elegant fingers, chaos curling at the edge of his mouth as he spins tales of cities Will has never seen, of people Will already loves. A life unfolding in laughter and legend, stitched together with a kind of trust that feels holy.

“You’re kind of amazing, you know that?” Will says suddenly, before he can stop himself.

Nico’s smile fades, but only because it’s replaced by something softer. Something heavier.

He doesn’t answer right away.

Then, finally: “Sei impossibile, lo sai?”

Will tilts his head, brain catching on the familiar edges of the words. Sei —you are. That one’s easy, like ser in Spanish. Impossibile is almost identical. Lo sai ... saber , to know.

You are impossible. You know that?

He laughs, warmth blooming in his chest. “You just called me impossible in Italian, didn’t you?”

Nico leans in slightly, wine glass cradled in one hand like it’s an afterthought, eyes steady on Will. “If the shoe fits.”

Will’s heart stutters. “Only for you.”

Will laughs, breathless, heart full and thrumming.

“God,” Will says, grinning and a little breathless. “Say more things in Italian. I don’t care what. You could be telling me my hair looks stupid and I’d fall harder.”

Nico’s eyes flick up from his wine glass, dark and steady. He doesn’t answer right away. Just leans back in his chair, the candlelight catching in the angles of his face. Then, quietly—dangerously—he says:

“Voglio baciarti fino a farti dimenticare il tuo nome.”

Will blinks. His brain immediately scrambles, reaching for the handful of Latin roots and Spanish cognates it knows how to cling to.

He scrambles to keep up, brain fogged with wine and want. Voglio —he thinks that’s I want . Like yo quiero , right? Spanish. And Latin. Volō, velle . Something about his high school Spanish teacher ranting about Latin roots and the “shared DNA of Romance languages” resurfaces now, unhelpfully and all at once—her voice echoing in his head like a ghost with a grammar fetish.. To want. He’s pretty sure. His heart is hammering.

Baciarti—he has no idea. But maybe it’s close to beso , like in Spanish? Kiss? That feels right. It has that soft start, that almost sweet rhythm. Nico said it like a promise, and it did sound like a kiss.

Fino a—no clue. Fino sounds like fine , or maybe finish ? So… maybe “until”? He’s guessing. Wildly. But something about the rhythm sounds like a transition. A thread pulling toward something else.

Farti—that one rings a bell. Far , like the Latin facere . His Spanish teacher used to go on and on about conjugations of hacer — hacerte , hacerme —“to do something to you.” So… farti must be something like do to you . Right?

Dimenticare… okay, he’s lost. That one’s a black hole. Dime is Spanish for tell me , but that’s probably not even close. Demi- like diminish? Care like—no, now he’s just free-associating.

Il tuo nome—easy. Your name. He’s got that one. At least there’s that.

“I want to… something something… your name?” Will guesses, half-laughing, half-terrified. “I got, like, three words. Maybe four. Should I be scared?”

Nico doesn’t move, but something shifts in his expression—like he hadn’t expected Will to try, or maybe he had, but not to get that far. There’s a pause. The silence stretches long enough that Will almost fills it with another joke.

But then Nico says, softer this time, almost shy:

“It means… I want to kiss you until you forget your name.”

Will stops breathing.

“Oh,” he says.

Nico won’t quite meet his eyes now. The Italian had slid from his mouth like a silk ribbon—fluid, confident. But the English translation feels heavier in the air, like an offering made without the safety of distance. Like something naked and irreversible.

Will swallows. He’s not sure if it’s the wine, or the heat pooling low in his stomach, or the fact that his heart just tried to climb up his throat.

“Okay,” he says again, hoarse this time. “That definitely wasn’t about my hair.”

Nico smiles. Slow. Crooked. Wicked.

Will is certain he’s never wanted anything more in his entire life.

Nico refills Will’s glass with the last of the wine, then leans back in his chair, watching him across the soft pool of candlelight. The chaos of dinner has given way to quiet now—just the two of them, seated in the golden hush of a night that doesn’t feel like it needs to end.

Will’s still glowing, flushed from laughter and wine and the thrill of being seen. And maybe that’s why Nico asks—gently, carefully, like setting down something fragile between them.

“You’re always asking about me,” he says. “But I don’t know much about… before. Back home. What was Austin like?”

Will blinks, startled for a moment—like he wasn’t expecting the question, or maybe like he didn’t think anyone really wanted the answer.

Nico watches the hesitation flicker across his face, then adds quickly, “You don’t have to—if it’s…”

“No,” Will says, shaking his head. “No, it’s okay. It’s just… it wasn’t all good. But some of it was. And I like remembering those parts.”

He fiddles with his glass, eyes down. “Austin was loud. Big skies. Hot as hell in the summer. I grew up…well, all over when I was really young, that’s one of the not so good parts. But then we moved to this old craftsman house with chipped paint and creaky floors. There were sunflowers in the backyard, and you could smell barbecue in the air year-round. We weren’t fancy or anything. But there was music. Always music.”

Nico leans forward, listening.

“My mom,” Will says softly, “she’s a musician. Naomi Solace. Well, I told you about her, sort of—she’s kind of a niche alt-country singer. Big hair, rhinestones, acoustic guitar, the whole thing. She was always on the road, always chasing the next show. But when she was home… she made the whole house sing. I used to sit at her feet while she played and try to match the chords on this beat-up toy guitar.”

Will smiles at the memory, but it’s tinged with something older, deeper.

“She tried. She really did. Even when she was gone more than she was there.”

Nico doesn’t interrupt. Just waits.

“And then there was Lee,” Will says, his voice catching slightly—like the name is a tether to something that still pulls. “Lee Fletcher. He wasn’t family, not by blood. But he might as well have been. He was a couple years older, but he always looked out for me. Taught me how to tie a tie, and how to drive stick. Drove me to school when my mom was on tour. He’d sneak me into high school football games and let me sit on the roof of his car to watch the stars.”

Will laughs softly. “I thought he was the coolest person in the universe. And he never made me feel like a burden. Not once.”

Nico’s eyes soften. “He sounds like he meant a lot to you.”

“He did. He does.” Will’s voice goes quiet. “He was the first person I ever came out to. I was fifteen. Terrified. I’d been carrying it around for months like it was some secret that would blow up my whole life. And I told him on this random Tuesday night in his truck after we’d gotten ice cream. I just blurted it out like I couldn’t hold it anymore.”

He swallows. “He didn’t even flinch. Just looked at me and said, ‘Cool. You wanna finish my fries?’ Like it was the most normal thing in the world.”

Nico smiles, but it’s faint. A quiet kind of reverence. “That sounds like something Jason would say.”

“Yeah,” Will murmurs. “Lee had that same energy. Big brother vibes. Safe.”

He pauses there, thumb absently tracing the stem of his glass, heart stuttering under the weight of memory.

And then it hits him—like a tide rolling backward just to return harder.

That’s how Nico described him.

Earlier, in the candlight quiet and the glow of honesty, Nico had looked at him—really looked—and said:
“Everyone said the same thing. That you were kind. That you made people feel seen in ways they didn’t know they needed. That you listened—to everything, even the silence. And that you were brilliant. Not just smart, not just good at school. Brilliant in the way that makes people stop and pay attention, even if they don't know why.”

And Will had brushed it off at the time, too stunned to let it settle. But now—

Now, he realizes Nico had described him the way Will would’ve described Lee. The way Will had described Lee. With reverence. With awe. With a tenderness that meant home .

It’s almost too much to carry.

Because Lee had been his compass. His shield. His safe place. The person who showed him how to be good, how to be himself .

And Nico—who knows the storm of Will’s anxiety, who’s seen the cracks in his armor and the chaos beneath—still looked at him and saw that. Called him brilliant. Called him kind.

Will’s breath catches, his chest tight with something that’s not quite grief and not quite joy. Just the dizzying weight of being seen , not as the messy, spiraling version of himself—but as someone worthy of the kind of love he’d always held sacred.

Lee would’ve liked Nico. Will knows that now, deep in his bones.

Will exhales, something loosening in his chest. “I think about him a lot. What he’d say about all this. About you.”

Nico raises an eyebrow, his mouth quirking. “Yeah?”

Will smiles. “He’d say you’re weird as hell. And definitely out of my league.”

That gets a soft huff of laughter from Nico—quiet but real. “He sounds like a wise man.”

“He was,” Will says. “He also once tried to convince me that hair gel was a personality trait, so, you know. Mixed results.”

Nico snorts. “I’m starting to understand your tragic grooming habits.”

“Oh, wow. ” Will clutches his chest dramatically. “Betrayed. In my own home.”

Will’s grin lingers even as the smile softens. “But,” he adds, voice gentler now, “he’d be happy for me. He always wanted me to be with someone who made me feel safe. And seen.”

He looks up. His eyes find Nico’s across the flickering candlelight. And suddenly it’s quiet again—real and weighty, but not heavy.

“You do.”

Nico doesn’t look away.

And there’s something in the stillness that hums between them. A wire strung taut. A warmth that doesn't come from the candles or the wine or the low kitchen lights, but from something older, softer, something that makes Will’s breath catch.

They clear the table slowly, quietly, their fingers brushing now and then as they gather plates, stack forks, rinse glasses. Each touch sparks a little brighter, lasts a little longer. At one point, Nico reaches past him to grab a dish towel, and his arm brushes Will’s—warm and deliberate—and Will forgets how to breathe for a full three seconds.

“You cooked,” Nico says, stepping up beside him as Will struggles to roll his sleeves without dipping them in wine or sauce, “so I’ll do the dishes.”

Will lifts an eyebrow, skeptical. “Do you even know how to do dishes?”

Nico gives him a look—flat, unimpressed, and somehow still carrying the flicker of a challenge. “I’m not feral, Solace.”

“That’s… debatable,” Will mutters, sinking into one of the kitchen stools with the dramatics of someone who’s been standing for four hours straight. He refills his wine like he’s clocking out of a double shift. “Didn’t you literally threaten to bury Leo alive the first time you met him?”

“He deserved it.”

Will grins over the rim of his glass. “Still does.”

Nico rolls his eyes, then shrugs out of his overshirt, revealing a plain black t-shirt that fits way too well to be accidental. Will tries very hard not to stare. Or blush. Or forget what sentences are.

Nico steps up to the sink like it’s a foreign artifact. He turns on the faucet, frowns at the trajectory, then adjusts the handle with the caution of someone defusing a bomb.

“Okay,” Will says, watching him over the top of his wineglass, amusement tugging at his lips. “But seriously—when’s the last time you washed dishes by hand?”

“I know how to use a dishwasher,” Nico says, with the defensive edge of someone who absolutely does not .

Will tilts his head. “You mean the one Jason loads alphabetically by brand name and culinary function ?”

“His brain is like that,” Nico mutters. “He labeled the spatulas once.”

“He labeled the spatulas ?”

“With barcodes.”

Will chokes on his wine. “Please tell me he uses a scanner.”

Nico rinses a plate with cautious dignity. It slips sideways in the stream. He catches it with a speed that surprises even him.

Will is openly smirking now. “So who actually does the dishes at home? You, or Captain Inventory?”

There’s a pause. A slight narrowing of Nico’s eyes. Then, carefully: “We have someone. Harper.”

Will blinks. “Harper?”

“Our cleaner. She comes twice a week. Sometimes three if Jason has a mental breakdown about the state of the spice cabinet.”

Will throws his head back and laughs. “Gods, that’s so Jason.”

Nico smirks faintly, scrubbing a fork with a little too much concentration. “I do put my own laundry away. Occasionally.”

Will raises a brow, taking a slow sip of wine. “You’re such a rich boy. Do you even own sponges?”

“I do now,” Nico declares, holding one aloft like a knight unsheathing a sword. “See? Progress.”

Will leans against the counter, hip cocked, wine glass loose in his fingers as he watches Nico do his best not to drown the cutlery. “Honestly, I didn’t think I’d live to see the day you voluntarily touched a dish.”

“I’m full of surprises,” Nico replies, rinsing another plate with faux elegance. “Next thing you know, I’ll be vacuuming.”

Will raises his glass in mock salute. “To your evolution.”

Nico flicks a bit of suds at him, eyes glinting. “To your nerve. ”

Will ducks, laughing, and flops back onto the barstool like he’s been felled by a particularly dangerous suds-based weapon. He props his chin on his hand and watches Nico move around the kitchen with careful, reluctant efficiency.

There’s something almost painfully sweet about it—Nico di Angelo, in all-black everything, sleeves shoved up to his elbows, damp curls sticking out where the steam has started to frizz them. His boots squeak faintly on the cheap linoleum every time he shifts his weight. The overhead light flickers slightly, catching on the pale line of Nico’s wrist, the curve of his neck as he leans over the sink.

Will doesn’t say it aloud. But he thinks it.

Nico di Angelo, domestic.

It doesn’t feel like a punchline anymore. Not something to laugh about, or marvel at, or frame in irony. It’s endearing, sure— disarming , in that way Nico always is when he’s not trying to be—but it’s also… real.

Real in a way that sinks into Will’s chest and settles there, quietly, insistently.

It makes him picture things he shouldn’t. Things like this happening again. Not just tonight, not just once, but all the time—Nico in his kitchen, sleeves rolled up, making the steam curl around his shoulders like some soft myth made modern. Nico grumbling about forks while Will steals kisses between drying dishes. Nico, here, like it’s always been his place too.

Their place, maybe. Someday.

Will bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling too stupidly.

“You’re actually not bad at this,” he says instead, because the alternative is admitting he’s one emotional beat away from envisioning them splitting a mortgage.

Nico shrugs without turning around. “Turns out when you don’t grow up with appliances and spend half your life living in castles, you eventually figure it out.”

Will blinks, caught off guard. “Castles?”

Nico glances over his shoulder, eyes gleaming with faux nonchalance. “My mom’s family had a summer estate in the hills outside Verona. There were tapestries.”

Will stares, processing that sentence like it’s been spoken in Elvish. “That is the most absurd sentence anyone has ever said to me while washing a spatula.”

Nico smirks, turning back to the sink. “You invited me.”

“Regret is a slow, creeping thing.”

They both laugh—unrestrained and easy, the kind of shared joy that blooms quietly between two people when the night is soft and no one’s looking. The air smells like leftover garlic and cheap wine and dish soap, and Will thinks: this is what it feels like to want a future.

He refills Nico’s wine glass and sets it on the counter near the sink, close enough to reach.

Close enough to mean stay awhile .

“You know,” Will says, quieter now, swirling the claret wine in his glass, “I used to think the difference between us was this giant thing I’d never be able to reach across. Like, you have all this… history. Money. Gravity.”

His voice barely carries over the soft clink of dishes in the drying rack. But Nico glances over anyway, attentive, patient—like he’s learned by now when something matters.

Will shrugs, trying to play it off, even though his chest feels tight. “And I’ve got student loans and a closet full of Goodwill finds and a landlord named Dale who refuses to fix the bathroom fan, even though it’s become self-aware and growls at me when I brush my teeth.”

That gets a ghost of a smile from Nico, faint but real.

But Will doesn’t laugh. Not this time. Because he means it.

It had felt impossible before—the gap between them, like a canyon he wasn’t allowed to name. That first night, when they’d both sat in a place too expensive for honesty, Will hadn’t been able to say a word without the weight of it pressing down on him. Nico had looked so effortless in that restaurant, all candlelight and elegance and quiet poise, while Will had felt like a fraud in borrowed clothes and good intentions.

But now?

Now they’re in his kitchen.

Steam still curls against the windows, and the sink smells like soap and garlic and something faintly citrus. Nico is drying his hands on a towel Will got free (borrowed, stole) from the restaurant’s laundry bin. His sleeves are pushed up, his curls a little wild, his shirt rumpled from leaning against the counter. There’s no violin music, no expensive lighting, no unspoken rules about who belongs.

Just them. Here. Now. Real.

Nico finishes with the towel and turns to face him, deliberate, steady.

“Yeah,” he says. “But I’ve never had anyone cook for me before. Not like that. Not for no reason.”

Will’s breath catches. Because he meant that . Nico, who could afford dinner anywhere in the city. Nico, who grew up with summer estates and ancient tapestries. Nico, who has always been surrounded by people who either needed something from him or expected him to be something else.

Nico picks up his wine, takes a slow sip, then lowers the glass. His voice is casual, but the words land with weight.

“It’s nice,” he says. “Being chosen.”

Will’s heart stumbles. Actually stutters.

Because he’s spent so long convincing himself that Nico belonged to a world just out of reach—that this wasn’t sustainable, that he would never be enough—but now, Nico is standing in his kitchen, with dish soap on his hands and hope in his voice, saying this is what he’s never had.

“You’re not hard to choose,” Will says softly.

And it’s not a line. It’s not even flirty.

It’s just true.

Nico doesn’t respond—not in words. He leans back against the sink, wine glass tilted toward Will like a toast, and lets the quiet settle between them.

Not awkward.

Not unspoken.

Just… understood.

And Will, sitting there in his thrifted sweater and his tiny, imperfect apartment, feels—for once—like he’s not reaching across a canyon at all.

He’s standing on level ground.

They move to the couch, wine glasses in hand, the dishes forgotten in the quiet hum of the kitchen behind them. The candles still burn low and steady. The playlist Will put on hours ago has mellowed into something hushed and slow, soft guitar strums and distant harmonies threading through the space like background heat.

They don’t sit far apart.

Will drops onto the cushions first, legs folding under him, glass balanced on his knee. Nico joins him a moment later, casual but deliberate, close enough that their thighs brush when they settle. He leans back, stretching one arm along the top of the couch like he’s staking territory, though his fingers don’t quite touch Will’s shoulder. Yet. 

They sip in silence for a beat.

The warmth of the wine lingers on Will’s tongue, in his throat, in the quiet ache blooming low in his stomach. The air between them hums with the same charged stillness as a summer storm, thick and waiting. Nico’s knee is pressed against his. He could move—there’s space on the couch—but he doesn’t.

Neither of them do.

The candlelight casts shadows up Nico’s jaw, softens the sharp lines of his face, and paints his cheekbones in bronze. His lashes are darker in the low light, fluttering briefly as he takes another sip of wine. He’s flushed—not drunk, but warm in a way Will hasn’t seen before, like something inside him has begun to unspool.

Will watches the curve of his mouth as he drinks. Watches the way he swallows. How his lips part slightly, like they might be about to say something but think better of it.

He looks away before he can stare too long. But it doesn’t help—Nico’s presence is still right there, close enough that Will can feel the heat of his body like a gravitational pull.

The silence stretches, taut and glinting.

Then Nico shifts—just slightly—and his fingers brush the back of Will’s neck.

It’s the lightest touch. Barely there.

But Will feels it like a spark through his spine.

Nico doesn’t move his hand further. Doesn’t pull away either. Just lets it linger there, lazy and unassuming, fingertips trailing along the hair at Will’s nape like it’s an accident. Like it’s permission.

Will’s breath stutters.

Will is the one who breaks the silence. “Okay, but seriously—how do you make Italian sound like that?”

Nico turns his head, lazy and amused, the flickering candlelight gilding his cheekbones. “Like what?”

“Like a sin,” Will mutters, voice low.

Nico raises an eyebrow. “Un peccato?”

Will hears it—“Un peccato”—and something tightens in his chest.

Italian: Un peccato?

Spanish: ¿Un pecado?

A sin.

The translation isn’t hard—"peccato" and "pecado" share the same Latin root: peccatum , meaning offense, fault, transgression. Gods bless Mrs Garcia, who loved to harp on about how Romance languages were all siblings in a dysfunctional Latin family. And this one? This root? It's ancient. Heavy. Biblical.

A sin.

But not the fire-and-brimstone kind—not really. Not in Nico’s mouth. Not when it sounds like velvet and candlelight. Not when it’s offered with that little lilt of amusement, like he’s saying isn’t it tragic and isn’t it fun?

Will swallows.

Because un peccato doesn’t just mean “a sin.” Not here. Not between them. It means something more nuanced. More layered.

It’s the kind of phrase whispered in a confession booth and then scrawled across a love letter. It’s not you’re wrong —it’s you shouldn’t, but I want you to anyway . It’s flirtation dipped in guilt and indulgence.

It’s this is dangerous, but don’t stop.

It’s Nico’s way of saying: You’re looking at me like that? Listening to my voice like it’s something you want to touch? Poor thing. What a shame.

And maybe that’s why Will’s heart stutters the way it does—because yes he said it first, but Nico repeated it in Italian, and made it sound like a promise.

Will groans, head tipping back against the couch, exposing the long line of his throat. “See? That. That right there.”

“What?” Nico asks, all faux innocence—except for the glint in his eyes, sharp and deliberate.

“You’re doing it on purpose.”

Nico shrugs, like sin has never looked more casual, lips curling into the faintest, most infuriating smile. “I can’t help it if you’re weak.”

Will narrows his eyes, fire simmering low in his stomach. He grabs the last of his wine and downs it in a single, reckless sip, the glass clinking softly as he sets it aside. “Say something else. I dare you.”

Nico smirks, turning just slightly—closer now. “ Sei bello quando ti irriti. ”

Will blinks. His pulse trips. “Okay. That sounded—flirty?”

“It was,” Nico confirms, tone dry but heavy with intent.

Will leans in, squinting like that’ll help him think through the wine haze and the distraction of Nico’s mouth. “Give me a clue. ‘Bello’ means pretty, right? Or handsome?”

“Handsome,” Nico says, still smug, like he knows exactly what he’s doing. “Technically.”

Will hums, mind turning over what he caught. " Irritato is irritated in Spanish… ti irriti sounds close. So… something-handsome when I’m irritated?”

“Mm.” Nico doesn’t confirm. 

And Will suddenly feels very warm—like the room’s spun sideways and the only thing anchoring him is the weight of Nico’s gaze.

“Help a guy out here, di Angelo.”

“Yes,” Nico murmurs, voice like velvet drawn slow across skin. “You’re handsome when you’re irritated. When you get all worked up like you are right now… You blush. Your eyebrows scrunch just so. And there’s this little line between them like you’re trying not to combust. It’s very…” His gaze drags over Will, lazy and deliberate. “ Carino. ”

Carino. Cariño. Cute.

Will groans again, louder this time, and flops dramatically against the back of the couch, one arm thrown over his eyes like a swooning poet. “This is cruel. This is targeted harassment.”

Nico watches him with a look that could peel paint. He sips from his glass like he’s entirely unbothered, but the faint curve of his mouth betrays him—wolfish, amused, hungry.

Will peeks at him from beneath his arm. “Do you do this to everyone, or am I special?”

Nico doesn’t even blink. “You’re special.”

The words hit like a match to dry leaves—simple, quiet, and utterly combustible. There’s no wink, no smirk, no tease—just the truth of it, spoken like a promise and wrapped in flame.

Will straightens slowly, heart thudding, the room suddenly feeling warmer than it did a moment ago. The candlelight flickers against Nico’s cheekbones, gilding the sharp lines of him in gold. Dangerous , Will thinks, and then— I want to drown in this.

“Say something else,” he murmurs, voice low.

Nico sets his glass down with deliberate grace. He doesn’t move closer—but his voice does, slipping into the space between them like silk pulled taut across skin.

“Mi fai perdere la testa.”

Will blinks, his brain catching on the la testa part. “Okay. That one I don’t know.”

Nico tilts his head, eyes dark and glinting. “Guess.”

Will frowns, dragging up what little he knows. Testa… he doesn’t know why he knows this (Mrs Garcia and her love of Latin roots again, probably), but a sliver of French pops into his mind, tête? Head? His eyes widen. “You—you’re saying I make you lose your…head? Lose your mind?”

Nico’s smile curves, slow and devastating. “Exactly.”

There’s a pause. Electric. The kind of silence that feels like skin about to touch.Will swallows. “Jesus.” He laughs, but it comes out thinner this time, breathier. “That’s… that’s definitely not something they teach in high school Spanish.”

“I’m giving you a better education,” Nico says, voice pitched low, intimate like a shared secret in a dark room.

Will shifts toward him, just slightly—just enough. “Are you going to quiz me later?”

Nico hums, a sound that curls around Will’s spine like smoke. A half-smile tugs at his lips, wicked and fond. “ Forse a letto. ”

Will’s brain, already half-melted from the wine and the way Nico is looking at him, scrambles to translate.

Forse —maybe. That one’s easy. Latin root: forsitan . Same as quizás , tal vez . He remembers a vocab quiz from tenth grade, remembers the way Mrs Garcia said, Uncertainty is romantic. It means there’s still a chance.

A —In.

Letto.

His breath catches.

Letto. Too close to lecho in Spanish. Not cama , not just a bed. Lecho is heavier. Poetic. The kind of word that belongs in ballads and whispered confessions. The kind of bed people fall into—not just to sleep, but to surrender.

He doesn’t need the full translation. His body already knows what it means.

His ears are burning. His pulse stumbles. “Okay,” he manages, voice cracking just slightly. “That one was definitely dirty.”

“Only if you want it to be,” Nico murmurs, his voice a slow slide of velvet, the gleam in his eyes daring, deliberate. He lifts his wine glass, takes a sip, and sets it down with infuriating calm—like he hasn’t just shattered Will’s entire nervous system.

Will stares at him, completely undone. The space between them is thin as breath, charged like air before lightning.

“You’re dangerous,” he whispers, voice frayed at the edges.

“And yet,” Nico says, the words almost a caress, “you’re still here.”

Will’s heart trips, then steadies. The air smells like candle wax and red wine and something more ancient, more electric.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says. And he means it. Gods, he means it.

The silence stretches—taut and full and waiting. The kind that feels like it could tip into something irreversible with a single breath. Nico watches him through his lashes, expression unreadable, except for the way his gaze lingers on Will’s mouth. Like he’s deciding whether to kiss him or ruin him—or both, and in what order.

Will leans in, just slightly. The air between them hums.

“Say something else,” he murmurs, voice low, unsteady.

Nico inhales like he’s tasting the moment—like he’s savoring the ache of it—and then his voice drops, velvet-wrapped and dangerous.

“ Vieni qui. ”

Will’s breath hitches.

His brain stumbles over the translation, not because it’s complicated, but because everything else has gone quiet. His heartbeat is loud in his ears. He licks his lips, eyes never leaving Nico’s.

“That means come here, doesn’t it?” he asks, barely more than a whisper.

Nico doesn’t answer right away.

He just smiles—slow and devastating, like he already knows Will will obey. Like he’s made of gravity and Will is already falling.

Will doesn’t wait for a second invitation.

He leans in—slow but certain, like gravity has finally won—and Nico meets him halfway. No hesitation, no walls, just heat, rising like smoke between them. Their mouths find each other in a kiss that begins like a secret, barely spoken, and ends like a confession carved into stone.

Will’s hand lifts instinctively to cradle Nico’s jaw, thumb grazing the edge of a cheekbone so sharp it feels like a promise. Nico exhales into him—one soft, shattered sound like he’s been holding his breath for years and only just remembered how to let it go.

The kiss deepens quickly, no room left for shyness—just need, layered and unfolding, desperate in its elegance. Nico shifts closer, knees brushing Will’s, then parts them with deliberate slowness. He swings one leg over and settles into Will’s lap with all the unspoken certainty of someone claiming something they’ve already dreamed of a thousand times.

Will gasps, the sound swallowed between their mouths. His hands find Nico’s hips and grip tight, grounding himself in the solid heat of him, fingers digging in like he’s afraid this moment might slip through his hands if he doesn’t hold on hard enough.

Nico fits there too perfectly—hips against hips, chest to chest, as if the space between them was always meant to be filled. He tilts Will’s head back, hungry now, kissing like he’s starved. Like poetry and prayer and sin, all in one breath.

Will’s hands drift upward beneath Nico’s shirt, fingertips skating over the curve of his spine, mapping skin and heat and the edge of a rib like they’re learning a language. Nico shudders—just enough to be felt—and his hands slide into Will’s curls, tugging once, soft, then again, rougher, when Will groans like he’s coming undone.

“Jesus,” Will gasps against his mouth.

“No,” Nico murmurs between kisses, breath ragged. “Nico.”

Will huffs a breathless laugh. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Lo so,” Nico mutters before dragging his mouth down to Will’s neck.

Lo so. Lo sé. I know. 

Nico presses open-mouthed kisses along the edge of Will’s jaw, down the curve of his throat—slow, deliberate, like he’s branding him with every touch. There’s nothing rushed about it. Just heat and reverence. Like he’s trying to memorize the way Will tastes, the way he shivers when Nico mouths just beneath his pulse.

Will tilts his head back, offering more, breath caught somewhere between a gasp and a prayer. His fingertips dig into Nico’s back, clutching like he’s afraid of waking up.

“Do you know what you’re doing to me?” Will asks, voice cracked and low, wrecked in the way only Nico can make him.

Nico pauses. Draws back just enough to meet his eyes—his pupils blown wide, lips flushed and swollen, curls falling messily into his face like he was carved for chaos and intimacy.

His voice drops to something molten, rough with hunger and awe.

“Ti sto conquistando” he says, faux-innocent.

Ti sto conquistando. Te estoy conquistando. I’m winning you over. I’m conquering you.

Will groans. “Yes. Fully. Irreversibly.”

Nico grins. “ Bene. Gods, you’re so fucking smart.”

He dips down again, kissing him hard, like punctuation—full stop, end of sentence, no room for doubt—and Will opens up beneath him, all instinct and heat, matching every movement with a desperation that borders on reckless. It’s not soft anymore. It’s greedy. The kind of kissing that leaves your mouth bruised and your hands lost, chasing skin and friction and more. Nico rolls his hips once—just once—but it’s devastating, precise, a slow grind that steals the breath from Will’s lungs and turns it into a gasp, ragged and sharp.

Will’s fingers dig into Nico’s waist, anchoring himself, like he might come apart otherwise. Like if he doesn’t hold on, he’ll unravel entirely beneath the weight of this—of Nico. Of the way his breath hitches, of the heat pooled between them, of the knowing glint in Nico’s eyes like he knew exactly what that would do.

“Holy shit,” Will breathes, dazed, and Nico only smirks, rolling his hips again—slower this time, more deliberate.

Will’s head tips back against the couch like surrender.

“Mi piace quando mi tocchi così,” Nico breathes, low and dangerous, lips brushing the shell of Will’s ear.

Mi piace quando mi tocchi così. Me gusta cuando me tocas así. I like it when you touch me like that

Will makes a sound that could be a whimper. “God. You could be reciting pasta recipes right now and I’d still be losing it.”

Nico leans in, breath ghosting against Will’s jaw. “Strozzapreti,” he murmurs, low and dangerous.

Will’s breath stutters. “That’s not fair.”

Nico only smirks—lazy, lethal, and impossibly fond—and then their mouths find each other again, colliding with more hunger this time, less caution. The kiss is messy now, urgent, all teeth and tangled breath. Will’s hands slide up Nico’s back, then into his hair, curling tight around the dark strands and tugging just enough to drag a sound from Nico’s throat—low and wrecked, like something private breaking loose.

Will’s whole body reacts to it. Every nerve lit up.

The room slips away. The candlelight flickers soft and golden, throwing shadows that blur the edges of the world. Everything smells like basil and salt, warm skin and wine, like the charged stillness before a summer storm.

It’s heat—yes—but not just that. It’s need tangled up with reverence. It’s Will kissing like he’s starving for it and terrified it’ll vanish. It’s Nico kissing back like he’s learning how to stay.

There’s no armor between them now. No sharp edges. Just this—breathless and bare and devastating.

Will has never been kissed like this. Not by someone who touches him like every inch matters. Like the wanting is real, but the care is, too.

And Nico—Nico kisses like he’s making a promise he doesn’t know how to say aloud.

Notes:

Okay so… I hope the Italian isn’t too much or annoying. I created this little headcanon where Will understands Spanish and kind of muddles his way through Italian based on that, and yes, it’s definitely a narrative tool so I can translate stuff for you without breaking the flow. I talked about this way too much on Tumblr, as always.

Also, yes—this is a fade to black. But don’t worry, the smut outtake is coming. Eventually. I’m currently editing it and it’s taking me forever because writing smut is a cursed art form and I am not a natural. It’s so hard to strike the right balance between “poetic and emotional” and “clear enough to know where everyone’s limbs are” without veering into gross. So. We’re working on it.

In other news, you may have noticed this fic is now part of a series, and Chapter 1 of the 4-part Nico POV prequel is up and ready for your consumption. It’s dark academia, moody yearning, and borderline stalking in the library. Enjoy.

Chapter 40: Nico di Angelo Flirts with My Nervous System, Our Study Date Gets Live-Tweeted By Campus Paparazzi, and My GPA Is Probably In Hiding Now

Notes:

hey besties. if you’re reading this, it means i survived.

barely.

this chapter was brought to you by:
– two days of drinking exclusively wine (like a victorian ghost with access to a tesco express),
– day one period cramps that made me briefly believe i was dying of an undiscovered victorian illness,
– and the deeply cursed experience of being caught in a real-life romantic subplot that i did not audition for. unfortunately, the feelings are not mutual. unfortunately, i am still somehow the main character. unfortunately, it is nothing like this fic. (less yearning, more awkward silence and badly timed eye contact.)

ANYWAY. despite all that, i did manage to churn out this chapter, which is… absurdly long. possibly too long. it’s a little clunky in places and i know some bits are repetitive but! let me have this!! i really just wanted will and nico to get some quality time to be flirty and chaotic and so clearly down bad for each other. no parental drama. no childhood trauma. just mutual pining and library-based thirst with a side of finals-induced dread.

thank you for bearing with me. i promise i’ll be more plot driven next time. or at least more hydrated.

November at Olympus University means two things: frostbitten fingers from stubbornly drinking iced coffee anyway, and gossip thick enough to be registered as a hazardous fog advisory.

The morning wind howls through the stone quad like it’s been personally wronged, funneling around the columns of the library and flinging dried leaves against the grand wooden doors. Will tugs his hoodie tighter as he trudges up the steps, boots skidding slightly on the slick stone. His nose is pink, his curls wind-mussed, and he’s pretty sure his fingers are about to lose constitutional rights.

Behind him, Nico emerges from the side path, boots silent on the frost-slicked flagstones, scarf coiled dramatically around his neck like he’s on his way to haunt a cursed estate and not, say, leaving an 8:30 a.m. seminar on Funerary Rites in the Ancient World.

Will turns at the sound of approaching footsteps, and the cold doesn’t matter quite so much anymore. Nico steps into his space without hesitation, gloved hands brushing sleet from Will’s shoulders like it’s a ritual, then leans in for a quick kiss—chapped lips against chapped lips, warm breath ghosting between them in the frozen air.

“Hi,” Will murmurs, grinning as they part.

“Hi,” Nico echoes, quieter, like it’s a secret.

“I can’t feel my face,” Will mutters, stomping slush off his boots just outside the library’s heavy entrance. “I think we passed the temperature where lips fall off.”

“Good,” Nico says, brushing sleet from his own shoulders with surgical precision. “Maybe people will stop staring at yours.”

Will freezes. Nico freezes. Unfortunately, the rest of campus does not.

Across the quad, a small crowd of students clusters near the coffee cart stationed just outside the philosophy building steps, all too obviously whispering, pointing, and—yes, one of them is sketching. Sketching.

Will’s shoulders tense. Nico exhales like this is the price of being hot and misunderstood.

Lou Ellen sweeps past, balancing a precarious tower of books, scarf askew, and wearing a hat that says TEAM SOLANGELO in glitter. “You’re trending again,” she calls over her shoulder, chipper as ever. “Congrats on your ongoing reign.”

From behind the outdoor book sale display, Cecil pops up like an academic groundhog, holding a laminated sheet of paper. “‘Campus Casanova Spotted Smooching the Prince of Darkness on Halloween Party Balcony,’” he reads aloud. “An investigative feature by someone named Belladonna Quinn, sophomore journalism major. I rate it five stars.”

Will stares at him, horrified. “Where did you even get that?”

Cecil shrugs. “I know a guy in campus publications. They’re doing a whole series on university power couples. You’re a myth now.”

“I will smite you,” Nico says without inflection, which somehow makes it worse.

“See, that’s exactly why they call you the Prince of Darkness,” Lou Ellen says, returning to lean casually on the bannister like she isn’t an agent of chaos. “Gods, Nico, you’re literally living my dark academia dream. This is your villain origin arc but with better lighting.”

Will doesn’t respond right away. Mostly because Nico is standing far too close for comfort, hands stuffed into the pockets of his black wool coat, shoulders slouched in his usual too-cool indifference. But Will’s been around him long enough to notice the slight twitch at the corner of his mouth. The ghost of a smirk threatening to surface. He is absolutely basking in this.

Cecil slurps his latte with malicious joy. “You know everyone’s talking about it, right? The balcony make-out? The seduction of Olympus’s resident sunshine by the literal god of shadows?”

Will chokes on his breath.

Lou Ellen tries—fails—not to grin. “Even Katie and the Stolls stopped arguing long enough to watch. That’s how iconic it was.”

Nico still doesn’t say anything.

But Will can see it now—the full-on smirk, blooming slow as sunrise.

And gods help him, it’s kind of hot.

“Are you blushing?” Cecil asks, squinting at Will like he’s just uncovered a new species. “Oh my gods , you are . That’s so cute. Write that down, Lou, this is canon now.”

Will’s face combusts.

He wishes the ground would open up and swallow him whole. Not dramatically. Just a quick little crevasse. A polite vanishing act.

Since Halloween, he hasn’t known peace. Lou Ellen and Cecil have been recounting the infamous balcony make-out like it’s a historical reenactment, complete with sock puppets, dramatic voiceovers, and unsolicited background music from Cecil’s phone. But if he thought that was bad, it was nothing— nothing —compared to the interrogation he faced the morning after his do-over date with Nico.

He and Nico had fallen asleep wrapped around each other, tangled in sheets and limbs like something out of a postcard or a war zone. It was perfect. Romantic. Possibly life-ruining. Will had woken up at 3 a.m. dying of thirst, arm completely numb, and debated chewing it off rather than risk waking Nico. Then, a few hours later, he stirred again—this time to the rustle of sheets, the creak of the mattress, Nico shifting beside him.

Will, in his sleep-addled panic, immediately assumed the worst. That Nico was leaving. Fleeing. Abandoning him in the cold light of morning. So naturally, he grabbed him. Dragged him back down. Wrapped his arms around him like a human seatbelt and refused to let go.

It took Nico several minutes—and a lot of gentle swearing—to explain that he wasn’t running away. He just had an early meeting with a professor and didn’t want to wake Will, so he was going to leave a note.

Will, still half-asleep and embarrassingly needy, eventually let him go. Nico left the note anyway. Probably because he assumed (correctly) that Will wouldn’t remember the conversation. Or maybe because Nico wanted to leave something behind. Just in case.

Will still has the note. It’s folded neatly on his nightstand, creased at the corners from how often he’s picked it up to reread it like a deranged Victorian widow.

But the glow of early morning affection didn’t last long. Because if Nico ever found out what breakfast had looked like after that date, Will would simply cease to exist out of secondhand embarrassment.

They’d cornered him at the kitchen table before he could so much as grab coffee—Lou Ellen already perched like a vulture, Cecil vibrating with unsupervised energy. Eyes wide. Jaws loaded. The full post-date debrief had begun.

He tried to lie. Obviously. He said things like, “It was nice,” and “We just talked a lot,” and “Yeah, no, I’m totally fine, why would I not be fine, I slept great, thanks for asking.”

Lou Ellen narrowed her eyes instantly. “Then why do you look like you haven’t slept at all?”

Cecil nearly choked on his cereal. “Why does your neck look like you lost a fight with a vampire?”

And that’s when Will—red-faced, caffeinated, and exhausted—cracked. He admitted what happened. Not everything , obviously. Just the parts that made him want to melt into the floor.

They screamed. All of them. Loud enough that someone upstairs banged on the floor with a broom.

Lou Ellen genuinely asked if they needed to get the couch professionally cleaned. Cecil tried to high-five him and missed so dramatically he almost hit the microwave. Will, horrified, had dropped his head into his arms and asked the universe to take him swiftly.

And now, as they linger outside the library, Will catches Nico out of the corner of his eye—serene, composed, perfectly still in his scarf and coat like he hasn’t permanently change the trajectory of Will’s life.

Smug little bastard.

Will sighs and throws a withering glare at Lou Ellen and Cecil. “You’re both being incredibly normal about this. Thanks for your emotional maturity.”

“Oh, please ,” Cecil says, grinning like the absolute menace he is. “This is us being normal .”

“Yeah,” Lou Ellen chimes in. “If we were being abnormal, we’d have made a PowerPoint.”

Will groans into his hands. “Gods, don’t give him ideas.”

Nico, entirely unhelpful, looks delighted . “I kind of want to see that PowerPoint.”

“You don’t ,” Will mutters, peeking out from between his fingers just in time to catch the slight quirk of Nico’s mouth. The tilt of his head. That infuriatingly smug little spark in his eyes like maybe he wouldn’t mind being publicly humiliated via slide deck.

And that’s somehow worse.

Will groans louder and tries to disappear into his coat.

Nico, again, not helping in the slightest, leans in with casual menace. “So. What else are people saying?”

“Oh, you know,” Lou Ellen says breezily, twirling her phone like a dagger. “That you’ve enchanted him. That he’s cursed. That Will Solace is no longer Will Solace—he’s become your dark apprentice.”

Will peeks through his fingers. “There are curse theories ?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Cecil says. “Our favorite is that Nico’s feeding on your life force to maintain his eternal youth.”

Nico’s eyebrows lift, genuinely impressed. “That’s flattering.”

“There’s also a running poll on whether he’s dragging you to the underworld by winter break,” Lou Ellen adds.

Will squints. “Wait, is that the one on the bulletin board outside the library?”

“No, that’s the bracket for ‘Most Likely to Think They’re Being Subtle.’ You and Nico are up against Piper and that girl from her Media Persuasion Strategies class.”

Will exhales sharply. “Cool. Great. Love that for us.”

And the worst part? He can’t even argue . Because the gossip isn’t totally wrong.

It’s been a week since their date, and in that week Will has:

• Been kissed within an inch of his life behind the biology lab, against a wall that is definitely not up to campus code
• Nearly died of shame when Nico whispered something obscene in Italian during a late-night phone call and followed it up with, “Will you be needing those tissues again?”
• Endured the sock puppet reenactment—Cecil did voices, Lou Ellen brought props, and yes, they staged the post do-over date religious oral experience scene with aggressive commitment. There was a glittery cravat, a suspiciously shaped breadstick, and way too much eye contact. Will hasn’t recovered. He may never recover.

And now, here they are. On campus. Supposedly keeping things quiet .

Which is incredibly difficult when Nico insists on walking him to class like it’s some sacred quest, and even harder when Will catches him looking—really looking—like he’s already planning the next time they’ll be alone.

Nico glances at him now, just a flicker of dark eyes under darker lashes, and Will feels it like a static shock down his spine. He is, without question, completely and irrevocably screwed.

Cecil and Lou Ellen vanish in a flurry of caffeine and chaos, Cecil muttering something about hacking the dining hall projector so it plays Clueless instead of morning announcements.

Lou Ellen blows them a kiss over her shoulder. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t narrate with sock puppets!”

“Parting is such sweet gay panic,” Cecil adds, striking a Shakespearean pose before tripping over his own backpack and disappearing across the quad.

Lou Ellen’s already texting Piper in full capslock.

Will watches them go, somewhere between dread and fondness. “They’re going to start a cult,” he says quietly.

“Already did,” Nico replies, deadpan. “It’s just disguised as brunch.”

They linger just a little longer outside the library, cold breath curling in the air between them. Will bumps their shoulders together, gentle, like a secret. Nico doesn’t flinch—just smirks and steals a sip of Will’s coffee without asking, then makes a face like he’s offended it’s not more bitter.

Will rolls his eyes and tries to take it back. “You’re welcome.”

Nico hums, noncommittal. But he doesn’t let go of the cup right away.

Then the doors open with a groan of wood and old hinges, and they step inside—out of the wind and into the hush of morning. The library is warm with radiator heat and soft light, dust motes drifting lazily through the tall windows. Everything smells like paper and time and cracked leather bindings. Somewhere in the distance, someone coughs like they’re trying not to disturb a ghost.

They settle into their usual table in the far corner—a heavy, uneven thing that creaks dramatically every time Will shifts his weight. It’s tucked between two shelves of oversized atlases and outdated medical reference books, half in shadow, half bathed in pale gold from the stained-glass window above. Quiet. Tucked away.

Will spreads out his hematology notes with the determined chaos of someone trying very hard to act normal. Highlighters, index cards, diagrams of cell lines and red blood cell abnormalities. Nico, by contrast, produces a battered copy of Thucydides and a spiral notebook filled with aggressive marginalia and at least one doodle of a skull in a flower crown.

For a few minutes, they actually work.

But only a few.

Because Will is very quickly distracted. By the way Nico pushes his hair back with ink-smudged fingers when he’s concentrating. By the crease that forms between his eyebrows when he’s rereading a passage for the third time. By the way he mouths the Latin under his breath like a prayer, voice barely audible, tongue poking out slightly as he searches for the right phrasing.

Will tries to focus—he really does. He draws a wobbly circle around the term spherocytosis and underlines it three times. But it’s hard to concentrate on the breakdown of red blood cells when the boy across from him is wearing a cashmere sweater under his coat like it’s a casual war crime. When his leg brushes Will’s under the table and doesn’t move away. When the last time that mouth had been this close, it was murmuring something filthy in Italian and then asking if Will “needed a moment to recover.”

Which—he did.

He absolutely did.

Will inhales, steady and shallow, trying to ground himself in facts and lab notes and things that don’t involve Nico’s collarbone.

It doesn’t help.

Because now he’s here. Right here. In the soft hush of the library, under a pool of gold-tinted light, eyes flicking up occasionally with a look that feels like gravity and fire at once.

And somehow, this—quietly sharing a table, pretending to study, knees barely touching under a creaky slab of wood—is even better than any fantasy Will ever let himself have.

“Okay,” Will says, breaking the quiet between them with the casual precision of someone who’s been waiting to ask. “I know we’ve talked about trauma. And death. And your general disdain for the living—”

“I’m literally right here,” Nico mutters, not looking up from his notes.

“—but I realized I don’t actually know your favorite movie.”

That gets Nico’s attention. He blinks, caught mid-sentence in his translation of a Linear B inscription. “That’s because I don’t really have one.”

Will leans back in his chair, arms folded, eyeing Nico like an unsolved equation. “That’s the most mysterious answer you could’ve given.”

“I’m serious,” Nico says, setting his pen down. “Hazel’s always trying to get me to watch stuff, but I get bored. Most of it feels… loud. Too shiny. Like it’s trying too hard to be real.”

Will’s brow furrows, intrigued. “You’ve never cried over a dumb teen romance or marathoned a trilogy out of spite?”

Nico shrugs. “I like documentaries. And old horror. Stuff from the thirties. German expressionism. American noir. The kind of films where the camera lingers too long, where shadows tell half the story and the silence says more than the dialogue. The monster’s usually just a man anyway. Or grief in a trench coat.”

Will stares at him, completely enthralled. “You are the human equivalent of a haunted oil painting.”

Nico smirks without denying it. “And you? Let me guess. Something heroic. Or space-related. Or both.”

Will grins, wide and bright and exactly as expected. “Star Wars. Obviously. I watched the VHS trilogy so many times I wore the tapes out.”

Nico arches a brow. “Originals or prequels?”

Will gasps like he’s been insulted. “Originals. I have standards.”

“Do you, though?”

“Okay, bold words from someone whose cinematic tastes involve rampant cigarette use and casual misogyny.”

“It’s about atmosphere,” Nico says, primly. “And moral ambiguity. And dramatic backlighting.”

Will leans forward, biting back a grin. “Sure. And the Star Wars prequels were about trade negotiations.”

Nico raises an eyebrow. “Weren’t they?”

Will waves a hand. “Irrelevant. The only good thing about the prequels was Anakin Skywalker.”

“That explains so much.”

Will sighs, one hand running through his curls. “I saw him brooding in a cloak with that little rat-tail braid and had a full bisexual meltdown.”

Nico laughs, soft and warm. “That explains everything.”

Will shakes his head, mock-tragic. “The angst. The hair. The way he always looked like he was two seconds from losing control but still trying so hard to do the right thing.”

Nico glances at him, curious now. “You really like tragic characters.”

Will meets his gaze without flinching. “I like complicated ones.”

There’s a beat of silence. Not awkward—just… charged. The kind that hums in the air like electricity before a storm.

Nico hums, flipping a page like he’s not enjoying this way too much. “So you’ve always had a thing for doomed boys with too much power and not enough coping mechanisms.”

Will meets his gaze. “Apparently I have a type.”

Nico smiles—small, sharp, impossible to look away from. “Good to know.”

They don’t touch. They don’t have to. The table between them feels like it’s the only thing stopping gravity from pulling them into each other.

But Will catches the flicker of Nico’s gaze over the top of his notes—slow and considering, like he’s recalibrating something important. And Will, flushed and quietly breathless, just leans back in his chair and smiles.

They go back and forth like that for a while—trading the kind of information that doesn’t feel important until you realize you’ve filed it away like gospel.

Snack preferences: Nico hates marshmallows with the quiet fury of someone personally wronged by them, which Will finds outrageous and slightly tragic. Will, for his part, has a near-religious devotion to peanut M&M’s, something Nico calls “deeply basic,” though he never says no when Will shares.

Weird sleep habits: Will needs a fan on at all times—something about airflow and ambient noise and the comforting hum of not-being-alone. He says it like a joke, brushing it off with a shrug, but the way he won’t meet Nico’s eyes gives him away.

Then, quieter:
“I also kind of... need to be holding something. When I sleep.”

Nico doesn’t look up from his textbook, just flips a page with careful fingers. “Like what?” he asks, casual, like he’s not already listening too closely.

Will hunches over his notes. “I have this stuffed bear. Mr. Bear. Lee won him for me in a claw machine when I was ten and—whatever. He’s lopsided and his fur’s all matted and one of his ears is basically half off, but—yeah. I’ve had him forever. Helps me sleep.”

There’s a pause. Nico doesn't say anything right away.

He just shifts slightly, his knee brushing Will’s under the table. A deliberate kind of contact. Subtle. Steady. Grounding.

Will exhales like he’s been holding the story in for too long. “I hid him when you came over. For our date. I didn’t want you to think I was pathetic.”

Still no immediate reply from Nico. Just the faintest upward twitch at the corner of his mouth as he underlines a phrase in his translation notes. “You’re not,” he says simply, eyes still on the page. “It makes sense.”

Will blinks. “What does?”

“You like to be close to things. You always sleep facing me. Even that first time on the couch on the roof, when you were pretending you weren’t freaking out inside.”

Will flushes. “You noticed that?”

Nico finally looks at him, expression unreadable but his gaze warm, anchored. “I notice a lot.”

And he goes right back to his book, but his foot doesn’t move from where it’s pressed against Will’s under the table.

Later, Will thinks about how easily he sleeps when Nico’s there. How, both times they’ve dozed off together, he didn’t need to reach for Mr. Bear—because Nico had already taken his place without even trying.

First concerts: Will’s was a tiny folk band in a dive bar, the kind of place with sticky floors and bad acoustics, where he sat on an overturned milk crate while his mom sang backup vocals with a tambourine and a glass of wine. He still remembers the harmonies and the way her voice wrapped around the verses like a promise. Nico’s first was a disaster turned revelation—he accidentally wandered into a punk show at sixteen while trying to escape a school dance and stayed because the mosh pit made more sense than anything else in his life at the time. It was loud, and chaotic, and for the first time, he didn’t feel out of place.

They trade other things too. Favorite breakfast foods (Nico: espresso and quiet; Will: pancakes, chaos optional), least favorite classes (Nico hates anylecture that involves group work; Will loathes organic chemistry with every fiber of his being), childhood injuries (Nico broke his wrist falling off a mausoleum wall; Will once tripped over a goat at a petting zoo and had to get stitches in his chin. He cried and Lee bought him ice cream afterwards.).

It’s easy. Easier than either of them expected. And as the morning light slants gold across the library table, the pretense of studying slips away. What’s left feels quieter. Softer. Like building a home out of shared glances and half-told stories—out of all the little things no one else ever thought to ask.

Somewhere between Nico recounting a dig site internship that spiraled into mild chaos, and Will explaining how he fainted in hematology lab after catching sight of his own blood under a microscope, their knees brush under the table—and stay there.

Not urgent. Not accidental. Just there.

Steady. Warm. Like a promise forming between them, still unsaid, but felt all the same.

Then Nico shifts, just enough for their fingers to brush where they rest on the table—light, unintentional, but lingering.

Will jolts back into the physical plane with all the grace of a man struck by Cupid’s least subtle arrow.

His pulse trips. Nico, of course, doesn’t flinch. Just keeps reading, eyes steady on the page, like he didn’t just short-circuit Will’s entire central nervous system with a single touch.

He clears his throat, yanks out his anatomy flashcards like they’ve personally betrayed him, and fans them across the table with the air of a magician about to pull a rabbit out of his GPA.

Nico watches him, unimpressed, already flipping open a dense-looking mythology textbook with marginalia scrawled like battle notes in the margins.

Will sighs. “Okay. Time to suffer. Again.”

“Which body part are you quizzing yourself on today?” Nico asks, dryly amused. “Because last time you tried reviewing cranial nerves while sleep-deprived, you called the trochlear nerve ‘the squinty one.’”

Will doesn’t miss a beat. “It is the squinty one. Fourth cranial nerve. Superior oblique muscle. Makes your eyes go whoosh.”

He demonstrates with a bizarre, overly dramatic diagonal eye-roll that nearly knocks Nico off his goddamn chair laughing.

“You’re such a disaster,” Nico says, half-buried in his scarf and fond disbelief. “No wonder you’re in pre-med. If you can’t fix it, at least you can flirt with it.”

Will grins like he’s won a prize. “Coming from the guy whose hobbies include cataloguing ancient burial rites and bullying French professors.”

“I do not bully him.”

“You made him cry.”

“He was wrong about the Latin translation of bellum sacrum . That’s not bullying. That’s justice.”

Will flips another flashcard and bites his lip, trying to hide the way his smile is curving dangerous. “Gods, you’re terrifying. No wonder half the campus thinks you drink blood and sleep in a mausoleum.”

Nico shrugs, unbothered. “I just have good bone structure and a low tolerance for small talk.”

Their knees are still touching.

Will wonders if Nico notices. (He definitely does.)

And worse—Nico isn’t moving away.

He’s sitting just close enough that Will can feel the heat of him, a steady line of warmth pressing against his leg. Every time Will shifts, Nico shifts too—calm, deliberate, like he’s not going anywhere.

Will tries to focus on his notes, highlighting a phrase that doesn’t need highlighting, hand slightly unsteady. He can feel Nico’s gaze on him now—not direct, not obvious, but real. Intent.

First, it’s the curl of Will’s fingers around his pen. Then, the slow drag of eyes across his forearm, up to the line of his jaw where Will is very consciously not clenching. He feels it—feels Nico looking at his mouth like it’s a question he wants to memorize the answer to. The air seems to thin.

Will swallows. His neck burns.

Nico turns another page in his book, completely composed. Too composed.

Will forces himself to look down. Tries not to imagine the weight of that gaze on his skin. Tries not to think about how badly he wants to lean in and ruin both of them.

“Well,” Will says, voice low as he leans in just slightly across the creaky table, “for the record? I think you’re hot and brilliant. Like, unfairly so. If we were in a Greek myth, you'd be the brooding immortal prince everyone’s too scared to talk to but secretly writes odes about.”

Nico doesn’t move away. He raises a brow, unimpressed. “And you’d be the golden-haired healer who thinks puns count as personality.”

Will grins. “Nice to know we’re staying on-brand.”

They don’t kiss—not here, not in the corner of the library with sunlight striping the table and the slow tick of a nearby clock—but Will catches the way Nico’s eyes drop to his mouth and then flick back up. Measured. Intentional. Like he’s thinking about it.

The tension hums, soft and steady. Like the breath before a storm.

For a little while, they actually study. Will flips through enzyme pathway flashcards with the desperation of someone clinging to a GPA, while Nico jots translations in neat, ancient Roman cursive like he invented the alphabet. Occasionally, their hands brush across the table.

Will doesn’t move his.

Eventually, Will glances up—and freezes. Two students at a nearby table are definitely pretending not to watch them. One elbows the other and mouths something that looks suspiciously like balcony boyfriends .

Will sighs and nudges Nico under the table. “We’ve got fans.”

Nico doesn’t even look up. “Good. Maybe they’ll write epic poetry about us.”

Will snorts. “Gods, you’re insufferable.”

“You’re the one dreaming about me,” Nico says, deadpan, underlining something in his notes like this conversation isn’t actively killing Will.

Will, still sun-warm and sleep-deprived, exhales like he’s been hit in the chest. “Yeah, you haunt my dreams. With your cheekbones. And your emotionally devastating Latin.”

Nico finally looks up. His gaze lingers—slow, deliberate—and drops to Will’s mouth again for half a heartbeat. A flicker of heat passes between them, sharp and immediate.

Nico flips a page, then glances over, entirely too casual. “You talk in your sleep, you know. Said my name when I stayed over after the date.”

Will freezes, blinking fast. “I did not.”

Nico shrugs, all wicked innocence. “You did. Twice. Very reverent.”

Will groans, burying his face in his hands. “You’re insufferable.”

“Sounded like more than haunting,” Nico murmurs, lips just barely curved. “You moaned.”

Will shifts in his seat, dragging a hand down his thigh like it might help. “You’re one to talk. You said you’ve dreamed about me too.”

Nico’s pen stills mid-word. “I never said they were that kind of dream.”

Will arches a brow, the corner of his mouth twitching. “You implied it. Strongly.”

Nico pointedly doesn’t look at him. “You’re imagining things.”

Will leans in just a little, voice lower now. “You said—and I quote—‘It was very vivid, and I woke up sweating.’”

A flush creeps up Nico’s neck, visible even in the soft library light. “I was being poetic.”

Will grins, absolutely insufferable. “Sure you were, Mr. Shadows-and-cigarette-smoke.”

Nico mutters something in Italian that might be a curse—or a prayer—but he still doesn’t move away. If anything, he leans closer. And Will feels it like a live wire, that tension, that invitation.

He taps his highlighter against Nico’s notebook, smug. “Admit it. I haunt your dreams too.”

Nico smirks. “Even if you did, I don’t need to keep emergency tissues next to my bed.”

Will chokes. “That’s—that’s not—”

“You’re the one spiraling,” Nico murmurs, turning a page with infuriating calm. “I just lie there. Brooding.”

“You’re a menace,” Will whispers, half in awe, half in agony.

“And yet, here you are.”

Their knees are still touching. Will’s heart is doing catastrophic things inside his chest. The library is far too warm, and Nico’s mouth is far too close.

He’s so, so doomed.

Will swallows hard. They are not going to make it to finals week.

 

But slowly—like mist lifting from marble statues at dawn—the tension begins to soften. Not disappear. Just shift. Sink into the bones of the moment, quieter now, folded beneath the surface like a secret.

It’s not peace, not exactly. But it’s something close. A kind of hush, intimate and sprawling, drawn out like the golden light bleeding in through the library’s cathedral-high windows. The dust floats in lazy spirals, catching in the beams like powdered gold. Shelves cast long, uneven shadows across the floor. The table beneath their arms is warped and water-stained, carved with generations of initials. It smells faintly of old paper, lemon cleaner, and something warm that Will can’t name.

He exhales slowly and lets himself lean back, shoulders easing, legs stretched under the table like he finally remembers he has a body. His textbook lies open to muscle structure—smooth, skeletal, cardiac—and his fingers trace lines on the page without thinking. Pen taps against the margin. The familiar rhythm steadies him. Focuses him. Here, he’s not nervous or flustered or spiraling. He’s just… himself.

Across from him, Nico is a study in contrasts. Jacket shrugged off, hoodie sleeves bunched at the elbows, dark hair falling into his eyes as he scribbles neat, sharp notes beside a faded transcription of a stone stele. The language is dead; Nico is resurrecting it with careful hands. There are faint smudges of graphite on his thumb, a single ink blot near the edge of the page. His concentration is quiet and consuming. His lips part sometimes when he reads.

Their knees still touch beneath the table—barely, just the press of fabric against fabric—but it anchors Will like a hand on his spine.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t want to.

They work like that for a while. Parallel rhythms. One scribbling through layers of ancient earth, the other charting the inner scaffolding of the human body. Two anatomies. One table. And somewhere between their notes and silences, the space between them stops feeling like distance. It feels like gravity.

“Okay, you’ve got to explain that to me,” Nico says, nodding toward Will’s scrawled notes. “Is that a diagram of a human ribcage or a really ambitious attempt at drawing a car crash?”

Will laughs, low and warm. “Ribcage. Mostly. It’s for my musculoskeletal systems class—anatomical landmarks.” He taps the page, where thin blue ink marks the sweep of the sternum. “This bit here is the xiphoid process. Technically part of the sternum, but if you press on it during CPR, there’s a decent chance you’ll puncture a lung.”

Nico raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Romantic. So you’re saying I could kill someone through a poorly timed gesture of love?”

“Look, I’m not saying you should,” Will says, grinning. “But yeah, technically.”

There’s a beat. Will turns back to his notes, but he can feel Nico’s gaze lingering—measured and intent.

“You know,” Nico says after a moment, voice quieter, “you’d make a good war medic.”

Will glances up, caught off guard. “Thanks? I think?”

“Don’t get weird about it,” Nico mutters. “You’re just… calm under pressure. And fast. I’ve seen it.”

Will watches him now, the way his thumb runs along the edge of his translation sheet, how his eyes don’t quite meet Will’s. There’s a flush to his cheeks that could be the heat or the sunlight or something else entirely.

“And what about you?” Will says, trying to even the playing field. “You’ve got half a dead language cracked open over there and it still looks easier than this.”

Nico huffs, but he’s pleased. “It’s Linear B. I’m translating a tablet from Knossos for a paper on Mycenaean burial rites.”

Will stares at him. “You say that like it’s a normal sentence. I’m over here labeling bones and you’re out here decoding the Bronze Age.”

There’s a pause. Nico shrugs, almost shy beneath the humor. “You’re smarter than you let on,” he says. “When you’re not trying to impress me by walking into walls.”

“That happened one time.”

“Twice,” Nico corrects.

“I rest my case,” Will mutters, nudging Nico’s foot under the table.

Their eyes meet, and the air shifts again—quieter this time. Closer.

Will flips to a new page, feigning nonchalance. “So if I ace my hematology quiz, do I get a prize?”

Nico smirks. “Depends. How well do you know your arteries?”

Will looks up slowly, gaze locking with Nico’s. “I know the ones that make the heart race.”

Will’s highlighter drags across the page in a slow, uneven stroke. The text in front of him is dense—something about cytokine signaling and immune response modulation—but none of it registers. Not with Nico watching him like that.

Nico, who looks far too composed for someone actively dismantling Will’s focus with a single eyebrow raise.

Will opens his mouth—probably to say something disastrous—when a voice breaks through the hush of the library:

“Oh my gods, they’re here again! ”

It’s whispered, but not whispered enough.

Will sighs, pressing the bridge of his nose like he can physically squish the embarrassment out of his body. Across the aisle, two freshmen are half-hidden behind a precarious stack of books on Greek tragedy, not even pretending to be subtle. One of them is holding her phone at a suspicious angle.

“Fifth time this week,” Will mutters.

Nico doesn’t look over. Just reaches for his pencil like he’s annotating something vital and not hiding a smirk. “Do you think we’ve been assigned a watch committee?”

“I think we’ve become the campus cryptids,” Will says. “People probably think we only emerge when the sun hits the stone lions just right.”

“Or during equinoxes,” Nico suggests. “To recharge our cursed talismans.”

Will tilts his head. “Would explain the Wednesday rumor about you raising me from the dead.”

Nico hums. “I didn’t even deny that one. Felt rude to take away their hope.”

Will laughs—quiet but helpless—and tries, valiantly, to refocus on his notes. But it’s hard to concentrate when Nico keeps looking at him like that and students across campus seem to be documenting their every interaction like it’s a mythological courtship arc. Honestly, they’re probably halfway to fanfiction by now.

Somewhere behind them, a phone camera shutter clicks.

Will sighs again and flips to a new page.

“Okay,” he mutters, “if someone starts a subreddit, I’m deleting my existence.”

Nico shrugs. “If someone hasn’t started a subreddit, I’m disappointed in the student body.”

Will throws him a look—part exasperated, part undone. Nico just leans back in his chair, smug and unbothered, like a man fully aware he’s the reason Will’s GPA is in mortal peril.

And Will—utterly doomed, undeniably weak for this boy, and dizzy with affection—lets himself grin.

Nico is supposed to be finishing his translation. His notebook lies half-empty, his pen forgotten. He’s watching Will instead, chin propped on one hand, eyes dark and intent. The sunlight catches on the curve of his cheekbone, glances off his ring, and for a second he looks like some sculpture come to life—dangerous and gorgeous and just a little too pleased with himself.

“Tell me something else,” Nico says, voice low, almost lazy.

Will blinks. “Something else?”

“Something medical. Complicated. I like when you talk about that stuff.”

Will stares at him. “You like hearing me talk about… immunology?”

Nico shrugs, casual on the surface but still tracking every beat of Will’s pulse with unnerving accuracy. “You sound smart. Like, actually smart. And a little smug about it. It’s hot.”

Will’s brain short-circuits. “Um.”

Nico leans forward slightly, and it’s unfair how easily the air shifts around him. “Come on. Impress me.”

Will swallows and flips a page like it might protect him. “Okay. So—uh—T-cells are part of the adaptive immune system. They can differentiate into subsets depending on environmental signals. Th1 cells activate macrophages—those are the ones that basically eat pathogens—and Th2 cells help promote antibody production. The balance between them matters, especially in cases of chronic inflammation or autoimmune stuff like allergies or—”

“Keep going,” Nico murmurs.

Will stares. “You’re actually into this?”

“I’m into you ,” Nico says, cool and effortless, “and your stupid, brilliant brain.”

Will forgets how to breathe for half a second. He barely manages to keep talking.

“There’s this thing called a cytokine storm,” he says, voice wobbling just a little. “It’s when the immune system panics and floods the body with pro-inflammatory signals. Too much of it can cause fever, tissue damage, organ failure—basically, the body starts attacking itself.”

Nico’s eyes gleam. “Are you trying to seduce me with immunological catastrophe?”

Will laughs, breathless. “You told me to keep going.”

Nico reaches out, lazily dragging a finger along the inside of Will’s wrist—just a brush, featherlight, but it hits like static and sets off something bright and unbearable in Will’s bloodstream.

“I like it,” Nico murmurs. His voice is low, smoky, like he’s admitting something he’s already turned over a thousand times in his head. “You get this little crease in your forehead when you’re concentrating. Like you’re trying to memorize the universe. It’s…” His eyes flick downward, then back up, heavier now. “It’s distracting. Makes me want to bite something.”

Will blinks. “Bite what exactly?”

Nico’s mouth quirks. “Something vital.”

Will chokes on air. “Gods, you are such a menace.”

“You’re the one whispering about immune cell differentiation like it’s foreplay.”

Will leans in, just slightly—close enough to feel Nico’s breath when he talks, the air between them drawn tight like a held note. “Want me to tell you about hematopoiesis next?”

Nico’s gaze flickers to Will’s mouth. “Is that the blood thing?”

“That’s the blood thing,” Will whispers. “Bone marrow stem cells. Myeloid lineages, lymphoid branches. Neutrophils. Basophils. T-cells. It’s… foundational.”

Nico doesn’t blink. “Say more.”

There’s a pause, too long and too loaded. Someone in the next aisle drops a pencil with an audible clatter. Another person lets out a cough that’s clearly performative. The air in the library thickens—buzzing with interest, eyes darting over bookshelves and tabletops. But Will doesn’t move.

He keeps talking, softer now, as if the words might do damage if they’re any louder. “If it goes wrong—hematopoiesis, I mean—it can trigger immune collapse. Autoimmune disorders. Cancer. But when it works… it’s this perfectly orchestrated process. Regenerative. Balanced. It’s kind of beautiful.”

Nico’s hand is still on his wrist, thumb brushing the pulse point like he’s testing the limits of Will’s composure. His voice dips even lower. “You’re kind of beautiful.”

Will exhales like it hurts.

They don’t move. They don’t dare.

But Will’s heartbeat is loud enough now that he’s sure Nico can feel it—and maybe that’s the point.

He tilts his head slightly. “You realize we’re going to get kicked out of this library.”

Nico smiles like it’s inevitable. Like he planned it. “Worth it.” Then, quieter, low and a little wrecked—“Tell me more.”

And Will—heart pounding, textbook forgotten, totally undone—leans just a little closer.

The air between them is all static and slow-burn heat, thick with something unspoken and pulling tight. For a second, Will forgets what air even feels like in his lungs.

So, he does what any flustered pre-med with a crush and a desperate need to please would do: he talks about medicine.

With a breath that doesn’t quite steady him, Will flips a page in his notes, highlighter cap tucked between his teeth like it’s anchoring him, and gestures to the diagram like it's a shield. He speaks fast—too fast—but the knowledge flows out easily now, practiced and instinctive, the way it always is when someone’s watching and he wants—needs—to impress them.

“It’s like a domino effect,” he says, gesturing to a frantic swirl of color-coded arrows on a brain scan. “A stroke cuts off blood flow, so neurons start dying from lack of oxygen. But then that kicks off this whole biochemical meltdown—glutamate overload, calcium influx, mitochondrial dysfunction. The body basically panics and floods everything with signals trying to fix it, but all it does is make the damage worse.”

He’s glowing—cheeks flushed from momentum, curls a little wild, pen ink smudged across his hand like a constellation of effort. He glances up, a little breathless, still buzzing with adrenaline from talking too much too fast.

And Nico is watching him.

Not politely. Not casually.

But like he wants to memorize every word. Like he’s weighing how much trouble he could get into if he kissed Will right now and still walked out with a clean conscience. Like Will is both the spark and the powder keg—and Nico’s just deciding when to light the match.

“What?” Will asks, blinking, voice cracking up an octave. “Did I—was that too much?”

“No,” Nico says, low and deliberate. He leans in, slow as gravity, elbows braced on the table, and his voice drops into something rough and dangerous—something made to undo people. “You just… say things that shouldn’t sound hot. But somehow they do.”

Will makes a noise that cannot be classified by science. His highlighter falls out of his mouth and rolls off the table like it’s fleeing the scene.

“I’m—okay, that’s not—I was literally talking about brain death—”

“Exactly,” Nico says, unbothered, pupils blown and unreadable in the honeyed afternoon light. “Maybe I like when you talk dirty in neurology.”

Will groans and flings himself back in his chair, arms dramatically limp. His curls bounce against the seat. “You can’t say things like that while I’m trying to be a serious student.”

Nico tilts his head, eyes tracking every inch of him like he’s committing Will to memory in layers—skin, bone, soul. “You’re not just a pretty face, Solace.”

Will squints at him between his fingers. “Please don’t say that like I’m a background character in Clueless .”

“Fine,” Nico says, with a smirk that could be measured in casualties. “You’ve got a pretty face. And a pretty brain. And a pretty body.”

Will opens his mouth to object—he has something. He swears he does—but Nico is already leaning closer, gaze steady, voice dropping into velvet.

“And a very pretty cock.”

Will slaps both hands over his face like he can scrub himself out of existence. “You’re evil,” he hisses, voice muffled by pure, vibrating secondhand embarrassment.

“I’m honest,” Nico says, flipping casually to a new page in Will’s anatomy textbook like he didn’t just detonate every coherent thought Will’s ever had. “You’re the one getting flustered.”

Will gropes blindly for his stethoscope case like it’s a crucifix and Nico is some morally ambiguous succubus from a medical-themed fever dream. It offers no salvation. Only the cold knowledge that he is, without question, medically and emotionally wrecked.

And Nico?

Nico just watches him—calm, amused, and very, very smug.

The rest of their so-called study session goes downhill immediately—derailed by fluttering glances, smug comments, and the kind of tension that could power a small city. At one point, Will tries to refocus by whispering hematology terms to himself like a prayer. It only makes things worse.

Will is definitely failing his next quiz. And for once, he doesn’t even care.

Because Nico keeps asking for more.

More medical facts. More anatomy terms. More Will Solace with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, gesturing wildly with his pen as he explains neuroplasticity, or vasovagal syncope, or the exact sequence of muscle contractions during CPR.

And every time Will opens his mouth, Nico shifts a little closer. Barely an inch at a time. His chair edging toward Will’s like gravity’s pulling him in slow motion. He leans in with practiced ease, all shadows and sharp angles, tilting his head like he’s listening to poetry, not pre-med jargon. His eyes stay locked on Will’s mouth, half-lidded with focus. Reverent.

And under the desk—gods help him—Nico’s fingertips brush lightly against Will’s thigh.

Will almost drops his flashcards.

The touch is casual at first, maddeningly subtle, just a single point of contact. But the longer Will talks, the more complex the material gets, the higher Nico’s hand trails—along the seam of Will’s jeans, slow and unhurried, like he’s plotting vascular pathways on Will’s skin. By the time Will’s explaining the clotting cascade, he’s gripping the edge of the table like it’s the only thing keeping him upright.

He can’t stop. He doesn’t stop.

Because when Nico’s voice dips into curiosity, low and coaxing— And then what happens? —Will’s whole nervous system lights up like a Christmas tree in cardiac arrest. He pulls diagrams from his notes with trembling fingers like he’s conjuring holy texts. Talks with his hands like he’s trying to sculpt understanding from the air itself.

Somewhere between leukocyte differentiation and the part where Will starts breathlessly describing thrombin, he forgets how to be nervous. Forgets there’s a library around them. Forgets his name, possibly.

Nico wants his brain?

Nico can have it. He can have the whole damn thing—gray matter, long-term memory, and whatever fragment of sanity Will has left after this study session.

Fully, breathlessly, and with disastrous academic consequences.

They forget the world outside their little library bubble—until Will’s phone buzzes with a message from Cecil: a screenshot of a campus gossip thread titled "Med Boy and Death Boy: Forbidden Library Rendezvous???" complete with a blurry zoomed-in photo and the caption “is this you.”

Will chokes on air—actually chokes, spluttering like he’s just inhaled his own textbook.

Nico doesn’t flinch. His hand is still on Will’s thigh, fingertips resting in a way that is absolutely not accidental, slow and steady and infuriatingly confident. He glances up mid-choke, calm as ever, and locks eyes with a girl seated across the reading room.

She doesn’t even pretend to look away.

She just smirks behind the rim of her coffee cup, like she’s been watching a slow-burn rom-com unravel for the last thirty minutes and is personally invested in the kiss payoff.

Will leans in across the table, voice low and panicked. “We’re not being that obvious, right?”

Nico raises an eyebrow, deadpan. “You’ve been moaning the word medulla oblongata for ten minutes.”

Will lets out a strangled whimper and drops his forehead to the table with a thunk , the pages of his notes crinkling under his cheek. “I hate myself.”

Nico leans in close enough for Will to feel the warmth of his breath just above his ear. His hand doesn’t move. If anything, his thumb traces a lazy, infuriating little circle just above Will’s knee.

“You’re lucky I don’t,” he murmurs.

And then—it’s technically time for lunch.

They do not eat lunch.

They don’t even pretend to eat lunch.

Instead, Nico grabs Will by the wrist.

“Come with me,” he murmurs—low, certain, no room for argument—and Will doesn’t hesitate. He couldn’t, even if he tried. His body is already moving, tethered to Nico like gravity’s been rewritten.

They slip through the library like a secret, past mezzanines and marble busts and bored-looking grad students. The light fades the deeper they go, swallowed by narrow aisles and the thick hush of archived silence. Nico finds a forgotten study room tucked behind a half-collapsed display on postwar art theory—dusty, dim, the door still bearing a crooked “Out of Order” sign someone hung during finals last semester and never removed.

The moment it clicks shut behind them, Nico presses Will back against it—firm, decisive, no hesitation.

Will gasps, spine thudding gently against the door, and Nico is already there—mouth on his, hands tangled in the collar of his hoodie, weight leaned in like he’s claiming him inch by inch. The kiss is rough and unrelenting, not rushed but full of urgency, like Nico’s been holding himself back all day and this is the dam breaking.

Will melts. Utterly.

And what undoes him most—what sends heat curling low in his stomach, sharp as a struck match—is the way Nico fits against him.

Nico is all precision and quiet power. Smaller, yes—slighter than Will by nearly half a foot—but there’s nothing delicate about him. He’s built like something forged, not grown: lean muscle wound tight over a narrow frame, coiled strength shaped by years of silence and survival. Every inch of him is intention. Control. A blade in human form.

Will is the opposite. Sun-drenched and solid, built broad through years of lifting plates in overheated kitchens and shelving stacks of hardcovers at the bookstore until his shoulders ached. Back in Austin, he’d taken every odd job he could find to save money—yard work, hauling lumber, helping a neighbor’s cousin renovate their garage—anything that paid under the table and built strength into his frame alongside the tutoring gigs and EMT volunteering that padded his med school application.

He’s strong in that easy, incidental way—like the world has always handed him weight, and he’s simply learned to carry it.

But none of that matters now.

Because it’s Nico who has him pinned. Nico who moves like gravity obeys him. Nico whose fist twists in the collar of Will’s hoodie, dragging him down like a secret, mouth already pressed to the hollow of his throat.

And Will—tall, broad-shouldered, golden in the way summer is—doesn’t just let him. He surrenders.

Nico kisses like he’s starving and strategic all at once, tongue and teeth and breath skating over skin with clinical precision. Will registers it dimly, half-delirious and clinging to consciousness by a thread, as Nico’s mouth finds the soft spot just beneath his jaw—right over the carotid artery, where blood pulses close to the surface.

It’s maddening. He shouldn’t be thinking about vascular flow and nerve clusters right now, but his brain short-circuits every time Nico’s mouth brushes another textbook-perfect erogenous zone. Along the sternocleidomastoid, where tension builds and lingers. Over the supraclavicular hollow, where the skin is thinner and more sensitive, heat pooling in Will’s chest like an electrical current. Down the line of his throat, right where the vagus nerve snakes invisibly beneath skin and muscle—touch there is almost too much.

He’s being unraveled with surgical precision, with all the focus and control of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing—and Will, a third-year pre-med student with a thousand hours of anatomy labs under his belt, feels completely out of his depth.

Nico maps him like a body he intends to memorize. Like muscle and skin and nerve endings are a language he’s fluent in. Will’s head tips back against the door, lips parted on a broken breath, every part of him pliant and burning. He’s being studied and worshipped and devoured, all at once—and gods, he’s never wanted anything more.

Nico presses closer, fitting seamlessly into the line of Will’s body, every movement deliberate, every brush of fabric and skin calculated. And Will—sun-warm and frayed at the edges—lets his hands wander at last, bunching the back of Nico’s jacket in his fists like he’s afraid to let go.

He’s always been the one expected to take the lead. People look at him and assumed: confident, dominant, unshakable.

But now? Now he lets Nico take. Lets himself be held in place, spine flush to the door, with Nico’s hand still curled in his hoodie like a command. Nico is smaller, sure—slimmer, all sharp lines and coiled strength—but none of that matters when he’s like this. In control. Certain. Touching Will like he knows exactly where to press to make him tremble.

And Will does. Tremble. Not from weakness, but from the exquisite relief of letting go.

Of letting someone else guide the moment.

Of not having to think, for once.

Just feel .

Nico nips at the curve where Will’s jaw meets his neck, just sharp enough to make him jolt. “You’re so warm, so hot ” Nico breathes, voice husky and far too steady. “It’s unfair.”

Will whimpers—actually whimpers—and Nico responds by pressing closer, slotting their bodies together until Will feels every line of him. His thigh between Will’s. His hands firm and certain. His mouth, gods, his mouth…

They don’t go further. Not here. Not with the risk of being caught. But gods, the restraint only stokes the heat.

Will can feel the tension like a taut wire running down his spine. Nico’s lips press behind his ear, then his jaw, then his throat again—each kiss a brand. Will shudders beneath the touch, not even trying to stay upright anymore. He’s pinned and panting and utterly lost.

“You’re letting me do this,” Nico breathes, voice rough and unsteady, like he can’t quite believe it.

Will’s head thuds gently back against the door, chest rising fast. “I want you to,” he says, and gods, he means it—means it so much it aches.

Nico pulls back just enough to look at him, eyes blown wide, lips kiss-bruised and parted. “You don’t get it,” he says, voice low and wrecked in its own right. “You were talking about neurobiology like it was a love letter and I—gods, Will—I’ve never been so turned on by someone being smart in my entire life.”

Will huffs a stunned laugh, breathless and bright. “You're such a nerd.”

“You’re the nerd,” Nico snaps back, equally breathless, but there’s no heat behind it—only awe. “You were gesturing at T-cells like they were sonnets.”

Will laughs again, giddy and ruined. “You have no idea what you do to me.”

Nico’s fingers curl tighter in the front of Will’s hoodie, knuckles brushing his chest. “Same,” he says, barely a whisper. “I can’t think straight around you.”

And then he kisses him again—slow this time, thorough, like he’s trying to commit every inch of Will’s mouth to memory. Like knowing all the right medical terminology was just the foreplay.

Will moans into it, clutches Nico’s jacket like it’s the only thing keeping him from collapsing entirely.

And in that dim, dusty room, with the door closed and their bodies pressed so tightly together, there’s no question left.

Their study session never stood a chance.

Chapter 41: Unresolved Grief: The Thanksgiving Special (Featuring the World’s Best Mom and My Worst Feelings)

They’re tangled in Will’s too-small bed, limbs a mess of exhaustion and gravity, Nico’s cold feet tucked under Will’s calves like he’s entitled to thermoregulate via boyfriend. Will would normally complain— your feet are actual corpses, di Angelo —but his legs are too sore and his brain too fried to bother.

Finals prep has begun in earnest, which means Annabeth has handed out color-coded study schedules with the gentle urgency of a woman about to snap. Will has three chapters of molecular biology to review, two problem sets to finish, and no fewer than eleven sticky notes reminding him to actually sleep. Nico, on the other hand, has a Dante paper and post-Pilates trauma.

“My soul is sore,” Nico mutters into Will’s neck. “I think Coach Hedge broke something. Probably my spine. Or my will to live.”

Will lets out a wheezy laugh and drags his hand up Nico’s back, massaging lazily at his shoulder blades. “That’s what you get for letting Jason convince you Pilates would be ‘low impact.’”

“I didn’t let him convince me,” Nico says, offended. “He lied. That man is a himbo serpent with abs. I have been betrayed.”

“You knew what you were getting into,” Will hums. “You’ve seen his yoga mat. It has motivational Latin phrases on it.”

Nico groans and flops dramatically onto his back. “He cheered when I nearly fell off the reformer. Said I was ‘building core awareness.’ I’m going to kill him. Slowly.”

Will shifts, leaning over him, propped on one elbow. “You’re not going to kill Jason.”

“I might,” Nico says darkly. “If he ever makes me hold ‘teaser’ pose again.”

Will kisses him before he can spiral further. Just a quick, soft press to the corner of his mouth, which immediately turns into something deeper when Nico hooks a hand into his T-shirt and pulls him down with a sleepy growl.

They kiss like they’re too tired to stop. Like they’re too sore to go further but too in love to do nothing. Will’s hand drifts up to Nico’s hair, curls his fingers gently at the base of his neck, and Nico hums against his mouth in that way that always makes Will forget every useful fact he’s ever learned.

“I thought we were trying to sleep,” Will mumbles between kisses.

“We are,” Nico whispers, breath warm. “Just… eventually.”

Will grins into the next kiss. “You’re the worst at boundaries.”

Nico kisses the corner of his mouth, then his jaw. “You love it.”

He does. Gods, he does.

Eventually, they shift again, bodies adjusting to the ache in their muscles and the pull of gravity. Will pulls the blankets higher, wraps one leg over Nico’s, and settles into the quiet—just the sound of the city outside the window, and Nico breathing next to him.

They lie there like that for a few minutes, skin to skin, lips still brushing occasionally, the space between them barely a breath wide.

Then Nico sighs. It’s soft, but heavy. The kind of sigh that deflates something deeper.

“Tomorrow,” he says. Just that. A single word, full of weight.

Will doesn’t answer right away. He knows what Nico means. Tomorrow, they both head home for Thanksgiving. Will’s flying back to Texas. Nico’s being picked up in a car that probably costs more than Will’s tuition, and being chauffeured to a private jet.

Nico shifts slightly, staring up at the ceiling. “Do you think anyone’s ever died from anticipation-induced dread?”

Will kisses his temple. “Only the dramatic ones.”

“So me.”

“Exactly.”

Nico is quiet for a beat. “I don’t want to go.”

Will’s heart tugs. He threads their fingers together under the blanket. “I know.”

“It’s not even—my dad won’t say anything. He’ll just look at me like I’ve disappointed him in a language I don’t speak.” Nico swallows. “And Hazel’ll try to mediate, and Persephone will comment on my posture, and I’ll end up in some overpriced marble room trying not to scream.”

Will pulls him closer, pressing a kiss behind his ear. “I’ll be thinking about you the whole time.”

“Yeah, well,” Nico mutters, “that won’t fix my posture.”

“No, but it might keep you from homicide.”

Nico’s mouth twitches, just barely. “No promises.”

They lie in silence again. Nico’s breathing slows. Will traces soft circles on the back of his hand.

“You’ll come back to me,” Will says quietly. “Right?”

Nico turns his head, meets his eyes. “You make it sound like I’m going to war.”

“You kind of are.”

Nico kisses him then. Soft and slow and sad. Not desperate—but heavy with everything unspoken.

Will kisses back, one hand cupping Nico’s jaw, like he’s trying to memorize it. Just in case.

They stay like that for a while, mouths brushing in a rhythm too lazy to be urgent but too meaningful to be casual. There’s no rush. Just the weight of parting pressing down around them, made bearable by the press of Nico’s lips and the warmth between their chests.

“I mean it,” Will murmurs, thumb stroking the curve of Nico’s cheek. “If it gets bad, you can call me. No matter what time it is. Even if you’re just hiding in a gilded bathroom whispering ‘kill me.’”

Nico huffs against his mouth, but it’s a soft sound. “You’re not really the assassin type.”

Will grins. “No, but I’m very good at long-distance comforting. And passive-aggressive texting.”

Nico presses another kiss to his mouth—slower this time, almost reverent. “I know.”

Will threads his fingers through Nico’s hair, feeling how it’s already drying into gentle curls against his temple. “Promise me you’ll get some sleep. You have to be up early.”

“You say that,” Nico mumbles, nosing at Will’s jaw, “but you’re currently enabling a deeply irresponsible amount of kissing.”

“I’m trying to be responsible!” Will protests weakly, which is difficult to do when Nico is kissing down the side of his neck like he has something to prove.

Nico pulls back slightly, eyes half-lidded and far too smug for someone who claimed his soul had left his body an hour ago. “I need to compensate for the kisses I won’t get while I’m gone.”

“That’s not how interest works,” Will mutters, even as his arm slides instinctively tighter around Nico’s waist.

Nico leans in again and kisses him once, slowly, like punctuation. Then again, and again—small, rhythmic, like he’s cataloguing each one to carry with him. Will melts beneath it, caught between laughter and aching, wanting so badly to bottle up the feel of this—of him.

Eventually, Will pulls the blanket up around Nico’s shoulders and tucks it in gently, like Nico might get cold even though he’s a living space heater pressed against his side. “Okay,” Will whispers against his temple. “That’s your last one. Doctor’s orders.”

“Mm,” Nico murmurs, eyes closed now, voice thick with sleep. “Don’t think you’re a real doctor yet.”

“I will be. And I’m prescribing you eight hours of unconsciousness.”

Nico hums in reluctant agreement, but he doesn't move—just shifts closer, his leg sliding between Will’s, his face tucked into the curve of Will’s neck.

Will closes his eyes, lets himself breathe it in. Nico’s weight against him, the way their bodies fit like puzzle pieces, the slow and steady drag of their breaths falling into sync.

“I’ll miss you,” Will whispers.

Nico doesn't say anything for a moment. Then, quietly: “I’ll miss you more.”

They don’t kiss again after that. They don’t need to.

They just hold on to each other, hearts slowing in tandem, sleep finally slipping over them like the tide.

Wrapped in warmth. Wrapped in each other.
For now.

And when morning comes, they’ll part.
But for tonight, they stay.

***

Will wakes to the feeling of movement—warmth shifting, weight pulling away. The sheets rustle, cool air rushing in where someone had been pressed against him all night.

He blinks one eye open. It’s still dark outside, the kind of pre-dawn gray that makes everything look soft around the edges. His brain is slow, limbs heavier than they should be, but he knows this feeling. The specific ache of Nico trying to sneak out of bed like a guilty raccoon.

Will makes a noise. It’s not a word—just a long, exhausted nnnnghh that translates loosely to get back here, you beautiful bastard.

Nico freezes, halfway through reaching for his suitcase.

“I was trying not to wake you,” he whispers, already dressed, hoodie zipped up, curls still damp from the world’s fastest shower. He looks unfairly pretty for someone functioning before sunrise.

Will, still mostly horizontal and half-buried in blankets, lifts a hand in protest. “You’re abandoning me.”

“I have a flight.”

“So? Cancel it. Live here now.”

Nico rolls his eyes but his smile is soft. “Hazel’s downstairs already. If I make her circle the block again she’ll come up here and drag me out by the ear.”

Will groans. “Tell her I said she’s a tyrant.”

“I will. She’ll be flattered.”

Nico steps back over to the bed and leans down, pressing a kiss to Will’s temple. Will immediately wraps both arms around him and hauls him down into a reluctant half-cuddle, burying his face in Nico’s chest.

“You smell too clean,” Will mutters. “You used my good shampoo.”

“I did. And I regret nothing.”

They kiss again—sleepy, slow, more affection than heat. Will tastes like sleep and dehydration. Nico tastes like peppermint toothpaste and farewell.

Will makes a face. “Ugh, I probably have horrible morning breath.”

“You do,” Nico says solemnly. “It’s disgusting. I’ll miss it.”

Will laughs into his collarbone. “Romance is alive and well, I see.”

But then Nico pulls back, just slightly, hand trailing down Will’s side. “I really do have to go.”

Will nods, but doesn’t let go immediately. He holds on for another breath, another heartbeat. And then, finally, he releases him.

Nico shoulders his bag, glances back one last time, and says, softly, “Text me when you wake up properly.”

Will gives a bleary thumbs-up from the pillows. “I will.”

He hears the smile in Nico’s voice. “I’ll be waiting for it.”

Then the door clicks shut behind him.

The apartment is too quiet.

Will stares at the ceiling for a few minutes, the warmth of Nico’s body still lingering in the sheets like a shadow. He could close his eyes again. Could roll over and chase the sleep still dragging at his limbs.

But he doesn’t.

Instead, he drags himself upright with a groan, shuffles toward the bathroom, and brushes his teeth with one hand braced against the sink like he’s survived a war.

The stillness settles in as he moves—brushing his hair, pulling on sweatpants, waiting for the kettle to boil. And that’s when it hits him.

The dread.

The low, creeping anxiety that’s been curled in his chest for days now, too easy to ignore when Nico was warm and close and kissing him senseless. But now, in the quiet morning air, it sinks in fully: he’s going home today.

His stomach turns, just slightly. He presses his hand to it and exhales through his nose.

The flight is booked—courtesy of his mother, who texted the confirmation with a note that her “latest single landed well on the alt-country charts, sweetie! Might as well put it to use <3” Will hadn’t asked. But he also hadn’t refused. Which was its own kind of guilt.

He doesn’t travel light. Not because he has much to bring, but because everything feels heavy right now. The goodbye to Nico still clings to him like secondhand smoke—soft kisses under a too-early sky, sleepy confessions, the lingering warmth of Nico’s body in his bed like a ghost.

The city feels colder without him. Or maybe it’s just Will.

At the airport, he scrolls through texts from Lou Ellen and Cecil, both of whom are staying in the city over break. Couldn’t afford to fly home. Didn’t want to deal with their families even if they could. Lou said she was planning a Friendsgiving with a few other theatre kids and a frozen lasagna. Cecil threatened to dye her eyebrows festive colors.

Will had offered—of course he had—but they’d both shut it down with the easy, practiced force of people who know how to laugh off disappointment. And now he’s the one boarding a plane with his mother’s money in his pocket, feeling like he’s leaving something behind that he can’t afford to lose.

The flight is uneventful. Will stares out the window for most of it, earbuds in but nothing playing. Just white noise and clouds and the ache of something that feels like homesickness, except not for Texas. For something else. For someone.

By the time he touches down in Austin, the sky is gold-streaked and low. His phone buzzes with a text from his mom— “Can’t wait to see you!! Your room is ready and the house smells like cinnamon xoxo” —and Will leans his head back against the seat, eyes closing for a moment.

He already misses the cold bite of New York. The bookstore. The chaos. The ridiculous group chat. Nico’s hoodie under his pillow.

He misses Nico.

And he hasn’t even gotten off the plane yet.

***

The Austin air is soft when Will steps out of the terminal, not cold exactly—just the kind of cool that brushes against bare arms and makes you consider a jacket before deciding you’re fine. The sky’s painted in dusty blue and warm gold, and the breeze smells like cedar and car exhaust and dry leaves. Late November in Texas always feels like it’s pretending to be fall.

He spots Naomi before she spots him—though with Naomi, spotting is the wrong word. She appears in a blur of motion and color, weaving through the crowd in a burnt orange skirt that swishes around her boots, turquoise eyeliner catching the light, and a leather jacket that looks like it might’ve once belonged to a cowboy on a spiritual journey.

Will doesn’t wait for her to speak. He crosses the distance in a few long strides and wraps her in a hug so tight it knocks the air out of both of them.

“Oh, my baby ,” Naomi laughs, her voice muffled against his neck. She squeezes him right back, her rings cool against his spine. “I didn’t even get a hello before I was nearly tackled.”

“I missed you,” Will says simply.

He didn’t mean to say it like that. But it’s true. The kind of truth that lands heavy in his chest as she pulls back to look at him, both hands on his face like she’s checking for damage.

“Well,” she says, eyes crinkling, “you look taller.”

“I’m the same height.”

“Happier, then,” she says, and drops her hands. “Come on, your chariot awaits.”

Naomi’s truck is waiting in the short-term parking zone, looking only slightly more beat-up than it did in the summer. It’s an ancient turquoise thing with rust along the edges and a license plate that’s hanging on by divine intervention. Sun charms dangle from the rearview mirror, catching the light as they spin gently with the motion of the door.

She sees him looking and smiles. “They always remind me of your father.”

Will nod, swallowing something in his throat. His eyes flick to the gold cross that hangs next to the charms. It’s always been there, tangled in the chain, catching on hope and memory and things left unsaid.

They pile into the truck. Naomi starts the engine with a cough and a rumble, turning the radio down when it crackles to life on some local indie folk station. The road winds them out of the airport and toward home, sun low over the hills, painting the sky in streaks of light that bounce off the windshield and wash them in gold.

“So,” Naomi says after a beat, eyes on the road but voice light. “How’s life in the big city? Still doing the hero’s work? Still drinking coffee like it’s water?”

Will leans his head back against the seat, half-smiling. “It’s… good. Busy. Finals are coming.”

“And your roommates?”

“Chaos incarnate.”

Naomi chuckles. “That’s what college is for.”

She lets it hang there for a moment, giving him space. Will scrolls absently through his phone—not opening anything, just checking. No new texts. No Nico.

Naomi glances sideways, catching the motion. “You’ve checked that thing five times since we left the airport.”

Will stiffens slightly. “Have I?”

“Mmhmm.” She drums her fingers on the wheel. “You’ve got that look. The same one you had when you were fifteen and hiding love notes from the girl with the pink guitar pick earrings.”

Will snorts. “That was a phase.”

“Was it?” Naomi raises an eyebrow. “You got real into sad acoustic playlists that spring.”

He hesitates. Then, quietly, “It’s not a girl this time.”

Naomi doesn’t react for a beat. Just hums, adjusting the mirror with one hand. “No, I figured.”

Will blinks. “You… did?”

“You’ve got this light in your eyes,” she says, glancing at him. “And every time you smile, it’s like you’re remembering something that hasn’t faded yet.”

Will looks down at his hands, heart thudding, mouth tugging into a crooked, helpless smile.

“His name’s Nico,” he says.

Naomi exhales softly. “Tell me about him.”

So he does.

Tentatively at first—like testing the temperature of deep water—but then all at once. He tells her about that first party, the one where he accidentally spilled his drink all over Nico di Angelo and nearly melted into the floor from shame. Nico hadn’t said a single word—just stared at him, dripping and stunned, with a look so sharp and unreadable Will was convinced he’d be hexed on the spot. “It was awful,” Will says, laughing now. “I offered him a napkin and he just blinked at me like I’d spoken in tongues. I was so sure he hated me.”

Naomi smiles gently. “But?”

Will shrugs, warmth creeping into his voice. “Turns out it was the beginning of everything.”

Naomi chuckles softly under her breath, her hand still tapping along to the rhythm of the road.

He tells her about the dinner party at Annabeth’s place—how he’d been nervous the entire time, unsure if he belonged in a room full of people who felt like they’d known each other forever. How Nico had shown up in head-to-toe black, looking like he’d rather melt into the shadows than make small talk, but still stayed.

“It wasn’t anything dramatic,” Will says. “We ended up on the balcony at one point. Just the two of us. And he… I don’t know. He let me see a little more of him. Told me about his family. About how weird it is to feel like everyone’s watching you but no one really sees you.”

Naomi doesn’t interrupt. Just listens, one hand steady on the wheel.

“I remember thinking—he’s not cold. He’s just scared. And he doesn’t want anyone to know it.”

Naomi hums, low and thoughtful. “He trusted you.”

Will nods, watching the city pass by outside the window. “I think so. Just a little. But it felt like… something.”

Then he tells her about the open mic night. About how he’d been so nervous, so completely in his head about performing and the fact that Nico was there , watching, that he ended up puking in the alley beside the venue like some kind of tragic Victorian heroine.

“I smelled like vodka and nerves,” Will says, cringing. “It was deeply unattractive.”

Naomi laughs softly, casting him a side glance as they pause at a stoplight. “And did this boy run screaming into the night?”

Will shakes his head, the memory softer now. “No. He called us a cab. Took me home. Didn’t say much, just—sat with me. Like it wasn’t a big deal.”

Naomi hums, touched. “Sounds like he sees you. Even when you’re a mess.”

Will smiles to himself, just a little. “Yeah. He does.”

He even tells her—quietly, reluctantly—about the first date. The disaster of it. How Nico had unknowingly chosen the restaurant Will worked at, how Will had panicked, shut down, and couldn’t bring himself to explain the whole class-divide mess happening in his head. How he’d watched the confusion on Nico’s face and hated himself for not being able to say the words.

Naomi doesn’t say anything right away, but her hand stills on the wheel. Her voice is quieter when she finally speaks. “That kind of thing doesn’t go away easy. That feeling like you’re not allowed in certain rooms.”

Will swallows, throat tight. “He didn’t mean anything by it. I just—froze.”

“You’ve been holding yourself together with duct tape and pride since you were thirteen,” she says gently. “Sometimes it’s okay to let someone see where it hurts.”

Will doesn’t reply. But he lets the silence stretch between them like a thread—not cutting, not tense, just real.

He tells her about the Halloween party after that. Nico in eyeliner, grumbling in his corner like he hadn’t been invited but had shown up anyway just to loiter. How they’d ended up on the balcony together. The way Nico had kissed him, slow and certain, like he’d been thinking about it for a very long time. And then the morning after, up on the rooftop, wrapped in a hoodie and sunlight, like something from a dream.

Will smiles to himself at the memory. His fingers twitch in his lap like they want to reach for something that isn’t there.

Finally, he tells her about the redo. The dinner at his place. The pasta. The sweater with the hole in it. How Nico had looked at him like he was something rare, something his , and how Will had cooked for him with hands that shook because he didn’t know how to show that kind of love without setting something on fire.

“He liked the food,” Will says, voice soft. “That meant everything to me.”

He does not tell her about the life-changing oral sex that followed. Because, unlike Cecil and Lou Ellen, Naomi does not need that kind of information.

When he finally stops talking, he’s surprised to find they’re already halfway across the city, the roads familiar now, warm light slanting through the windshield. Naomi hasn’t interrupted once. Just driven in silence, one hand tapping on the wheel, her eyes on the road but her attention never far from him.

At a red light, she reaches over and squeezes his knee.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she says, with the kind of softness that comes from a place older than words, like it’s stitched into her bones. “You’re glowing.”

Will laughs, startled and embarrassed. “Don’t start.”

“I’m just saying,” she teases, giving his knee another gentle squeeze before letting go. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that look on your face.”

“What look?”

“That look like you’re standing in the sun and you just realized it’s warm.”

Will makes a face, turning toward the window. “That’s disgusting.”

“It’s adorable ,” she insists, bumping his shoulder. “And I want to meet this boy immediately.”

He groans, flopping his head against the seat. “Don’t say it like that.”

Naomi just laughs, rolling down the window a few inches as the breeze picks up, curling her fingers into it like she’s testing the weather. The truck rattles gently beneath them, every dent and loose screw humming with familiarity. The sun charms hanging from the rearview mirror spin lazily, catching the light in flashes, and the old cross next to them sways like it remembers everything he doesn’t say.

Outside, Austin slides by in soft November colors. The city looks like itself but dulled at the edges—oak trees half-bare, the sidewalks strewn with leaves that crunch and dance in the wind. Houses wear their seasonal decorations with a kind of resigned cheer: twinkle lights strung up before Thanksgiving, wreaths already hanging on sun-bleached doors. Someone’s burning cedarwood down the block, and the scent follows them through the open window, mingling with the dry air and something sweet and distant from a bakery.

Usually, coming back here makes Will feel like his stomach is folding in on itself. The humidity, the silence in the house, the too-bright kitchen with its curated vintage decor. The way his mom talks around things, always smiling just a little too brightly. The ghosts of everything unspoken still echo in the walls.

But this time—this time, it doesn’t settle in his chest the same way. His throat doesn’t close up the second they leave the airport. He doesn’t feel the creeping urge to climb out of his skin and disappear into the pavement. He still feels the tension, the dread of long silences and loaded conversations—but it’s softened, dulled by the way Naomi glances at him and smiles, like she already knows he’s changed and isn’t trying to fix it.

Because his mom makes everything feel okay. She always has. Even when she was halfway across the country chasing gigs and leaving him behind with Lee and too many questions. Even when she messed things up. Even when she didn’t have the answers. She still made space for him to breathe.

And now, with her beside him, the city feels just a little less heavy. And for a moment, despite everything waiting in that too-bright house up ahead—the looming name of a father no one ever says aloud—Will feels… okay.

Like he might just make it through this break with his heart intact.

***

The next few days unfold like a collage—stitched together in bright, fractured pieces, soaked in music and morning light.

Naomi’s house is a small, sun-worn bungalow tucked between bigger, shinier homes that came with newer money. Hers leans like it’s tired, ivy creeping up one wall, a porch swing that creaks when the wind shifts. Inside, the walls are covered in mismatched art: old tour posters, framed Polaroids of twenty-something Naomi holding guitars, candles half-burned down on every surface.

Thanksgiving prep begins with a ritual Naomi calls “The Sacred Inventory,” which involves dramatic sighs, one handwritten list, and at least two kitchen chairs that have to be moved so she can dance while checking the cupboards. Will offers to chip in, quietly sliding a folded bill onto the counter.

Naomi sees it, rolls her eyes, and flicks him with a tea towel. “Put that away, honey. I’m not charging my child to eat mashed potatoes.”

“But—”

“I said no. I’ve got it. We’re doing a shoestring dinner, just like always. Besides,” she grins, “poor food tastes better.”

He doesn’t argue again.

They make stuffing from torn bread and garlic powder. The pie crust falls apart twice and gets patched back together like a quilt. Naomi burns the green beans and makes a show of mourning them like fallen soldiers. Will peels potatoes while she plays old records in the background—Patsy Cline and Fleetwood Mac and Naomi Solace & the Hollow Saints, her first band, still etched into the vinyl like a ghost.

There’s music in everything she does. She sings while slicing apples. Hums while folding napkins. Taps rhythms against the table with her rings. Her voice fills the house like sunlight—warm, worn-in, a little bit wild. Will finds himself harmonizing under his breath without thinking.

They don’t talk about the rest of the family. Naomi doesn’t bring them up. But when Will asks if Aunt Beryl is coming by this year, Naomi just laughs—short, humorless—and changes the subject. There’s something tight around her mouth that wasn’t there before. Something bitter.

He doesn’t press, but he knows. It was about him. It always is.

***

Nico texts every night.

Sometimes it’s brief:

Persephone just called me “melodramatic” for glaring at the heirloom napkin rings. Send help.

Sometimes it’s dramatic:

Hazel and I made direct eye contact across the ballroom and mutually agreed to fake a phone call. If I don’t make it out of this country estate, tell Jason he’s not allowed to give a eulogy.

Once, it’s simply a photo of an aggressively over-decorated dining room: gilded candlesticks, a floral centerpiece the size of a hydra, and what might be a baby grand piano playing itself in the background.
Underneath, he writes:

This is what happens when gods marry mortals with taste and no boundaries.

Another time, it’s:

Persephone told Cerberus he was “a messy boy with no manners” for trying to eat one of her rose arrangements and my father said “aren’t we all” and left the room. That was three hours ago. No one’s seen him since.

And then, quietly—after a lull in the chaos, late one night when the house has finally gone still:

Wish you were here.

Will always answers, no matter how late. With teasing replies, with concern disguised as jokes, with a steadying rhythm of I’m here, I see you, you’re doing okay.

And every time that last message arrives, Will presses the phone to his chest like it might carry warmth.
Because gods, he wishes he were there too.

He reads the messages lying belly-down on his childhood bed, face buried in his pillow, texting back slow and smiling until his phone slips from his hand.

Nico says things are going okay, and Will believes him. Or wants to. But sometimes the pauses between texts feel longer than they should.

***

On Thanksgiving Day, they eat at the little table in the kitchen. Naomi lights all the candles, even the ones shaped like sunflowers. The pie is ugly but perfect. They toast with store-brand cider and pass the potatoes back and forth like a peace offering. Naomi makes him go around and say three things he’s grateful for, and when he says “you,” her eyes go glossy and she blinks too hard.

Later, they sit on the porch swing with mismatched blankets and peppermint tea, watching the sky turn navy and soft. Somewhere in the distance, a neighbor is playing Willie Nelson too loud.

Naomi nudges him with her foot. “Y’know, I like this version of you.”

Will raises an eyebrow. “What version?”

“The one that glows,” she says. “The one that sings to himself. You’re not carrying the world on your back right now. And I think I have that boy of yours to thank.”

Will doesn’t answer right away. He just smiles, small and real, and sips his tea while Nico’s latest text buzzes in his pocket.

The warmth of the mug seeps into his palms. The porch swing creaks softly beneath them. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks, and Naomi hums along with the breeze like it’s a song only she knows.

And yet—
The heaviness comes anyway.

The next morning is too bright.

Texas autumn tries to pass itself off as gentle, but the light always feels a little too sharp in November—slicing through the kitchen blinds like it’s looking for something to illuminate. The house is quiet except for the hum of the kettle and Naomi’s bare feet against the tile. She moves with practiced ease, hair tied back, rings clicking against the chipped rim of her mug.

It’s his last day here.

And they both know it.

They sit at the table like they always do, elbows resting on its scratched wooden surface, mugs steaming between them. Naomi’s wearing one of her old tour shirts and a velvet robe the color of mulberries. She hasn’t put on makeup yet. There’s a string of sunlight in her hair and a look in her eyes that Will knows too well—one that says I know what you’re dreading, and I wish I could carry it for you.

But she doesn’t say it out loud.

She never does.

“You want toast?” she asks instead, halfway through sipping her coffee.

Will shrugs. “I’m not hungry.”

Naomi hums—not disagreement, not surprise, just that soft noise she makes when she’s thinking about too many things and only saying one.

“You don’t have to go, you know,” she says, still looking at her coffee. “Not today. Or not at all.”

He doesn’t answer right away. Just watches the steam rise from his tea, watches it disappear into nothing like it’s trying to teach him something.

“I do,” he says quietly. “I need to.”

Naomi nods. Her rings tap twice against the table. “I figured. But I thought I’d say it anyway.”

She reaches for the sugar and doesn’t ask if he slept last night. Doesn’t point out the way his shoulders are pulled too tight or the way he keeps checking his phone without unlocking it. Doesn’t ask if Nico knows.

Instead, she spreads butter onto a piece of toast that Will won’t eat and says, “You want me to drive?”

Will hesitates. Shakes his head. “I think I should do it alone.”

Another pause. Then: “Okay.”

It’s not approval. It’s not relief. It’s just okay , and it lands like something gentle and immovable, like a hand on his back saying go on, then .

They don’t talk about it more than that. They let the morning spin out around them like a record they’re not flipping yet—full of the clink of mugs and the scent of cheap coffee and the ache of something coming.

Later—
Will will do the thing he’s been avoiding for days.
The thing that makes his stomach churn and his hands go cold.

But for now, the kitchen hums with silence, and Naomi slices an orange, and Will watches the sun slide through the blinds and pool at his feet like it wants to remind him that light can still find its way in.

***

Naomi’s truck rattles down the sun-bleached stretch of backroad like it’s apologizing for the silence. The sun charms hanging from the rearview mirror catch the morning light and scatter it across the dash in fleeting little bursts—like laughter in a room no one occupies anymore. They twist with every bump in the road, spinning gold.

Beside them, the old cross dangles on its chain, swaying in slow, deliberate arcs. Will doesn’t look at it. Can’t.

Everything about the car feels wrong today. Too bright. Too loud. Too full of memory.

The air still smells like the perfume Naomi sprayed before handing him the keys—orange blossom and old vinyl and something too sweet to belong to this morning.

He grips the wheel tighter.

The long-term care facility sits on the edge of town, tucked behind a row of squat medical buildings and a diner that hasn't changed its menu since the nineties. It’s the kind of place meant to feel homey in theory—stone veneer, wide windows, well-tended flowerbeds—but all Will sees is the white paint peeling off the porch columns and the shadows lingering behind the curtains.

Lee Fletcher is here.

Has been for years.

Will parks under a tree that’s already dropped most of its leaves. Kills the engine. Doesn’t move.

He stares through the windshield at the front door. At the wreath someone’s hung there—plaid and cinnamon sticks and forced cheer. The cross on the rearview mirror swings once more and finally stills. The sun charms settle.

The light disappears.

And suddenly, Will feels seventeen again. Sitting in this same truck, on this same patch of cracked asphalt, heart thrumming as the words traumatic brain injury echoed in his mother’s voice like thunder. He hadn’t known what to do with that. Couldn’t understand how someone so alive could suddenly be unreachable. How a person could just... vanish inside their own body.

Lee had been everything.

Next-door neighbor. Babysitter turned tutor. Surrogate brother. He was the one who helped Will build a vinegar volcano for his fourth grade science fair and who laughed so hard he cried when it exploded all over the living room rug. He was the one who used to sneak Will into the local planetarium on discount days and explained entropy like it was a bedtime story.

He was the one who got Will into science. Into anatomy. Into thinking maybe he could be someone who saved people.

But Lee never got to see any of that.

He didn’t see Will ace the AP bio exam he’d helped him cram for. Didn’t see him walk across the high school graduation stage, didn’t get a front-row seat when Will opened his first college acceptance email. He’d already been gone—lost in a coma and fluorescent light and a world of static where no one knew if he could hear them.

Will closes his eyes. His hands won’t stop shaking.

Lee had wanted to go to college too. Had talked about it all the time, in that wistful, half-joking way people do when they’re afraid they won’t make it. But there was no money. No legacy grants. No distant uncles with alumni connections. He was working some temp job at a warehouse, trying to save up for community college. The accident happened on his way home from the night shift. Black ice. A guardrail. A moment.

Everything changed.

And Will got lucky. A scholarship. A chance. The kind of miracle that only lands if you're born in the right place at the right time and have someone like Lee to help with your chem homework.

It’s not fair.

Will breathes in. Counts to five. Breathes out.

Then he opens the door, steps out into the sharp Texas air, and walks toward the entrance.

He doesn’t know what he’s going to say. Doesn’t know if Lee will hear it, or if it matters. But he has to say it anyway. Because he owes him more than silence. 

The glass doors slide open with a mechanical sigh, and the scent of antiseptic hits like a punch to the ribs.

Will swallows hard and steps inside.

The sliding doors part with a hiss, and the world goes sterile.

Fluorescent light hums faintly overhead, too white, too wide, like it’s trying to bleach the place of memory. The air smells like lemon cleaner and something vaguely medicinal—sharp and sour beneath the artificial cheer of cinnamon-scented plug-ins someone has dutifully placed in every outlet. Will’s boots squeak faintly against the polished floor, which is spotless in a way that feels less like kindness and more like forgetting.

The receptionist barely looks up when he approaches. She wears lavender scrubs and a name tag shaped like a butterfly, and she asks for his name in a tone that suggests she already knows it.

“Will Solace,” he says. His voice feels too loud. Too alive.

She types something slowly, deliberately. Clicks her nails once against the counter. “You’re on the list.”

There’s a beat. A flicker of her eyes up and down his frame—boots, rings, tired eyes. “Room 107,” she adds, with a nod. “Down the hall, second left.”

Will swallows, throat tight. “Thanks.”

She doesn’t say It’s been a while. She doesn’t have to.

He’s been here before. Once last year. Once the year before that. He didn’t come this summer. Told himself it was because of work. Told himself Lee wouldn’t know the difference. Told himself a lot of things he didn’t believe.

The hallway is quiet. Too quiet. The kind of silence that isn’t peaceful, just hollow. A nurse in green scrubs passes by pushing a cart of medication cups, and Will stops her gently, almost without thinking.

“Excuse me,” he says, his voice thinner than it should be. “Has there been… I mean. Any change? Since the last update?”

The nurse—older, tired, kind—pauses just long enough to soften her expression. “No,” she says. “There hasn’t been. I’m sorry.”

That’s all. No hope. No gentle lie.

Just the truth, clean and cold as bleach.

Will thanks her and steps inside the room.

It’s dimmer here. One window, half-covered by the mechanical slant of blinds. A recliner in the corner. A TV bolted high in the ceiling that isn’t on. The walls are beige. The kind of beige that feels like a waiting room for God.

And Lee is there, small and still in the hospital bed, pale under too-white sheets. There are machines, but not many—just enough to monitor, not enough to save.

Will’s breath catches.

Lee’s hair is still blond. Lighter than Will’s, but close enough that strangers used to stop them in grocery stores and ask if they were brothers. You’ve got the same smile, they’d say. The same eyes.

Will would roll his eyes. Lee would grin and call him “kid” like it wasn’t a wound.

But now—Lee’s skin is pale in a way that doesn’t belong to the living. His freckles have faded. His face is thinner. His hands are still and folded neatly on his chest, as though someone keeps trying to make him look peaceful.

Will doesn’t feel peace.

He closes the door softly behind him. Takes a few trembling steps forward and drops into the chair beside the bed like gravity’s finally caught up with him.

And then—
He breaks.

Quietly, at first. Just a stuttering breath. A twitch at the corner of his mouth like maybe he could smile this away if he really tried.

But he can’t.

The tears come fast and hot, the kind that burn as they fall—because he’s been holding them back for so long it feels like he’s bleeding. His breath goes thin, the kind of breath you don’t realize you’ve been starving for until your ribs ache from the lack.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out, his voice raw. “I should’ve come sooner. I should’ve been here.”

His hand finds Lee’s, cool beneath his fingers. The skin is soft, but the warmth is gone—has been gone. Still, Will laces their fingers together like muscle memory, like maybe the years will fall away and he’ll hear that voice again, teasing and bright, saying, What took you so long, kid? .

And Will wants—more than anything—to see his eyes. Those ridiculous, hopeful, too-blue eyes. The ones everyone used to say Will had inherited, even though they weren’t related.

“People used to think we were brothers,” Will whispers, brushing the back of Lee’s hand with his thumb. “I used to pretend we were.”

He laughs, quiet and wet and full of ache. “I guess I just really wanted to belong to someone.”

There’s no answer. Just the steady rise and fall of Lee’s chest, artificial and empty.

Will wipes his nose on his sleeve and tries to speak through the tightness in his throat. “You used to say I’d do something big. That I’d help people. And I used to think you were just saying it to be nice. But I got in. I got into med school. Full ride. Pre-med, biology, lab coat and everything. You would’ve lost your mind.”

He swallows hard. “I’m working two jobs and I barely sleep, and I miss you so much , and some days I feel like I’m failing you, but I’m still doing it. I’m trying. ”

The words falter. Then come back, softer.

“And I met someone.”

His voice goes very quiet.

“His name’s Nico. He’s… he’s smart. And kind, even if he pretends not to be. He’s funny in this really dry way that always catches me off guard, and he rolls his eyes at everything but somehow still remembers the little things. Like my coffee order. Or how I need quiet when I’m thinking. Or when I’m about to spiral before I even say a word.”

Will’s throat tightens. He leans his forehead against their joined hands.

“I think you’d like him. I mean, you’d give me crap for sure—he dresses like a vampire and has resting murder face—but you’d like him. He’s steady, even when I’m not. He makes me feel like… like maybe all the things I used to hate about myself aren’t flaws. Just parts.”

He closes his eyes, the grief rising like water. “I wanted you to meet him. I wanted you to see how far I’ve come. I wanted to show you that you were right. That I made it.”

His voice breaks entirely. “But you’re not here. And it’s not fair. You should be here.”

The machines go on blinking, indifferent. The room doesn’t change.

Will breathes through it, each inhale like glass.

“I miss you,” he whispers.

And it sounds like a prayer.

Time slips strange in the quiet.

Will doesn’t know how long he sits there. The minutes fold in on themselves like pages he can’t bring himself to read. Outside, the world must still be spinning—nurses walking the halls, traffic moving just beyond the glass—but in here, it’s nothing but the hum of machines and the unbearable stillness of a boy who grew up without a brother, except he didn’t.

He had Lee.

Lee, who snuck him candy when Naomi was trying to do a no-sugar month. Lee, who helped him practice Spanish verbs and taught him how to throw a punch. Lee, who ruffled his hair and told him you’re gonna be okay, kid, even when Will didn’t believe it.

Will talks, sometimes. Falls quiet in the spaces between. Then speaks again, like if he just keeps going, something will give. That maybe—somehow—Lee will twitch, or blink, or shift in the sheets and say Hey, Solace. Missed you.

But nothing happens.

The machines go on. The silence thickens. And the grief curls tighter and tighter in his chest until it feels like he’s breathing through cotton.

At some point, Will stands. His knees nearly give. He braces himself on the edge of the bed, fingers trembling, heart stuttering.

He leans down and presses a kiss to Lee’s forehead—cold, smooth, familiar in a way that breaks him open.

And that’s when it hits him.

Lee used to do that for him.

When Will was little and scared of thunderstorms. When he stayed up too late watching horror movies and couldn’t sleep. Lee would tug the blanket higher and kiss his forehead and say You’re safe. I’ve got you.

Will makes a noise—raw and small, halfway between a sob and a gasp—and stumbles back like the grief has weight.

“I love you,” he whispers. “I didn’t say it enough, and I should have. I love you.”

Then he turns. Fumbles for the door. Misses the handle once.

And then he runs.

The hall is too bright. The air too dry. Everything too much.

Will barrels through the lobby with his head down, past the receptionist who doesn’t ask if he’s okay, out into the slap of Texas sun that feels like a betrayal. The light is everywhere—too gold, too hot, too much like Augusts long gone. The sun feels like Lee —summer and sweat and porch railings and skin browned from too many afternoons outside.

Will stumbles to the edge of the lot and sinks to the ground under a tree, curling in on himself where the shade is cooler, quieter, almost real. His breath is coming too fast now, a staccato of broken rhythms, and his chest won’t rise the way it’s supposed to.

He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.

His hands fumble for his phone like they’re moving underwater. He doesn’t think—he just calls.

It rings. Once. Twice.

Then: “Will?”

It’s Nico’s voice, low and scratchy with sleep or worry or both.

Will tries to answer, but the sob breaks first. A wet, stuttering sound he can’t swallow fast enough. He covers his mouth with one shaking hand, the phone clutched too tight in the other.

“Will?” Nico’s voice sharpens. “Hey—hey, it’s okay. Just breathe, okay? I’m here. I’m here. ”

Will makes another sound, guttural and cracked, and Nico’s voice softens just a fraction, like he’s dropped to a whisper just for him.

“Breathe in. Just one. Come on, sunshine—one breath.”

Will tries.

The inhale comes ragged, thin, barely there.

“There you go,” Nico says. “Good. Now again. Don’t talk yet. Just stay with me.”

The sound of his voice—steady, patient, real—wraps around Will like a lifeline. Like shelter.
And Will presses his forehead to his knees, clutching the phone like it's the only thing tethering him to the earth.

For a moment, there’s only the sound of his breathing—wet, uneven, ragged with the kind of pain he’s been holding in too long. The kind that rots from the inside when you pretend it’s manageable.

“I’m sorry,” Will gasps out, voice catching like gravel in his throat. “Gods—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—this wasn’t supposed to be—”

“Stop,” Nico says, quiet but firm. “You don’t have to apologize.”

Will’s whole body shakes.

“It’s just—he’s my—he was—I mean—he’s still here but he’s not, and I didn’t tell you, I never told you what happened to him and I should’ve—”

“Will,” Nico says again, gentle now. “Breathe.”

Will tries. It comes out broken, but the words keep pouring through the cracks.

“Lee’s in a long-term care facility. He’s been in a coma for years. Since I was a senior. Head trauma, they said. I didn’t even know what that meant back then, not really. But he never woke up.” His voice cracks, thin and ragged. “I haven’t seen him in over a year. I couldn’t do it over the summer—I couldn’t even walk inside.”

Nico doesn’t say anything. He just listens. Steady. Solid.

Will closes his eyes, tears slipping hot down his cheeks. “He was working a shitty warehouse job trying to save for community college. Couldn’t afford anything else. He was on his way home and there was ice and—and he crashed and now he’s—he’s just there. In this fucking facility like a body someone left behind.”

His voice breaks again, and he curls in tighter. “He never got to see me graduate. Never saw me get into med school. He would’ve lost his mind , Nico.”

“I know,” Nico says, soft. “Gods, Will.”

“I used to call him my brother,” Will goes on, his voice thinning to a whisper. “Even though we weren’t. People thought we were. And I just let them. I wanted it to be true.”

“It was true,” Nico says without hesitation. “Of course it was.”

Will sobs again, sharp and hoarse. “But I feel so fucking stupid talking about him like this when your actual sister is dead.”

Silence. Just for a moment. Then:

“Don’t,” Nico says, low and quiet but suddenly so sure . “Don’t ever say that.”

Will flinches, breath catching.

“Bianca was my sister. But that doesn’t mean you don’t get to grieve yours. Blood doesn’t mean anything when someone raises you. When someone loves you like that. You don’t have to explain why it hurts.”

Will tries to say something, but the words tangle up with more tears. He feels like he’s coming apart in slow motion, pulled at every seam.

“I wanted to tell you,” he says, finally. “Back in New York. So many times. But I didn’t know how. I didn’t want to—gods, you had so much going on. And I told you to call me if things got bad with your family, and now I’m the one—”

“Will,” Nico cuts in again, softer now. “You don’t have to be the strong one all the time.”

Will blinks, stunned silent for a beat.

“You don’t have to carry everything for everyone,” Nico says. “You’re allowed to fall apart. You’re allowed to lean on someone. Especially me.”

There’s a tremble in Will’s chest, the kind that comes not from breaking, but from being seen.

Will wipes his eyes again, trying to catch his breath, but his voice is still trembling when he speaks.

“I wish you were here,” he says. “I—”
He swallows hard. The next words rise up like instinct, like breath. I love you, his heart wants to say. So badly it aches.

But he stops himself. It’s too soon. Too raw.This moment is grief, not clarity—and gods, he wants the first time he says it to mean something, not spill out because he’s breaking.

So instead, he says the only true thing he can:

“I miss you.”

Nico’s breath catches on the other end—just a flicker, like he feels it too.

“I miss you, too,” he says, voice low. “Every minute.”

And Will closes his eyes. Clutches the phone tighter. Hears the truth in Nico’s voice—the steadiness, the care, the promise beneath the words.

The wind shifts around him, shaking the branches overhead. Will watches the sun stutter through the leaves like it’s trying to reach him. It’s still too bright. But the voice in his ear is softer than shade. Warmer than guilt.

“You’re not alone,” Nico says. “Not now. Not ever.”

And for the first time since walking into that room, Will lets himself believe it might be true.

He presses the phone closer to his ear like he can pull Nico through it. His body still trembles, chest aching in slow waves, but the edge of the panic has dulled—eased by Nico’s voice, by the steady rhythm of his breathing, by the simple, unwavering presence of him.

“I’ll see you as soon as we’re back in New York,” Nico says after a beat, quieter now, but sure. “I’ll come to the airport. I’ll—” He hesitates, just slightly, like he’s weighing something. “I’ll get a car.”

Will blinks, surprised. That’s not Nico. Nico doesn’t do ostentatious gestures—not when it comes to money. He usually slinks around extravagance like it might bite him.

But the thought of stepping into an arrivals terminal and seeing Nico there, in black jeans and a scowl, arms already open—that thought hits Will so hard he can’t breathe for a moment.

“Okay,” Will whispers. “Yeah. That sounds… perfect.”

Nico doesn’t say anything, but Will hears the breath he lets out. A soft, silent exhale that says I need to hold you too.

Will curls tighter under the tree, knees drawn to his chest, and tries to memorize the sound of Nico’s voice in his ear. It’s the only thing holding the rest of him together.

“I should—” Will starts, then falters. “I need to drive back. My mom’s probably wondering—”

“Be careful,” Nico says, gentle but firm. “Text me when you get home.”

“I will.”

They linger, both unwilling to hang up first.

And then, in a voice that shakes more than he wants it to: “Thank you, Nico.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“I do,” Will says. “Just… thank you for staying. For this.”

“Always,” Nico murmurs. “I’ll see you soon.”

They hang up.

The silence after is almost unbearable. The wind through the branches, the creak of sun charms still jingling in Naomi’s truck across the parking lot. The smell of dust and sunlight and grief clinging to his skin.

Will gets up slowly. Opens the car door with hands that still tremble. And drives.

The landscape blurs. Fields and highway signs, familiar back roads and cracked pavement, all swaying in the corners of his vision like ghosts. When he pulls into the driveway, the sky is already deepening, the light gold and bruised at the edges.

Naomi’s waiting in the kitchen. She must’ve seen the truck through the window, because she’s already at the door when he walks in.

She takes one look at him—and opens her arms.

Will falls into them.

No words. No explanation. Just the weight of his body sagging into hers like something too heavy to carry anymore. His head tucks into her shoulder. He breathes in the smell of her—citrus and cedarwood and old flannel—and breaks all over again.

He cries until he gives himself a headache.

Naomi holds him the whole time, one hand in his hair, the other rubbing his back in slow, steady circles, humming something soft beneath her breath. Some old lullaby she used to sing in the days before grief was something he understood.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep. Only that, at some point, he’s on the couch, a blanket over his shoulders, a glass of water on the table, and Naomi’s hand still resting on his knee like she never stopped holding him.

And for the second time that day, Will lets himself believe he’s not alone.

Notes:

i dont have much to say, just that i'm so sorry (not really i love torturing you all and will).

Chapter 42: My Boyfriend Sold His Soul to the God of the Dead (Also?? I Have a Boyfriend Now??)

It’s been a week since Thanksgiving, and Will still hasn’t unpacked the grief sitting behind his ribs like an overstuffed carry-on bag. He brought it back with him on the plane from Austin, tucked under his jacket and buried somewhere between the safety instructions and a plastic cup of ginger ale, pretending it didn’t weigh more than all his other baggage combined.

Nico had been waiting at the arrivals gate like some kind of myth. Not leaning against a column like a normal person or lurking outside in a hoodie—no, Nico di Angelo had arrived in full silent-film drama, curled in the backseat of a chauffeured black car with tinted windows and a driver who definitely made more per hour than Will’s entire weekly paycheck. The privacy glass had been down just enough for Will to see the outline of him: legs crossed, sunglasses on indoors, expression unreadable.

The moment Will slid inside and the door shut behind him, Nico didn’t say anything. Just reached out and took his hand like he’d been holding that space for him all along.

He brought Will back to the apartment like a secret. Ordered pizza from the place Will liked best—the one with crust so greasy it left its own fingerprints—and told him to go shower, to take his time, to come out when he was ready. Will had scrubbed at his skin until the water turned cold and the echo of home felt slightly less like it was clawing down his spine.

They didn’t do anything, not that night. No breathless kisses or tangled sheets. Just two boys in a too-small bed, limbs overlapping, hearts syncing by accident. They talked in whispers. About Lee. About Bianca. About grief that calcified into silence and the strange, painful clarity of speaking it aloud. Nico listened without flinching. Will tried not to shatter.

And then, quietly, Will had pulled out the old teddy bear from the drawer beside his bed. The one Lee had won for him at a carnival when they were six and the world had still been wide and stupidly kind. It was missing an eye, half a paw, and most of its stuffing, but Nico had just looked at it like it was sacred, kissed the worn crown of its head, and tucked it between them like something worth keeping safe.

Now, one week later, Will is sitting in the library surrounded by the weight of borrowed knowledge and the echo of Nico’s quiet closeness.

Outside, Olympus University is shedding its last few golden leaves like the trees are trying to remember what it means to be bare. Inside, Annabeth’s color-coded finals spreadsheet reigns supreme—its wrath printed in red pen and capped highlighters, with individual battle strategies issued to each member of their chaotic little army.

Will is supposed to be studying endocrine disorders. Nico is supposed to be translating Homer. Instead, they are both very clearly not doing that.

Will has reread the same paragraph on pituitary hormone regulation four times and still couldn’t tell you what it says. Across the table, Nico hasn’t turned a page in twenty minutes. His eyes are on the book in front of him, but his mind is clearly somewhere else—far away, inward and silent and wound tight enough to hum.

It’s not unusual for Nico to be still. Stillness lives in his body like breath does in other people. But this isn’t calm. This is bracing. This is the kind of stillness before a storm breaks.

Will watches him for another long beat, letting the silence settle like dust between them.

The lamp above them casts a wan, academic glow across Nico’s cheekbones, throwing shadows beneath his eyes like smudged kohl. He looks like something carved from the concept of exhaustion—pale, sharp-edged, beautiful in the way ruined cathedrals are beautiful. The kind of beauty that makes you want to whisper in reverence and never ask why the doors are locked.

Will shifts his foot under the table and nudges him. Not hard. Just enough to say hey, come back.

Nico blinks. Not at Will. Just… in general. Like his body has only just remembered it’s in a library, and not a memory.

“You’re doing that thing again,” Will says quietly.

Nico raises an eyebrow, the motion slow and dry. “What thing?”

Will rests his chin on his hand, elbow on the table. “The brooding statue of eternal suffering thing. It’s very dramatic. Rachel would try to paint it.”

That earns the faintest twitch at the corner of Nico’s mouth. The ghost of a smirk. It flickers, then dies. Gone before it can land.

Will puts his pen down. Deliberately. Like it’s part of a negotiation. He folds his arms across the table, leans in—just enough to signal that he’s serious, but not enough to startle the shadows still clinging to Nico’s shoulders.

“You gonna tell me what’s going on?” he asks. His voice is softer now, the kind of soft that tries not to scare a wounded thing further back into hiding. “Or do I have to start reading endocrine flashcards out loud until your soul evacuates your body?”

Nico closes his book.

Not slams. Not drops. Just closes. Slowly. Carefully. As if it might shatter if he moves too fast.

He doesn’t speak.

And that’s how Will knows—it’s serious.

Because silence is Nico’s native language, but this isn’t quiet-for-the-sake-of-it. This isn’t dramatic flair or deadpan disinterest. This is stillness as a last resort. This is the kind of silence that hums like static in the air before a power line snaps.

Will watches the slight tension in his hands, the way his fingers curl in on themselves like they’re holding something fragile and invisible. Finals, he thinks distantly, feel like the least threatening thing in the room.

Then Nico exhales, low and measured, and tilts his head just enough for the lamplight to catch the edge of his jaw—but he still doesn’t look at Will when he speaks.

“Thanksgiving wasn’t a celebration,” Nico says.

His voice isn’t cold, exactly. It’s stripped. Sanded down to something bare and blunt, like a blade that’s already drawn blood and doesn’t see the point in pretending otherwise. It lands in Will’s chest like sleet—sharp and quiet and undeniable.

Will sets down his pen. Carefully. Like anything sudden might fracture the air between them.

Nico doesn’t see it. He’s still staring into the middle distance, into some polished, lacquered room three thousand miles away and ten degrees colder than this one.

“It was an ambush,” he says.

And Will feels it in his bones. In the way Nico exhales—not like someone calming himself, but like someone emptying out just enough breath to keep functioning. Like smoke escaping from a structure already gutted by fire.

“My father waited until after dinner,” Nico continues, voice low. “Took me into the study. Just the two of us. He called it tradition—whiskey, cigars, men talking legacy. Like we were part of some old photograph he could summon into reality if he set the lighting right.”

Will feels something old and familiar crawl up his spine—grief, maybe. Or dread.

Nico’s tone doesn’t shift. But the silence around his words feels like it’s leaning forward, listening.

“He poured two glasses like we were equals. Like it was a coronation instead of a cornering. And then he told me—calmly, like it was a quarterly report—that this was my last chance to take the business. Officially. Sign the documents. Become the heir.”

Will’s heart stutters.

That word again. Legacy. It echoes through his chest like a slammed door.

Nico doesn’t blink. Doesn’t move. But Will sees the fracture anyway—in the subtle twitch at the corner of his mouth, in the pulse jumping in his throat, in the too-careful stillness of his hands. Like one wrong breath might cause everything inside him to rupture.

“If I didn’t take it,” Nico says, “he’d give it to Hazel.”

And that lands like a blade across Will’s ribs.

“He said she was innocent enough to mold. That with time and guidance, she’d learn to lead.” Nico scoffs—low and bitter—but it’s not humor. It’s salt. “She wouldn’t say no. Not to him. Not if he framed it like duty. Like legacy wrapped in love.”

His eyes drop, lashes casting long shadows down his cheeks.

“She’d accept it to protect me.”

The words fall like snow—quiet, slow, devastating.

“And it would ruin her life.”

Will can’t breathe. He doesn’t know if he’s holding his breath or if it’s simply gone.

Nico exhales, a sound more hollow than tired. “She has a future. A real one. One that doesn’t start in a boardroom and end in blood.”

And then—soft, almost inaudible:

“I couldn’t let him take that from her.”

A long pause.

“So I said yes.”

Will feels it in the back of his throat—something thick and aching. Like grief with nowhere to go.

“I signed the papers. All of them,” Nico murmurs. “Didn’t ask questions. Didn’t look at the fine print. I just… signed.”

He presses his lips together. His jaw flexes.

“Then I sat in his study for hours. Alone. With a bottle of whiskey and a glass that kept refilling itself. I don’t even remember if it tasted like fire or if it just felt like it.”

His voice catches—not a crack, but a fault line shifting. Not collapse. Resonance. The kind of damage that doesn’t flatten a person. It sharpens them.

And Will, who is watching him now like he’s trying to memorize the exact shade of Nico’s sorrow, feels something split inside him.

Not in fear. Not in pity.

In awe.

Because Nico said yes.

To spare Hazel. To hold the line. To burn himself before anyone else got scorched.

And now he sits here—exhausted and beautiful and unknowably sad—like a prince who never wanted the crown but took it anyway to keep the sword away from his sister’s throat.

And Will wants to kiss him.

Wants to touch his hand. Wants to cradle that grief in his own palms and say I see you. I see everything you’re holding and I still want you.

“I was still hungover the next morning,” Nico says. His voice is low again, but rougher now—like something snagged in his throat on the way out and never quite dislodged. “That’s why I didn’t answer your call right away.”

Will blinks, the words lodging somewhere behind his ribs.

“You answered—?”

“I did. I did.” Nico finally looks at him, and gods, it wrecks Will—because there’s no armor left in his face. No irony. No smirk. Just open weariness. The kind that seeps into your bones and stays there. “But I was asleep at first. I didn’t hear it. When I woke up, the phone was about to ring out and I—” He breaks off, scrubs a hand through his hair. “You were crying so hard I could barely understand you at first.”

Will’s throat clenches. He remembers that morning in his body more than his mind—his knees drawn to his chest under the slanting Texas sun, fingers white-knuckled around the phone, breath coming in broken sobs. A voice on the other end, calm and patient, saying You’re okay. I’ve got you. I’m here.

And now he knows what that steadiness cost Nico.

“I wanted to tell you,” Nico says, softer. “I did. But it felt like… like my pain didn’t matter in that moment. Yours did.”

Will closes his eyes.

There’s a pressure building behind them—behind his chest, behind his teeth. Sharp and stupid and human.

Because that’s Nico. That’s who he is. Bleeding in silence so someone else doesn’t have to.

“You should’ve told me,” Will whispers. “Not because I needed to know. But because you shouldn’t have had to carry that alone.”

Nico looks down at his hands like they’re foreign things. Like they’ve done something wrong just by existing. There’s a tiny tremble in the way his fingers twitch against the grain of the table, as if he’s resisting the urge to clench them into fists.

“I didn’t want to make it about me,” he says.

And Will wants to laugh. Or cry. Or both. Because if anyone has earned the right to make it about them every once in a while, it’s the boy sitting across from him—shoulders heavy with legacy, with silence, with every choice he’s ever made to protect someone else.

Will reaches out slowly, carefully—like approaching a bird with a broken wing, like one wrong move might send everything shattering. His hand finds Nico’s on the tabletop, warmer than he expected, the skin rough in places from years of fountain-pen-handling and stubborn independence, the shape of it grounding in a way Will hadn’t realized he needed until now. He threads their fingers together with something close to reverence, and Nico—gods, Nico—doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t flinch. But he doesn’t move toward him either. He just lets it happen, his body still as stone, his expression unreadable, as if he’s waiting to see whether the moment will be taken back, whether this comfort is conditional, whether he’s truly allowed to be held.

Will doesn’t push. He just breathes in, steadying himself on the quiet weight of their joined hands, even as the storm inside him rattles the windows of his chest. He doesn’t say the rest—not out loud, not here in this lamp-lit library where finals and futures loom like gods. He doesn’t tell Nico how afraid he is. How he doesn’t know what this means for their future. How, in the back of his mind, he’s already tracing every possible route this road could take, and none of them lead to freedom. Not for Nico. Not when the ink has already dried.

But that’s not what matters right now.

What matters is this moment—the table between them, the silence holding them like breath, the solid, living shape of Nico’s hand in his. And Will holds on, gentle but sure, like it means something.

For a while, neither of them speaks. The silence between them hums—not tense, exactly, but weighty. Will watches the slow rise and fall of Nico’s chest, the way his eyes drift down to their joined hands like he still can’t believe they’re real. Outside the window, the world goes on—students hurrying past with coffee and color-coded notes, finals-week prep chaos in full swing—but in here, the air feels slow, suspended. Like they’ve stepped out of time for a breath.

Eventually, Will breaks the quiet. His voice is soft, hesitant, like the words are fragile things he’s afraid might shatter.

“So… what does this mean? What happens now?”

Nico exhales through his nose, then leans back slightly in his chair, fingers still loosely tangled in Will’s. “Nothing yet,” he says, after a beat. “Not officially. I mean… he’s letting me finish school. That’s the deal. He agrees I need a degree—says it’s for the optics, for credibility, whatever.” He shrugs one shoulder, a bitter kind of amusement flickering across his face. “God forbid the heir to the House of Hades not have a BA in something respectable.”

Will huffs a breath that might be a laugh, but it doesn’t quite make it out. “And after?”

Nico’s eyes flick away again, toward the stacks. The shadows are back in them, thin but sharp. “There’s a few offices here. New York. Manhattan. Midtown. I’m supposed to start… showing up. Sitting in on board meetings. Meeting the people who run the day-to-day. Learning how it all works. Like shadowing. But for the underworld.”

Will swallows. His heart stirs uneasily. “And when do you start?”

“I don’t know,” Nico says. “Soon. He didn’t say.” His voice goes tighter, more clipped. “They’ll summon me when they need me.”

That makes Will flinch— summon —because of course that’s how Nico would phrase it. Like he’s a ghost being dragged back into orbit. Like choice isn’t really part of the arrangement.

Still, Nico turns back to him, the line of his mouth softening. “But it won’t change anything. Not really. Not between us.” His thumb brushes over Will’s knuckles. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Will nod slowly, some of the tension in his shoulders easing. “Okay.”

“But…”

It’s quiet. Barely there. And the way Nico says it—low, reluctant, brittle at the edges—undoes everything Will just managed to patch back together.

Will straightens, eyes sharpening. “But?”

Nico doesn’t answer right away. His shoulders curl in, just slightly, and he withdraws his hand—not completely, not all at once, but enough that Will feels the loss of it like a chill down his spine.

“Hey.” Will’s voice is soft, coaxing now. “Talk to me.”

Nico presses his lips together, jaw tightening like he’s trying to trap the words behind his teeth. Whatever he’s about to say, it’s something he doesn’t want to. Will watches the struggle play out behind his eyes—like a storm turning in on itself, like truth scraping up against bone.

Then Nico exhales, a long breath through his nose, and says, “Every year my father’s company hosts a gala.”

That, in itself, doesn’t sound terrifying. Will waits, brows inching together.

“It’s… a whole thing,” Nico mutters, eyes flicking toward the nearest row of dusty volumes like maybe he can find shelter in the Dewey Decimal system. “It rotates locations, but this year it’s in the city. At the Beekman Hotel. You know the one.”

Will does. That gilded Art Deco nightmare with champagne walls and a chandelier taller than most of the dorms on campus. It looks like a Gatsby party swallowed a funeral and came out dressed in designer grief.

“Everyone goes,” Nico continues, quieter now. “Every family that’s part of the old blood networks. The board members. Industry people. Press. Hades Inc. likes to show off.”

Will’s stomach knots.

“And this year…” Nico hesitates, then looks at Will, dark eyes steady but uncertain. “He’s going to introduce me. Officially. As the heir.”

Will’s chest goes tight.

“I didn’t go last year,” Nico adds, too quickly. “I refused. Jason covered for me and told everyone I had swine flu, which somehow people still believe is a thing. But this year, now that I’ve signed, I don’t get a choice.”

Will watches him, waiting for the other shoe.

“And—” Nico glances down, then back up, and this time his expression falters into something sheepish and adorably uncertain, like he knows exactly how this next part is going to land. “I told him… I’d only go if I got to bring my boyfriend.”

The word hits Will like a shot of electricity.

He blinks.

Boyfriend.

Nico said it so casually. So offhandedly. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like the world hasn’t cracked open underneath Will’s chair.

“You don’t have to come,” Nico is saying, already spiraling. “I mean—I know you hate that kind of thing. You’d have to wear something ridiculous, and the people are awful, and the food’s all… decorative. But I didn’t want to do it alone. He said I could bring someone if it made me look more approachable —which is already disgusting—but I said I wouldn’t let him parade me around unless it was on my terms, and my terms were you.”

Will’s heart is going to climb out of his chest and hide behind a bookshelf.

“There’s a speech,” Nico says, with a wince. “I’m supposed to say something about legacy and values and gods know what else, and I’ll be in a tux and it’s going to be awful, but I thought… if you were there, it might not be.”

He’s still going. Will can’t believe he’s still talking.

“You don’t have to say yes,” Nico adds quickly, running a hand through his hair. “Seriously. I know it’s a lot. And I know it’s sudden, and that your life’s already chaotic, and you probably have work or finals or literally anything else you’d rather do than walk into a cursed Manhattan ballroom full of ghosts in custom tailoring—”

“You told your dad about me?” Will asks, the words soft but stunned, like they land too quietly for the weight they carry.

Nico freezes.

Will stares at him across the table, eyes wide, his breath caught somewhere behind his ribs. The library seems to still around them—the rustle of pages and the squeak of chairs fading into a hush as the floor tilts under him just slightly.

“You… told your terrifying, god-tier, probably-has-a-body-count father about me ?”

“I—yeah.” Nico’s voice is quiet. Unsteady. “Of course I did.”

Will opens his mouth. Closes it again. Opens it. His fingers twitch on the tabletop like they’re looking for something to hold onto. “And you called me your—?”

“Boyfriend.” Nico shifts in his seat, shoulders hunched like he’s bracing for impact. “I mean. Yeah. That… felt like the right word.”

The air rushes out of Will’s lungs all at once, sharp and breathless. His heart does something humiliating and fluttering in his chest—like it’s trying to take off without permission. Every inch of him is suddenly aware of Nico. The curve of his wrist. The slope of his throat. The mess of dark curls falling forward over one brow, catching the light like silk spun from ink.

“We haven’t even talked about that,” Will says, voice barely more than a whisper.

“I know.” Nico’s gaze drops to the floor. His lashes cast shadows down his cheeks. “Sorry. I just… that’s what it feels like. To me. If that’s not what it is for you—”

“No,” Will blurts, too loud. Then, quieter, “I mean—yes. Yes. It is.”

His pulse is a riot, a wildfire beneath his skin. He presses both hands over his face, overwhelmed with how much he wants to kiss him, to throw something, to laugh and cry and scream how dare you be so casual about calling me your boyfriend while I’m actively combusting across from you.

When he lowers his hands again, his cheeks are flushed pink, but he’s smiling like it’s involuntary. Like the happiness won’t fit inside his mouth.

“You’re really bad at casual,” he says, voice full of affection and disbelief.

“I warned you,” Nico mutters, looking at him now—but there’s something unguarded in his face. Something soft. His fingers are still fidgeting, but there’s a warmth creeping into his expression, a kind of tentative awe that makes Will ache.

Slowly, deliberately, Will leans across the table. His hand lifts—gentle, reverent—and he brushes a stray curl from Nico’s face, tucking it behind his ear with unbearable tenderness. Nico goes perfectly still, eyes locked on his, and Will can feel the tremble in the moment, the charged quiet of something just about to begin.

The world narrows to this: Nico’s breath catching. His lashes fluttering. The heat of his skin under Will’s fingertips. The way the light pools around them like something sacred.

“I’m yours,” Will says, not loud, not tentative—just true. “If you still want me.”

Nico’s throat bobs as he swallows. “I do.”

And just like that, it settles—quietly, irrevocably—into place. No grand declarations, no sweeping orchestral crescendo. Just the slow, seismic hush of something inevitable finding its shape. Something true.

Will feels it in his chest first, like a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding finally exhaling all at once. And gods, the way Nico is looking at him—this sharp, secretive, impossible boy—is enough to undo him completely. Because there’s no armor in Nico’s gaze now. No distance. Just something open and unguarded, something that says I see you, and I want you anyway.

Like the word boyfriend isn’t a risk but a promise.

Like Will isn’t a compromise, but a choice.

Their hands find each other again beneath the table—fingers tangling, steady and sure—and Will holds on like it’s a vow. Like if he squeezes just hard enough, he can make this moment permanent.

I would go anywhere for you , he thinks.

Even to a palace made of bone and champagne.

Nico shifts a little in his seat, their hands still laced together under the table, and glances down, a rare shyness softening the line of his mouth. “So… is that a yes? To the gala?”

Will exhales a laugh, quiet and breathless, and leans in just slightly—enough that his knee brushes Nico’s under the table, enough that their joined hands feel like an anchor instead of a question. “Of course it’s a yes,” he murmurs. “You called me your boyfriend. You really think I’d let you face a room full of terrifying rich people and soul-contract lawyers without me?”

Nico huffs, but there’s something blooming slow and warm behind his eyes. “I wouldn’t blame you.”

“Well, I would,” Will says, lips twitching. “Besides… someone has to be there to make sure you don’t start a knife fight with a venture capitalist.”

Nico shrugs, completely deadpan. “I make no promises.”

The moment stretches again—charged, electric, their hands still clasped between them like a current waiting to spark. And Will… gods, Will is spiraling. Not in the dramatic, drowning way he used to around Nico, but in that dizzying rush of this is real.

He’s still reeling from the word—boyfriend—and how Nico said it like it belonged to him. How easily it slipped from his lips like it wasn’t something sacred and terrifying and impossible. Will can’t stop looking at him, like he’s trying to memorize every part of this moment, of him , before it fades—except it’s not fading. It’s not a dream. Nico’s still here. Holding his hand. Wanting him.

It’s overwhelming.

It’s too much.

So Will blurts, “You should come over tonight.”

Nico blinks. “What?”

Will’s hand jolts slightly against the table, like the words surprised even him. “I mean—Lou Ellen and Cecil are out all night. They’re going to some underground show-slash-drag bingo thing that’s probably illegal. So the apartment’s empty.”

The air between them shifts. Just slightly. Enough for Will to feel the heat rise behind his ears. His voice comes faster, lighter than it should. “And, um. You should come over. Hang out.”

Nico tilts his head, studying him. “Hang out.”

It’s not a question, not really—but there’s something wicked curling at the edge of his mouth. That slow, deliberate kind of knowing Will has absolutely no defense against. His eyebrow lifts. His eyes go darker.

Will nods, too eagerly. “Yeah. You know. Like… watch a movie. Talk. Lie on top of each other a little.”

A breath. Then—

Now Nico is definitely smiling. “Lie on top of each other a little,” he echoes, voice low and amused and unbearably smug. “That’s the plan?”

Will’s ears flush a brighter shade of pink. “That’s a totally normal thing for boyfriends to do.”

“Oh, boyfriends, ” Nico says, lips twitching as he leans his cheek into his hand like he’s settling in to enjoy the performance. “Right. So very wholesome. Very G-rated.”

Will groans and drops his head to the table with a theatrical thunk . “I hate you.”

“You don’t,” Nico says, effortlessly smug. His fingers drift toward Will’s hand on the table, brushing against his knuckles. “You’re just flustered.”

“I am not,” Will mumbles into the table.

Nico hums. “You’re thinking about me on top of you right now, aren’t you?”

Will lifts his head, slowly, eyes gleaming with something new—something bolder. Something that hums beneath his skin like static and warm hands and heat under the surface. “Fine,” he says, voice quieter now, but lower. More certain. “Then how about this—you should come over tonight so I can prove I deserve the boyfriend title.”

Nico makes a sound .

A real one. Not a word. Not even close. Somewhere between a groan and a gasp, like the suggestion hit him like a punch to the solar plexus. He turns slightly in his chair like he’s trying to hide it, like the tension that just rippled through him wasn’t enough to knock the wind out of the entire library.

“Oh my gods,” he mutters, covering his face with his hands. “You’re going to kill me.”

Will leans in, close enough that he can feel Nico’s breath catch, his own voice barely more than a whisper—low, teasing, electric. “That’s the plan.”

Nico lowers his hands just enough to peek at him, eyes dark and shining with disbelief and something hotter beneath it. “You can’t just say things like that in public.”

“You started it,” Will says, grinning now, shameless and wrecked with want. “You were the one who called me your boyfriend. I’m just living up to expectations.”

“Unreasonable expectations,” Nico mutters, voice strained. “High-risk, cardiac-event-inducing expectations.”

Will shrugs, feigning innocence, but his foot nudges Nico’s under the table again—this time slow and deliberate, like punctuation. “Guess you’ll have to come over and see for yourself.”

Nico exhales like he’s trying very hard not to combust. “I’m going to combust.”

“Then I’ll kiss you until you recover,” Will says, casually, like it’s not going to be the end of both of them.

And gods, the look Nico gives him in response—equal parts affection, exasperation, and pure unfiltered want—is enough to light him up from the inside.

Notes:

Thank you so much for reading!! 💛

If you made it through all the boyfriend feelings, soul-selling emotional whiplash, and the endless internal screaming on Will's part—I salute you. He’s really going through it.

YES, the smut outtake does exist and it is up next in the series under the charmingly academic title:
Will Solace And the Socialites of Olympus University: Extra Credit (Advanced Oral Studies and Other Hands-On Learning Experiences)
It’s chapter 2 of that work and picks up later in the evening after this scene, because these boys deserve some A+ emotional intimacy and, well, other things.

As always, thank you for the kudos, comments, screaming, and general love. It means the world and keeps me going. See you in Extra Credit 💋

Chapter 43: Pros: I Can Dance. Cons: I Might Have to Borrow Jason’s Pants

The restaurant is half-empty by the time Will scrubs his hands and clocks out. Outside the tall windows, the city looks dipped in tin foil—wet pavement gleaming under streetlamps, people passing in oversized coats, breath rising like ghosts.

Inside, it’s warmer, but only just. The heat’s been flickering all night. Will’s toes feel like someone left them in the freezer aisle.

He’s halfway to the back when Austin flags him down with a look of exaggerated martyrdom.

“She’s summoning us,” he says, nodding toward the office. “Bring snacks. Or a will to live.”

Will groans. “I just worked a double.”

“Yeah, and Rachel’s been making the holiday rota like she’s planning a military campaign. I think I saw her open a sixth spreadsheet tab.”

They duck into the office together, Will still peeling off his apron, Austin already slumped in the guest chair like he’s aged three decades in the last ten minutes.

Rachel doesn’t look up from her laptop. “You’re late.”

“We’re punctual,” Austin corrects. “You’re possessed.”

“Do you want Christmas Eve off or not?”

Will lifts both hands in surrender. “Here to serve.”

Rachel sighs and waves them closer. The screen is a battlefield of dates, codes, color-coded chaos, and despair. Will squints at it like it might reach out and slap him.

“Finals start next week,” she says. “I’m building the schedule around your exam blocks, so no one has an academic breakdown while holding a soup tray.”

“A benevolent queen,” Austin says reverently.

“So.” Rachel taps something. “Austin, you’re closing the 19th. Will, I’ve got you for the 20th dinner shift—”

“Wait,” Will cuts in, frowning. “I can’t do the 20th. That night. I have… plans.”

Rachel glances up. “Plans?”

Will hesitates. “It’s… sort of a gala?”

Austin sits up. “A gala?”

Rachel tilts her head. “Do you own a tux?”

Will rubs his face. “It’s not that fancy—okay, it is. It’s some kind of annual thing Nico’s family does. I wasn’t going to go, but—”

Austin leans in, grinning. “A gala. With your boyfriend. Look at you.”

Will flushes. “It’s not a big deal.”

Austin snorts. “You’re going to meet the parents, man. That’s huge.”

Will opens his mouth to argue—

Then stops.

Then slowly, visibly, dies.

“Oh my gods,” he whispers. “I’m going to meet his dad.”

Rachel blinks. “You didn’t realize that until just now?”

Will stares at nothing, eyes wide. “I completely forgot. I’ve been so busy… thinking about the boyfriend part. And the sex part. I—oh my gods. I’m going to meet Nico’s father. Hades. The literal king of death and luxury antiquities.”

Austin grins. “Yeah, good luck with that.”

Rachel leans back in her chair, amused. “You’ve kissed his son, slept with him, now you’re officially boyfriends—and you’re going to his family’s gala. What part of this didn’t scream ‘meet the parents’?”

Will drags a hand down his face. “I didn’t think it through. I didn’t picture formal introductions. I just pictured tuxedos and hand-holding and maybe a dramatic dance sequence.”

Austin wheezes. “Please waltz with him in front of the coffin king. Please.”

“I’m going to die,” Will mutters. “Or worse—be judged silently by a man who wears cufflinks that probably cost more than my rent.”

Rachel shrugs. “At least you’re pretty. That’ll buy you ten minutes of grace.”

The wind howls faintly against the windows—sharp, sudden. Rachel glances toward it, brows lifting.

“Cold front’s coming early,” she says. “Supposed to hit freezing tonight.”

Austin shivers. “Guess winter’s officially here.”

Will doesn’t answer. He’s too busy staring at the spreadsheet, now vaguely wondering if Rachel could schedule him a shift change and emergency gallows lessons. Or etiquette coaching. Or a tutorial on surviving intense eye contact with a man who probably owns a crypt in Venice.

Because somehow, meeting Nico’s dad had fallen off the to-do list.

And now?

Now it’s blinking in neon.

Like: Congratulations on your boyfriend. Time to meet the cryptkeeper.

Will groans into his hands. “Do we think it’s too late to fake my death?”

Rachel hums thoughtfully, like Will’s sudden emotional combustion is a fascinating art installation. “Honestly? You should’ve realized the minute he said the word ‘gala.’ That’s not a normal person word. That’s rich people code for trial by champagne flute .”

“I thought it would be, like… soft lighting and hors d'oeuvres,” Will mumbles into his hands. “Not a summoning circle of ghosts in Gucci .”

Austin snorts. “Man, I’ve never even been to a wedding and you’re out here about to tango with the King of the Dead. That’s next-level dating.”

Will lets out a strangled noise. “I need a guidebook. A translator. A sacrifice.”

Rachel spins in her desk chair with the calm of someone who’s already survived three debutante seasons and a hostile corporate boardroom by age eighteen. “You need posture, eye contact, and to pretend you weren’t raised in a Waffle House.”

“ I was raised in a Waffle House,” Will hisses. “Metaphorically. Emotionally. And sometimes literally—my mom toured a lot.”

Austin clutches his chest. “Gods, that explains so much .”

Will points at Rachel. “You’ve done this! You were born in a place where forks had multiple tines for reasons . Help me.”

Rachel sighs, dramatically noble. “Fine. First, don’t speak unless spoken to.”

“Great. I’ll just stand there like I’m auditioning to be turned into marble.”

“Second,” she continues, “don’t comment on anything you think is weird, overpriced, or haunted. Assume all three are true.”

Will groans. “I’m going to offend someone ancient and powerful and Nico’s going to have to hide my bones in the basement.”

Austin pats his shoulder, solemn. “Don’t worry. We’ll visit you on All Hallow’s Eve.”

Will groans into his hands. “I’m serious, Rachel. I can’t just waltz into some infernal palace and charm the Godfather of Death with small talk about flu season and bone density. I need help.”

Rachel sighs like she’s just been conscripted into war. She stands, stretching like a prophet preparing to deliver bad news from a mountain. “Fine,” she says. “But if I’m going to save your social life from total collapse, you have to listen .”

Will straightens like a student at the gallows.

Austin perks up, eyes gleaming. “Should I get a pen?”

“I’m not kidding,” Rachel says, already pacing. “You’re going to be surrounded by wealth. Old wealth. The kind that doesn’t feel the need to prove itself because it’s too busy owning half of Florence and a minor island in the Aegean.”

Will winces. “That’s not helping.”

Rachel exhales like she’s about to teach a toddler how to bluff through a Senate hearing. “Okay. New angle. Rule number one: never look surprised. Doesn’t matter what happens. Someone name-drops a baron who was legally declared dead but still runs an art syndicate? Nod. Someone serves you soup that looks like gemstone runoff? Sip. Someone makes a veiled threat in Italian? Smile and say it reminds you of Capri.”

“Jesus,” Will mutters.

“You need to be unfazeable,” Rachel continues, circling the room like a fencing instructor preparing for war. “The goal is to look like you’ve been attending these things since birth. Like you were baptized in champagne and cut your first teeth on a canapé.”

Austin’s still scribbling. “Look bored. Even when cursed emeralds are involved.”

“Exactly,” Rachel says, snapping her fingers. “Rule two: find your anchor. One person you can cling to when the crowd gets weird. Someone you can retreat to for fake conversation. Nico should be that person, but if he gets dragged off for family diplomacy or someone tries to duel him in the smoking room, you need a backup.”

Will blinks. “There’s a smoking room?”

“There’s always a smoking room,” Rachel says darkly.

“Gods,” Austin whispers, “I want to go so bad.”

Rachel shoots him a look. “You would spontaneously combust.”

“Worth it.”

“Rule three,” she presses on, “never, ever accept a drink from someone you don’t know. Rich people don’t spike things, they emotionally sabotage you and then tell stories about it to their friends on a yacht. You’re not dodging roofies—you’re dodging character assassination.”

Will rubs his temples. “Do I need to carry a flask of holy water?”

Rachel tilts her head. “Only if it’s locally sourced.”

Austin gives a solemn thumbs-up. “Don’t drink the haunted gin.”

“Correct,” Rachel nods. “And—if someone says something vaguely insulting and you’re not sure if it was on purpose, assume it was. But don’t engage. Smile like they’re the one who farted during grace and move on.”

Will groans. “This sounds like being trapped in a live-action Succession episode.”

“Welcome to the upper crust,” Rachel says. “Next: posture. Shoulders back, chin soft, spine long. You want to look confident, not like you’re expecting a lightning bolt through the ceiling.”

Austin mimics her stance with comical precision. “Is this confident or constipated?”

“Same thing in those circles,” Rachel replies. “Next—never compliment anything unless it’s been clearly placed in your line of sight for the express purpose of being complimented. That antique bust? Ignore it. That tray of hors d'oeuvres passed your way with a flourish? Smile and praise the chef’s restraint.”

“ Restraint? ” Will echoes weakly. “Not flavor?”

“They’re rich, Will. They don’t eat , they display digestive discipline .”

“I’m going to perish.”

“You’re doing great,” Austin says, solemn, still scribbling. “This is already better than sex ed.”

Rachel ignores them both, lost now to the spiraling momentum of inherited trauma. “Also, if anyone brings up your background, you deflect. Say something vague about your upbringing being character-building and pivot to art. Or horses. Or vineyards. And if someone says ‘Tell me about your family,’ do not talk about your mom’s band unless you want to be banished to the second-tier wine room.”

Will blinks. “There’s… a tiered wine system?”

Rachel pauses. “Of course. Also, if someone offers you caviar, take it , even if you hate it. Spit it into a napkin if you must. But never decline. It’s not food—it’s currency.”

Austin stops writing. “I feel like I just unlocked a side quest.”

Rachel crosses her arms, finally done, the fluorescent light catching the edge of her cheek like she’s posing for an oil painting titled Lady of Exasperation . “Any questions?”

Will, who has fully gone limp in his chair, raises one trembling hand. “What happens if I faint during introductions?”

“Then you die as you lived,” Rachel says, “dramatically and deeply unprepared.”

Will slumps over the desk. “Can’t you come with me? Just hide in my coat pocket and whisper stock phrases like oh yes, a charming vintage and your daughter is so talented, sir .”

Rachel smirks. “Tempting. But I’ll be here, managing a seasonal staff of caffeine-addled twenty-somethings and praying no one spills gravy on the vegan menu.”

Austin leans over, holding out his scribbled napkin like a sacred text. “Here. I’ve titled it Things Will Must Not Do Unless He Wants to Be Banished to Hell Twice .”

Will takes it. Reads. “You drew a picture of me in a coffin that says ‘RIP Soup Boy.’”

Austin beams. “Visual aid.”

Rachel, unfazed, spins her laptop around and opens a new tab like she’s unveiling a second round of psychological combat. “All right, cadets. Let’s move on to ballroom etiquette.”

Will groans. “Do I need to curtsy?”

Rachel tilts her head. “Only if you want to start rumors about a royal engagement.”

“I swear to the gods, if I trip and take down a duchess I will never recover.”

Austin smirks. “You’d be legend.”

But Will isn’t smiling anymore. His fingers toy with a loose thread on his sleeve. He leans back, voice softer now. “What about… dancing with Nico?”

Rachel pauses, fingers still on the keyboard. Austin glances over, the mood shifting subtly—something more fragile stirring under the sarcasm.

Will shrugs, but it’s a brittle motion. “I mean, is that even… allowed? In a place like that?”

He thinks of the world of ancient families and marble estates, names passed down like dynasties and legacy like gold leaf on a mausoleum wall. The world where wealth often buys silence, but not safety. Not sincerity. Not softness. Where queerness is tolerated only in theory, allowed in whispers and curated aesthetics, but punished the moment it’s too loud. Too visible. Too real.

Rachel exhales, the tension showing in the set of her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she admits, for once unguarded. “I’ve been to events like that where it wouldn’t be allowed. Where even a glance too long would start a scandal.”

Will’s chest tightens. Of course. Of course he’d only just gotten comfortable in his skin, only just started letting himself hope that things could feel easy—only to walk into a place where love might be something to hush in corners, like a secret shame. Where two boys dancing could be seen as provocation. As spectacle. As threat.

Rachel looks at him then, eyes sharp with something older than her age, shaped by years of cocktail parties and whispered judgments and the kind of loneliness that smells like old money and cold crystal. She sees it—the flicker of fear in his expression that has nothing to do with tuxedos or dinner forks, and everything to do with being queer in a room full of people who’ve mastered the art of polite cruelty.

“But,” she says slowly, “if Hades is letting Nico bring you at all… that means something. Men like him—men with names that hold weight—don’t allow anything that might endanger their image. If he didn’t want the world to know Nico was gay, he wouldn’t risk it. You wouldn’t be on the guest list. You’d never even hear about the event.”

Will swallows. The lump in his throat is sudden and strange—heavy in the way that kindness can be when you never expected it. Like an open door where he’d only ever found locks.

It doesn’t erase everything. It doesn’t outweigh the years of silence or the pressure Nico’s still under, or the way grief has shaped every room his family touches. It doesn’t undo the memories of school hallways where love was a liability, or the way Will still sometimes checks a room before reaching for someone’s hand.

But.

It’s something.

It’s a sliver of light in a place Will expected to be shadow. A signal flare through the fog—quiet, tentative, but real. Proof that maybe, just maybe, this isn’t a trap. That love doesn’t always have to be something flinched away from under chandeliers and stained glass.

And maybe that’s all anyone ever gets.

A moment. A gesture. A foot of space on the dance floor.

Will exhales slowly, almost a laugh. “You’re saying I might actually get to dance with my boyfriend without being tackled by an old man in a cravat?”

Rachel smiles faintly. “If anything, they’ll just pretend not to see. That’s how these things work.”

“That’s encouraging.”

“Is it?”

Will presses a hand to his heart, dramatic. “I will now begin praying for Nico to take lead and sweep me away mid-waltz.”

Rachel raises one brow. “You want to dance?”

Will blinks. “I mean, not want want. Not right now. I just meant, in theory—”

She stands abruptly. “Too late. You’re getting a crash course.”

“What.”

Austin straightens, eyes gleaming. “Oh, we’re doing this. This is Dancing with the Star-crossed. ”

Rachel clicks a few keys, and suddenly the tinny speakers of her laptop are crooning Vivaldi— Winter , sharp and swirling, like snow falling with purpose. It doesn’t matter that it’s playing through Spotify with a ten-second ad for allergy medicine cutting in halfway. The mood has been summoned. The vibe cannot be stopped.

Will stares at her, incredulous. “Are you serious?”

Rachel holds out one hand with regal expectation. “Do I look unserious?”

“I—I don’t know how to ballroom dance!”

“Perfect,” she replies. “That makes you a moldable canvas.”

Austin claps like he’s just been granted box seats. “Let’s go, Soup Boy. Impress us.”

Will takes Rachel’s hand with the hesitance of someone defusing a bomb. She corrects his grip immediately—fingers here, not there, thumb light, palm steady. Her other hand lands on his shoulder like she’s done this a thousand times, and maybe she has—at boarding school galas and deb parties and family weddings with too much tulle and too little love.

“Lead with your left,” she instructs, already shifting her weight. “Count in fours. Don’t look at your feet. They’ll follow.”

“They won’t,” Will says grimly. “They’ve never followed anything in their life. They’re anarchists.”

Rachel tightens her grip. “Then make them fear you.”

Will exhales and starts to move.

At first, it’s awful. An inelegant tangle of elbows and apologies, Will muttering sorry every third step, Rachel correcting him like a disappointed governess. 

But then—slowly, impossibly—it starts to shift.

He finds the rhythm. Not all at once, but in pieces. A breath. A turn. A step where her weight meets his just right, like a circuit closing. His body remembers things he didn’t know it knew—timing, grace, instinct.

And Will Solace, who spends most days feeling like a human pile of dropped coat hangers, glides.

Austin lets out a scandalized gasp. “He’s dancing. ”

“I’m trying,” Will says, not quite breathless but close.

“You’re succeeding,” Rachel mutters, half in awe. “Gods, you’ve got—what is that, natural rhythm? Good posture? Damn it, Solace.”

Will laughs, surprised. “Wait, really?”

She pulls back for a spin, lets him guide her in a clean, competent arc, and lands with a solid step and a raised brow. “Really. You’re annoyingly good at this.”

“Woo!” Austin whoops, throwing a fist in the air like they’ve just scored in overtime. “Look at our little soup ladle go!”

Rachel gestures for Will to take it again from the top. “This time with feeling. Pretend you’re at the gala. Lights low. Strings playing. Your boyfriend in something silk and sinister.”

Will swallows. “Okay. Yep. Good. Just gonna have a small stroke first.”

“Now dip me,” Rachel commands.

Will makes a startled noise but obliges—and to everyone’s surprise, the dip is smooth, practiced, showy even.

Austin leaps to his feet, shouting, “TEN! I give it a TEN!” and brandishes his napkin like an Olympic scorecard.

Rachel dangles dramatically from Will’s arm. “Who are you,” she demands, “and what have you done with my anxiety-ridden coworker?”

Will, flushed and grinning, helps her upright. “Apparently I contain multitudes.”

“Apparently you contain Fred Astaire,” Austin adds, voice strangled with glee. “I’m going to cry. This is my Roman Empire.”

Rachel brushes imaginary dust off her shoulders. “All right. Let’s not get cocky. Again. And this time, we add flair.”

They dance.

Badly, then better, then astonishingly well. They circle the room like they own it, knocking into chairs and nearly decapitating a coat rack, but somewhere between the pirouetting chaos and the antique busts of dead sommeliers glaring down from the office walls, something golden sparks.

Will lets himself imagine it—the marble floors, the orchestra, Nico in a suit that makes him look like the end of the world. Will reaching out, touching his waist, spinning him once, twice, laughing like he hasn’t had to earn it.

He steps forward into the fantasy. Leads the dip again. Holds Rachel steady.

“Not bad,” she says softly, genuinely now. “You might survive this after all.”

They straighten, the office still humming faintly with the ghost of Vivaldi. Rachel smooths her shirt like nothing has changed, but her eyes linger a moment too long on Will’s face—like she’s debating something.

Then she exhales and says, “Okay. Time for the rundown.”

Will blinks. “There’s a… rundown?”

“Oh, honey.” She rolls her eyes. “Galas are like battlefields. Just with more tulle and silent judgment. If you don’t know the terrain, you’ll get devoured by someone named Theodosia who runs an art charity and drinks the blood of interns.”

Austin, still sitting on the desk, solemnly mimics writing that down.

Rachel begins pacing—small circles, efficient, like a general mapping troop movements. “Galas follow a rhythm. Arrival, mingling, drinks, dinner, speeches, dancing. In that order. You can gauge how rich the host is by how long the speech section lasts and whether there’s a violinist who only plays Philip Glass.”

Will tilts his head. “Nico’s family probably skipped Glass and commissioned Orpheus directly.”

“Exactly. So: the entrance. You’ll be announced. Not loudly, not with trumpets, but subtly. A nod, a whisper, a glance to whoever keeps the mental seating chart of social relevance. That’s the moment people decide who you are. Don’t trip.”

Will looks stricken. “I wasn’t planning to, but now I will. ”

Rachel ignores him. “After that, there’s mingling. Circles of people with names that sound like auction lots. Smile. Make polite conversation. Do not talk about politics or religion. You are charming. You are mysterious. You are dating the dark prince of the antique mafia. Act like it.”

Austin chokes on laughter.

Rachel shoots him a look, then continues. “Dinner’s your best chance to breathe. You’ll probably be seated by name cards. Your restaurant experience gives you an advantage—cutlery knowledge, wine etiquette, the power to not visibly weep when someone uses the word ‘mouthfeel.’”

Will snorts. “I do know how to fold a napkin into a swan.”

Rachel points. “Weaponize that. But still—some reminders: never butter the whole roll, only what you’ll eat immediately. Never clink glasses too loudly. Napkin in your lap the second you sit down, and gods help you if you reach for the wrong bread plate.”

Will mouths bread left, drinks right like a prayer.

“Also,” she adds, “don’t drain your glass. It’s considered uncouth. Sip. Savor. Pretend you’ve never chugged a Capri Sun in under ten seconds.”

Will grimaces. “I’ve been living a lie.”

Rachel halts her pacing, eyes flicking to the side for just a second too long. “My family will probably be there,” she says flatly.

The room stills.

Will looks up. “Wait, seriously?”

She shrugs, too casual. “They go every year. My father…he knows Nico’s father. Old money, old friends, old ghosts.”

There’s a bitterness in her voice like burnt sugar—sharp and hidden beneath a crisp shell. It’s gone almost immediately.

“Anyway,” she says briskly, like swatting at a memory, “if you see a woman in sapphire silk and diamonds like a chandelier died on her—don’t engage. That’s my mother. She can smell insecurity.”

Will is still watching her, careful. “Are you okay?”

Rachel waves him off. “Don’t do that. Don’t get soft on me. You’ve got enough on your plate without worrying about my childhood trauma and whatever vintage shade of emotional repression my parents are bringing this year.”

Austin, quieter now, mutters, “Noted.”

Rachel claps once, tone snapping back into focus. “Back to you. Dancing comes last. Sometimes it’s formal. Sometimes it’s just a slow creep of violins and billionaires. The good news is, you know what you’re doing now. Just remember—if you dance with Nico in front of everyone, it’s not just a waltz. It’s a statement. There’ll be eyes. Cameras. Gossip.”

Will swallows. “And if we don’t dance?”

Rachel hesitates. “That’s also a statement.”

The silence sits for a moment—heavy, not cruel, but real.

Then Austin says, “Okay, but if you do dance, can you please dramatically kiss him during the final spin and make one elderly woman faint into a taxidermy peacock?”

Will lets out a breathy laugh. “I’ll do my best.”

Rachel smirks. “Just remember: walk tall, speak softly, and if someone tries to put you down, let them think they’ve won. Then charm the heir out of their family fortune when they’re not looking.”

Will grins. “Rachel, that’s the most terrifying thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

She bows. “High praise.”

And just like that, the spell breaks.

The music has long since stopped. The spreadsheet still glows behind them like a slowly ticking bomb. Outside, the wind sharpens into a low howl, brushing against the windows like a warning, a whisper, a dare.

Rachel sits, posture crisp, and dives back into the rota like nothing happened—just another night, just another war to plan in colored cells and time stamps. The cursor blinks. The fluorescent lights hum.

Will lingers where they’d danced, one hand still half-raised like his body hasn’t gotten the memo that reality has returned.

He clears his throat. “Hey. Thanks. For all of that.”

Rachel doesn’t look up. “Don’t mention it.”

Will huffs a laugh, but it comes out thin.

He moves to the chair beside Austin and sinks into it, the air suddenly colder now that the adrenaline’s worn off. His legs stretch out, heavy. His thoughts do the same—slow, creeping, too loud in the quiet.

Rachel’s keyboard clicks like distant gunfire.

Austin nudges his foot. “You good?”

Will doesn’t answer at first.

He studies his hands—faintly red from the dish soap, knuckles dry from the cold, fingertips still warm from where they’d pressed against silk.

“I don’t know,” he says finally.

Austin shifts, sitting up. “Talk to me.”

Will exhales through his nose, head tipping back to stare at the ceiling like it might offer divine guidance, or at least a polite exit sign.

“I’m terrified,” he says simply.

Austin doesn’t interrupt.

Will sits up, elbows to knees, voice low. “I’ve never been to anything like this. Not even close. And it’s not just the forks or the fashion or the marble floors. It’s—” He scrubs a hand over his face. “It’s everything. That world. That name. The way Nico carries himself like he was carved out of some Renaissance myth and I’m—” he gestures vaguely to himself, a tired college student in a too-thin hoodie that smells faintly of soup. “This.”

Austin frowns. “Will—”

“I don’t want to embarrass him,” Will says quickly, before he can be interrupted. “I don’t want people to look at me and see someone who doesn’t belong. Who’s… disposable. Who waited their table last month or stocked their bookstore or held open their town car door.”

His throat tightens.

“I don’t want them to look at him and think less because of me. ”

The silence after is brittle and strange.

Austin blinks. “Will. He would never—”

“I know,” Will says, but it sounds like a lie. Not about Nico, exactly—more about the world. “He wouldn’t. But they might. And he’ll see it. He’ll feel it. And even if he doesn’t say anything, even if he defends me, he’ll know. That I don’t fit.”

Rachel looks up from the spreadsheet then, eyes sharp. “Will, you don’t have to be rich to be worth something.”

Will gives her a look. “Tell that to the ghosts in Gucci.”

Austin runs a hand through his hair. “Seriously, dude. Nico—he’s not like that. He’s—he’s weird. And gloomy. And quiet. And if he’s bringing you to something like this, it means you’re important. It means he wants you there.”

“I know you mean that,” Will says softly. “But you don’t know him.”

Neither of them respond.

Not because they disagree—but because they do know the truth in that.

They don’t know Nico like Will does. Don’t know the silences he keeps, the weight he carries, the way his name opens doors but closes others. They don’t know how hard he worked to let Will in, how many times Will’s touched that guarded heart and been shocked it didn’t shatter.

They don’t know what it means to be chosen by someone like Nico di Angelo.

Or what it means to risk disappointing him.

Will’s voice is small when he speaks again. “I don’t want to lie.”

Austin tilts his head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” Will gestures vaguely, helpless. “Pretending. Wearing clothes I can’t afford, saying things I don’t believe, smiling when I’m scared shitless. I don’t want to become someone else just to survive a night. I don’t want to make myself smaller or quieter or more… acceptable.”

He swallows, heat rising behind his eyes. “I’ve done that enough.I’ve learned how to shrink to fit every room. But I don’t want to do that with Nico. Not now. Not when it actually matters.”

Rachel watches him, unreadable for a moment.

Then she stands, quietly. Crosses the room. And without fanfare, she places her hand on Will’s shoulder—light, steady, there.

“You don’t have to shrink,” she says. “You just have to stand up straight.”

Austin nods, voice softer than usual. “You’ve already survived worse than a fancy room full of assholes.”

Will lets out a shaky breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “Yeah. But the food’s probably worse at this one.”

That gets a small smile out of Rachel. Brief, rare. Like a coin tossed in a wishing well. But it breaks the heaviness enough for Will to do what he always does when things start to feel too big, too tender, too much.

He panics sideways.

“I have nothing to wear,” he announces, throwing up his hands. “Truly. Nothing. I’m going to walk into this palace of death and diamonds in my nicest pair of cargo shorts and get smothered by a vintage mink wrap.”

Rachel’s face freezes like she’s just witnessed someone insult the concept of silk.

Austin sits up straighter, sensing danger. “Oh no.”

“You didn’t ask about the dress code?” Rachel’s voice is low. Dangerous. Like thunder in a designer boot.

“I was distracted!” Will protests. “Nico just said ‘gala’ and then we were suddenly boyfriends and I was inviting him over for sex and never circled back—”

Rachel stands like she’s been summoned by ancient law. “It’s black tie.”

Will’s eyes go wide. “It might be black tie.”

Rachel’s eyes narrow. “It’s absolutely black tie. And possibly cursed-Venetian-winter-funeral-themed, knowing Nico’s family. Which means: tuxedo. Not a suit. Not business formal. A real tuxedo. With satin lapels, cufflinks, and shoes that could double as murder weapons.”

Austin lets out a low whistle. “Can you say that last part slower?”

Rachel ignores him, too busy spiraling in a controlled, fashion-forward fury. “No sneakers. No bolo ties. No tragic clip-on bowties from prom night. You’ll need an actual shirt with a standing collar, no buttons showing, possibly a waistcoat. Maybe even gloves.”

Will feels like he’s about to pass out. “I don’t own any of that. I barely own a belt that works.”

Austin grins. “You could borrow one of Nico’s suits.”

Will throws him a horrified look. “He’s half a foot shorter than me. I’d look like I shrank myself in grief.”

Rachel pinches the bridge of her nose like she’s warding off an aneurysm. “Do not— do not —wear something that doesn’t fit. That’s worse than wearing nothing at all.”

Will stares at her, blinking. “That’s not a helpful metric.”

“I’m serious. If the tailoring’s off, they’ll see it. ” She looks him up and down like a tailor planning for a duel. “You’re tall. Broad shoulders. Long legs. You need something structured. Classic. Single-breasted. Maybe velvet. Something that says brooding old-money heir but approachable. Like Gatsby if he paid his taxes.”

“I hate everything about this,” Will mutters.

Rachel continues, relentless. “You need something that moves well. Understated. Confident. Subtle flash. A black jacket, maybe a midnight blue if you’re brave. No pattern. No shine. And gods help you, Will, if you show up in polyester.”

Austin is scribbling notes again. “Got it. ‘Subtle flash.’ ‘Velvet brooding.’ ‘Polyester is a hate crime.’”

Will drops his head into his hands. “I’m going to die. I’m going to die wearing someone else’s jacket and mismatched socks while Nico looks like a Dior advertisement from the underworld.”

“You could ask Jason,” Austin offers. “He’s your height, right?”

Will lifts his head slowly, expression bleak. “Yeah. I could.”

He doesn’t sound convinced.

Rachel cocks her head. “You don’t want to?”

Will shrugs, uncomfortable. “It’s just… I don’t know. Borrowing clothes makes it feel like I’m playing dress-up. Like I’m pretending to be someone I’m not. Some guy who grew up knowing how to pronounce foie gras and owned multiple pairs of shoes that weren’t held together with duct tape.”

He looks down at his sleeves. At the fraying cuffs. At the loose thread he’s been twisting for the last hour.

“I hate that I have to ask. I hate that I can’t just… show up. As me.”

Rachel softens—not visibly, not really, but something in the line of her shoulders, in the silence between her next words.

Austin taps his pen against the desk. “You will show up as you,” he says. “You’ll just be wearing Jason’s pants while doing it.”

Will groans, but it’s weaker now. More tired than distressed.

Rachel closes her laptop with a decisive snap. “We’ll figure it out. One disaster at a time.”

Austin stretches like a cat that’s done no work and still expects praise. “And hey, worst case scenario, you show up in a toga. You’d still be the hottest thing in the mausoleum.”

Will levels him with a look. “I’d rather be buried in one.”

Austin grins. “That’s the spirit.”

Just then, Will’s phone buzzes in his pocket—a small, apologetic vibration that pulses against his hip like a heartbeat. He fishes it out, thumb already unlocking before he even registers the name.

nico: outside. around the back.

Will blinks. Then blinks again. “He’s… here.”

Austin perks up like a golden retriever. “What, like here here?”

Rachel leans back in her chair, arms crossing. “Did he slink in through the shadows? Dissolve through the wall?”

“Back entrance,” Will says, grabbing his jacket. “Probably didn’t want to deal with the front.”

Austin lets out a low whistle. “God. Your rich cryptic boyfriend is so on brand.”

Rachel nods sagely. “Tell him we say ciao. And that if he seduces you under a streetlamp, at least button your shirt afterward.”

Will throws them both a middle finger on his way out.

The air hits him the moment he steps through the back door—sharp and clean, biting in that way December does when it’s still flirting with snow, the whole city holding its breath.

The alley behind the restaurant is what it always is: concrete, cracked asphalt, a pair of dented dumpsters that steam faintly in the cold like they’re exhaling. The scent of frying oil clings to the bricks. Somewhere overhead, a train rumbles by like distant thunder. It shouldn’t feel magical.

And yet.

Nico is there, leaning against the wall like a shadow someone gave bones to. His hands are in the pockets of a long black coat, the collar turned up, curls dusted with cold. The streetlight doesn’t so much illuminate him as carve him out of darkness—pale skin aglow, cheeks red from the wind, eyes catching the city’s amber haze like twin embers refusing to go out.

Will’s breath leaves him.

Not in a dramatic, world-ending way. More like a quiet exhale. Like warmth rising from a cup held too long between cold hands.

Nico looks up, meets his gaze, and lifts one brow like he’s been waiting out here for hours instead of minutes. “Took you long enough.”

Will walks toward him, smile pulling slow and crooked at the corners. “Sorry. I had to learn how to waltz and have a minor class crisis.”

Nico doesn’t move, just watches him approach. “Did you win?”

Will shrugs. “I think I’m still mid-battle.”

And he is. Still scared. Still uncertain. Still bracing himself for a room full of cufflinks and quiet condescension, for the weight of old money and ancient expectations pressing down like a tombstone.

But Nico is here.

Nico, with his scowl-soft eyes and windblown hair. Nico, standing next to a dumpster with the same indifferent elegance he’d probably carry in a cathedral. Nico, who could’ve sent a car, or a driver, or a command—but showed up himself instead.

And somehow, impossibly, that makes everything feel more manageable.

Will stops just in front of him. Lets the quiet settle.

“You know this is the service entrance, right?” he says, tilting his head toward the dumpsters. “You could’ve waited literally anywhere else.”

Nico shrugs. “I figured this was the fastest way to see you.”

Will’s heart lurches in a way that’s annoying and unfair and absolutely unstoppable.

He steps closer. Their breath mingles between them, visible in the cold—two ghosts in the quiet heart of the city. Will’s fingers brush Nico’s sleeve.

And for the first time all night, Will thinks: Maybe I can do this.

The thought doesn’t just comfort him—it ignites something. Swift and sudden, like striking a match in the dark.

He doesn’t hesitate.

One breath, and then he’s there —closing the last inch like it’s nothing, surging forward, cupping Nico’s face in cold hands and kissing him senseless.

Nico makes a startled sound against his mouth, all sharp inhale and startled flicker of eyelashes, but Will doesn’t stop. He presses in, crowding Nico back, one arm wrapping around his waist as the other anchors at the back of his neck, steady and sure.

And Nico melts. With a groan, low and needy, he gives in completely—lets Will push him back until he’s flush against the wall, coat rustling softly against the bricks, hands twisting in the folds of Will’s jacket like he’s trying to anchor himself.

Will kisses him harder.

He means it, every inch of it—presses his mouth to Nico’s like he’s trying to etch a vow into skin, like maybe if he kisses him hard enough, the rest of the world will have no choice but to shut up and listen.

It’s new, this. Not Nico tugging Will by the collar into dark corners, not Nico pinning him against library shelves or dragging him onto a couch with greedy, biting fingers.

This is Will. Tall and broad and golden-warm from the inside out, all tension turned to purpose, all strength turned toward want.

Nico exhales against his mouth, a shiver laced in want. “You know,” he murmurs between kisses, breath hitching as Will’s hand finds his waist and presses , “I like seeing you use your strength for good.”

Will grins into the next kiss, open-mouthed and filthy. “Oh, we are definitely exploring that later.”

Nico groans again—half arousal, half amusement—and tilts his chin up to meet him with even more heat, hands sliding beneath the hem of Will’s jacket, fingers cold and searching.

And gods, he’s so small.

All sharp lines wrapped in layers of expensive wool and cashmere, every inch of him lean and compact and lethal , but right now? Right now he feels like something Will could lift with one arm and devour with the other.

Will pulls back just enough to look at him—at the flush rising in Nico’s cheeks, the way his lips are already swollen, the faint tremble in his breath. His curls are windswept and wild, his eyes darker than the city around them, and Will wants to kiss him until the sun rises or the streetlight burns out, whichever comes first.

“Hi,” he says softly, grinning like an idiot.

Nico’s breath hitches. He doesn’t smile, not exactly—but the corners of his mouth twitch like he’s fighting it. “Hi.”

Will leans his forehead against Nico’s, just for a second. Just to feel. “Sorry. I had a moment.”

“I noticed.”

“And I might be having another one. Right now. With your face. And your everything.”

Nico hums, smug and pleased and just slightly breathless. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They linger like that, tucked between dumpsters and frostbitten air and the hum of a city that never stops moving. It’s freezing. The wind bites at their fingers. There’s a siren somewhere, far off, and the streetlamp flickers once.

Will doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Just looks at Nico like he’s trying to memorize him—every flushed angle, every breath that fogs the air between them. His heart is a cathedral bell behind his ribs, ringing out a single truth:

More.

So he leans in again. This time slower. Deeper. One hand at the nape of Nico’s neck, the other resting against his ribs, feeling the faint thrum of breath beneath all that expensive fabric. Nico tilts into him willingly, mouth parting with a soft sound that curls heat through Will’s entire body.

And gods, the way Nico kisses—like possession cloaked in stillness. Like he’s letting Will have him, piece by piece, but only because he’s decided to be had.

Will groans into the kiss. He’s pressed in so close now that Nico has to arch his back to breathe, the line of his throat long and bare in the streetlamp glow. It’s dizzying—how perfect he feels, how small, how devastating.

They’re still kissing when the back door slams open.

“Oh my gods! ”

Will jerks back like he’s been shot, spinning just in time to see Austin—bag of trash in hand, expression one part scandalized, three parts theatrical horror—staggering backward into the doorframe.

“I am blind! ” Austin shrieks, dropping the trash with a thud. “I’ve been defiled! In my place of work!”

“ Shut up, ” Will hisses, face going bright red. “Why are you even—go back inside!”

“I work here, Will! Unlike your boyfriend who apparently thinks the back alley is a boudoir! ”

Will glares. “You knew we were out here!”

“I thought you’d be talking!” Austin flails dramatically, shielding his eyes with one gloved hand. “Not tongue-wrestling him against the brick like it’s the third act of a Victorian tragedy!”

Nico, utterly unfazed, adjusts the collar of his coat and deadpans, “We were actually aiming for French noir.”

Austin makes a strangled noise. “Do not do that at the gala. I swear to the gods, Will, if I hear about you defiling a decorative urn—”

“We weren’t going to—!” Will cuts himself off, dragging a hand down his face, utterly mortified.

Nico smirks. “No promises.”

“I’m going to die, ” Austin mutters, picking up the trash bag with the defeated air of a man who’s seen too much and earned too little. “I’m going to be found in the alley, face-down, a single tear frozen to my cheek. Tell Rachel I went out with dignity.”

Will groans. “Nico, let’s just go before he starts composing a eulogy.”

But as he turns back toward him, the reminder strikes—and he pauses. “Oh—actually. I need to talk to Jason.”

Nico raises an eyebrow. “About?”

Will winces. “His wardrobe.”

There’s a beat of silence.

Then Nico squints at him. “You’re going to wear Jason’s clothes?”

Will blinks. “I mean, I need something for the gala and he’s my height and—what?”

Nico stares. His voice is flat but unmistakably pointed. “You’re going to let Jason Grace dress you.”

Will frowns. “It’s not like that, I’m just borrowing a tux—”

“Borrowing,” Nico repeats. “From Jason.”

Will eyes him, something dawning. “Wait. Are you… jealous? ”

“I’m concerned, ” Nico says crisply. “That you’ll show up looking like a Senate intern with shoulder pads and self-esteem issues.”

Austin cackles from the trash pile. “Oh my gods. Kill me now. Just end it.”

Will laughs, long and warm, the anxiety from earlier peeling off like old paint. He steps closer to Nico again, this time more gently, brushing a kiss against the corner of his mouth. “You know I’d only wear it for you, right?”

Austin groans. “Can I please go back inside now? I’m freezing, I’ve been third-wheeled to hell, and my trash bag is leaking emotional trauma.”

Will shoots him a look. “Go. Before we start French-noiring again.”

Austin yelps and vanishes through the door like a gremlin at sunrise.

Will turns back to Nico, still breathless with laughter. “So. Tux plans pending?”

Nico just hums, dark and pleased. “We’ll find you something. Preferably something that doesn’t smell like Jason’s aftershave and unprocessed guilt.”

Will smiles and threads their fingers together, the air sharp, the world still cold—but his chest warm.

They walk off into the city, their breath rising behind them like twin ghosts, and for the first time, Will doesn’t feel like he’s heading into battle.

He feels like he’s already won.

Chapter 44: In Which the Library Becomes a Confessional Booth

The study room is too quiet when they arrive.

Too clean. Too fluorescent. The kind of sterile that makes Will feel like he’s walking into a freshman bio lab, except instead of pipettes and safety goggles, it’s finals and the slow, looming crush of academic despair.

Nico hates it on principle.

Will can tell before he even opens his mouth. He stands in the doorway like he’s been summoned against his will—hands in his pockets, coat still on, jaw tense beneath the hum of overhead lights that buzz faintly like a dying insect. He looks like he’s bracing for someone to ask him about group projects or god forbid, icebreakers.

Will, on the other hand, doesn’t mind. He drops his bag onto the table with a thunk, already mid-ramble about renal hormone signaling. “It’s ridiculous,” he says, not looking up. “Like, aldosterone and vasopressin are completely different hormones, but they both regulate blood pressure and water retention? That’s chaos. That’s morally unsound. That’s—”

“You don’t have to come to these, you know,” Will adds, a little more softly, finally glancing over. “Annabeth only has power over you if you acknowledge it.”

Nico sits with the elegance of someone who was raised to never look disheveled, even in a library basement at 6 p.m. He shrugs. “She threatened to staple a textbook to my face.”

Will grins. “You must’ve deserved it.”

“Probably.”

They lapse into a soft kind of quiet. The kind Will’s come to crave.

Nico’s knee bumps his under the table—casual, deliberate, familiar. Will hums, casting him a look that’s half fond and half hopeless, the kind that says, you ruin me without needing to say it aloud. Nico rolls his eyes like he’s allergic to affection but doesn’t move away. Their elbows graze. Their fingers drift just close enough to almost touch.

It’s still new, this whole boyfriend thing. But it doesn’t feel fragile. It feels like something that’s been slowly crystallizing for months, and now it’s just here—like breath. Like blood.

The door creaks open.

“Gods, it’s like a morgue in here,” Percy announces, his voice bouncing off every surface. He drops his backpack to the floor with the clink of what Will can only hope are water bottles and highlighters. “You guys pre-game this with a funeral or something?”

Annabeth follows with all the gravity of a general marching into battle. “Please ignore him. His IQ drops ten points when he’s within ten feet of fluorescent lighting.”

Percy shoots her a grin. “Then you must love me most under LEDs.”

She doesn’t even blink. “Sit down, Jackson.”

Will watches them with mild amusement as they take their seats—Percy sprawling like a sea creature on break, Annabeth already opening her folders with ruthless efficiency. Nico watches her like she’s some apex predator in pressed denim.

The door opens again. Lou Ellen and Cecil arrive mid-debate.

“I’m just saying,” Cecil insists, gesturing wildly, “if you wired the human brain to a closed-circuit power source—”

“You’d electrocute someone,” Lou Ellen says calmly, brushing past him. “Or best case, end up with a toaster that plays Pink Floyd.”

“I fail to see the downside.”

Will grins. “You guys ever hear yourselves and think, wow, we should never be unsupervised?”

“Yes,” they say in unison.

Hazel and Frank are next—Hazel smiling like it’s muscle memory, Frank trailing behind her with the weary acceptance of a man who knows he’s about to be assigned thirty flashcards and a partner drill. They settle across from Will and Nico, Hazel catching her brother’s eye and offering him a soft, knowing smile.

Will sees it—the way Nico’s shoulders loosen. The way the tension in his jaw eases like someone just dimmed the spotlight inside his head.

Jason shows up a few minutes later, looking slightly rumpled and already tired. He drops into a seat beside Percy with a muttered hello, nodding at Annabeth like they’re co-commanders in a war they’ve barely begun to plan.

Then the door flies open.

Leo Valdez enters with the energy of a caffeine-powered hurricane, three bags of vending machine snacks clutched in one hand and a half-empty bottle of Mountain Dew in the other. He is, for some reason, wearing safety goggles.

“Am I late? I’m not late. The space-time continuum is just judging me. Anyone ever try licking highlighters? No reason. On a completely unrelated note—I can taste sounds now.”

He plops into a seat next to Jason, immediately scattering a rainbow of Skittles across the table.

The chaos has arrived.

And then—

Piper.

She walks in quietly. Which, for Piper, is the biggest red flag of all.

She’s holding a coffee cup, hair perfectly braided, mouth pressed into a line so faint Will almost misses it. She doesn’t look at Jason. Jason doesn’t look at her.

Will feels the tension snap into the room like a rubber band. He glances sideways, finds Nico watching them too—not with judgment, but with that cold, clinical wariness that only comes from knowing exactly how bad silence can get.

Jason clears his throat. “Nice of you to show up.”

Piper raises an eyebrow, her voice calm, sharp. “Sorry, am I on your docket now?”

The air goes still. Even Leo stops talking.

But then Annabeth claps her hands once, loud enough to cut the tension clean in half. “Great. Now that we’re all here, let’s begin.”

She unrolls her master plan—a spreadsheet printed in full color, annotated with combat precision. “We have four study blocks: biology, environmental science, marine biology, and pre-med; classics, archaeology, architecture, and geology; engineering and computer science; theatre, communications, and pre-law. Two breaks. One snack rotation. If you didn’t follow your personalized study prep, congratulations, you’ve now endangered the entire unit.”

”And what if I die from exhaustion?” Percy grumbles. 

Annabeth smiles sweetly. “Then I’ll host your funeral right here. Anatomically labeled.”

She points at Will. “He’ll make sure the organs are in the correct place—”

“—and Nico will give you your last rites,” she finishes, already flipping to the next color-coded tab.

There’s a ripple of groaning and laughter.

Will leans sideways, shoulder brushing Nico’s. “We are not here to flirt,” he murmurs.

Nico’s hand slides across the table and takes his without hesitation. Their fingers tangle, quiet and warm under the chaos of crinkling snack bags and groans of academic despair.

“No,” Nico says softly. “But we’re definitely going to.”

The hours pass like they’ve been fed through a blender.

Flashcards pile up like casualties of war. Coffee is poured with the same reverence as blood offerings. Annabeth moves through the room like a general with divine sanction—distributing worksheets, quizzing definitions, barking orders when Percy tries to use a dry-erase marker on Hazel’s face as a diagram prop.

And somehow, it works.

Between the chaos and the caffeine and the slightly unhinged commitment to Annabeth’s color-coded battle plan, things actually start getting done. Frank crushes the biology section. Lou Ellen explains neurotransmitters using sock puppets made from her scarf and two highlighters. Cecil builds an algorithm on a napkin that might genuinely revolutionize study apps. Even Leo manages to stay focused for a full twenty minutes before veering off into a theory about using caffeine patches to absorb knowledge through osmosis.

Will is… trying. Really. But the thing is, Nico is sitting next to him.

Nico, in his dark hoodie and rumpled jeans, hunched over a printout of Homer’s Iliad like it personally insulted him. Nico, whose knee keeps brushing Will’s under the table. Nico, who absently reaches up to tuck a curl behind his ear—and Will’s brain chooses that exact moment to replay the memory of kissing his way down Nico’s chest two nights ago, mouth pressed to sweat-slick skin and the curve of Nico’s hip, saying things that made Nico’s eyes go wide and dark and desperate.

Will fumbles his pen.

He steals a glance at Nico, whose brow is furrowed as he translates something about ships and bloodlines with alarming focus. Will’s hand twitches like it wants to do something—brush his hair back, touch his thigh, lace their fingers together again. Something soft. Something small. Something dangerous, because they’re not alone anymore. People can see now.

Which is fine. He’s not ashamed. It’s just—

“Hey,” Nico murmurs without looking up. “Stop spiraling.”

Will’s ears flush. “I’m not.”

“You are.” Nico taps the back of Will’s hand with his pencil, glancing at him just long enough to offer a knowing, crooked little smile. “You get twitchy when you’re thinking about sex in public.”

Will makes a noise that might be a squeak and immediately ducks behind his textbook.

“I hate you,” he mumbles.

“No, you don’t,” Nico says, turning the page.

A few chairs down, Jason is pretending to read, but his eyes keep drifting toward Piper. She’s curled into a chair with her legs drawn up, pen tapping restlessly against her knee, lips pressed into a thin line. Will watches the tension simmer like a barely-restrained spell.

When Piper finally looks up, Jason says, “You okay?”

She doesn’t answer right away. Just reaches for her coffee and sips. “Fine.”

“You’ve been quiet.”

She arches an eyebrow. “Didn’t realize we were on speaking terms again.”

Jason blinks, caught off guard. “We are—I just—”

“I’m studying,” she says, voice flat. “You should too.”

The silence that follows is thick enough to cut with one of Annabeth’s dividers.

Will meets Nico’s gaze again, eyebrows lifted slightly. Nico just shrugs, like he’s seen this storm building for weeks.

There’s a pause—then Percy, trying to be helpful and failing magnificently, says, “At least you’re both hot. You’ll work it out.”

Annabeth doesn’t look up. “Gods, shut up.”

Somewhere near the end of the second study block, Annabeth’s system begins to break down. Cecil starts quoting Nietzsche. Hazel nearly cries over a mineralogy diagram. Leo reappears from a vending machine mission with four bags of gummy worms and a pack of off-brand Red Bulls labeled “RED BULLZ.”

Will, halfway through trying to explain pituitary hormones to Frank using a diagram of a sad clown, is now primarily just trying not to picture Nico’s mouth on him again. His boyfriend—the word still feels too soft, too good, like something he’s scared to say too loudly in case it disappears—leans close to look at the diagram and murmurs, “You’re blushing.”

“Because this clown has a tragic backstory.”

“Sure,” Nico says, clearly not buying it.

Will wants to kiss him so badly he has to recite amino acid structures in his head like a prayer.

Leucine. Glutamine. Histidine. Kissing Nico in front of everyone would be wildly inappropriate. Threonine. Lysine. Whatever the hell is going on with Piper and Jason. Valine. Valium. Gods, he needs one.

Around the table, chaos has fully bloomed. Flashcards have given way to arguments, which have given way to jokes, which have given way to more arguments about whether those jokes were funny. Percy is attempting to explain the nitrogen cycle using a stack of cookies. Frank looks concerned. Lou Ellen has stolen Will’s highlighters and is now drawing little frowny faces on the corners of Jason’s legal pad, each one progressively more aggressive. Leo is trying to balance a textbook on his head. Hazel’s attempting to translate her entire geology study guide into musical lyrics. Annabeth is two seconds away from murder.

Will leans in closer to Nico and murmurs, “What is going on with them?”—meaning Jason and Piper, who are currently sitting five feet apart like they’re co-parents in a tense custody meeting.

Nico doesn’t look up from his book. “It’s nothing.”

Will raises an eyebrow. “That’s not nothing. That’s a visible rift in the tectonic plate of Olympus University.”

“They’ll be fine,” Nico says simply, flipping a page. “They always are.”

But Will hears it—the slight hitch in his tone. Not uncertainty exactly, but something gentler. Like he’s trying to protect a version of events he doesn’t quite believe anymore.

He doesn’t press.

Still, the tension clings to the air like static. Piper has barely spoken since she arrived, and Jason—usually the grounding presence in any room—is restless, tense, like his limbs don’t fit right. Will catches him watching her at least three times, and each time, Piper refuses to look back.

Eventually, Annabeth—who has been holding the study plan together with sheer force of will and color-coded rage—snaps her laptop shut.

“That’s it,” she declares. “We’re done. No one is absorbing anything anymore. Go home. Get some sleep. Maybe tomorrow we’ll remember how to be functioning students again.”

There’s a collective sigh of relief and the scrape of chairs as everyone starts to gather their things.

Piper is the first to the door.

She reaches for the handle. Tries it.

It doesn’t move.

She frowns. Tries again.

Click.

“What the—?” she mutters.

Jason looks up. “It can’t be locked.”

“It is,” she says.

“No, it’s—” He stands and crosses the room to try it himself. Pulls. Pushes. Rattles the handle.

Still nothing.

There’s a beat of silence.

“Well,” Percy says, “this is how horror movies start.”

Piper lets go of the handle with a clipped motion and turns to Jason, voice low and edged. “Did you lock it?”

Jason scoffs. “This is a disaster, why would I lock it?”

“I don’t know, maybe you were trying to get me alone and forgot the part where we’re not speaking.”

Jason’s jaw tightens. “You’re the one who showed up late.”

Piper crosses her arms. “Gods, sorry I didn’t sync my day with your schedule.”

And there it is. The crack in the veneer. The breath before the break.

Everyone freezes.

Nico exhales slowly beside Will, fingers curled tight around the strap of his bag. His voice is calm, deadpan, like it’s been trained to cut tension without bleeding. “We’re locked in a glorified box with snacks and unstable personalities. This is how we die.”

And Will, despite himself, laughs.

Because this night just got a whole lot longer.

Annabeth is the first to move.

She’s already halfway to the door, tablet in hand, muttering under her breath like the betrayal of physics is a personal insult. “This shouldn’t be possible,” she says. “Study rooms can’t lock from the inside. That’s a fire hazard.”

Jason moves out of her way, but not before giving Piper a look that could boil water. Piper pointedly ignores him, arms crossed, jaw clenched.

Annabeth kneels beside the handle and peers at the lock like it’s dared her to a duel. “Someone must’ve broken the latch mechanism.”

Leo appears at her side like a summoned imp, crouching dramatically. “Oh, what’s that? A tiny metal problem in need of my chaotic genius?”

“Don’t touch it,” Annabeth warns.

Leo touches it.

There’s a soft click, a spark, and then the very distinct smell of burned plastic.

Will leans against the nearest wall, rubbing his temples. “What part of ‘don’t touch it’ was confusing?”

“The part where I wasn’t already touching it,” Leo says with a grin. “Also, it wasn’t me. That latch was already half fried. Someone’s been messing with the electronics.”

Cecil, who had been lounging in a chair like a cat in a sunbeam, perks up. “Wait, seriously? Hold on—”

He crosses the room with unsettling speed and crouches next to Leo, pulling out his phone and a penlight like he’s cracking open a safe.

Will watches, arms crossed. “Is this about to turn into a tech heist?”

“If it is,” Lou Ellen says, “I want popcorn.”

Annabeth stands, now pacing. “We’re in the basement study wing. That means we’re under the east lecture halls. No natural light, no windows, no outside access. This room probably isn’t on the main security circuit—it’s not used past midnight.”

Will checks the wall clock. 12:37 AM.

“Oh good,” he mutters. “We’re trapped in a glorified panic room.”

Leo’s still fiddling with the door panel, wires exposed and tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth. Cecil is hovering over his shoulder like a particularly enthusiastic stage mom. Sparks fly again. A puff of smoke curls upward.

“Try the handle now,” Leo says.

Jason tries it.

Nothing.

Hazel sighs. “So what I’m hearing is we’re trapped.”

Annabeth’s already typing something into her tablet. “I’m checking the campus security contact line, but if no one’s in the booth overnight, we’re on our own until morning.”

“Great,” Percy mutters. “So we die down here. Like nerds.”

“We are not dying,” Annabeth snaps. “Worst-case scenario, maintenance unlocks the doors at 8 AM. We’ve spent longer in weirder rooms together.”

Nico, sitting calmly beside Will like he hasn’t just been told he’s locked in a box with eight other emotionally unstable college students, shrugs. “It’s like detention. But with more hormones.”

Will snorts. “And less adult supervision.”

Leo raises a hand. “I vote we pass the time by playing Truth or Dare.”

Cecil grins. “Seconded.”

Jason visibly recoils. “Absolutely not.”

Annabeth is already in a corner of the room pacing like a tiger in a lab coat, tablet in one hand, phone in the other, glaring at both like she can will them to function with rage alone.

“I don’t understand,” she mutters, stabbing at the touchscreen. “This app is supposed to ping security automatically. Where is the signal? Why is there no signal?”

“It’s the basement,” Will offers unhelpfully from his seat. “Thick walls, shoddy university WiFi, dreams die here.”

Annabeth makes a noise that could curdle milk. Percy, to his credit, approaches like a man trying to defuse a bomb with a toothpick. “Babe,” he says gently, “maybe it just needs to refresh.”

Annabeth doesn’t look up. “Say that again and you’re getting refreshed. Into the East River.”

In the background, Leo and Cecil are still fussing over the remains of the door panel, occasionally muttering things like “reverse polarity” and “bypass the circuit with your teeth.” Lou Ellen’s sitting cross-legged behind them, offering dramatic commentary in a faux-British narrator voice, while Hazel paces nearby, quietly attempting to talk them down before they rewire the emergency sprinkler system.

“I give it twenty minutes,” she says to no one in particular, “before they accidentally start a small fire.”

“I give it ten,” Nico mutters, flipping a page in his book.

Will hums, trying very hard not to think about the fact that Nico’s ankle is pressed against his, warm and casual and utterly distracting. He’s also trying not to think about the very vivid memory of what it felt like to have Nico’s mouth on his neck. Or what it looked like when Nico knelt between his—

Nope. Bad idea. He shifts in his seat.

Frank, bless him, has clearly decided to be Switzerland. He’s seated in one of the comfier corner chairs now, legs stretched out, textbook open across his lap, quietly chatting with Will and Nico about endocrine pathways like they’re not locked in a study dungeon after midnight.

Will tries to focus. Really. But he’s tired, and Nico is nearby, and also Nico is his boyfriend, and Will’s traitor brain keeps pinging between “I love him so much” and “I swear to the gods if I have a wet dream in this chair I will walk into the Hudson.”

“Anything?” Percy asks, glancing over at Annabeth’s screen.

“No signal. None.” She sounds personally offended by the concept of geological interference. “It’s like the university built this room in a lead box to trap ambition and WiFi.”

“That does sound like Olympus U,” Will offers.

Annabeth turns a cold look on him. “Are you helping?”

“Emotionally?”

“I will staple your med notes to your forehead.”

Percy raises both hands. “Hey. Group bonding. This is group bonding.”

“This is a disaster,” Jason says flatly from the other side of the room.

Piper, who has migrated to a chair near the whiteboard, doesn’t look up from her phone. “You said that already.”

Jason doesn’t respond. But the tension still sits there—thick and sharp as a blade tucked between them.

Will glances at Nico again, quietly, and Nico just shakes his head like: don’t. Not yet.

So Will doesn’t. He leans back, closing his eyes for a moment. Trapped in a study room overnight with twelve hours of lectures in his brain and Nico’s cologne still lingering in the folds of his hoodie. He exhales slowly, trying to manifest chill.

And then Leo says brightly from the floor, “Okay, so Truth or Dare was rejected, but what about—hear me out—group confessions.”

Cecil perks up. “Like… emotionally, or criminally?”

“Yes.”

Hazel groans. Lou Ellen claps her hands. “Finally. Let chaos reign.”

Annabeth pinches the bridge of her nose. “I’m going to kill every single one of you in alphabetical order.”

Will smiles faintly, head tipped back against the wall, Nico’s shoulder barely brushing his.

This is fine. Everything’s fine.

Probably.

Annabeth sighs like the fate of Olympus hinges on her patience. “Fine. If we’re doing this, we’re doing truths only. No dares.”

“Cowardice,” Leo whispers dramatically from across the room, where he’s sitting cross-legged on a chair like an overcaffeinated gremlin.

“No,” she snaps. “Survival. You can’t be trusted.”

“I resent that.”

“You licked a frozen handrail for a dare last week and had to be chipped free with a wrench.”

Leo pauses, eyes narrowing in exaggerated reflection. “Still worth it.”

“Truths only,” Annabeth repeats, like she’s etching it into stone tablets. She turns back to her tablet, tapping through Olympus University’s ancient website like she’s trying to summon the Oracle. The security live chat is glitching in and out on the screen, flickering like a haunted vending machine. “If I can get through to a human, maybe we won’t have to eat each other for breakfast.”

“Speak for yourself,” Percy says, lounging dramatically across two chairs. “Jason looks delicious.”

Jason doesn’t even blink. “Don’t make this weirder than it already is.”

“Impossible,” Nico mutters beside Will, flipping a page of Homer with the calm detachment of someone who has definitely witnessed war crimes.

The game begins innocently enough—training wheels truth or dare. Frank, ever the gentle giant, admits he once cried during a dissection lab in ninth grade and got sent to the nurse. Hazel confesses that she sometimes sleeps with her geology textbook under her pillow because she swears it gives her better dreams. Percy, somehow both proud and exasperated, admits he has never successfully tied a tie in his life and has been relying on Annabeth since sophomore year.

Laughter builds. Shoulders relax. Even Piper chuckles once, though it fades quickly.

Then there’s a beat—a silence like someone’s drawn back a slingshot.

Cecil clears his throat. “I have a truth.”

He’s lounging like a cat who’s just knocked something expensive off a shelf. His gaze slides to Lou Ellen, who narrows her eyes instantly.

“Lou?”

She tilts her head, slow and dangerous. “You wouldn’t.”

“I might.”

“Oh, for the love of—” She grabs the nearest highlighter and lobs it at his face. “We made a vow.”

“You made a vow,” Cecil says breezily, catching the highlighter midair and tossing it onto the table. “I just agreed under duress. And tequila.”

Will blinks. “What vow?”

“We swore never to speak of it again,” Lou Ellen says gravely, like she’s talking about a haunted house or a blood pact.

“It was traumatic,” Cecil adds, placing a hand over his chest with faux reverence. “Like kissing your cousin. If your cousin had opinions about 2000s pop punk and bad eyeliner.”

Lou Ellen makes a noise of revulsion and buries her face in her scarf. “Don’t remind me.”

Will blinks. “Wait, wait. You two—?”

“Kissed,” they say at the same time. Then shudder in unison.

“At that awful bar downtown,” Cecil adds, leaning back like he’s narrating a war story. “The one where the floor is permanently sticky and the air smells like regret and coconut rum.”

Will’s brain short-circuits at the phrase coconut rum. He’s been there. He remembers that smell. It haunts him like a freshman year hangover.

“The lighting was bad,” Lou Ellen groans, pressing a palm over her eyes like she’s reliving the crime scene.

“We were sad,” Cecil supplies with a tragic nod.

“There were drinks involved,” Lou Ellen adds, with the same energy someone might use to say there was a landslide and also a bear attack.

“We thought—” Lou Ellen gestures vaguely, fingers flapping like she’s trying to shoo away the memory. “I don’t even know what we thought.”

The room goes still, and Will blinks so hard he sees afterimages.

“You never told me,” he says, scandalized. “I’ve known you both for three years—three years—and you just… what? Took this secret to the grave?!”

Lou Ellen shrugs like it’s nothing. Nothing. Like they didn’t just casually reveal they made out in a setting that likely included dollar shot specials and sticky bar stools.

“You’d already left the bar,” she says simply.

Will frowns. “Left with who?”

Lou Ellen smirks like the devil himself just whispered in her ear. “Some guy in a leather jacket.”

Silence.

Then Will makes a sound that can only be described as an emotional death rattle and slaps both hands over his face. “Oh my gods.”

Across the room, Percy is already leaning forward like he’s watching the premiere of a reality show. “Will, did you used to leave bars with guys a lot?”

“No!” Will yelps. “I mean—not a lot—I mean—”

“Define a lot,” Leo says, waggling his eyebrows with all the grace of a raccoon who’s found a stash of fireworks.

“Enough that we lost count,” Cecil adds, cheerful as ever.

Will groans like he’s dying of terminal humiliation and slides dramatically down in his chair. “I hate all of you.”

He considers evaporating. Just… demolecularizing into vapor. Surely someone as smart as Annabeth could figure out how to reverse it later.

Hazel, ever the voice of warm support, bites back a laugh and says kindly, “It’s college. You’re fine.”

Annabeth doesn’t even glance up from her screen. “Statistically, you’ve made fewer reckless choices than Leo.”

“Hey!” Leo looks personally offended. “That was one time. And I still think the bartender was into me.”

“I think he was trying to call security,” Jason mutters.

Meanwhile, Will is still curled in on himself, internally constructing a one-man shame spiral powered entirely by vodka, gay panic, and the haunting glow of neon bar signs. His face is buried in his hands, but through his fingers, he dares a peek—

Nico is beside him, arms crossed like a portrait of disinterest, jaw set, shoulders stiff. His expression is the picture of deadpan neutrality. Almost.

But his foot is bouncing. And his knuckles are white where they grip his forearm. And his eyes—gods, his eyes—are doing that sharp, glittering thing Will has only ever seen when someone tries to flirt with him in the library stacks.

Will’s stomach flips.

Cursed gay bar stories: 1. Boyfriend jealousy: definitely engaged.

And it’s not that Will’s proud of the effect—he’s not. (He is.) But Nico looking like he’s trying very hard not to disintegrate the memory of every leather-jacket-wearing bar hookup with the sheer force of his mind is… well. It’s cute.

And also, unreasonably, unfairly hot.

Will feels approximately 200% more flustered than before.

Cecil, who has never once in his life chosen peace, raises his eyebrows like a cartoon villain who’s just located the detonator. “Are you… jealous?”

Nico doesn’t even turn his head. “No.”

“You sound jealous,” Percy says, already grinning.

“I’m not,” Nico snaps—but his ears, traitorous bastards that they are, are flushed pink like a warning beacon.

Will nearly combusts.

“Gods,” he groans, dragging his hands down his face. “Please don’t start a fight over my tragic gay bar phase.”

Lou Ellen, who has absolutely zero sympathy, pats him on the arm like he’s a sitcom character who just tripped over their own dignity. “It’s okay. You were young. You were experimenting. Also, you were trying to win a bet.”

Will lifts his head in horror. “That was one time!”

“You were very convincing,” Cecil chimes in helpfully, still looking too pleased with himself.

Will lets his head thunk against the table with theatrical despair. “I’m going to have a nightmare about this later.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Nico lean back just slightly, arms loosening, jaw unclenching—but his expression is still carefully blank. Too carefully. He’s trying so hard to be chill, and the effort is written in every line of his body.

And Will, who is nothing if not hopeless, just sort of… melts.

Because Nico doesn’t do performative jealousy. He doesn’t usually bother with posturing. So the fact that he’s visibly not okay right now, over Will—Will of all people—is somehow both hilarious and wildly validating.

Will tries not to grin. He fails.

“You’re definitely jealous,” Lou Ellen says, pointing at Nico with her pen.

“I am not.” Nico glares at the floor like it’s responsible for this conversation.

“He’s one tragic ex away from setting something on fire,” Cecil adds cheerfully.

Will, still half-flopped against the table, lifts his head just enough to speak. “Okay, we all moved on from the fact that you two made out in a bar way too fast.”

Cecil looks like he’s reliving a war flashback. “Please let me forget.”

Lou Ellen grimaces. “It was one time. And we were emotionally compromised.”

“Also drunk,” Cecil mutters. “Also not in our right minds. Also—”

“Let’s ask Percy something embarrassing!” Lou Ellen blurts, clapping her hands together. “New truth! Percy, go!”

There’s a beat. Percy blinks, clearly unfazed. “Sure,” he says. “What do you want to know?”

Will watches as Cecil and Lou Ellen visibly relax—like invoking the power of Percabeth was the social equivalent of pulling the fire alarm.

Hazel leans forward, grinning. “Okay, most embarrassing moment in your relationship with Annabeth. Go.”

“Oh, easy,” Percy says, not even hesitating. “One time we were at the beach and I was trying to be sexy—”

Annabeth looks up from her tablet so fast it’s a miracle her neck doesn’t snap. “Perseus Jackson, I swear—”

“—and I tripped over a jellyfish. Face-planted. Full body slam. She still brings it up.”

Annabeth huffs, cheeks scarlet. “You screamed.”

“I did not.”

“Like a banshee,” she says, face buried in her tablet. “You screamed like it was sent by the gods.”

“She was worried I’d gotten stung,” Percy says, completely unbothered. “Which is how I know she loves me.”

Annabeth makes a strangled noise and does not look up again.

Will watches the way Percy beams like a Labrador who just knocked over a priceless vase and still expects praise. “You’re so in love with her it’s gross,” he mutters.

“Thanks,” Percy says brightly. “I try.”

Annabeth continues typing furiously, but the tips of her ears are unmistakably pink.

Cecil raises a hand. “Honestly? I respect the jellyfish thing.”

Lou Ellen nods solemnly. “You took the sting for love.”

“Shut up,” Annabeth says, voice tight. “I think I’ve got someone on the security chat—stop talking before I lose them.”

Will watches her with quiet awe. Even trapped in a locked basement room with a cast of academic disasters, she’s still managing crisis control while fending off public romantic humiliation. He leans toward Nico and whispers, “Annabeth’s gonna be the first person in our generation to run for office and also kill someone with a paperclip.”

“She already has,” Nico replies. “We just don’t talk about it.”

Will snorts—then catches the residual tension still clinging to Nico’s shoulders and nudges their legs together again, casual but firm. Nico exhales, slowly, and leans in just a little.

Then—because no good thing lasts forever—Leo leans forward in his chair, cracking his knuckles with theatrical flair, his grin all teeth and danger.

“Alright,” he says, voice bright with the kind of chaos that spells doom. “New question. Weirdest place you’ve ever had sex.”

Jason immediately chokes on his own breath. The sound is somewhere between a cough and a betrayal. “No.”

“Yes,” Lou Ellen says without hesitation, like she’s been waiting her whole life for this. “Absolutely yes.”

Nico, who had just taken a sip of water, lowers his cup with a slow, ominous blink. “Is that really necessary?”

Leo shrugs, grinning wider. “Necessary? No. Hilarious? Always.”

Annabeth doesn’t even look up from her flickering tablet screen, where Olympus University’s security chat still flashes Connection Lost in an increasingly unhinged font. “I swear to Athena, if you corrupt this group’s last surviving brain cell—”

“It’s one truth. No passes though,” Leo says, holding up his hands. “And it’s funny! I’ll go first.”

He clears his throat dramatically, leaning back like a lounge singer about to perform. “Maintenance closet. Engineering building. Midterm week. There were blueprints involved.”

A beat of stunned silence follows.

“…Oh gods,” Hazel mutters, visibly torn between laughter and spiritual horror. She clutches her knees like they might save her from the visual.

“Was it with a person?” Percy asks cautiously.

Leo blinks, affronted. “Yes? What else would it—actually, no. Don’t answer that.”

Frank looks like he’s doing mental math he didn’t ask for. “Wait. You mean during midterms?”

Leo shrugs with the practiced grace of someone who has absolutely no shame. “We were stress-testing the shelving units. For load-bearing capabilities.”

Jason covers his face with both hands. “You’re joking.”

“I never joke about structural integrity,” Leo replies solemnly.

Cecil raises a hand. “Planetarium,” he announces.

All eyes swivel toward him.

“What?” he says with a casual shrug. “The stars were out. The vibe was romantic. Also, there was an audio guide on the solar system playing in the background. Very sensual.”

“Educational,” Lou Ellen adds with a smirk, giving him a proud little fist bump.

Will lets out a long, defeated breath and puts his face in his hands. “I’m in hell.”

Next to him, Nico doesn’t say anything, but his eyebrows are doing very judgmental things.

Will’s brain helpfully flashes through a series of memories that are absolutely not appropriate for a locked basement study room, and he nearly whimpers. Do not picture anything. Do not think about the bedroom. Or the couch. Or—

“Will?” Leo grins at him. “You look suspiciously quiet.”

Will blinks. Red is already blooming high on his cheeks like a warning flare. “Nope,” he says, too fast. “Absolutely not. I’m not playing.”

“Oh no,” Piper drawls, finally relaxing into the rhythm of the game. “We said no passes.”

“Besides,” Cecil adds, eyes gleaming, “it’s always the quiet ones with the wildest answers.”

Will opens his mouth to protest—then pivots hard. “You know what? Let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about Lou Ellen having sex in the prop loft.”

There’s a collective gasp. Lou Ellen immediately flings a Skittle at his face.

“Traitor!”

Will ducks, laughing. “I’m just saying. I wasn’t the one who nearly broke their spine on a pile of Shakespearean wigs.”

“It was tech week!” Lou Ellen snaps, pointing furiously. “We were stressed! It was consensual! And we were very careful about the foam swords!”

“Wasn’t it with that girl from the lighting crew?” Cecil asks, already grinning.

Lou Ellen sighs dramatically. “Yes. And no, it’s not a big deal. She transferred to NYU the following semester and now does lighting design for off-Broadway horror musicals. She’s thriving.”

“She’s a legend,” Percy says reverently.

“And so are you,” Leo adds, raising an imaginary glass. “Long live horny tech week.”

The attention shifts, energy high and loose, like the room’s forgotten it’s locked.

“Alright, someone else,” Cecil says. “Percy?”

Percy shrugs. “Easy. Aquarium tunnel. After hours. It was… wet.”

“Oh my gods,” Will mutters.

Annabeth, still glued to her tablet in a desperate flirtation with the flickering campus security chat, doesn’t even glance up. “That was one time.”

“But a good time,” Percy says, his grin lazy. “I saw sharks and stars.”

Will groans into his hands. “I’m going to get saltwater PTSD.”

“What about you two?” Leo asks, nodding at Jason and Piper.

Piper stiffens. Jason glances at her like he’s waiting for a cue that never comes.

Finally, she says, “Greenhouse. Sophomore year.”

Jason nods once. “At night. Was raining.”

“You said it’d be romantic,” she mutters.

“I was right,” he says—but his voice is strained, defensive in the way that says he knows he’s not.

The silence stretches too long.

Hazel, mercifully, jumps in. “Frank and I don’t have any,” she says too quickly. “We’re boring.”

Frank nods. “Incredibly boring.”

“They’re lying,” Leo stage-whispers, but lets it go when both of them go redder than a failed chemistry experiment.

He turns to Will again. “Okay, sunshine. Texas boy. Let’s hear it.”

Will, who had been hoping to coast into obscurity, practically folds in on himself. “It wasn’t that weird—”

Leo leans forward, waggling his brows. “Define ‘not that weird’ in Solace terms.”

Will exhales. “…In the back of a pickup truck during a heatwave. I was sixteen. There was a thunderstorm rolling in. It was very cinematic.”

There’s a beat.

“Yeehaw,” Cecil says solemnly.

“Did you keep your boots on?” Percy demands.

“I hate you all so much,” Will mutters.

“Did you have a lasso?” Leo presses. “Were there spurs? Was there a country song playing in the background? Were you under the stars or just the oppressive weight of American masculinity?”

Will is red from his hairline to his collarbones.

“I will commit a crime,” he says.

“Save a horse, ride a cowboy,” Leo adds immediately, already cackling.

Will groans. “For the record, it was a girl. So technically, I was the horse.”

There’s a pause. Percy chokes. Hazel drops her pen.

“Oh my gods,” Piper whispers.

Leo slaps the table. “Even better! King behavior!”

Frank looks vaguely impressed. “Wait—actually?”

Will shrugs, cheeks flaming. “Yeah. My first time, actually.”

The room erupts again. Leo points at him like he’s just been knighted. “Sir Will Solace, Defender of Bisexual Chaos, Patron Saint of Pickup Truck Debut Sex. I salute you.”

“You’re never allowed to say any of those words in that order again,” Nico mutters, but he’s clearly trying not to smile.

“Honestly?” Piper says, nodding approvingly. “That’s iconic.”

Will covers his face with both hands. “Why did I speak. Why did I think sharing would make it better.”

“Because it did,” Leo crows, practically vibrating with joy. “I mean, that’s real main character energy. First time during a thunderstorm? In a truck? With a girl who rode you into the sunset? Someone put that in a country song.”

Will groans into his palms.

Then—soft, so soft he almost thinks he imagined it—Nico leans in, breath warm against the shell of his ear.

“I wouldn’t mind riding you in a pickup truck,” he murmurs, voice low and deliberate, like he’s reciting something profane and sacred all at once. “I’ll even wear a cowboy hat.”

Will jerks like he’s been electrocuted.

Every cell in his body lights up and tilts. His lungs forget how to function. His stomach drops, flutters, flips. His thighs tense automatically under the table and the skin at the base of his neck goes hot. His mouth opens—nothing comes out.

“I—what—I— Nico .”

Nico sits back, deceptively casual, but there’s a devil’s glint in his eyes. Like he knows exactly what he did and exactly what it did to Will.

Leo throws up his hands. “No! Absolutely not. I veto horny whispering!”

Will, still reeling, points an unsteady finger at Nico. “He just committed a war crime. That was weaponized flirtation.”

“Keep your pickup-truck-turned-sin-wagon energy out of the circle,” Leo declares, making a banishing motion.

“I was innocent,” Will says, which earns him every kind of skeptical look.

Cecil dramatically shields Lou Ellen’s eyes. “There are children present.”

“I’m older than you,” she says.

“Spiritually, though.”

Percy, grinning, zeroes in on Nico. “Alright then, cowboy killer. You’ve been dodging long enough. What’s your weirdest?”

Nico shrugs. “Library.”

There’s a collective groan.

“Of course it was a library,” Piper mutters.

“In a palace,” Nico adds, and the room explodes.

“What?” Frank says, blinking fast.

“Like an actual—?” Hazel squints.

“Palace,” Nico repeats, like it’s no big deal. “Some event. My father was invited. It was boring. I left early.”

Leo’s already halfway out of his chair. “Who was it with?”

Will, still recovering from Nico’s whisper, weakly mumbles, “Please don’t say the son of the Italian ambassador or something equally unhinged.”

Nico tilts his head, thinking. “I think they were a royal? Second or third son. Belgian, maybe? I don’t remember. He wore too much cologne.”

There’s a stunned beat.

Percy shoots out a hand for a high five. “Dude. Library and royalty? That’s a flex.”

Nico gives him the barest of smirks and accepts the high five.

Leo is sputtering. “How have you never told us this?!”

“I told Jason,” Nico says, nodding toward him.

Jason, unfazed, just shrugs. “He did. Junior year. I made the mistake of asking what he meant by “noble pursuits.””

Will is blinking at Nico like he’s trying to reconcile a spreadsheet full of improbable variables. “I don’t even—how—what—”

Piper leans back, arms folded, tone a little too sharp. “Royal hookups, secret confessions… you’ve got quite the history, di Angelo.”

The tension spikes—barely perceptible, but real. Jason glances her way, but she doesn’t look at him.

Nico doesn’t reply.

And Leo—still the one-man chaos engine—claps his hands once. “Okay! So far, we’ve got palace sex, sea-life sex, tech-week sex, and pickup truck debut sex. I’m telling you, we’re two confessions away from a Netflix anthology.”

“Please don’t give Cecil ideas,” Annabeth mutters, eyes still locked on her tablet. The online chat flickers like a haunted lightbulb.

Cecil perks up. “Wait—do haunted escape rooms count?”

“No!” everyone shouts at once.

Annabeth claps her hands with the force of someone seconds from snapping a whiteboard in half. “Okay! That’s enough sexual confessions for one night. Frank, say something horrifyingly wholesome to cleanse the air.”

Frank blinks, visibly jarred. “Uh. Hazel and I once read Pride and Prejudice to each other over Zoom?”

A collective groan echoes around the room like a tragic Greek chorus.

“Ugh, my teeth are rotting,” Leo mutters, clutching his chest.

Percy tips his head back. “Please. I’m begging you. Take me back to the thunderstorm truck sex.”

But Will’s just relieved. The room is off him again, the heat in his face cooling, and Nico—still pretending to be grumpy—has shifted closer, their knees now fully pressed together under the table.

Time moves in fits and starts after that, stuttering forward like the flicker of the dying fluorescent lights above them. The energy crests and dips with each new round of unhinged truths, each deranged anecdote, each spiraling interruption.

At one point, Percy tries to balance The Principles of Marine Biology on his head while rattling off ocean facts like a very handsome street magician. “Did you know octopuses have three hearts?” he declares, wobbling.

Annabeth, rubbing at her temples, looks like she’s seconds away from summoning Athena with a blood sacrifice.

Meanwhile, Lou Ellen and Cecil spiral into a violent argument over whether or not you could hack a vending machine with a Game Boy. Lou Ellen swears it’s possible. Cecil demands a calculator and a Mountain Dew for proof.

Frank quietly falls asleep with his head on Hazel’s shoulder, only to wake up ten minutes later and deliver a flawless, mildly groggy summary of environmental law.

There’s a stunned beat of silence, followed by Leo muttering, “Did Frank just solve climate change in his sleep?”

Before anyone can answer, Annabeth gasps.

Like, actual gasp. Sharp and loud and alarmingly triumphant.

She launches to her feet so fast her tablet nearly goes flying. “Yes!” she shouts. “Yes yes yes!”

Percy flinches like she just declared war. “Gods, warn a guy.”

“I got through!” Annabeth is already pacing in a victory lap around the table, hair flaring like a battle banner. “Security’s on the way. Someone’s unlocking the east wing in fifteen minutes.”

The room erupts.

“Bless,” Hazel breathes, pulling Frank upright like she’s just been granted parole.

Lou Ellen throws her arms in the air. “We survive another day!”

“Damn,” Leo says. “And I was so close to building a pulley system out of table legs and dental floss.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Cecil says, stretching his arms behind his head with the air of a man who knew they’d escape all along.

Will stands up slowly, his back cracking in seventeen separate places. “I was fully preparing to live out my final hours here in shame and unwashed glory,” he mutters.

Nico rises beside him, rolling his shoulders. “Don’t worry. I was prepared to cannibalize Leo first.”

“Rude,” Leo says, “but honestly, fair.”

Across the room, Jason and Piper both quietly stand and start packing up—still pointedly not speaking to each other. Percy flops onto one of the beanbags like a man reborn. Lou Ellen begins humming a victory anthem that sounds suspiciously like the Star Wars theme.

Annabeth is now pacing with her tablet in hand like a general mid-campaign. “They’re dispatching a maintenance tech. They said fifteen minutes but you know it’ll be at least thirty. Still, we are no longer prisoners of Olympus University’s underground educational tomb.”

“Best news I’ve heard all week,” Will mutters.

Nico leans in, close enough that Will feels it in his spine. “Better than me offering to ride you in a cowboy hat?”

Will chokes on air.

Nico smirks.

“Okay,” Will wheezes, fanning himself. “Second-best.”

Around them, the group is buzzing with restless energy—stretching, laughing, grabbing snacks from what’s left of Leo’s vending machine hoard. Annabeth’s organizing her notes with terrifying focus, Percy is trying to nap again, and for the first time all night, the air doesn’t feel heavy.

About twenty minutes pass in a blur of yawns, snack raids, and half-hearted attempts at reading their abandoned notes. Then—three sharp knocks at the door.

“Facilities. Someone stuck in here?”

Annabeth nearly tackles the door. “Yes. Yes, thank the gods.”

There’s a clatter, a twist of metal, and then the handle finally turns. The door creaks open, revealing a bored-looking maintenance guy in a parka and beanie, holding a heavy ring of keys and a clipboard like a holy relic. Behind him stands a campus security officer sipping what looks like the saddest cup of vending machine coffee known to man.

“You the study group?” the maintenance guy asks flatly.

“No,” Percy says. “We’re the underground resistance.”

Annabeth glares at him. “Yes, we’re the study group. The room locked itself. It was a mechanical malfunction.”

The maintenance guy shrugs. “Door’s good now. You’re free to go.”

As the group starts filing out, stretching and dragging their bags like survivors of some caffeine-fueled purgatory, Leo claps his hands together. “Well, that was fun.”

“Fun?” Will asks, still blinking against the overhead lights like a prisoner emerging from a bunker.

Leo shrugs. “I could’ve popped that lock two hours ago. But, you know…” He gestures vaguely. “Truth or dare seemed more educational.”

Will stares at him, unsure whether to laugh or stage an intervention. “You’re joking.”

Leo gives him an infuriatingly unreadable smile. “Am I?”

Will decides to save the moral crisis for another time and follows the group out into the hall.

The quiet thud of sneakers and boots on linoleum echoes down the corridor as they make their way back up to ground level. The doors at the top of the stairwell groan open—and then all of them stop in unison.

Outside, the quad is glowing.

Snow, soft and powder-fine, drifts down in slow, reverent spirals beneath the golden haze of the quad’s lamplight. The air smells clean—cold metal and damp stone and the sharp bite of winter arriving early, like the world has just drawn in a breath and forgotten how to exhale.

It’s not even properly December. This shouldn’t be happening. But Olympus University seems to bend to moods more than calendars, and tonight, it’s indulging in the kind of quiet magic that only follows a night of too much chaos and too little sleep.

“Whoa,” Frank murmurs.

Hazel slips her hand into his, her face turned upward, eyes wide with wonder. “It’s really snowing.”

Even Nico’s expression, eternally hovering somewhere between unimpressed and exhausted, flickers—just for a second—into something surprised. Something a little more open.

Piper tilts her head back and closes her eyes, letting flakes settle into her braids. Jason stands off to the side, hands in his pockets, gaze fixed on the sky like it might give him an answer he doesn’t know how to ask for.

Then:

“I CALL SNOWBALL RIGHTS!” Cecil yells, and vanishes into the darkness with a shriek.

Lou Ellen whoops and races after him, Percy already scooping ammunition with a war cry. Annabeth groans like someone who knows exactly how much chaos is about to unfold but can’t quite stop herself from smiling, arms curled protectively around her tablet.

Nico watches the others descend into gleeful violence. “They’re going to end up in the ER.”

Will, breath fogging the space between them, steps closer. The cold doesn’t bite as much when Nico’s this near.

“Probably,” he says, grinning.

Snow is catching in Nico’s hair now, a soft dusting of silver at his temples and lashes, like the sky is tracing his edges with light. Will aches to reach up and brush it away. He doesn’t.

“Still,” Will says quietly, “kind of magical, right?”

Nico glances at him, eyes darker under the lamplight, his face kissed with frost. And then—just the barest shift in his features, something melting at the corners of his mouth.

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “It kind of is.”

Will’s heart stutters.

And then Lou Ellen pelts them both with a snowball that explodes down Will’s coat like divine punishment.

Nico sputters.

Will yells, “Traitor!” and the moment detonates into flurries and chaos.

Frank and Hazel join the fray, Hazel ducking behind a bench and Frank valiantly throwing himself in front of a snowball that nearly decapitates her. Leo is already building some kind of defensive snow fort. Annabeth has given up entirely and is refereeing with the dead-eyed resignation of someone who used to believe in structure.

Will shakes flakes out of his hair, laughing, heart still fluttering too close to the surface. Nico’s beside him, pale and windblown, mouth twitching like he wants to complain but can’t quite manage it.

Off to the side, Piper and Jason remain still. Separate. Watching the others. Not quite looking at each other.

Will sees it, notes the space between them—and decides not to let it touch the warmth blooming low in his chest.

He turns back to Nico.

“Truce?” he asks.

Nico narrows his eyes. “Not a chance.”

And tackles him into the snow.

The snow is everywhere now—clinging to coat sleeves and caught in eyelashes, settling soft and secretive into the folds of scarves and the soles of boots. Around them, their friends have devolved into full anarchy. Cecil has taken over a bench and declared himself King of the North. Lou Ellen is dual-wielding snowballs like she’s in a fantasy epic. Percy and Frank are locked in an alliance against Leo’s crumbling fort, and Annabeth is shouting rules no one is listening to.

But Will only sees Nico.

They’re ducking behind a low marble bench, half-laughing, half-frozen, both covered in snow. Nico’s cheeks are flushed from the cold, his hair a windswept mess of black curls tangled with snowflakes. He looks—well. Will would say “gorgeous” if it didn’t feel too small a word for the moment. For the way it makes something ache low in his chest.

Will tosses a lazy snowball that arcs and lands with a splat against Leo’s shoulder. Leo spins, affronted. “BETRAYAL!” he howls.

Nico snorts beside him, eyes alight. He reaches out and brushes a handful of snow from Will’s collar with exaggerated solemnity.

“You are terrible at cover fire,” he says.

Will grins. “I was going for moral support.”

“Moral support won’t keep us alive,” Nico mutters, but there’s no bite in it. He’s close enough now that their knees are touching, his glove-clad fingers still resting lightly on Will’s chest.

And then something shifts.

Nico looks at him—not sharply, not wry, but soft. Open. Dreamy-eyed in the lamplight, with snow melting slowly against the heat of his skin. His mouth parts like he’s going to say something clever, then doesn’t.

Will’s smile fades into something gentler.

“What?” he asks.

Nico hesitates, just for a second. Then: “Remember how I told you I started crushing on you last winter?”

Will tilts his head. “When you saw me having a snowball fight with Lou Ellen and Cecil?”

Nico nods, looking down, suddenly shy. “I don’t know. I just… never imagined that almost a year later we’d be here. In the snow. Together. And you’d be—my boyfriend.”

Will’s breath catches.

Nico’s voice isn’t steady—there’s a flicker of disbelief in it, like he’s still waiting for the universe to take it all back. His fingers tighten on Will’s coat. “It just doesn’t feel real sometimes.”

Will wants to say something clever. Something charming. Instead, he lifts one hand to cup the side of Nico’s jaw, his thumb brushing gently against the curve of his cheek where the cold has kissed him pink.

“You’re not dreaming,” Will says. “I’m here.”

Nico looks at him, eyes wide and dark, lashes tipped with snow.

Then Will leans in, slowly, giving him every chance to pull away.

He doesn’t.

Their mouths meet in the middle of the snowstorm.

It’s soft at first—tentative, reverent. But then Nico leans in, and Will parts his lips, and the world drops away like a sigh. There’s only heat now—between their mouths, between their hands, between the thrum of Will’s pulse and the way Nico’s fingers curl into the front of his coat like he’s anchoring himself.

The cold fades. The air bites but they don’t feel it. Snow melts where it lands on skin, vanishing in the heat building between them.

Will tastes wind and winter and Nico. He wants to live in that taste.

When they finally part, breathless and red-mouthed, Will leans his forehead against Nico’s and whispers, “Still magical?”

Nico smiles, eyes half-lidded. “Yeah,” he says. “But you’re better.”

A snowball sails past their heads—this one sloppily formed and half-melted—and explodes against the bench behind them. Will startles, Nico rolls his eyes, and Leo’s voice rings out over the quad.

“Okay, lovebirds!” he calls. “Wrap it up before your new wildest sex location becomes a snowbank on campus property.”

Groans echo from around the lawn.

“Oh my gods, Leo,” Hazel moans, half-laughing.

Cecil immediately gasps. “Wait, would that technically be public and seasonal? Iconic.”

Will pulls back, flushed but grinning, and Nico mutters something under his breath that might be “I’m going to kill him.”

Annabeth, now properly freezing, clutches her tablet like a lifeline. “Can we please go home before I lose circulation or sanity?”

With a chorus of grumbling and laughter, the group regathers, peeling away from the quad and beginning the slow migration toward the campus gate and the nearby subway entrance. Snow crunches underfoot, light and clean. The lamplight turns the flakes gold as they drift past, and breath curls like smoke in the midnight air.

Leo, naturally, fills the silence with a story—this one about the time he built a snowman at age ten that accidentally triggered a neighborhood feud involving three dads, a stolen leaf blower, and one very confused UPS driver.

“Okay, technically it was at my family’s ski chalet in Utah,” he clarifies mid-tale, as if that part might go unnoticed. “But snow is snow. Frosty deserved justice.”

Will’s step falters just a little.

Family ski chalet.

Right. Of course Leo has one. Of course his childhood snow stories don’t involve icy Austin slush and dreaming about boots that didn’t leak. Will listens as Leo recounts a feud that apparently ended with an accidental snowball to a police cruiser, everyone laughing, Frank nearly crying.

And it’s funny. It is.

But still, the reminder lands—soft, but sharp: they’re not all starting from the same place. Not really.

Will presses closer to Nico and lets the snow in the air distract him.

“So there I am,” Leo says, waving his arms like a conductor mid-symphony, “trying to defend Frosty’s honor with a broken rake. Meanwhile, Mrs. Anderson is screaming from her porch with a garden gnome, and my abuelita—gods rest her soul—just yells, ‘Mijo, you’re not wearing your hat!’ Like that was the problem.”

Everyone’s laughing, even Percy, who has managed to fall behind with Annabeth while poking at the icicles forming on the fence rails. Piper shivers suddenly and wraps her arms tighter around herself.

Jason doesn’t say anything at first. He just unwinds his scarf and offers it to her.

She hesitates.

Then, carefully, takes it.

Their shoulders bump. Just slightly. She doesn’t move away. And for a moment, the tension between them seems to thaw like ice under soft pressure—not gone, but melting.

Leo stumbles on a line of his story—just briefly. A stutter in the rhythm. Will catches it, just a blink of something uncertain flickering across Leo’s face as he glances back at Jason.

But then Leo laughs too loudly, spins the tale back into absurdity, and the moment is gone, folded seamlessly into the next.

They keep walking.

The city is hushed around them—no cars, no sirens, just the soft hush of falling snow and the distant glow of dorm lights across the dark lawn. It should be eerie, this kind of quiet. But it isn’t. It feels suspended. Like time has been slowed, stretched thin, made sacred by the cold and the closeness and the knowledge that soon—too soon—they’ll be back in the chaos.

Finals are coming. And then the gala. And after that… the endless unknowns of winter.

Will thinks about Nico’s father. About suits and penthouses and names that weigh like anchors.

But then Nico shifts closer, bumping their shoulders. Their gloved hands brush, then tangle. And Will exhales, letting it all slide off his back for now.

Here, in the hush of snowfall and midnight and friendship, everything feels bearable.

For the moment, at least, he’s warm. He’s walking through the cold with Nico beside him. And somehow, impossibly, that’s enough.

Notes:

Look, I know this chapter isn’t exactly heavy on plot—unless the plot is “everyone descends into chaos, Will nearly combusts from horniness, and Annabeth considers homicide.” But honestly, it had been too long since we had the entire crew in one place, and I missed the group dynamics too much not to trap them in a glorified academic panic room together.

Also! If you noticed the tension between Piper and Jason, congrats—you’ve unlocked one of the emotional subplots I’ve been quietly stirring in the background. And if you caught Leo’s reaction to their maybe-kind-of-sort-of moment of reconciliation at the end… good for you. I’m sure that won’t be relevant again. Not even a little bit. Definitely nothing to see there. 🙂

Fun fact: I actually wrote this chapter ages ago, and there was no plan—none—for a smut outtake. But then I was editing, Nico did one (1) mildly possessive thing, and my brain went “hm :) what if he was actually jealous :)” and now here we are. So yes, Chapter 3 of the next fic in this series is 100% a product of that single feral thought spiral. You're welcome.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the chaos 💛

Chapter 45: Call Me Nancy Kerrigan, Because Nico di Angelo Makes Me Weak in the Knees

Will is sprawled on his bed in the apartment, phone warm against his cheek, comforter tangled somewhere near his knees. He’s still in his hoodie from earlier, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, textbook cracked open beside him like he might pretend to study at some point tonight. The desk lamp glows low in the corner, casting soft golden light across the rumpled sheets. But Nico’s voice in his ear—low, dramatic, slightly wheezy—has derailed any productivity.

Apparently, Jason had dragged him to a solidcore class that evening—something about breaking up their study schedule with endorphins and strength training. Judging by Nico’s level of distress, the class had been more akin to torture.

“My roommate is a sadist,” Nico mutters. “He told me it would be gentle stretching. There were kettlebells, Will. Kettlebells.”

Will flips a page in his book, more for show than anything else. “Actually, mild to moderate strength training can improve cognitive function by up to twenty percent post-exercise. So Jason’s kind of right.”

“You’re siding with the enemy now?”

Will grins into his pillow, the sound of Nico’s indignation far too enjoyable. “I’m just saying. He might be onto something.”

Nico groans, gravel-voiced and melodramatic. “Traitor.”

“Come on,” Will teases, nudging at the edges of something warmer. “Usually when I spout medical research you get all hot and bothered.”

There’s a pause on the other end. Then, dry as ever: “That’s when you’re shirtless and explaining what an erythrocyte is. This is different.”

Will laughs, that warm, bone-deep kind that he only really uses with Nico now. It escapes him before he can temper it, curling up from somewhere under his ribs. “Fair point. But admit it—you still like it when I’m smart.”

“I tolerate it,” Nico says, too quickly. Then softer, almost begrudging: “I like it too much.”

That hush—just for a second—makes something flutter in Will’s chest. They’re better at this now. The honesty. The openness. It still sneaks up sometimes, still edges in like it’s testing the air first, but it doesn’t scare him the way it used to. It makes him want to reach through the phone and cup Nico’s jaw, kiss the stress away from his temples. Just to touch. To anchor.

They fall into the kind of warm silence that’s become familiar—soft breathing on either end of the call, the occasional creak of bedsheets, the quiet rustle of someone shifting under covers. Nico breaks it first, his voice quieter now, like he’s turned slightly toward the dark.

“I forgot to tell you,” he says. “Something happened earlier. It’s… kind of a big deal.”

Will rolls onto his back, blinking at the ceiling, heart immediately alert. “Yeah?”

Nico takes a breath, and Will can tell it’s the kind that has to push past hesitation. “You didn’t really know me yet in the spring. But I was working on this paper—it was for a directed study with Reyna. She’s my advisor. It started as this theoretical thing about Roman funeral games, and it turned into something bigger. More personal, I guess.”

Will’s brow furrows, his thumb brushing absentmindedly along the seam of the comforter. “Okay…”

“I submitted it to a journal. Back in summer. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Reyna, at first. I wasn’t sure I wanted it to go through. Or that I wanted my name on it if it did.”

Will sits up a little straighter, the shift in Nico’s tone drawing his spine taut. “Why not?”

There’s a pause. Then Nico says, slowly, “Because people don’t see me when they see my name. They see my father. They talk about me like I’m a myth, not a person. I didn’t want that to overshadow the work.”

Will is silent for a moment, heart twisting. He can picture it too well—Nico walking into lecture halls and conference rooms, dark-eyed and too young and already carrying centuries of expectation on his shoulders. “But it went through?”

“It did,” Nico says softly. “Peer-reviewed. Accepted. It’s getting published next issue.”

“Nico.” Will’s voice breaks into a smile, proud and awed. “That’s… that’s amazing.”

Nico doesn’t say anything, but Will can hear the tension behind the silence—like he’s still waiting for the catch, like praise is something sharp he expects to flinch from.

“What’s the paper about?” Will asks gently, shifting the phone to his other ear. His voice is careful now, reverent without being fragile.

Nico exhales, slower this time. “It started as a translation project about the theology of Roman funeral games—how rituals intersected with power, how grief was weaponized as spectacle. But I ended up writing about legacy. About my mother. About how we remember people, and how names carry more weight than they should.”

Will swallows. “You wrote about her?”

“Not directly,” Nico says. “But she’s in it. Between the lines.”

Will’s quiet for a moment, the ceiling blurry in his peripheral vision. Then he says, “I’d like to read it.”

Nico lets out a breath like he’s been punched. “You… you don’t have to.”

“I want to,” Will says. “Not because of your name. Because it’s yours.”

Another beat of silence. Then: “Okay.”

And it’s so soft, Will barely hears it.

But it’s there. A small, fragile permission. Like a bloom cracking open in shadow.

Will smiles to himself in the quiet. “You know,” he murmurs, “this officially means you’ve out-published me in undergrad.”

Nico snorts. “I’m hanging up.”

“No, you’re not.”

There’s a faint pause. Then—dry and fond, like a thread of silver through smoke: “Fine. But only because I like your stupid, sexy brain.”

Will’s grin spreads slow and smug. “Told you.”

And across the distance, between scattered papers and tangled blankets, between the weight of names and the hush of late night, something warm unfurls and stays.

Will shifts again, phone cradled tighter to his ear, smiling up at the ceiling like it might echo the warmth in his chest. “Hey,” he says softly, voice threading into the quiet. “I know finals start in a few days, and we made that whole very serious, very solemn pact to be academically virtuous.”

Nico makes a skeptical noise. “You made that pact. I was tricked.”

“You agreed,” Will counters, amused. “We shook on it. Swore to focus. No distractions. No… clothes removal in study spaces.”

“It’s not my fault you look hot in a lab coat,” Nico mutters.

Will huffs a laugh. “You’re the one who insisted the stress relief was medically relevant.”

“Still is,” Nico says under his breath. “I have sources.”

“Uh-huh,” Will teases. “Well, Dr. Di Angelo, as part of my extremely well-balanced study strategy, I was thinking… I’d like to take you out tomorrow night. To celebrate. You don’t have to dress up or anything, but—just something nice. Just us.”

There’s a pause. Not a bad one—just the kind where Will can hear Nico thinking. A breath caught on the edge of hesitation. He can almost picture it: Nico sitting cross-legged on his bed, thumb tracing absent lines over his knee, biting the inside of his cheek like he’s not sure what to do with affection that isn’t earned through fire.

“You don’t have to make a big deal out of it,” Nico says eventually, and Will can hear the way he tries to flatten his voice, the quiet fold of shyness tucked between the syllables. “It’s just a paper.”

Will softens instantly. “Yeah,” he says, tender and sure, “but it’s your paper. And it matters. You worked your ass off. You wrote something meaningful and brave and—don’t roll your eyes, I know you’re rolling your eyes—”

“I’m not,” Nico lies, so quietly Will can hear the smile behind it.

“Good,” Will says, nudging the moment back to warmth. “Because I want to take you out. Not to make a big deal out of it. Just to mark it. Just so we remember. Tomorrow night?”

There’s another beat, quieter this time.

“Okay,” Nico says. “Yeah. That’d be… nice.”

And it’s soft, so soft, like the shy beginnings of a grin.

Will beams. “Cool. It’s a date. I promise not to quiz you on anatomical terms in public unless you beg.”

“Gods, please don’t,” Nico groans. “I want to be seen with you, not arrested with you.”

Will laughs again, head falling back against his pillow, heart full. “You’re just jealous I make the brachial plexus sound sexy.”

“I’m hanging up again.”

“You love it,” Will says smugly.

“…Shut up.”

But he doesn’t hang up.

And Will doesn’t stop smiling.

***

The city is strung in gold.

It’s just past six, and Manhattan’s already dim, dusk curling between the buildings like smoke. Snow drifts lazily in the air, catching in the Christmas lights crisscrossing above the streets, clinging to awnings and iron gates. Every storefront glows with garlands and carefully arranged pine boughs; window displays flicker with mechanical reindeer and toy trains looping through miniature villages. Even the steam rising from the grates looks festive somehow—like the city is exhaling glitter.

Will adjusts the strap of his tote bag, breath fogging in front of him as he glances around the plaza. It’s one of those quiet pockets near the edge of Central Park, tucked between a cafe that smells like cinnamon and overpriced cocoa and the glossy spillover of a holiday market. He picks a spot near a lamppost wrapped in twinkle lights and waits, hands tucked into the pockets of his coat to keep from fidgeting.

He’s early. Nico will pretend to be annoyed about the ambiguity—Will had only texted him dress warm but, like, cute-warm and meet me here, trust me —but he’s also going to secretly love it. At least, Will hopes he will. He hasn’t planned a lot of things recently. Between finals and… everything, there hasn’t been much time. But this? This felt right.

He spots Nico before Nico sees him—dark coat, black scarf, boots cutting through slush. There’s snow caught in his curls, and the wind’s turned his cheeks faintly pink. Will’s heart does something traitorous.

Nico looks around, clearly unimpressed, and checks his phone. Will watches him read the last emoji he sent—a heart, because he’s a menace—and roll his eyes. He’s so beautiful, even when he’s annoyed.

Especially when he’s annoyed.

Will steps forward, boots crunching. “Hey,” he says, grinning. “You made it.”

“I always make it,” Nico replies flatly, as if he hadn’t just braved a thirty-minute subway ride and New York holiday crowds for a mystery date. “What are we doing?”

Will leans in to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth, just cold enough to make them both shiver. “You’ll see.”

“I swear, if there are carolers involved—”

“No carolers,” Will promises, grabbing Nico’s gloved hand. “Just winter magic and possible humiliation.”

He feels the way Nico hesitates before following, suspicion radiating off him like static. Will tightens his grip. There’s laughter echoing just beyond the trees, the soft scrape of blades on ice.

They cut across the street and toward the park entrance, boots slipping a little on the packed-down snow as wind snakes through the gaps in their scarves. The city glows behind them—headlights smeared like brushstrokes, skyscraper windows blinking like constellations—but here, it feels quieter. The kind of hush that wraps around Central Park in winter, where everything feels just slightly enchanted, like they’ve stepped out of time.

Will glances at Nico, who’s still eyeing him with suspicion.

“You recovered from solidcore yet?” he asks, nudging him with an elbow. “Because, uh… you’re gonna need full use of your legs.”

Nico narrows his eyes. “What kind of date requires quad strength? Is this a trick?”

“I’d never trick you,” Will says, grinning. “Maim you accidentally? Sure. Trick you? Never.”

“That’s exactly what someone planning to murder me would say.”

Will snorts. “Relax. It’s festive murder.”

They round a bend, passing under a canopy of branches dusted with fresh snow. Up ahead, the trees part to reveal the edge of the Wollman Rink, nestled like a postcard in the middle of the park. Strings of lights arc overhead, casting everything in a golden haze, and soft music filters through the speakers—jazzy renditions of holiday songs, the kind you’d expect to find on an overpriced vinyl. The rink is already full of people skating in lazy loops, laughter rising with the mist of their breath.

Will watches it hit Nico in real time.

Nico slows, boots crunching to a stop, and stares at the rink like he’s trying to decide whether it’s a trap. His expression doesn’t change right away—just a flicker of something unreadable in the crease of his brow. Not upset, not exactly. But not the overjoyed reaction Will had been secretly hoping for either.

Will’s heart thuds, throat going dry.

“I thought—” he starts, voice too bright. “I mean, we don’t have to, if this is too much or cheesy or—”

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” Nico says quietly, eyes still fixed on the lights.

Will blinks. “Wait. Really?”

Nico glances at him, cheeks a little pinker now—not from the cold. “Yeah. I mean—three years in this city and I’ve never gone. It’s not exactly something I was gonna do alone. And I definitely wasn’t going to ask Jason.”

Will grins, relief washing through him, warm and fizzy. “Why not? I’m sure he’d love to hold your hand and yell motivational quotes while you fall on your ass.”

“I’d rather die,” Nico mutters, and Will laughs so hard he nearly trips over his own feet.

They keep walking, Nico a little closer now, his fingers brushing Will’s like he’s not sure how to ask for more. So Will reaches for him first, lacing their hands together.

“You’re really okay with this?” Will asks, softer now.

“I’m not just okay with it,” Nico says. “I’m going to destroy you.”

Will blinks. “Wait, what?”

“I used to skate with Bianca when we were kids,” Nico says loftily. “I’m incredible.”

“You’ve been pretending to be weak this whole time so you could lure me into a false sense of superiority?”

“Exactly.”

“You’re a monster.”

“And you’re about to be embarrassed in front of fifty strangers and a jazz rendition of Frosty the Snowman, so maybe start praying to your little medical gods now.”

Will squeezes his hand, laughter bubbling in his throat. “I should’ve known I was dating an ice demon.”

Nico grins—sharp, flushed, unguarded—and for a second Will forgets how cold it is. The city disappears into light and laughter and the slow, inevitable glide toward the rink.

He leans in close, breath warm against Nico’s ear.

“Don’t fall harder for me on the ice.”

Nico scoffs. “Too late.”

The rental counter smells faintly of wet socks and childhood nostalgia, the kind of sharp, plasticky air that clings to laces and rubber soles. Will keeps his gloves on as he pulls out his wallet, tapping his card before Nico can even finish reaching for his own.

“I can—” Nico starts.

“Nope,” Will says immediately, shooting him a look over his shoulder. “This is non-negotiable. We’re here to celebrate you.”

Nico’s mouth pulls into a thin line, the kind he usually makes when arguing with professors or enduring Cecil’s singing in the shower. But after a moment, he just exhales through his nose and slips his hands back into his coat pockets.

Will knows what that expression means. Knows it down to the bones.

It’s not that Nico can’t pay. It’s that he’s still not entirely used to not paying. There’s a quiet tension that surfaces sometimes in moments like these—when the bill comes, when Will books a movie ticket, when they pass an overpriced bakery and Will ducks in just to buy Nico something stupid and sweet. Will recognizes that hesitation. He feels it too, tangled in pride and practicality and the weight of years spent calculating cost before desire.

But this—this night—isn’t about splitting things evenly or measuring value. This is about Nico, about joy, about saying you’re worth it in the small, human way Will knows how.

They lace up in silence. Nico’s brows knit as he tightens his skates, black gloves moving with sharp precision. Will’s fingers are a little clumsier, but it doesn’t matter—he’s already grinning as they step out into the open rink.

And gods.

It’s like watching a spell unfold.

Nico glides onto the ice like he’s been conjured from it—graceful, precise, every movement smooth as if his body was made for winter. There’s a kind of elegance to it that feels unfair, like the wind itself might move out of the way to avoid ruffling his hair. His scarf trails behind him like a ribbon as he picks up speed, cheeks flushed and eyes shining in the low golden light.

Will is still on the ledge, blinking like an idiot. His brain short-circuits just long enough for Nico to glance back and smirk.

“Well?” Nico calls, skating backward like it’s nothing. “You coming, or should I lap you?”

Will rolls his eyes and steps on.

He doesn’t fall.

Which is, honestly, a miracle. He pushes off, wobbles slightly, then steadies—and Nico’s expression flickers from cocky to stunned.

“You’re… not awful,” Nico says slowly, skating alongside him.

Will hums. “You sound disappointed.”

“I was promised flailing.”

Will grins, gaining a little speed. “I’ve had practice.”

“With what? Dream ballet?”

“Lou Ellen and Cecil drag me every winter,” Will says, ducking slightly to avoid a little kid zooming by. “Cecil is Bambi on ice. Last year he took out a hot dog cart.”

Nico snorts, and Will feels it deep in his chest.

“And Rachel gave me this whole lecture at work last week about posture and control,” Will adds. “Something about balance from the core and letting momentum carry you. It was supposed to be about ballroom dancing, but—” He curves into a slow, careful turn, surprising even himself. “Turns out it works here too.”

Nico watches him, mouth slightly open.

Then, softly: “Show-off.”

Will shrugs, cheeks pink from more than the cold. “Just trying to impress the guy I like.”

Nico scoffs, but it’s too late—he’s smiling, the corners of his mouth betraying him.

They fall into an easy rhythm after that—one lap, then another, their skates cutting smooth arcs into the ice beneath strings of golden lights. The rink’s crowded enough to hide in, but not so packed that they can’t move freely. Will keeps catching himself smiling like an idiot. Nico is laughing more than usual. It’s the kind of night that feels quietly magical without trying too hard.

At one point, a group of college girls nearly skates into them while trying to take a group selfie, and Nico, unbothered, guides Will away with one hand on his hip like they’re performing in the Winter Olympics. It’s absurd. And weirdly hot.

“Okay, you’re showing off now,” Will says, breath puffing visibly in the cold.

“I’m not showing off,” Nico replies innocently, skating a tight circle around him. “I’m just naturally better than you.”

Will squints at him. “You literally did a backwards loop around a child.”

“He was in my path.”

“He was eating a churro!”

Nico shrugs, utterly unrepentant. Then he offers his hand.

“Come on. Let me teach you something.”

Will raises an eyebrow but takes it. Nico’s gloves are cold, but his grip is steady as he guides them toward the center of the rink where there’s a little more space. He slides behind Will, both hands resting lightly on his hips.

“Okay,” he murmurs near Will’s ear, “now just shift your weight to your right foot, bend your knee, and push off with the other—yeah, like that. Now let the momentum pull you into the spin.”

Will does it.

Actually does it—maybe a little slower than Nico intended, maybe more of a half-rotation than a full spin, but it’s still smooth. Balanced. Not even a stumble.

He turns to find Nico blinking at him like he’s offended.

“You’re so annoying,” Nico mutters.

Will blinks. “What did I do?”

“You shouldn’t be this good at it,” Nico grumbles, crossing his arms. “You have some freakishly stable center of gravity. I swear.”

Will beams. “You’re just mad because I’m naturally gifted.”

“I’m mad because I wanted to impress you and now you’re impressing me.”

Will slides closer, trying not to let it show on his face just how fast his heart is pounding. “You do impress me.”

Nico tries to hide his smile by rolling his eyes. It doesn’t work.

They skate side by side for a while, hands brushing. Eventually, Will reaches out again—tentative at first, then firmer when Nico links their fingers together without hesitation. Will’s stomach flips. Their joined hands swing between them, casual, like they’ve done this a hundred times before.

He thinks, not for the first time tonight, about kissing Nico.

It would be so easy. The lights are soft. His cheeks are already pink. Nico looks like something out of a snow globe—windswept and glowing, eyes bright under the fairy lights. And Will wants to lean in, tip his chin, press their mouths together right here in the middle of the rink where the world feels quiet and full of good things.

But he doesn’t.

Not because he’s ashamed. He’s not. He’s worked hard to shed that part of himself, and gods, he loves Nico—loves him in a way that makes him want to be seen.

But the city isn’t always kind. Even in moments like this, Will still catches himself scanning the crowd, reading expressions, watching for the wrong kind of attention. Years of caution don’t unlearn themselves in a night.

So he squeezes Nico’s hand instead. Nico glances over like he knows. Maybe he does.

Then, right as Will’s about to suggest they do one more lap, Nico shivers.

A real, full-body, shoulders-hunching shiver that makes him look like a kicked puppy.

Will halts immediately. “Okay. That’s it. Time for something hot.”

Nico grins, wicked and teeth-baring. “Are you offering to warm me up?”

Will raises an eyebrow. “Tempting. But no, I meant the kind that comes in a paper cup.”

Nico sighs dramatically. “Fine. I’ll settle for cocoa.”

Will smirks as they head toward the exit. “You can sulk into your marshmallows.”

“Don’t underestimate me,” Nico mutters. “I’m a world-class sulker.”

Will bumps his shoulder against him as they walk. “I know. It’s part of the charm.”

The hot chocolate comes from a cart that smells like roasted sugar and cinnamon, steam curling into the crisp winter air like a spell. Will swears it’s the best in the city. Nico takes a skeptical sip, then hums faintly—clearly impressed but too proud to admit it out loud.

Will just smiles and nudges their shoulders together as they walk. The snow crunches under their boots, city lights blurring softly through the cold. They’re wrapped in scarves and too many layers, cheeks pink from the wind, fingers brushing occasionally in a way that makes Will feel warm in places the cocoa hasn’t reached.

He returns from a nearby food cart with two trays in hand—crispy dumplings and something vaguely flaky and seasonal he picked on impulse.

Nico eyes the paper trays like they’re traps. “Is this edible?”

Will raises a brow. “Yes. What were you expecting, gold-rimmed porcelain and sixteen forks?”

“Seventeen,” Nico corrects, deadpan. Then adds, “I’m just saying, there are usually utensils.”

“They’re finger food.”

“So are ribs. And yet.”

Will huffs a laugh and hands him a dumpling. “Eat it before it gets cold, Your Highness.”

Nico bites in like he’s bracing for disaster—then goes still. His brows lift. “Okay. Fine. That’s actually good.”

Will beams. “I live to serve.”

They eat perched on a bench dusted with snow, the lights of the park glowing behind them in soft ribbons—red, green, gold strung through the trees, casting halos on the people passing by. Somewhere nearby, a child shrieks with laughter. Music from the rink drifts faintly on the air.

For a while, there’s just the warmth of food and shared silence. Then, unprompted, Nico says, “I’ve been thinking about the paper again.”

Will shifts slightly to face him. “Yeah?”

Nico nods, his eyes fixed on the steam rising from his cup. “I told you it was about Roman funeral games, and it is. But… I couldn’t stop writing about her.”

Will doesn’t have to ask who he means.

“I don’t remember her,” Nico says, voice steady but distant. “She died when I was born. I’ve only ever known her through scraps—photographs, letters, whatever my family was willing to tell me. And even that’s colored by who they wanted her to be.”

His fingers curl a little tighter around the cup. “Sometimes I think I made her up. Like I built a mother out of Latin and guesswork.”

Will doesn’t speak, doesn’t interrupt.

“She’s in the paper. Not by name, but… between the lines. In the way I talk about memory. In the rituals. In the longing.”

There’s a pause, and then Nico adds, quieter, “She deserved better than being forgotten. Or mythologized.”

Will’s heart twists. “She won’t be. Not with you writing her into history.”

Nico doesn’t look at him, but his shoulders soften.

“I think,” Will continues, voice gentler now, “people will read it and see more than a paper. They’ll feel what you carry. What you’ve kept alive.”

Nico breathes out like he’s been holding that weight for days. Maybe years.

“At the gala,” he murmurs, “my father wants me to speak about the future. About being the heir. What I’ll do with the family name, the empire, all of it.”

He pauses, then shakes his head. “But all I want to do is talk about her. About the mother I never met but still miss like a phantom limb. About Bianca. About how names carry weight—and how some of us are born under them like tombstones.”

Will doesn’t say anything right away. He just reaches out, lets his glove brush Nico’s under the bench until their fingers tangle. Not pulling. Not gripping. Just… there. Steady.

“I think you should say what you want to say,” he murmurs. “Even if it’s only a part of the speech. Speak their names. That’s a kind of legacy, too.”

Nico turns his head slightly, just enough for their eyes to meet. He’s not smiling, but he’s softer now—like Will’s words have found a quiet place inside him to settle.

For a moment, Will wants to kiss him. Right there. Snow in his hair, lights in his eyes, the sound of the city curled gently around them.

But instead, he holds the moment like something sacred. A pause. A promise.

And Nico doesn’t let go.

Later, they’re walking shoulder to shoulder, snow crunching underfoot as they wander through the edges of the Christmas market—really just a glorified row of booths strung with fairy lights, selling everything from carved ornaments to overpriced mulled cider.. The air smells like cinnamon and pine and roasting chestnuts, and Will is trying not to smile too obviously.

Then he sees it.

Tucked between a stall selling hand-knit scarves and a guy dressed as a Victorian caroler is a battered little Polaroid photo booth, barely big enough for two. The outside is plastered with cheap tinsel and a handwritten sign that says Sleigh Your Selfie: $4 – Cash Only.

Will stops walking.

Nico takes half a step before realizing he’s alone. “What?” he asks warily, eyeing Will’s expression.

Will jerks his head toward the booth. “Get in, di Angelo.”

Nico raises an eyebrow. “You cannot be serious.”

Will’s grin is immediate and wide. “I am absolutely serious. Come on. It’s tradition. First snowy date, you document the moment in a booth with bad lighting and worse photo quality.”

“That’s not a real tradition.”

“It is now.”

Nico stares at him, flat-eyed, like he’s weighing the pain of public embarrassment against the obvious sparkle in Will’s eyes.

Then, with a theatrical sigh, he mutters, “You’re lucky I like you,” and ducks inside.

Will nearly chokes but recovers fast enough to shove a crumpled five-dollar bill into the coin slot and squeeze in beside him. The booth is small. Really small. Their knees knock together. Will’s thigh is pressed to Nico’s. The curtain barely closes, and the air smells like dust and old Christmas candy.

Nico glares at the camera like it owes him money.

The first flash goes off while Will is mid-laugh.

The second captures Nico trying very hard not to smile.

In the third, Will kisses Nico’s cheek. Nico turns just slightly at the last second, and their lips brush.

And the fourth—blurry, off-center—catches both of them looking stunned.

Will exhales, warm and full. “That one’s going in my wallet.”

Nico rolls his eyes. “You’re going to carry my face around like a middle-aged accountant showing off his kids?”

“Obviously,” Will says, grabbing the damp strip as it prints. “You’ll be right next to my health insurance card and an expired Starbucks gift certificate.”

Nico makes a sound of protest, but he’s smiling—fully, openly, the way Will still can’t quite believe is for him.

They step back out into the cold, breath fogging between them, and for a second Will thinks about kissing him again. Right here, beneath the Christmas lights, market noise fading behind them. But instead he just laces their fingers together, Polaroid tucked in his coat pocket like a secret, and lets the moment hum softly between them.

They wander slowly toward the subway entrance, neither of them in any particular rush. The crowds have thinned, the air colder now, sharp with December’s bite. Somewhere, faintly, a street musician is playing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” on a cello, and Will’s chest hurts with how stupidly romantic it all is.

Nico pulls his scarf tighter around his neck. “You don’t have to walk me all the way.”

“I do,” Will says. “Otherwise how would I mock you for taking the subway like a commoner?”

Nico snorts, breath fogging in front of him. “Sorry to disappoint. My chauffeur had the night off.”

“Oh no,” Will gasps. “How will you survive? Should I call the Times? House of Hades heir spotted on public transit—stock market trembles.”

“You’re lucky I don’t make you sign an NDA every time we hang out.”

Will grins and bumps his shoulder into Nico’s, heart a little too warm for how cold it is. “You’d miss me too much.”

“Maybe,” Nico says, barely audible.

They reach the steps down to the station. Will stops walking.

Nico turns to face him, hands tucked deep in his coat pockets. For a second, neither of them says anything. The moment stretches—like the air has thickened around them, like snow could fall at any second and seal them in a snow globe.

“This is it, then,” Will says quietly. “Finals truce.”

Nico nods once, face unreadable. “No distractions.”

“No distractions,” Will echoes, even though everything in him is already rebelling.

They’d agreed—no dates, no sleepovers, no staying up all night tangled in each other instead of studying. Just two weeks of brutal focus. Clean lines. Boundaries. Logic.

But gods, logic is a flimsy thing when Nico is standing this close under Christmas lights, cheeks pink from the cold, dark eyes on him like he’s memorizing the shape of Will’s face.

Will reaches out. Nico meets him halfway.

The kiss is instant and intense—no slow build, no hesitation. Will pulls him in by the collar of his coat, mouth slanting against Nico’s with something between reverence and hunger. He’s dimly aware of people passing behind them, but he doesn’t care. Not about looks. Not about judgment. Not about what anyone might think.

All he cares about is this.

Nico, kissing him like the next two weeks are a lifetime, like he’s carving the shape of Will’s mouth into memory. Nico’s hand in his hair. Nico’s breath hitching. The way Will feels like he’s falling, even as he clings harder.

They break apart slowly, breathless. Nico rests his forehead against Will’s, eyes still closed.

“I’m going to fail everything,” he whispers.

Will laughs, hoarse. “Same.”

They stay like that for one more heartbeat—just one—before Nico steps back. The absence hits harder than it should.

“I’ll text you,” Nico says.

“Only if it’s to  cry about your ancient civ exam,” Will replies.

“I’m great at ancient civ.”

Will rolls his eyes. “Nico, last week you called Cicero ‘that pompous guy with the tragic eyebrows.’”

Nico just smirks and turns toward the stairs. “Goodnight, Will.”

Will watches him disappear into the station—black coat, soft scarf, silent footsteps swallowed by the mouth of the subway. The city hums around him, strung with lights and breathless with cold.

“Goodnight,” Will calls after him, a little too soft, a little too late.

The ache settles in his chest anyway. Not just from the wind, but from the space Nico leaves behind.

He presses a hand to his coat pocket. The Polaroid’s still there.

He wants to say I love you. He’s wanted to say it every day since that kiss on the balcony at Halloween—since the press of Nico’s mouth against his, desperate and startled and sure. He’s wanted to say it in libraries, in stairwells, in the spaces between breaths. In every quiet moment they’ve stolen, in the pauses between jokes and the silences that aren’t silence at all.

But it’s too much. Too soon. Too intense. He’s afraid it might tip the balance—break whatever golden thread is holding them steady.

So he says nothing.

Just presses his hand tighter over the Polaroid.

Something to hold onto.

Something to get him through.

“I love you,” he murmurs, at last, to the sidewalk. To the cold. To the space where Nico used to be.

And then he turns toward home.

***

Will gets home to the smell of burnt popcorn and the sound of yelling.

Cecil and Lou Ellen are camped out at the kitchen table, surrounded by open textbooks, half-eaten granola bars, and what looks like a murder wall of color-coded flashcards. There are at least four empty Red Bulls stacked like a shrine between them.

“I swear to the gods, Lou, if you highlight one more thing in orange—”

“Orange is the color of insight and memory retention!”

“It’s the color of chaos!”

Will toes off his boots, scarf still looped around his neck. “Should I come back later?”

They both look up at once.

“Look who finally decided to grace us with his presence,” Cecil calls. “We were starting to think Nico had dragged you off to a crypt somewhere.”

Lou Ellen arches a brow. “Or that you brought him back here and we were about to be serenaded by the sweet, sweet sound of you moaning his name for three hours.”

Will doesn’t even flinch. Just sighs and mutters, “You’re both terrible,” as he escapes down the hallway, ignoring their cackling.

His room is cold, the radiator barely functioning, but it’s quieter here. Calmer. He peels off his coat and hoodie, tugging a blanket off the bed and curling into it like a cocoon. From his pocket, he pulls the Polaroid—slightly crinkled from the walk home.

It’s just them, blurry at the edges, cheeks pink from the cold, Nico not quite smiling but close. Will’s arm is around him. Nico’s hand is resting on Will’s wrist. You can barely tell, unless you know to look for it.

Will places it carefully on his nightstand, next to his phone and the half-finished anatomy notes he’ll have to review tomorrow.

The pressure of finals still coils tight in his chest, a tangle of nerves and caffeine and unanswered questions. And beneath that—deeper, quieter—the weight of the gala waits. Of legacy. Of names and futures and the impossible ache of loving someone like Nico di Angelo.

But for tonight, Will lets himself drift.

The Polaroid rests beneath his fingers on the nightstand, a small square of light in the dark—like a lighthouse through stormwater, guiding him home.

Something steady.

Something real.

Someone worth every breath of the fight.

Will falls asleep thinking of him, and the world feels a little less impossible.

Notes:

okay so. once again, not much in the way of plot development here because apparently i’ve decided this fic needs an emotional intermission where everyone just ✨feels loved✨ and kisses under christmas lights. groundbreaking.

but listen. after emotionally waterboarding these poor boys for like 15 consecutive chapters of angst, betrayal, abandonment issues, and unspoken yearning—I figured i owed them (and you all) a soft, stupidly cute date. consider this my apology. or my bribe. whichever lands better.

writing fluff is still wildly unfamiliar territory for me and honestly this got so tooth-rotting sweet i had to go chew ice afterward to rebalance. but i hope you guys liked skating gays, quiet declarations, and will solace realizing in real time that he is, in fact, in love and completely screwed about it.

see you next chapter for: exams, breakdowns, and pre gala spiralling that will 100% ruin someone’s night

Chapter 46: I Can Name 206 Bones but Not One Healthy Coping Mechanism

Will is on the floor, half-buried beneath a semi-circle of open textbooks, printed diagrams, and what might be a protein synthesis flowchart he accidentally drew upside-down at 3 a.m. last night. He’s wearing Nico’s hoodie—black, oversized, fraying at the cuffs—and only halfway aware he put it on instead of his own.

It still smells like cedarwood and salt and that stupidly expensive cologne Nico wears—the one that clings like smoke and sugar, warm spice threaded with something darker. It’s maddening. Will keeps catching himself inhaling like an idiot, drowning in scent and serotonin. No wonder he can’t focus.

Across from him, Lou Ellen is draped across the couch like she’s auditioning for a particularly chaotic Shakespeare reboot, dramatically reading from a binder of notes in her best stage-ready English accent:

“To monologue, or to die of artistic irrelevance, that is the question—”

She punctuates the line by hurling a pillow at Cecil, who’s hunched over his laptop muttering darkly.

“Stop trying to teach your final project how to write code with puns, or I swear to god—”

“They’re not puns,” Cecil says, eyes still on the screen. “They’re recursive humor loops.”

Lou Ellen doesn’t miss a beat. “I am going to recursive loop your skull into the wall.”

Cecil flips her off without looking up.

Will sighs and stabs a highlighter into his textbook. He’s trying to memorize the steps of gluconeogenesis, but they’re blurring together like a biochemical fever dream—especially with Nico’s last text still glowing in his mind:

“ Sleep well. I’m proud of you. Don’t let it go to your head.”

It doesn’t help. Will’s already been unofficially diagnosed (by Lou Ellen) with Acute Nico Withdrawal Syndrome. Symptoms include: rereading texts with medically inadvisable frequency, sighing like a regency heroine, and staring at the Polaroid on his nightstand like it might blink.

His phone buzzes again. This time it’s from the group chat. Annabeth. And the message is terrifying in its precision:

ANNABETH: “Just a reminder that sleep is important. But if any of you bomb tomorrow’s final I will come over and quiz you personally. Don’t make me put on my tutoring cardigan.”

A second message follows immediately:

ANNABETH: “This is not a threat. This is a promise.”

Cecil, pale and sweating: “She still has my midterm flashcards. She color-coded them by level of shame.”

Lou Ellen: “She once made me cry using nothing but a rubric and a red pen.”

Will, solemn: “She’s the only person scarier than organic chemistry.”

A beat of collective silence. Then—

Cecil: “Wanna order fries?”

 

***

Finals begin with a 200-question biochem exam and a broken coffee machine in the science building. Will stares at a question about enzyme kinetics—Michaelis-Menten curves and all—and seriously considers giving up medicine, New York, and modern plumbing in favor of goat herding in the Alps. Maybe he’ll write poetry. Maybe he’ll start a commune.

Day two: he nearly misses his 8 a.m. pathophysiology final because Cecil accidentally reset all the alarms in the apartment to play Gregorian chant.

“It’s good for focus,” Cecil insists, still in his pajamas, munching Pop-Tarts.

Will threatens murder. Lou Ellen weeps softly into her Dramaturgy notes and says she can hear God now, and he’s just as disappointed as she expected.

Day three is organic chemistry, and Will is running on fumes, peanut M&Ms, and academic spite. The questions blur together—aldol reactions, stereoisomers, and something that might’ve been the plot of a horror movie disguised as a synthesis pathway. Every carbon chain starts to resemble the angle of Nico’s collarbone.

He blinks too hard and knocks over his coffee. It soaks into his notes. He doesn’t cry. He just dies a little, internally.

That afternoon, he drags himself to his medical ethics final and nearly blacks out halfway through. The prompt glares up at him in sterile, black ink:

“Is there such a thing as a noble lie?”

Will reads it once, then again. Then laughs—soft and sharp, the sound of something brittle cracking.

All he can think about is Nico.

How he smiled after Thanksgiving like he hadn’t just spent hours clawing through the wreckage of his father’s empire. How he answered the phone, hollowed out, hungover, and unbearably burdened and still never said a word.

Because Will was crying about Lee.

And Nico just listened.

He always does. Carries other people’s pain like it's lighter than his own. Like he was built for it—bone and shadow molded into a vessel for everyone else’s grief. He steadies people without ever asking who steadies him. Offers quiet comfort, a steady voice, a place to land—never mind if he’s already falling. He’s the one who holds the sky when it starts to crack, as if he was born with Atlas’s curse stitched into his ribs.

He makes space. Always. Even when there’s none left for himself.

But Will knows better now. He’s memorized the fault lines in Nico’s voice, the hesitation before the lie. The way even shadows can fracture under pressure.

He would lie under oath for that boy. Swear on Apollo’s name and every sacred text in his medical ethics syllabus. He would falsify an oath and forge a myth if it meant sparing Nico even an ounce of pain. He’d noble-lie his way through the Underworld, barter with ghosts, defy Olympus itself just to make sure Nico di Angelo never has to flinch from the weight of being seen.

He stares at the empty essay box for a long time. Then writes:

“Sometimes, love is the most ethical lie of all.”

It’s either deeply profound or just the byproduct of three sleepless nights and the phantom scent of Nico’s hoodie still clinging to his skin.

Either way, it’s the only answer that feels true.

That evening, he has a shift at the restaurant. Rachel—patron saint of overworked twenty-somethings—lets him study when it’s slow. He’s perched on an overturned milk crate in the kitchen, surrounded by the scent of garlic and looming academic despair.

“If I drew you like this,” she says, flipping through the night’s specials, “it’d be titled The Cursed Martyr of Academic Burnout .”

Will groans and stabs another flashcard into his binder like it personally insulted Nico.

Annabeth continues her tactical assault on the group chat with the terrifying efficiency of a military campaign.

ANNABETH: “The brain can survive on 3 hours of sleep. Not 0. Hydrate. Review. DOMINATE.”
HAZEL: “Did you just quote a Peloponnesian general?”
ANNABETH: “No. I quoted myself. I’m worse.”

The next morning arrives with the grace of a freight train. Will oversleeps, forgets his lab coat, and downs cold brew like it’s holy water before stumbling across Leo in the student union microwaving noodles with a blowtorch.

“The machine’s broken,” Leo shrugs.

“So is your frontal lobe,” Will mutters, walking away.

Piper is curled in a beanbag chair whispering ad copy for a fake deodorant: “Smell like confidence. Sweat like vengeance.”

Frank and Hazel nap back-to-back in the library like synchronized swimmers of academic survival. Jason—already finished with exams—is spotted in three buildings, distributing granola bars like a six-foot-tall UNICEF ad. According to Cecil, Percy almost fell asleep in the pool and had to be gently fished out by a janitor with a mop.

Will’s brain is white noise. Every whiteboard looks like ancient Greek. Every anatomy diagram starts to morph into Nico’s profile—shadows and sharp cheekbones and the crooked smirk that’s colonized half his hippocampus. He hallucinates Nico’s voice in the lab, low and dry:

“Stop flirting with the cadavers, Solace.”

At some point, Will sends a text:

WILL: “I just drew the gracilis as a heart. Interpret that however you want.”

NICO: “Poetic. Terrifying. In that order. I miss you.”

Will’s reread those three words so many times they’ve worn grooves into his brain. I miss you. Simple. Soft. Like a hand at the back of his neck. Like warmth against the cold of finals week.

By Friday, he’s pulled three all-nighters, has glitter in his hair (origin: unknown, suspects Lou Ellen), and may or may not have eaten a granola bar that expired during the Obama administration. He hasn’t cried, but he’s made increasingly hostile eye contact with a campus squirrel who looked at him wrong.

Nico’s last message still lingers like a charm:

“Don’t forget to eat. Or sleep. Or breathe. You’re brilliant. I’ll see you soon.”

Will aches. The kind of ache that doesn’t show up on scans. Not muscle, not bone—something liminal and maddening. Phantom-limb longing tucked between the sternum and something softer. It buzzes under his skin. It makes every page blur.

He just wants to see him.

But for now, only one exam stands between Will Solace and his boyfriend.

Anatomy.

And unfortunately, he does need to know the difference between the semimembranosus and the semitendinosus or he will cry in the exam room—and not even out of despair, but out of pure, exhausted spite.

***

Will is curled into the farthest back corner of the library, barricaded behind three half-finished anatomy diagrams, a tangle of color-coded notecards, and what might once have been a respectable cup of coffee. The overhead light hums gently, casting a warm, flickering pool across the textbook sprawled open in front of him. He’s been reviewing cranial nerve functions for twenty minutes, and “glossopharyngeal” still looks like a made-up word someone dared him to spell in a fever dream.

He tips his head back against the bookshelf behind him, squinting up at his notes. “Nerve IX—glossopharyngeal. Mixed. Sensory to the back third of the tongue. Motor to the stylopharyngeus—whatever that is. Some kind of cursed neck muscle.”

He’s seconds away from pulling up another video on jugular foramen structures when someone clears their throat nearby.

Hazel.

She’s cradling a heavy geology textbook against her chest, scarf still tucked neatly into her coat like she’s just come in from the cold. Her smile is shy, tentative.

“Mind if I join you?”

Will blinks, surprised—but gestures to the open space beside him. “Yeah, of course. Want the side with better lighting? It makes suffering look more academic.”

She settles in quietly, careful not to disrupt the fragile highlighter ecosystem surrounding him. For a while, there’s only the soft rustle of pages and the steady scratch of pens against paper. Will flips between abdominal vasculature diagrams and pelvic cavity sketches, muttering the branches of the internal iliac artery like they’re sacred rites.

But ten minutes later, everything starts to blur. The superior gluteal artery becomes “super gay artery” in his margin notes, and that’s when he knows: it’s time for a break before he loses what’s left of his brainstem.

Will drops his pen and rubs his eyes hard enough to see stars. “I need five minutes or I’m going to start confusing the ureters with the vas deferens.”

Hazel looks up from her notes with a quiet laugh. “That’s… not a mistake you want to make. Very different destinations.”

Will lets out a weak laugh and leans back against the shelf, his anatomy notes a tangle of nerve branches and caffeine stains. For a moment, they just sit there—surrounded by the hum of fluorescent lights, the quiet rustle of pages, and the knowledge that finals are going to kill at least one of them.

Then Hazel says, quietly, “I wanted to thank you.”

Will blinks. “For what?”

“For being good to Nico,” she says. “For… being there for him.”

Will’s breath catches. There’s no fanfare in the way she says it—just quiet sincerity, and something older beneath it. Grief, maybe. Gratitude carved out of guilt.

“I know you already know,” she adds after a beat, not looking at him. “About the business.”

Will nods. There’s no need to elaborate. They both know the truth.

“He did it so they wouldn’t force it on me,” Hazel says. “Because I wouldn’t have said no. Even if I hated it, even if it crushed me—I would’ve smiled and said yes. And he knew that.”

Will’s throat tightens. “Yeah. He knew.”

Hazel finally glances over, eyes darker than before, steady in that way grief can be—quiet but unsparing. Her voice is low, certain. “He saved me from a life I would’ve stepped into without hesitation. Because I was raised to say yes. Because saying no to him… I don’t think I could’ve done it.”

She pauses, then adds, more quietly, “And he never once asked me to feel guilty for it.”

Will says nothing. He doesn’t have to. The silence between them is heavy with understanding.

Hazel looks down at her lap. “He doesn’t talk about it. Not to me. Not really. He pretends it’s manageable, like it’s just another responsibility.” Her fingers twist at the edge of her scarf. “But after those calls with Father… he goes so quiet. Like something’s settled in him. Like he’s bracing for something that never stops coming.”

She hesitates, then meets Will’s gaze. There’s nothing accusatory in it—just soft honesty. “I think maybe he talks to you.”

Will shifts, suddenly feeling too large in his own skin. “Sometimes. Not enough. He still tries to make me feel better when I ask how he’s doing.”

Hazel lets out a breath that’s more knowing than surprised. “Of course he does.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Will admits. “Half the time I feel like I’m fumbling in the dark, trying not to say the wrong thing. He’s got this whole… empire on his shoulders, and I’m over here trying to pass anatomy. He talks about legacies and funeral directors and European tax law, and I’m just—me. Still asking Rachel if I can pick up a shift because I can’t afford a new lab coat.”

Hazel doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t pity him, doesn’t soften into platitudes. She just nods, slow and thoughtful.

“It terrifies me too,” she says. “All of it. But he’s always been like that. The one who steps in. The one who carries it. Even when it breaks him.” Her voice thickens. “I hate that he had to do it for me. But I’m so grateful he did.”

Will looks down, trying to focus on the textbook in front of him, but the lines blur again—this time not from exhaustion, but from everything he’s trying to hold in.

Hazel’s voice is gentler now. “He’s different around you, you know. He laughs more. He rests. It’s like… whatever part of him never believed he was allowed to be happy finally gave up trying to argue.”

Will’s throat is tight. He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to carry this without dropping it.

“I’m just trying to be someone he can lean on,” he says quietly. “Even if he never does.”

Hazel smiles, tired but sincere. “He does. More than he realizes. More than he ever says.”

For a while, neither of them speak. The library hums around them—soft, golden with late afternoon light. Two people sitting side by side, held in quiet orbit around someone they both love. Someone who’s spent a lifetime carrying the weight of legacy and silence like it’s just another coat to shrug on.

Will leans back in his chair, pen loose between his fingers. The moment stretches—fragile, unspoken, real.

“I’m terrified of this gala,” he says eventually, voice low. “I keep pretending I’m not, but… meeting your father? Being in that world?” He exhales a laugh that barely makes it to the surface. “I’ve handled hematology labs, shadowed trauma surgeons, once patched up a sous chef with a bread knife gash with half a roll of duct tape—but put me in front of a billionaire funeral magnate who probably drinks scotch older than democracy, and I forget how to breathe.”

Hazel smiles gently, eyes steady. “You won’t be alone.”

“Are you going?”

“Yeah. All of us are,” she says, and something in the way she says it—all of us—makes Will’s shoulders loosen. “Jason’s skipping a mock trial tournament to come early. Annabeth’s already drafting a speech strategy with Percy to keep it from turning into a PR circus. Piper’s helping me pick a dress, and Leo’s planning to fake-electrocute himself just to escape small talk. So you’ll have plenty of backup.”

Will snorts. “I’m not sure Leo setting himself on fire will calm me down, but—thank you. That helps.” He hesitates, then adds, “Rachel calls you guys anchors. Says you only survive storm waters if you know what you’re holding onto.”

Hazel’s eyes brighten. “Then cling to us. Nico does.”

Will looks down at the edge of his notes—neat diagrams of the nervous system, a smudge of highlighter near the medulla oblongata—and fidgets with the page corner.

“Okay, but seriously,” he says, voice uneven with nerves. “Do you have any advice for meeting Hades? I don’t want to act like someone I’m not, but I also really don’t want to screw this up and make things worse for Nico. I’ve never done the whole meet-the-aristocrat-parent-from-Hell thing before.”

Hazel watches him for a moment. Then, slowly, her smile curves upward—that unreadable, steady warmth she always seems to carry. “Nico talked about you a lot over Thanksgiving.”

Will stills. “I know he told them I exist, I just… didn’t know what he said.”

“He didn’t want to at first,” Hazel says, lips twitching. “Persephone kept poking at him. Said he seemed different—less thundercloud, more… human.” She glances down, fiddling with the corner of her book. “And Nico, being Nico, finally snapped and said, ‘Fine. Yes. I’m seeing someone. His name is Will, and he’s smart and kind and stubborn and hardworking and good, and he makes things feel… less heavy.’”

Will blinks. Something shifts beneath his ribs—like a breath he didn’t know he was holding softens its grip.

“It kind of… spilled out after that,” Hazel continues, her voice gentler now. “He couldn’t stop. Said you’re the most resilient person he’s ever met. That you care too much, push yourself too hard, make terrible jokes—and that it makes him want to be better.”

Will swallows hard. It’s not just emotional—it’s physical. His heart stutters, his throat tightens, and something lodges between his sternum and spine like a truth that’s always been waiting to be named. The words settle inside him not like a shock, but like a suture knitting something broken. A ligament catching under strain and holding.

“And,” Hazel adds, almost offhandedly, “he said you’re beautiful.”

Will freezes again. “What?”

“Beautiful,” Hazel repeats, her tone light but sincere. “He said it like it annoyed him how much he meant it.”

Will presses the heel of his palm to his chest again, like that might stop his heart from combusting on the spot. “Oh my gods.”

It’s ridiculous—he knows it’s ridiculous—but he can’t help picturing it. Nico, cool and composed and intimidating even in sweatpants, sitting across from his father and stepmother—people he doesn’t even like—suddenly blurting out that Will is beautiful. Gushing, even. The image short-circuits his brain.

But Hazel isn’t teasing. Her voice is steady. Her eyes kind. She isn’t lying.

Will is melting from the inside out.

Hazel nudges his arm. “You’ll survive this. Maybe even do better than survive. And hey—if you start to panic, just find Percy and remind yourself no matter what you do, he’ll do something worse.”

Will huffs a laugh, raw but real.

Hazel grins. “And if that doesn’t help, just look for Nico. He might not say anything—but you’ll feel it.”

Will nods, dazed. “Okay. I’ll try not to faint in front of Death himself.”

Hazel bumps his shoulder again, lighter this time. “If you do, I’m sure Nico will catch you before you hit the floor.”

Will exhales slowly, his pulse finally starting to settle. “Thanks,” he says, voice rough at the edges. “I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear that.”

Hazel smiles—small, but sincere. “Anytime.”

For a moment, they just sit there. The library hums softly around them again, pages rustling in the distance, the low whir of a heater kicking on somewhere behind the stacks. The golden light has shifted slightly, stretching longer across the floor as afternoon leans toward evening.

Eventually, Will straightens the edge of his anatomy notes with more care than is strictly necessary. His throat’s still tight. Finals still loom like a tsunami on the horizon. And the gala—that polished, opulent nightmare—still makes his stomach clench.

But knowing the rest of them will be there—that Annabeth has a strategy, that Percy will inevitably say something stupid in a tux, that Piper and Hazel and Leo will be watching his back—it eases something in him he hadn’t realized was braced.

He glances at Hazel, who’s already flipped open her geology book again, pencil in hand.

“Okay,” he says, quieter now. “Back to arteries and existential dread.”

Hazel doesn’t look up, just hums in agreement. “Sounds about right.”

And together, in that small, golden corner of the library, they return to their books—shoulder to shoulder, steady in their own quiet orbit.

***

The library smells like highlighters and fear.

Will is folded into a carrel on the second floor, surrounded by color-coded flashcards, half a protein bar, and three open textbooks bleeding diagrams and mnemonics. His foot bounces uncontrollably beneath the desk, a staccato rhythm keeping pace with the sudden tachycardia he’s pretending not to notice. His hands are clammy. His vision blurs slightly when he shifts his focus between the hepatic portal vein and the looming Google Calendar alert glowing red at the corner of his screen: ANATOMY FINAL: FOUR DAYS.

The words on the page won’t stay still. Every sentence writhes—veins becoming vines, arteries tangling like roots. He blinks, hard. His temporal pulse hammers under his skin like a warning. His chest tightens with the slow, creeping weight of hypoxia—not from anything anatomical, but from the sheer pressure of it all: the gala. The exam. The last exam. The scholarship he needs to keep. The GPA that needs to hold. The sleep he hasn’t had. The fact that he snapped at a barista this morning for giving him two sugars instead of one, then immediately apologized and tipped five dollars he doesn’t have.

His sympathetic nervous system is in full revolt—heart rate elevated, respiratory rate shallow, fingers tingling faintly with peripheral vasoconstriction. Panic attack, his brain supplies helpfully, then adds, Good luck treating others when you can’t even regulate your own cortisol levels.

He swallows hard, pressing the heel of his palm to his sternum, as if that’ll keep the whole thing from caving in.

“Gods,” a voice says, sharp and familiar, “you look like you’re about to code in the middle of the reference section.”

Will blinks up.

Clarisse La Rue is standing a few feet away, backpack slung over one shoulder, a half-eaten protein bar clutched in one hand. Silena Beauregard is next to her, dressed like a Pinterest board for soft academia, eyes narrowing with concern as she takes him in. She’s practically tucked into Clarisse’s side, one hand lightly brushing Clarisse’s elbow as if grounding them both.

“I’m fine,” Will tries.

“You’re not fine,” Clarisse says bluntly, peeling back another bite of her protein bar. “You look like someone trying to take their MCAT in a burning building.”

Silena crouches beside him, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Her other hand finds Clarisse’s shin and squeezes once—quiet reassurance. “You’re pale. And sweating. When’s the last time you ate something not vacuum-sealed or caffeinated?”

He opens his mouth. Then closes it. The pause is answer enough.

“I can’t—” He cuts himself off, voice cracking like overstretched cartilage. “The exam is in four days, I still haven’t reviewed spinal reflex arcs, I think I bombed bioethics, and if I screw up anatomy I lose my GPA cushion and I need that to even be considered for Columbia Med—”

His breath hitches. His eyes sting.

Silena reaches for his hand, gentle. “Will.”

“I’m serious,” he says, too fast. “I—I can’t afford to screw this up. I’m barely hanging onto my scholarship as it is, and Nico’s in his last exam, and Lou Ellen and Cecil are locked in that weird caffeine cult study room on the third floor, and everyone else is off having their own academic nervous breakdowns across campus like a goddamn apocalyptic scavenger hunt—”

“Breathe,” Silena says softly. “Your sympathetic nervous system is going into overdrive.”

“Which is appropriate,” Will mutters hoarsely. “Since I’m currently sympathizing with my own impending academic death.”

Clarisse rolls her eyes but tosses him her unopened protein bar anyway. “Eat. Now.”

Will stares at it like it might bite him.

“Seriously,” she adds. “You look like a crash test dummy post-impact. You need a break. A real one. Even battlefield medics step back when their hands are shaking.”

“I don’t have time for a break.”

“Which is exactly why you need one,” Silena murmurs. “Look, I know finals make everything feel like life or death, but you’re burning out. And if you burn out, none of this works. Not the grades, not the scholarship, not you.”

Clarisse squints at him. “You seen the student support guy yet?”

Will gives her a blank look.

“Mr. D,” Silena says gently. “He’s technically a counselor. Allegedly. He’s… well, you’ll see.”

“He helped Beckendorf last week,” Clarisse offers. “Which means he’s either licensed or magical. Maybe both.”

Will manages the smallest, most broken laugh. His fingers are still shaking, but something in his chest unclenches just a little.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay, I’ll… I’ll go. After I finish this section.”

“You’ll go,” Clarisse says flatly, “after you eat. And drink actual water. And maybe stop looking like you’re halfway to a cardiac event.”

Silena squeezes his hand. “We’ve got you. Let us.”

Will nods, too tired to argue, too overwhelmed to fake composure anymore. He unwraps the protein bar and takes a bite, trying to remember how to breathe through his nose. The peanut butter sticks to the roof of his mouth like temporary silence.

Clarisse stands just behind Silena, still munching her own bar, but when Silena rises and leans back against her shoulder, Clarisse doesn’t move away. She rests her chin lightly on the top of Silena’s head for a moment, like it’s second nature, like it’s where her gravity lives.

Around them, the library hums on—soft light, low voices, books and battlefields.

Clarisse checks her phone and groans. “I have a kinesiology final in thirty minutes and I still don’t fully understand how muscle contractions work. Which feels ironic. Considering I’m basically made of them.”

Silena smooths her skirt and straightens with practiced grace. “Well, you’re not passing on charm alone. But the deltoids probably help.” Her voice is teasing, but there’s warmth in her eyes as she reaches up to brush a crumb off Clarisse’s shirt, fingers lingering a second longer than necessary.

Clarisse flushes, rolling her eyes like it’s muscle memory, but she doesn’t pull away. There’s a crooked smile tugging at her mouth, and when she slings an arm around Silena’s shoulders, it’s casual, familiar—protective in a way she’d never admit out loud. “Come on, beautiful menace. Walk me to my academic doom.”

Silena loops their fingers together with a practiced twirl and leans into her without hesitation. “Gladly. But for the record, you’re not doomed. Just… dramatically underprepared. Which is your brand.”

Clarisse snorts. “Said like someone who doesn't have an exam today.”

“I don’t,” Silena says primly. “I have a design critique. Entirely different brand of suffering. More chiffon. Fewer cadavers.”

“Sounds fake.”

“Sounds fabulous,” Silena counters, grinning. “Try not to punch your professor if they ask you about ATP.”

“No promises.”

Will watches them go, a little stunned by their ease, by the way Clarisse holds open the library door for her girlfriend like she’s afraid it might bite her if she lets go too fast. They disappear into the golden light outside, fingers still linked, heads tilted instinctively toward one another in the soft kind of orbit that makes everything—finals, fear, the future—seem briefly survivable.

When the door clicks shut behind them, the panic comes rushing back.

He tries—really tries—to focus. Picks up his pen. Reads the same paragraph on synaptic transmission three times. Writes down “acetylcholine” and underlines it twice, but the word might as well be “giraffe” for how much meaning it holds. His brain’s fried. His vision won’t center.

The protein bar did nothing. His anxiety is still pinging around his ribcage like a misfired reflex test.

With a groan of surrender, Will scrubs a hand down his face, gathers his things, and shuffles out of the library.

The student support office is tucked into a forgotten corner of the humanities building, like the campus itself is mildly ashamed of needing help.

Will knocks on the door labeled MR. D – STUDENT WELLNESS & OTHER MISTAKES , hesitates, and pushes it open with the sort of caution normally reserved for chemical spills and cursed scrolls.

Inside, it smells like Diet Coke and despair. The overhead light flickers like it’s giving up the will to live. One of the ceiling tiles is missing. A lava lamp glugs slowly in the corner, emitting more judgment than illumination.

Mr. D doesn’t look up from his sudoku book. He’s reclined dramatically behind his desk in a collapsible camping chair with a flamingo print, wearing a neon Hawaiian shirt covered in tiny grapes, a plastic green visor, and Birkenstocks with thick wool socks. There’s a precarious pyramid of empty Diet Coke cans beside him, and a ficus in the corner is tilted sideways, one branch bent against the cracked window like it’s trying to make a break for it.

“You,” Mr. D says flatly, stabbing a number into the page with theatrical disdain. “The pre-med stress skeleton. Sit. Suffer. Share.”

Will lowers himself into the seat across from him like he’s afraid it might dissolve on impact. “You knew I was coming?”

“I’ve been told by seven separate students and one crying TA that you’re at high risk of spontaneous combustion,” Mr. D deadpans. “Also, the blonde one emailed me and said if I didn’t help you, she’d hex my soda.”

“…Annabeth?”

“She frightens me. Deeply.” He doesn’t elaborate. Just takes a long, mournful swig of Diet Coke. “Well? This is the part where you unravel.”

Will blinks. “Aren’t you supposed to be, I don’t know… comforting?”

“I find sarcasm a more efficient diagnostic tool,” Mr. D says dryly. “Now go on, Solace. Your aura is twitching.”

Will exhales hard, like letting air out of a cracked balloon. “I’m overwhelmed.”

“Congratulations. So is literally everyone this time of year.”

“I—” Will scrubs both hands over his face, then into his hair. His curls are already a disaster. “I need to pass anatomy. I have to keep my GPA up to keep my scholarship. I’m barely sleeping. I bombed my last exam. There’s this gala coming up and I’m meeting my boyfriend’s terrifying father-slash-death-god. I haven’t done laundry in two weeks and yesterday I cried in the walk-in freezer at work because someone used the wrong tongs for the spinach.”

There’s a pause.

Then: ssshhhkk —the crisp crack of a new Diet Coke can being opened with reverence and doom.

Mr. D takes a long, almost theatrical sip, then lowers the can and stares at Will over the rim like a disappointed oracle.

“You sound like a mess,” he says finally. “And I mean that in the most diagnostic sense.”

“Thanks,” Will mutters.

“Let me tell you a secret, Sunshine Boy,” Mr. D says, leaning back with a sigh that sounds centuries old. “No one in college knows what they’re doing. Everyone’s paddling a leaky canoe across a lava lake and pretending they meant to take that route. The trick is to patch it with whatever you’ve got—duct tape, emotional trauma, caffeine. Preferably all three.”

Will just stares at him.

“And before you ask—yes, it’s okay to not be okay. Yes, it’s okay to ask for help. No, I will not write your final for you, and no, no one will care what you wear to the gala. Just don’t wear sandals.”

“I wasn’t going to wear—”

“Don’t.”

Will huffs out a short laugh despite himself. His shoulders drop by maybe a millimeter. “You’re weirdly good at this.”

“I’ve been cursed with the responsibility of wellness,” Mr. D sighs. “It’s my punishment for turning that one sorority formal into a minor bacchanalia.”

He leans forward suddenly, voice sharpening with sincerity that hits like a sucker punch. “Listen. You’ve got people. Use them. Let them hold some of the weight. Eat actual food. Stop studying when your pupils start dilating unevenly. And for the love of all things fermented, go outside once this week. Touch grass. Absorb vitamin D. Maybe even blink at a pigeon.”

Will nods slowly. “Okay.”

“Say it like you mean it, sunshine.”

“Okay,” Will says again, a little stronger this time. He sounds almost convinced.

Mr. D waves a dismissive hand, already grabbing another pencil. “Good. Now get out of here before I’m accused of caring.”

Will pauses at the door, one hand on the frame. His voice is softer now. “Thank you. Really.”

Mr. D raises his can in a mock-toast, smirking faintly. “May your arteries be clear and your GPA terrifying.”

Will walks out smiling. A little frayed around the edges, a little sleep-deprived—but smiling all the same.

The sun greets him like an old friend as he steps out of the building, the golden haze of late afternoon catching in his hair, softening the angles of the day. He blinks against the light, dazed and squinting like someone surfacing from hibernation. His body aches with exhaustion, nerves still humming with leftover exam static, but—miraculously—his stomach twists with real hunger for the first time in days. Not just the acidic gnaw of stress, but something solid. Tangible.

He grabs food from a café near campus. Real food. Something hot, slightly greasy, wrapped in foil and warmth. He sinks onto a bench, exhales, and lets the sun melt the edge of his stress like an ice cube pressed to the wrist. He’s halfway through the sandwich when his phone buzzes, the screen lighting up with a name that sends a ripple through his chest.

NICO: exam’s over. i lived. i’m now a free man. tell the masses.

Will’s fingers twitch. They were supposed to be keeping space this week—finals, focus, boundaries—but the sight of Nico’s name alone makes something ease between his ribs, like tension bleeding out of a wound he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying.

The world seems to slow for a beat. The library courtyard around him hums with the rustle of trees and low, anxious murmurs of other students, but all he can hear is the echo of Nico’s voice in his mind. His thumb is already tapping the call button before he has time to argue with himself.

Nico picks up on the first ring, like he’d been waiting.

“Did you run into traffic en route to throwing me a parade?”

Will lets out a breathy laugh, tipping his head back against the bench, eyes half-lidded against the filtered sunlight streaking down through the branches overhead. “Gods, you sound smug.”

“I’m allowed to be. I crushed that exam,” Nico says, and there’s a rare lightness in his voice that makes Will want to bottle the sound and keep it on a shelf next to the first aid kit. “Like, actual obliteration. Academic carnage.”

It’s the kind of joy Will doesn’t get to hear often from him—weightless, unguarded, blooming between words. It hits somewhere just below his breastbone.

“I’m so proud of you,” Will says—and it’s so immediate, so full, it quiets him for a second. The words settle between them like a balm. Then, softer: “You sound happy.”

There’s a beat of quiet on the other end, not awkward, just thick with something real.

“Yeah. I am, I think. Weird, right?”

“Not weird.” Will’s voice drops, honest and bare. “Beautiful.”

The word slips out before he can reel it back in, unguarded and true.

Will shifts, spine curving forward, heart skipping against the weight of everything—Nico’s happiness, fleeting and hard-won. Their distance this week. The gala looming on the horizon like a storm front. The anatomy final closing in fast, heavy as a pulse in his throat.

“I know we said minimal contact,” he blurts, voice rough at the edges, “and I know you’re working on your gala speech and I’ve got my final, but—” He exhales sharply, fingers tightening around his phone. “I need to see you.”

A pause.

Not the awkward kind—just full of breath and something soft, something unspoken.

“Then come over,” Nico says, voice low and steady, the kind of steadiness Will wants to tuck into his chest like a keepsake. “Tomorrow night. I’ll be writing and probably yelling at my laptop, but you can sit on the couch and study and sigh dramatically whenever I distract you.”

Will huffs a laugh, and it curls up from somewhere deep—warm all the way through, like sunlight slipping into places he forgot were cold. “So business as usual.”

“Exactly.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” Nico says, without hesitation. “You’re not a distraction. You’re… the opposite. You make everything feel less catastrophic.”

The words land with unexpected precision. Will presses his knuckles to his mouth for a second, like he can physically hold back the swell of feeling. Nico’s voice—fond, open, entirely unguarded—curls through the receiver like a lifeline, steadying his heart before it can race off again.

“Okay,” he says, trying to sound casual and failing, his voice gone breathless around the edges. “Tomorrow night. I’ll bring snacks and flashcards. You bring the attitude.”

“Always,” Nico says, and Will can hear the smile in it—can feel it, somehow, like the ghost of a hand brushing across his cheek.

Will doesn’t want to hang up. Doesn’t want to lose the tether of Nico’s voice, soft and sure in a way it so rarely is. He can feel the words rising in his throat— I love you , bright and inevitable, fizzing under his tongue like carbonated truth—but he swallows them down.

Not like this. Not yet.
Not over the phone.

He wants to say it with his eyes on Nico’s—those beautiful, dark, impossibly soft eyes, wide and brown like wet earth after rain. Eyes that always undo him. Doe eyes, his mother used to say, meaning gentle. Meaning startled. Meaning sacred. Will wants to say it while watching those eyes go round with surprise, while Nico breathes in like it’s the first time he’s heard the word spoken just for him.

So instead, he says, “I miss you.”

It’s the same shape. The same ache.
Close enough.

But it still leaves something unfinished in him, like biting into an apple and finding it just shy of sweet, like closing a door without hearing it click.

“Yeah,” Nico says, voice quieter now, the warmth still there. “I miss you too.”

They hang up.

Will sets his phone down beside the crumpled foil of his sandwich wrapper and leans back against the bench, eyes slipping shut. For the first time in days, his pulse has stopped galloping. The air feels clearer. His breath steadier.

He’s still tired. Still over-caffeinated and under-fed. Still a boy on the edge of unraveling, tangled in deadlines and expectations.

But tomorrow night, he’ll be in Nico’s apartment.
Studying. Sitting close. Closer. Maybe even close enough to breathe the same air.

And maybe—just maybe—that’s enough. For now.

Notes:

happy pride month, to celebrate i gifted you more ruegard content :))

Chapter 47: Make Anatomy Sexy Again

Will has never been more relieved to leave the apartment.

Lou Ellen and Cecil, both officially free from finals, were celebrating like they'd personally defeated the academic-industrial complex. Lou Ellen tried to put glitter in Cecil’s hair “for the vibes,” while Cecil countered by blasting the Mamma Mia! soundtrack at a volume that registered on the Richter scale. There was a brief but violent skirmish over Bluetooth speaker control. Someone screamed “academic liberation!” from the kitchen. Will—still hunched over his anatomy notes, dangerously close to crying over a diagram of the renal pelvis—had quietly grabbed his backpack and fled like he was deserting a war zone.

Now, as he makes his way up the quiet stairwell to Nico and Jason’s apartment, he’s still got his binder tucked under one arm and the residual glitter of chaos clinging to his hoodie. The hallway smells like varnish and money. Everything here feels still. Heavy. Quiet. Like the world outside has been muffled behind paneled walls and old oil paintings.

He knocks.

The door opens before he finishes the second rap.

And then—Nico.

Soft. Sleep-rumpled. Beautiful.

His hair is a mess, all cowlicks and curls pushed back like he’s been running his hands through it in frustration. He’s wearing a mismatched set of flannel pajamas—plaid pants, a faded Deftones T-shirt that hangs loose at the collar, and one sock inside-out like he lost a battle with the laundry. He looks like midnight trying to pass itself off as morning.

And Will wants to kiss him until the calendar resets.

Which is exactly what happens.

Nico doesn’t say anything. Just grabs the front of Will’s hoodie and pulls him in, slow and unhurried, like they’ve got all the time in the world. Their mouths meet in a kiss that’s less hello and more homecoming —deep, warm, edged with something hungrier than either of them want to admit.

Will’s breath stutters. Nico exhales against his mouth like a prayer.

When they finally pull apart, it’s only because Will’s heart is beating so hard he’s afraid he’ll say something irrevocable.

“You’re wearing my hoodie,” Nico murmurs, voice low and pleased.

“It smells like you,” Will says, before he can stop himself. Then, mortified: “That wasn’t supposed to be creepy.”

Nico’s mouth twitches. “It’s not.” He leans in again, brushes their noses together. “I like it.”

The door shuts behind them with a quiet click.

Will hesitates just inside, breath catching as the hush of the apartment settles around him like velvet. It's his first time here, and it shows—in the way he stands for a moment too long in the entryway, gaze dragging across every detail like he’s afraid to touch anything.

The place is dimly lit and deeply quiet, all dark wood, antique furniture, and the kind of tasteful clutter that doesn’t feel accidental. Heavy velvet curtains bleed the windows of daylight. Persian rugs soften the creak of the floor. The air smells like candle wax and old paper—books so ancient they hum with the weight of inheritance, not purchase. Time moves differently here, like it’s been folded over itself and stacked in layers.

Jason’s side is crisp and predictable—pre-law polished: textbooks stacked with geometric precision, polished Oxfords lined neatly by the door, a blazer draped carefully over the back of a leather armchair. A half-empty LaCroix rests beside a casebook on tort reform.

Nico’s half, though—it’s something else entirely. Curated chaos. A cracked mug of espresso sits beside a heavily annotated copy of Inferno , every margin bleeding with notes in three languages. There’s a vintage candelabra tucked between two uneven towers of research articles like it grew there, like it belongs. 

It’s beautiful. Overwhelming. Unapologetically expensive in the way that doesn’t brag, just is . The kind of quiet, generational wealth Will has always known how to clock from fifty paces, even when people try to dress it down in concert tees and combat boots.

His first instinct, for one dizzying second, is to shrink from it—to look for the door again, to laugh it off, to say something sharp before it can make him feel small. But then Nico glances back at him with that steady, soft look he’s been wearing all night—the one that says stay without needing to ask.

So Will breathes in deep and lets it settle. He compares it, unflinchingly, to the apartment he shares with Lou Ellen and Cecil—where the walls are too thin, the lightbulbs buzz, the heat is a gamble, and the couch has a mysterious stain that no one talks about. Where the books are secondhand, the furniture is scavenged, and everything smells like burnt coffee and effort.

And for once, he doesn’t feel the usual stab of shame. Just contrast. Just difference. Nico’s world has always had deeper shadows and richer fabric. Will’s has always been held together with staples and stubbornness. But standing here now, in Nico’s space, with Nico’s hands still warm from holding him, it doesn’t feel like trespassing.

It feels like invitation.

“You ate, right?” Nico asks, already padding toward the couch.

Will nod, following. “Real food. Silena and Clarisse would be proud.”

Nico hums like he approves. He sinks into the couch, legs folding beneath him, and gestures for Will to do the same. The second Will sits, Nico shifts to lean against him without a word—thigh pressed to thigh, pinky brushing his knee.

Neither of them mention it.

The silence is companionable, filled with the soft scratch of pens and the rustle of pages. Nico is scribbling lines on the back of a legal pad, muttering to himself in half-sentences—something about legacy optics, power dynamics, and trying not to sound like a funeral director with a god complex. Will, for his part, flips open his anatomy binder and pretends he isn’t memorizing the shape of Nico’s profile more than the spinal reflex arc.

At one point, Nico says, “What’s the word for when you use medical terminology to flirt with someone and they don’t realize it?”

Will blinks up. “...Clinical negligence?”

Nico huffs a laugh, crooked and quiet, and Will’s whole body warms like it’s been given sunlight intravenously.

Time passes without them noticing.

Outside, the city moves on—cars hissing through wet streets, distant sirens rising and falling like ocean tides—but inside the apartment, the world narrows to rustling pages and the quiet scratch of pens.

And Will—miraculously, impossibly—starts to focus.

Anatomy is his best subject. He knows this. But the chaos of the past week—the lack of sleep, the pressure, the freezer breakdown—had turned everything into white noise.

Now, in the low light of Nico’s apartment Will finally exhales all the way.

He reads a diagram of the lower limb arteries and realizes he recognizes every branch. He traces the course of the femoral nerve without second-guessing himself. Flashcards flip in and out of his hands like muscle memory.

It feels like coming up for air.

Eventually, Nico lets out a sigh like a deflated tire and slumps sideways, pen dropping onto the couch cushion. “I can’t look at another euphemism for death and dynasty tonight. If I have to rewrite one more paragraph about fiscal ethics, I’m going to bury myself alive under the rug.”

Will looks up from his notes, a little dazed but grinning. “You could just say you want a break.”

Nico glares at him with all the firepower of a sleepy cat. “Don’t be smug. I’m vulnerable.”

“Want to quiz me?” Will offers, holding out a thick stack of color-coded flashcards. “I’ve got everything from cranial nerves to pelvic arteries. Could use a trial run.”

Nico eyes the flashcards like they might bite. “I’m not responsible for what I mispronounce.”

“That’s okay,” Will says, smiling. “I am.”

Nico takes the cards with the caution of someone handling ancient scrolls. He squints at the first one. “What the hell is a… iliohypogastric nerve?”

Will doesn’t even pause. “Branch of the lumbar plexus. Sensory to the lower abdominal wall and gluteal skin.”

Nico flips the card over. “That’s correct, which is upsetting.” He pulls another. “Define… sphenopalatine foramen .”

Will tilts his head. “Small opening in the posterior part of the nasal cavity. Pathway for the sphenopalatine artery and nerves.”

Nico stares at him. “That doesn’t sound like a real place. That sounds like a Victorian haunting.”

Will laughs, bright and sharp. “Tell that to nosebleeds.”

They keep going.

Nico fumbles every pronunciation with increasing dramatics—“ ischiocavernosus ? That sounds illegal,” or “ obturator internus ? Pretty sure that’s a spell,”—and Will, steady and grinning now, answers every question without faltering.

It’s clinical poetry.

By the twelfth card, Nico lowers the stack and just stares at him.

Will raises an eyebrow. “What?”

“You’re disgusting,” Nico says flatly. “I mean that affectionately. You’re a terrifying genius and I hate you a little.”

Will snorts, cheeks going pink. “You’ve known I was good at anatomy.”

“I knew, ” Nico says, still staring, “but watching it in real time is like watching someone play a violin concerto while defusing a bomb. With one hand.”

Will bites back a smile, fidgeting with the hem of his sleeve. “I just needed to calm down enough to remember I knew it.”

Nico sets the flashcards aside, nudging Will’s knee with his own. “You do. You know it inside out.” A pause. “It’s kind of hot, actually.”

Will chokes on a laugh. “Wow. You’re into pelvic vasculature?”

“Only when you talk about it like that,” Nico mutters, eyes still fixed on him, warm with something quieter. “You’re brilliant, Will. I hope you know that.”

Will goes very still.

He’s had compliments before—grades, praise, the kind of exhausted awe Rachel throws at him during double shifts—but this is different. Nico isn’t just impressed. He’s seeing him, in that soft, devastating way he always does, like Will is something worthy, not because of what he can do but because of who he is when he’s not trying to prove anything at all.

For a moment, Will wants to kiss him again—wants to drop the flashcards, drag him into his lap, and press his mouth to Nico’s until he forgets how tired he is, how scared.

Instead, he smiles. Small. Lopsided. Soft. “You’re kind of biased.”

“I’m also right,” Nico says simply. Then, holding up another card: “Alright, genius. Impress me. What’s the difference between the semimembranosus and the semitendinosus?”

Will leans in, eyes gleaming. “Length, location, and the fact that I’m picturing your face every time I study the glutes.”

Nico throws the flashcard at him.

Will’s still grinning from the thrown flashcard when he notices it—that subtle shift in Nico’s expression.

A glint in his eye. Something mischievous, calculating. Dangerous in the way thunderstorms are dangerous: slow-building, magnetic, inevitable.

Nico sets the flashcards aside with far too much care, as if they’re sacred scrolls instead of dog-eared notecards smudged with Will’s highlighter. His fingers linger just a second too long, like maybe he’s reluctant to let the game end. Then he looks up, eyes unreadable, voice dipped in something low and thoughtful.

“You’re acing every question.”

Will blinks. He’s still holding the last card, half folded in his lap like it’s a lifeline. “I… yeah?”

“But exams aren’t just about recall,” Nico says, tone gone clinically casual, like he's reading symptoms off a chart. “They’re about pressure. High-stakes environments. Stress responses.” He tilts his head slightly. “Can you retain information under duress, Solace?”

Will narrows his eyes. “Are you trying to psych me out? Because if this is some reverse-psychology pep talk—”

“No.” Nico shifts forward on the couch with surgical precision, slow and deliberate, the kind of movement that suggests intent. Not menace, exactly. But close. “I’m saying we should replicate exam conditions.”

Will’s stomach flips. Not metaphorically—this is a full physiological event. Nico moves like liquid thought, fluid and certain, eyes locked on Will like he’s the final exam.

“Nico,” Will says, wary, already bracing for impact, “what are you doing?”

“Helping you study,” Nico murmurs, now settling across Will’s lap like he was made to fit there, palms braced lightly on his chest. His fingers curl slightly into the fabric of Will’s hoodie. “New approach. Sensory disruption. Multi-variable testing environment.”

Will opens his mouth, but his brain—usually so good with data, so reliable under fire—goes entirely, spectacularly blank. Gone. His neurons are filing HR complaints. His lungs forget their job.

And then Nico leans in, all dark eyes and darker promise, and his lips brush the shell of Will’s ear—soft, warm, devastating.

“Let’s begin.”

Will’s breath catches like it’s been snared.

“What’s this called?” Nico whispers, his voice molten now, words ghosting just behind Will’s earlobe, his breath cool and sharp like the edge of a scalpel.

Will stammers, already lightheaded, eyes blown wide. “Auricle. External ear. Innervated by… um… greater auricular nerve. Mostly.”

“Mmm.” Nico hums, pleased, and presses a kiss just beneath it—warm, soft, dangerously academic. “Correct.”

He shifts slightly, a slow realignment of weight and intent, mouth trailing down along the sharp curve of Will’s jawline. He kisses like he’s charting a constellation, like Will’s bones are stars he’s naming one by one.

“And this?”

Will’s voice cracks like static. “Mandible.”

Nico’s lips ghost over the hinge of his jaw. “Be more specific.”

Will gasps, trembling now under the weight of knowledge and want. “Angle of the mandible,” he breathes. “Posterior border of the ramus. Corner of the lower jaw. Innervated by the mandibular branch of the trigeminal—oh gods—”

“Impressive,” Nico murmurs, and kisses him there, just to be cruel. Just to be kind.

Will grips the couch like it might save him from drowning—except the water is made of Nico, and Will is more than willing to go under. His whole body feels like it’s been lit from the inside out—nerve endings sparking like faulty wires, neurons collapsing into a bonfire. 

Nico shifts again, this time slower, with the aching care of someone turning pages in a rare book. One hand slips beneath the hem of Will’s hoodie—fingertips cold and unrepentant—grazing warm skin, settling at the curve of his waist like punctuation.

He presses a kiss to the hollow beneath Will’s ear, lips dragging lower with a deliberate, maddening slowness.

“And here?” he asks, breath grazing the sensitive skin just above Will’s collarbone like a ghost brushing past the living.

Will’s head tips back against the cushions, eyes fluttering shut, mouth slightly parted. He’s barely hanging on. “Clavicle,” he croaks. “Sternal end. Articulates with the manubrium. You’re killing me.”

“Anatomy is a very serious subject,” Nico murmurs, nipping lightly at the spot like it’s a quiz he expects Will to ace. “Focus.”

“I am focused,” Will gasps, voice high and fraying. “I’m focused on not combusting.”

Nico laughs softly, the sound a dark curl of delight against Will’s skin. “Then consider this an applied learning assessment.”

Nico pulls back just enough to look at him—just enough to be smug about it. His expression is devastatingly composed, maddeningly serene, like he hasn’t just reduced Will Solace to academic rubble with nothing but his mouth and a non existent knowledge of anatomical terminology. Will could be speaking gibberish, for all Nico understands—but some ancient, instinctive part of him still aches to get it right, for him

Nico’s eyes flick down and then up again, slow as a metronome.

“So what I’m hearing is…” he says, head tilted, voice dark with amusement, “you’re performing well under pressure.”

Will catches his wrist—gently, but with intention. His fingers curl around Nico’s pulse point, grounding them both, and his gaze sharpens into something molten. “I’m starting to think you just like making me squirm.”

“Obviously,” Nico says, and then he kisses him again—less teasing this time, more decisive. Like he’s making a point in a lecture. Like he’s proving a theory.

And Will—ever the good student—still finds the presence of mind to mutter against his mouth, “You’re really lucky I’m into both medicine and masochism.”

Nico huffs a soft laugh that melts right into the kiss, like sugar into tea. He doesn’t pull back. If anything, he leans in further, lips brushing the corner of Will’s mouth again and again, not quite kissing—more like underlining, marking his place with each slow breath. Possessive, but in a way that’s oddly tender, like he’s making notes in the margin of something precious.

His fingers find their way back beneath Will’s hoodie, colder now, dragging upward with a kind of reverence that makes Will shiver.

Will hisses between his teeth. “Gods—your hands are freezing.”

“Shhh,” Nico says, the glint in his eyes bright enough to spark static. “I’m studying.”

“You’re not—”

“Shut up, pre-med.”

With a smooth tug, he pushes the hoodie higher, rucking it up over Will’s ribs until the fabric bunches at his sternum. The room is awash in dim gold—lamp light curling along the ridges of Will’s stomach, catching on the faint sheen of sweat along his skin like a spotlight in a cathedral. Nico’s hands settle there, at his waist, cool thumbs brushing just above the waistband of his sweats.

It’s electric. Not metaphorically. Will feels his whole nervous system light up like someone’s flipped the switch.

Nico looks down at him like a painter examining his canvas. Or a scientist about to poke something with a very expensive instrument. “Alright,” he says, voice entirely too calm, “what’re we looking at here?”

Will swallows hard, eyes flickering closed. “Um. Rectus abdominis. External obliques.”

Nico’s hands shift slightly, tracing along the curve of muscle. Will sucks in a breath so sharp it whistles through his teeth.

“You—oh gods—you’re definitely on the obliques right now.”

Nico’s thumbs sweep inward, pressing lightly just below Will’s ribs, calibrated and exact.

“This?” he murmurs.

Will’s head tips back, curls mussed against the couch cushions. He might be glowing. “Linea alba. Midline tendon. Divides the rectus muscles. Please keep touching me academically.”

Nico’s laugh is low, delighted, almost giddy with how much power he has right now. “You’re such a freak.”

“Says the guy giving a pop quiz with his hands,” Will pants.

“I’m being supportive,” Nico says, and the sheer gall of him is almost enough to make Will combust on the spot.

Will lets out a sound that isn’t quite a laugh and isn’t quite a whimper—a breathless, broken thing stuck between awe and agony.

“You’re—okay—still technically on the xiphoid process,” Will manages, fingers curling in Nico’s hoodie. “So I can’t even argue with that.”

Nico smirks against his skin, like he knows he’s just won another round in a game only he is allowed to redefine.

“Gods, you’re hot when you know things.”

Will blinks down at him, flushed and breathless, eyes dazed but full of fondness. “You’re the one who started this game.”

“And I’m winning,” Nico says, his smugness softened by something quieter now—something bordering on awe. His hands trail up slowly, palms warm as they spread over Will’s chest, fingers curving reverently along muscle. Or maybe they’re still cold, and it’s just Will burning beneath them, lit up from the inside out.

“Pecs?” Nico asks, casually, like it’s a question on a quiz and not the start of another undoing.

“Pectoralis major,” Will replies, biting back a smile that’s half pride, half plea. “Fan-shaped. Covers the upper anterior chest wall. Innervated by the medial and lateral pectoral nerves.”

Nico’s mouth twitches, pleased. “And this?” he asks, fingertips ghosting beneath Will’s arms, tracing the contours of muscle along his side.

Will lets out a shaky laugh. “Serratus anterior. You’re really going for extra credit.”

“Do I get a prize?” Nico murmurs, his voice dipping dangerously close to reverent now, like he's not even teasing anymore—like he wants the answer to mean something.

Will shifts beneath him, breath catching, eyes darker now with the weight of it all. “You’re already sitting on it.”

Nico blinks, startled, and then flushes, eyes crinkling as his teeth sink into his lower lip in a losing battle not to laugh. “Okay,” he says, quietly. “You win that round.”

Will’s the one who’s smug now—curls mussed, eyes bright, chest rising and falling fast beneath Nico’s touch. “Just admit it,” he says, lips quirking. “You’re into me for my brain.”

“And your abs,” Nico replies without hesitation. 

They hover for a beat, foreheads resting together, breath mingling in the quiet between them, like the world has narrowed to this: gold light, the hush of skin, and the closeness of shared air.

There’s no do you want to… or should we… —just a shared look, warm and wanting, and then Nico’s fingers curling in the hem of Will’s hoodie as he pulls back and says, voice low:

“Come with me.”

Will follows without hesitation.

They leave the flashcards scattered on the couch. Will’s laptop stays on the coffee table, still open to a perfectly highlighted diagram of the brachial plexus. His phone buzzes once from inside his backpack—probably Lou Ellen sending blurry celebratory selfies from wherever she and Cecil ended up—but he doesn’t check it.

Neither does Nico. His phone is face down on the kitchen counter, forgotten next to an untouched mug of tea.

They disappear down the hall, into the dim hush of Nico’s room.

It’s darker here, cooler—quiet in a way that feels sacred, like a cathedral hollowed out for one. The curtains are drawn tight against the city, muting the skyline to a soft gray glow. The only light comes from a cracked antique lamp on the bedside table, casting gold across the walls like candlelight in a crypt.

Will takes it in slowly.

The shelves are crammed and uneven—rows of books with cracked spines and dog-eared corners, tiny Greco-Roman statues, a chunk of obsidian no bigger than a fist, scattered candles burned all the way down to their wicks. A Mythomagic figurine is tucked behind an old clock, like it’s hiding. There’s a framed photo—black and white—of two children near a fountain, the glass slightly fogged.

The bed is unmade. The blankets are black and gray and tangled like seaweed, as if Nico left in the middle of some academic exorcism and never came back. There’s a sweater half-hung from the headboard. A textbook lies open, spine-broken and face-down on the floor.

He takes a step further in, heart thudding in his throat, eyes adjusting to the warm hush of the roomThis is the most unguarded version of Nico he’s ever seen—this messy, private softness he doesn’t show anyone. It’s raw. Human. Real.

He turns—

And then Nico is there again, drawing him close with a kind of quiet urgency that leaves no room for second thoughts. Will feels like a living diagram. Like something sacred. Not just studied—but understood.

“Still feeling confident?” Nico murmurs, his nose brushing along Will’s cheek, his breath warm where it catches just behind Will’s ear.

Will hums, smiling against his jaw, drowsy with affection. “I’m a walking Netter’s Atlas right now.”

“Prove it,” Nico whispers, and nudges him back onto the bed with a hand that’s more caress than command.

Will goes easily, landing with a soft huff and an even softer grin, elbows propping him up as he gazes up at Nico with a gleam in his eye. “Where do you want to start?”

Nico crawls over him slow as a shadow, hair falling into his eyes, mouth already parted like he’s one breath away from something he can’t quite say aloud. “Back muscles?” he asks, low and casual—too casual.

Will’s heart skips a beat, then the next. “You don’t even know what those are.”

Nico smirks, completely unbothered. “Nope.”

Then—without preamble—he leans down and runs the tip of his nose along the length of Will’s throat, slow and deliberate, like he’s trying to memorize him by scent alone. Every inhale an invocation. Every exhale a benediction.

What follows feels less like escalation and more like gravity. Clothes slip aside in pieces. Fingers map the familiar like it’s newly discovered. Their mouths find each other again and again, not out of urgency, but memory. Like this isn’t the first time or the last. Like it’s always been inevitable.

Will’s pulse beats steady now—not the sharp panic of earlier in the week, but something grounded. Something sure. He knows where he is. Who he’s with.

And then there’s nothing but heat.

Their banter softens into laughter, laughter into quiet sighs, and eventually even the teasing fades into something slower—gentler—like the world shrinking to just skin and breath and the shared space of a bed that holds no expectations except stay.

Outside, the city goes on. Their phones buzz in another room. The world waits.

But here, now—Will learns the anatomy of love by heart.

***

Will wakes to the sound of his own name being said too sharply, too loudly, and all at once the quiet of Nico’s room shatters like glass dropped in a cathedral.

“Will—get up. Now.”

He blinks into darkness, disoriented, heart already hammering from the tone, body slow to catch up. Nico is curled against him, boneless with sleep, breath warm at the curve of Will’s neck. The sheets are tangled around their legs. Will is shirtless, wearing nothing but Nico’s pajama pants—which are far too short, riding up around his calves, and a little too tight in ways that feel suddenly, wildly inappropriate.

The door is wide open.

Jason is standing in the doorway, looking rumpled and half-dressed in a threadbare t-shirt and gray joggers, hair flattened on one side like he was just dragged out of bed. Behind him, Piper hovers sleepily in a comically oversized shirt—clearly Jason’s—her hair pulled up in a crooked bun, arms crossed tight like she's only just registered she's awake.

“What—” Will tries, voice rough and slurred. His brain is still molasses, stuck in the heat of sleep and the memory of Nico’s mouth. “What’s—why are you—”

Jason strides in, ignoring the mess of limbs and the very obvious implication of what’s just happened in this bed. “Wake him up,” he says, low and urgent. “We have to go. Now. I mean it.”

Will pushes himself upright, limbs aching in protest, blood rushing loud in his ears. The lamp on the bedside table is still on, casting the room in soft gold and shadows. It feels dreamlike. Unreal.

“Go where ?” he croaks, glancing between Jason and Piper, then down at Nico, who hasn’t even stirred. “It’s—what time is it?”

Jason rakes a hand through his hair, clearly barely holding it together. “Three. Almost. Doesn’t matter. You need to wake Nico. We don’t have time.”

Will’s stomach drops. The tone—Jason’s tone —isn’t something he hears often. It’s not anger, not panic exactly, but something colder. Sharper. Urgency like a blade pressed against the moment. And Jason Grace doesn’t do panic. Not visibly. Not unless it’s bad .

Will shakes Nico’s shoulder, gently at first. “Hey—Nico. Wake up. Something’s wrong.”

Nico groans low in his throat and shifts, pressing closer, his face burrowing into the crook of Will’s neck like he’s chasing warmth. “Mmf. No.”

“Nico,” Will tries again, more insistent this time, but all he gets is a muffled grumble and a slurred stream of Italian—soft, drowsy syllables like sleep speaking through him.

“ Cinque minuti… sei caldo… lasciami dormire, ” Nico mumbles, voice thick with sleep, entirely unaware that Jason Grace is currently looming over the bed like a particularly intense thundercloud at three a.m.

Will would give anything to stay. To sink back down beneath the covers and let Nico pull him under again, back into the heavy, golden quiet. But Jason’s voice is sharp behind him, low and urgent— We have to go. We don’t have time —and Will’s stomach is already twisting.

“Nico,” he says again, fingers threading into his hair, gentle but firm. “You need to wake up. Something’s happening.”

Nico lets out an annoyed, half-conscious groan and wraps his arm tighter around Will’s waist, like he can physically hold him in place. “ È troppo presto… ” he mutters, nuzzling against his chest. “ Che rottura. ”

Will glances up—Jason’s moving in tight, controlled circles near the end of the bed, each step silent but taut with purpose. His posture is rigid now, spine straight, arms folded like he’s holding himself together by force. Piper stands just behind him, not quite in the room, her brows knit and her eyes sharp despite the hour. One hand rubs absently at her temple, the other curled into a loose fist at her side, like she’s itching to do something— anything —to make this make sense.

“Jason and Piper are here,” Will murmurs. “They’re freaking out. I think it’s serious.”

That finally gets through. Nico tenses slightly. One eye cracks open, groggy and bleary. “Jason?”

Will nods. “Yeah. And Piper. I don’t know what’s going on. Jason just keeps saying we have to go.”

Nico blinks harder, like he’s trying to drag himself to the surface of his own thoughts. He exhales through his nose, slow and reluctant, then begins to untangle from Will, still clinging for a second longer like his body hasn’t quite caught up with his mind.

He sits up stiffly, hair flattened on one side, eyes narrowed at the figures hovering in the doorway. “Jason,” he croaks, voice still rough with sleep. “What the hell is going on?”

Jason doesn’t answer right away.

Will’s gaze drops—almost involuntarily—to Jason’s hands.

And freezes.

Jason’s holding a phone.

Not his own.

Will sits up straighter, blood thudding hot behind his eyes. “Wait—why do you have my phone?”

Jason’s exhale is sharp, half a sigh, half a warning. “Gods, you two sleep like the dead. It’s been ringing non-stop out there. Piper and I were asleep—it woke us both up.”

Will’s stomach turns. “So… you answered it?”

Jason nods, jaw working, something unreadable flickering behind his eyes. “Yeah. I didn’t know what else to do. I thought it might be—something serious.”

Will’s heart is already racing, but it kicks harder at that.

There’s a long, brittle silence. The kind that happens before bad news.

“It was Lou Ellen,” Jason says finally, his voice lower now, strained around the edges. “She sounded drunk—and completely wrecked. Crying so hard she could barely breathe. I put her on speaker but Piper and I couldn’t even make out what she was saying at first. Just panic. Total panic.”

Will’s blood goes cold.

He’s moving before he can think, flinging the sheets off in one panicked motion, feet hitting the rug with a thud. His muscles protest, still sluggish with sleep, but his body ignores it. His heart is already racing—too fast, too loud—beating behind his ribs like it’s trying to outrun the words forming in his head.

Nico reaches for him instinctively, hand brushing his back, steadying. But Will barely registers the touch. His breath is tight in his chest, shallow and uneven, lungs refusing to cooperate.

Lou Ellen.

Drunk. Hysterical. Calling over and over.

He feels sick.

His mind is already playing out the worst possibilities—flashing images of her stumbling into traffic, crying in a dark alley, bleeding in some hospital hallway with no one to speak for her. He remembers the way she danced through the apartment earlier that night, laughing in Cecil’s jacket, eyeliner still smudged from finals stress. We’re celebrating, Solace, don’t wait up.

“She and Cecil went out tonight,” Will says, too quickly, the words tumbling over each other like they’re trying to outrun the feeling rising in his chest. “They were celebrating—exams are over. They were just out to have fun. That’s all.”

Jason nods, grim. “I know. She mentioned it. She’s… she’s okay. Shaken up, but she’s safe.”

Safe. The word doesn’t land. It ricochets around Will’s skull without sticking. He sways slightly as he stands, like gravity just shifted, the room tilting beneath him.

“What happened?” he asks, voice too loud in the stillness, sharp around the edges. “Did someone hurt her? Was she alone? Did—”

Jason cuts him off. “It’s not her.”

Will’s mouth is still open, breath frozen in his throat.

Jason’s jaw tightens. “It’s Cecil.”

That name. That one word. It slams into Will like a car crash.

“He’s been arrested.”

Everything stops.

The world narrows. Sound dulls. Even Jason’s voice seems far away now—muted, distorted, like Will is hearing it through a wall of water.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. Just blinks once, slow and hollow.

“What?” he says finally, but the word sounds small, like it left his mouth and shrank in the air.

Jason doesn’t repeat himself. He just looks at Will, steady and grim, holding his gaze like he’s bracing for the impact of the news he’s already delivered.

Will’s breath shudders out of him. He reaches blindly for the edge of the dresser, grounding himself on the nearest solid thing, but it’s not enough. His thoughts are sprinting in all directions—Lou Ellen’s voice shaking, the smell of tequila on her jacket, Cecil joking that he'd sweet-talk his way past any bouncer in the city. The laugh Will had given in return. The last thing he’d said to them.

“Gods,” he breathes. “No—no. Cecil. He—”

“Will,” Nico says, gently.

It’s the first time he’s spoken since the panic started, but his voice cuts through the fog like a thread. He’s beside Will in an instant, a steady presence at his side, warm hands curling around Will’s wrist, thumb stroking once along the vein like a pulse check. I’m here , it says without needing words.

Will swallows, hard. His hands are trembling.

Nico’s fingers tighten around his. “We’ll figure it out, okay?”

Will nods, barely.

Jason steps forward. His expression hasn’t changed, but there’s urgency in every line of him now. “We have to go. Right now. I’ll explain on the way.”

Notes:

hehe. bet you weren't expecting that ending, huh?

also, yes—this was originally going to fade back for a full smut scene in extra credit. but the thing about writing anatomically accurate makeouts is: it’s all fun and games until someone says “inguinal ligament” and the mood dies a horrible, sterile death. at a certain point, it just starts to feel like you're writing an erotic lab report. may revisit in the future if the spirit (or the lust) moves me, but for now: this is all you get. fade to black. vibe-checked pectorals. horny jail for everyone.

next chapter’s bringing the angst, so enjoy your cuddly little serotonin high while it lasts. :)

stay hydrated. stay gay. don’t get arrested.

Chapter 48: I Meet My Rich Evil Twin and the Cops Love Him More Than Me

Outside, it’s the kind of cold that feels personal. The sidewalk’s slick with half-melted slush and the wind cuts sideways, knifing through Will’s thin hoodie like it knows he didn’t come prepared. Everything smells like wet pavement, exhaust, and something faintly chemical leaking from the subway grate across the street.

They stand there for a moment—him, Nico, Piper, Jason—just outside the station’s main entrance. A squat, blocky building with flickering lights above the door and a kind of institutional heaviness that makes Will’s stomach clench on instinct.

Jason’s already pulling his sleeves straight, adjusting his posture, scanning the windows like he’s memorizing floor plans. Piper’s phone is in her hand but she’s not looking at it. Her coat is belted tightly over her pyjama bottoms, hair twisted up in a glossy clip that somehow makes her look like she’s on her way to seduce a corrupt senator.

Will glances down at himself.

His jeans are thrifted, skinny at the ankle but loose at the waist from too many washes. The faded band shirt is technically clean, but definitely wrinkled. His hoodie is inside-out. He hadn’t realized that when Nico handed it to him in a panic while they were rushing out the door. It still smells like Nico’s apartment. Like old books and expensive soap and that candle Nico insisted wasn’t “romantic,” just “aesthetic.”

They push through the door together, and the air inside hits him like a slap—too bright, too hot, too much everything . The front desk is bathed in flickering fluorescence, and the whole space hums with tension: buzzing overhead lights, murmured voices, a vending machine coughing up an off-brand soda two rooms away.

And suddenly—suddenly—Will is aware . Of every inch of him.

How wrinkled his shirt is from lying crumpled on the bedroom floor. How visible the hickeys on Nico’s throat are. How tight he’s holding Nico’s hand. How obvious it is, walking into a police station at three a.m. with his too-expensive, too-beautiful boyfriend in all black and kiss-bitten skin. He’s aware of his posture, his limp hair, the way his hoodie sleeve keeps slipping over his thumb. He’s aware that Nico is standing half a step closer than necessary and that they probably smell like sex and sweat and fear.

He’s aware of the way the desk sergeant—middle-aged, ruddy-faced, cop-thick around the middle—looks up and sees them .

Not as people. As something else .

Will can’t quite describe the look except that it’s not surprise. It’s not curiosity. It’s… assessment. That flicker of contempt barely hidden behind tired eyes. Like he’s already made up his mind about who they are, what they’re doing here, and how much help they deserve.

Jason’s voice cuts through it, smooth and practiced.

“Jason Grace,” he says, stepping up to the desk like he belongs here. He’s wearing that blazer he had slung over the back of his desk chair, the one that makes him look five years older and annoyingly credible. “We were told a friend of ours was brought in about forty minutes ago. Cecil Markowitz. Can you confirm if he’s being held here?”

The desk sergeant exhales like Jason’s voice personally offended him. He doesn’t look at the computer. Doesn’t type anything. Just leans back in his chair with the smug, glacial stillness of a man who knows the longer he makes you wait, the more power he has.

“Name again?” he says, like Jason hadn’t been perfectly clear.

Jason doesn’t flinch. “Cecil Markowitz. Brought in about forty minutes ago.”

Now the sergeant makes a show of squinting at the screen. “You a relative?”

Jason offers a tight, practiced smile. “No. I’m his emergency contact. I’m also a third-year pre-law student at Olympus University, and I’d like to know the charges.”

Will doesn’t miss the lie—he doubts Cecil listed an emergency contact, and Jason sure as hell wouldn’t be it—but he keeps his mouth shut.

That gets the faintest twitch of interest. Not much—just a flicker of calculation behind the man’s eyes as he scans their group again. To the sergeant, Jason’s the best of a bad bunch: white, clean-cut, articulate in the way that makes bureaucrats nervous. He fits into the system just enough to be inconvenient. The kind of guy who might actually know someone. The kind you don’t want complaining to the wrong inbox.

“Uh-huh,” the sergeant says. Still slow, still obstinate—but now he’s at least pretending to look. “Hold on.”

There’s no apology, no real courtesy, but something shifts. The tone dulls—less hostile now, shaded with the kind of performative politeness reserved for people who might know someone, or worse, know how to make noise in the right places. It’s not respect—just caution, calculated and thinly veiled.

Will sees the change as clearly as the badge number pinned to the man’s chest.

Jason gets something that almost passes for civility.

Piper tilts her head slightly toward Jason, voice like silk wrapped around steel. “You might want to mention we already spoke to Judge Mannheim’s office,” she says softly. “Just in case they need a reminder of who’s watching.”

That gets a twitch of reaction—the briefest pause in the sergeant’s hands.

Will doesn’t know who Judge Mannheim is. He’s pretty sure Piper doesn’t either. No one called a judge. The car ride over had been mostly him unraveling—knee bouncing, breath hitching, brain replaying worst-case scenarios on loop—while Nico murmured steady reassurances, his hand a quiet weight on Will’s thigh. Jason and Piper had barely spoken, their silence sharp-edged, not calm but calculated. Watching. Thinking.

She’s bluffing now—beautifully, ruthlessly. Like it’s second nature. Like she’s been playing this game her whole life.

The sergeant doesn’t look at her. Just clicks the mouse once, slow and deliberate, like he's pretending the screen matters more than the people in front of him.

“And who’s she supposed to be?”

“Piper” she says, stepping forward with the kind of grace that makes Will forget she’s wearing pyjamas under a designer coat. “I’m also an emergency contact. And a close friend.”

She smiles—but it’s not a nice smile. It’s the kind you wear to a funeral where the priest keeps mispronouncing the name. Her tone is velvet, smooth and unbothered, but her eyes are already scanning his badge number like she’s mentally engraving it onto his gravestone.

“You’re clearly very busy,” she says, pleasant as anything. “But we’d appreciate a little transparency. It’s been almost an hour, and we were told someone from this precinct made the arrest.”

The sergeant finally looks up. Not at her face. Just—up.

His gaze skims from the expensive coat to the bare ankle peeking out beneath her pyjama pants, then lingers—just a second too long—on the curve of her waist and the sliver of skin visible at her collarbone. Like he’s cataloguing her, not listening.

He grins, slow and greasy, like he thinks the attention is a favor.

“Well, Miss, we got a lot of folks coming through here. Lotta stories. Can’t just give out information to anyone with a pretty face and a bedtime sob story.”

Before she can answer, there’s a low whistle from somewhere behind them. A man in handcuffs being led through the booking area cranes his neck to look at Piper, muttering something obscene to the officer escorting him. The officer laughs.

Another cop passing by doesn’t even pretend to be discreet—he slows down, eyes fixed on Piper’s legs like they’re something he can buy. “Damn,” he mutters to his partner, nudging him with his elbow. “They don’t usually look like that when they come in at 3 a.m.”

Piper blinks once. Slow. Lethal.

“Of course not,” she replies, voice syrupy and unshaken. “But since this involved officers responding to an incident at a licensed civilian venue, I assumed your department still valued transparency. Unless that’s been replaced by catcalls.”

That gets a reaction. Not from the sergeant—he’s still stuck between leering and buffering—but from an officer walking behind the desk, mid-thirties, buzzcut, and already smirking like he’s waiting for an excuse.

“Relax, sweetheart,” he calls. “Your boyfriend’s probably just cooling off in the tank. Lotta guys cry their first time.”

“Do you usually harass women on duty, or is this a special occasion?” she asks, still smiling. “Just wondering what I should lead with when I call the Times .”

Will watches Nico’s knuckles go white where they rest on the desk. Jason doesn’t move, but the air around him sharpens, almost imperceptibly—like a pressure drop before a storm.

And Will—

Will feels it too. A thread of fury coils low in his gut, hot and mean. He wants to step in front of her. Wants to claw the smirk off the sergeant’s face. Piper can handle herself—she always has—but something about the way they look at her, like she’s on display, like they’re imagining what’s under the coat, like they’re entitled to imagine—

It makes his hands curl into fists.

Jason takes a breath like he’s counting to ten in Latin. “Sir,” he says, tight and professional, “with all due respect, under New York state law, you’re obligated to provide basic information about someone in custody upon request of their emergency contacts, especially if no attorney has yet been assigned.”

The desk sergeant finally types something. Slowly. One key at a time.

“I’m aware of the law,” he says. “But maybe your friend should’ve thought about his rights before he started a bar brawl.”

Jason opens his mouth—but Piper touches his arm, not stopping him, just anchoring. Calm in the way only someone used to commanding attention can be.

Will watches from just behind Nico, their joined hands loose between them, the warmth between their palms now edged with unease.

The station is bright in that hollow, institutional way—every light too cold, every sound too sharp. Will feels like he’s stepped into a play where everyone else already knows their lines. The roles were cast long before they walked through the door.

Jason—white, clean-cut, dressed like someone who interns for a senator—draws respect, if only reluctantly. He fits a shape the system recognizes.

Piper—composed even in pyjamas, sharp cheekbones and sharper eyes framed by a twist of glossy hair—carries the kind of polish money buys. But she’s a woman, and the moment she opens her mouth, the respect curdles into commentary.

Will remembers her telling him once—her family is Cherokee. She said it over lukewarm tea in the trio’s kitchen, voice low but steady, sharing stories passed down like heirlooms, the kind that never make it into textbooks. The cops don’t know that. They don’t need to. They just see that she isn’t white. And for them, that’s enough.

Nico leans in, voice low. “You okay?”

Will nods without thinking. Nico’s thumb brushes his knuckle—steadying, gentle.

And then there’s Nico himself. Just as wealthy, if you know how to read the tailoring. But what marks them isn’t money. It’s the way they’re standing—too close, too familiar. There’s something unmistakable about them: the flushed closeness of people who’ve only just pulled themselves out of bed, who didn’t have time to pretend they were anything but what they are.

Will can feel it—the eyes that linger too long, the ones that skim over them like a scan for fault lines. He wonders how fast they'd shut him down if he asked a question. How long before they decided he wasn’t here to help someone—he was here to be processed.

Finally, the sergeant grunts.

“He’s here,” he says. “One count assault. Claimed it was self-defense. We’ll see what sticks. If you’re here to post bail, you’ll have to wait.”

“Assault?” Will blurts before he can stop himself. “Are you serious? He—”

Nico’s hand finds his arm, a quiet, deliberate pressure—firm enough to ground him without pulling him back. Will exhales, barely, the breath catching in his throat like he’d forgotten it was there at all. And just like that, he remembers where they are.

Jason steps forward, voice calm. “Can you clarify the charge? Under New York Penal Law, assault can mean a lot of things.”

The sergeant gives him a long, unimpressed look. “Second degree. Injured a civilian. At least that’s what it says in the report. If you’ve got legal questions, you can save them for arraignment.”

Jason doesn’t flinch. “If it’s second-degree, that means the injuries were serious enough for hospital transport—or he used a weapon. That’s a pretty specific distinction.”

The sergeant smirks, clearly not used to being challenged with statute numbers at 3 a.m. “Like I said. Wait for arraignment.”

“Can we see him?” Piper asks, chin lifted, tone all velvet and steel.

The sergeant leans back in his chair and jerks his head toward a row of battered plastic seats against the far wall. “You can sit. That’s about all you’ll be doing for the next hour.”

He goes back to his screen like they’ve already ceased to exist.

Will doesn’t move right away. He’s still processing the word assault , still trying to fit it around Cecil’s name and make it make sense.

Then he sees her.

Lou Ellen, hunched on a plastic chair in the far corner like she’s trying to disappear into the wall. Her eyeliner is smudged, her knees are bouncing, and the moment she spots them, her face crumples. Will doesn’t even think—he moves, fast and graceless, crossing the room in a blur of adrenaline and guilt and something dangerously close to tears.

“Lou,” he breathes, and she’s already on her feet, throwing her arms around him.

She’s shaking. Or maybe he is. They hold on like it’s the only solid thing either of them has had all night.

“I didn’t know who else to call,” Lou Ellen whispers against his shoulder. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“You did everything right,” Will says, squeezing her tighter. “We’re here. You’re okay.”

She pulls back enough to look at the others. Piper gives her a nod, Jason a quiet, reassuring “Hey.” Nico’s expression is unreadable, but his eyes soften.

Lou Ellen wipes at her face with the sleeve of her jacket, then gestures vaguely toward the back of the station. “They’ve got him in holding. They won’t tell me anything, and I’m not family, so they wouldn’t let me see him—just stuck me out here like I’m the one who started the fight.”

“What happened?” Jason asks gently. “From the top.”

Lou Ellen takes a shaky breath and lowers herself back into the chair, Will crouching beside her like he’s anchoring her there. She runs her hands through her hair, fingers catching on a knot she doesn’t bother to untangle.

“We were just—out. This place on Avenue B. Cecil likes it ‘cause the bartender lets him plug in his phone and play music, and the owner used to be in a band or something. Divey, but cheap, and the kind of place you don’t have to be cool to get into, you know?”

They nod.

“And then these guys show up. Ivy League types. Button-downs and loafers and that vibe like they’re slumming it for fun. I could feel it the second they walked in—like they were looking for someone to pick on.”

Her voice cracks slightly. She swallows and pushes on.

“One of them comes up to me and starts flirting. Except not really—it was like a dare. Like they were laughing behind me. I told him to go away, but he kept pushing. Said something gross, I don’t even remember what, and then Cecil was just—there. He got between us. Told him to back off. And then it just—exploded.”

She presses her palms to her eyes. “Cecil didn’t start it. He just shoved the guy back. And then the guy swung first. The bouncers broke it up, but the cops showed up right after, and only one of them got cuffed.”

Will’s stomach sinks.

“Did the guy give a name?” Piper asks, her voice low but edged with steel.

Lou Ellen shakes her head. “No. They pulled him into a room. I haven’t seen him since.”

Jason mutters a curse, soft and surgical. Piper’s mouth presses into a line, arms folded tight around her ribs.

Will doesn’t move. Lou Ellen is still trembling beside him, and he leans into her slightly, hand steady on her back. She’s blinking fast, like she’s trying not to cry again, but her whole body keeps giving her away.

“I’ll get her some water,” Nico murmurs, already rising. He slips past them quietly, and Will feels the absence as soon as it’s there, like a pressure change.

Jason runs a hand through his hair, eyes already scanning the room like he’s building a legal case from the dust. “Okay. Bail first. It probably won’t be much—they’ll want to keep it simple, get him processed and out of here. I know someone who knows Judge Feldman. If he’s on shift tonight, we can probably swing something before morning.”

“Judge Kwon might still be on,” Piper says, already pulling her phone out of her coat pocket. “She owes my mom a favor from that zoning nightmare last year, remember? And my dad’s worked with a few of the bigger firms here—nothing criminal, but it’s all connected. One of his old business partners just got bumped to deputy AG for Queens.”

Will glances over, startled. He’s never heard Piper mention her father before—not once, not in all the months he’s known her. Her mother comes up constantly: gallery openings, fundraising events, cryptic quotes from the Times lifestyle section. But her dad? Nothing.

He files it away, even as the rest of the conversation gallops ahead.

“Wait—wasn’t your mom at that charity dinner with Castellanos last fall?” Jason says.

Piper nods. “The one that got shut down for fire code violations. She still got him to donate ten grand to that housing program.”

Jason whistles low. “Okay. Castellanos has juice. If we can get him to make a call—”

“Already texting,” Piper murmurs, scrolling with the speed of someone who’s done this kind of damage control before.

Will watches them trade names like currency—judges, lawyers, deputy DAs, city council members. He recognizes some from headlines on crumpled subway papers, others from the late-night news re-runs he listens to when anxiety won’t let him sleep. A few he remembers only because Jason has mentioned them before, usually in passing, like someone rattling off star athletes. These aren’t just people—they’re power brokers. The kind who can vanish a case or twist its narrative before the ink on a police report has even dried.

And Will’s grateful. He is. Truly.

But as Jason and Piper swap contacts with casual, terrifying fluency—like gossip passed over cocktails—all he can think is: what if we’d never become friends with the Seven at all?

It’s too easy to picture: another timeline, one twist different. No Nico, no Jason, no Piper. Just him alone in the apartment, hunched over anatomy notes while Lou Ellen’s number flashes across his phone.

He wouldn’t have known who to call. Wouldn’t have known how to help.

Just a tired pre-med kid in thrifted jeans with bad insurance and no connections, trying to reason with a system that doesn’t listen when people like him talk.

What happens to the people who don’t have a list of judges?

What happens to the ones without a Jason to talk down the desk sergeant, without a Piper who knows which phone calls to make, which names to drop?

The question twists under his ribs, uncomfortable and lingering.

His hands won’t stop shaking.

Nico returns with a paper cup and settles between them, passing the water to Lou Ellen with a quiet word. She takes it with a watery thank you, still trembling. Will leans in slightly from the other side, his shoulder brushing Nico’s. He tries not to look back at the front desk. Tries not to count how many times someone’s glanced at them like they’re the ones who caused the mess.

Piper is still scrolling, eyes scanning her contacts. “If I can get through to Eden’s assistant, we might have a backchannel to Judge Kwon before sunrise. And if all else fails, we still have your—”

“We can handle this without going through him,” Jason says abruptly.

Piper looks up, her thumb frozen mid-air. She doesn’t argue. Just nods once, crisp and professional. That—more than anything—tells Will exactly how loaded the topic must be.

Jason clears his throat and adjusts his cuffs, the gesture too stiff to be casual. “Let’s keep it clean. Straightforward. No need to escalate. No need to call him. It’s probably a misunderstanding.”

Will frowns. Him? Not the judge . Not the contact . Just— him . The word lands with weight, like a locked door in the middle of a conversation.

He glances at Nico for clarification, but Nico’s jaw is tight. He doesn’t look away from Lou Ellen, just mutters, “I’ll tell you later,” without elaboration, one arm now wrapped around her shoulders, steadying her as she trembles beside him.

Piper clears her throat and shifts her weight, fingers still curled around her phone. “Okay. If we go self-defense, we need to be smart about it. Who looked sober, who looked aggressive. If anyone was filming—or even if they weren’t—we can still establish that Cecil didn’t initiate. That matters.”

Lou Ellen nods, a little unsteadily. “He didn’t. He really didn’t. He—antagonized, yeah, okay, that’s fair. He was mouthy. But he never swung first.” Her hands tighten around the paper cup. “You know Cecil. He talks big. But he doesn’t like hurting people.”

Jason’s eyes flick up. “I hate to ask this, but—did he have a weapon?”

“No,” Lou Ellen says immediately. “Gods, no. He didn’t even have his keys out. Just his phone and wallet.”

Will’s jaw tightens. “He wouldn’t,” he snaps—sharper than he means to, the words slicing out of him like they’ve been waiting. Jason’s just trying to help, he knows that. Trying to line up the facts like any good future lawyer. But Will’s too tired for facts right now. Too tired for Jason’s careful neutrality.

Will’s been running on fumes for weeks now. Finals had gutted him—long nights folded over textbooks, caffeine sweats and bones aching from too many hours hunched over practice exams. He’s barely had time to eat, let alone breathe. The pressure hasn’t just been academic; it’s felt molecular. Like every cell in his body has been burning itself up just to keep moving forward.

And tonight—gods, tonight had almost been a reprieve. He and Nico had curled into each other like gravity had decided to show mercy for once. 

Clothes tossed in lazy arcs, the kind of laughter that only comes when you know someone wants you—wants you , not just your body, but the shy, aching mess of your soul too. Afterward, tangled up in each other’s warmth, Will had felt like he could finally exhale. He’d fallen asleep with Nico’s fingers curled against his chest, Nico’s breath soft against the curve of his throat, sweaty and smug and sore in that sweet, satisfied way.

And then Jason woke him up.

Now he’s here, heart still trying to catch up. All that warmth, that softness—it’s gone. Stripped away by the brutal overhead lights and the antiseptic chill of the station. Everything is sharp edges again: Jason’s voice, clipped and efficient; Piper’s pacing, shoes tapping like a countdown; the clatter of distant phones that keeps rearranging his pulse.The echo of weapon rings in his head like a verdict, like a warning.

“It’s Cecil,” he adds, lower now. “He runs his mouth, yeah, but he wouldn’t pull anything.”

Nico’s hand brushes his wrist—soft, grounding. He doesn’t say anything, just stands close enough for their arms to touch, his presence like a steady pulse beside Will’s fraying nerves.

Jason exhales, pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s building a case from memory. Will knows that gesture by now. He’s seen it a hundred times in study groups—Jason ticking facts off silently, playing both prosecutor and defense, calm even when the room is burning.

He hadn’t flinched when Will snapped at him. Hadn’t even blinked. Just absorbed the edge like it was nothing new, filed it away like another piece of the puzzle. That, somehow, only makes Will feel worse.

Jason shifts gears without missing a beat. “Okay. Lou—you said the other guy got pulled into a room when you arrived?”

She nods. “Yeah. Cops came out, called him back. He looked fine. Sweaty and pissed, but not bleeding or anything. No ambulance.”

Jason leans back slightly. “So he’s here. Not hospitalized. Not bandaged. No injury report.”

Before anyone can respond, the mood shifts.

A phone rings. Harsh. Immediate. A door slams open at the far end of the room and two officers stride out, jackets already half-on, heads low in conversation. Another follows, holding a clipboard, moving fast. The air hums—just slightly different now. Lou Ellen’s head snaps up.

Will feels it too. Not panic exactly, but momentum. Like something has just started moving, and they’re still standing still.

Piper lowers her voice. “Second-degree’s a stretch. If we can get someone to confirm he walked out with barely a bruise…”

Jason nods, jaw tight. “Without a weapon or injury, they’re overreaching. That’s leverage.”

Nico tilts his head. “Think they’re trying to make an example out of him?”

Jason doesn’t answer right away. Just glances toward the movement at the other end of the station, adjusts his cuffs again, and mutters, “Wouldn’t be the first time. We reviewed a case in my legal ethics seminar where—”

Jason doesn’t finish his sentence.

His gaze catches on something over Will’s shoulder, and he goes still—so still it startles Will more than if he’d shouted.His posture straightens, shoulders squaring with a tension that has nothing to do with waiting—and everything to do with recognizing a threat.

“What the—?” Jason mutters. “That’s... That can’t be right.”

Will turns, instinct tightening behind his ribs. “What?”

But Jason doesn’t answer. He’s still staring, eyes fixed across the room, like he hasn’t fully registered Will spoke—like whatever he’s seeing has pulled him out of the moment entirely.

Nico shifts closer to Will, their elbows brushing. His voice is low. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Will says—but something in the back of his mind is already bracing, like it knows exactly what’s coming.

Piper follows Jason’s gaze next, and she freezes. “Wait. No. That’s not— Is that the ADA?”

Everything inside Will jerks to attention.

“What?” he croaks. “ The ADA?”

Jason still hasn’t blinked. “Assistant District Attorney Themis,” he says grimly. “I’ve seen her argue policy on federal broadcast. She’s... not the kind of person you send for bar fights.”

Lou Ellen inhales too sharply. “You’re kidding.”

Will doesn’t move. He watches as the woman enters the precinct like she owns it—tall and immaculately put together despite the hour, her dark coat swirling behind her like a cloak of judgment. The fluorescent lights don’t dare flicker above her.

Her presence cuts through the room like a blade. Sharp heels. Precise stride. Eyes that scan without pausing on anyone too long—until they land on the front desk, and the sergeant shoots to attention.

Nico stands and steps half a pace forward, his expression unreadable, eyes fixed on Themis like he’s trying to place her. His fingers brush Will’s shoulder—wordless, grounding—but there’s tension in his jaw now, too.

Will bites his lip, voice hoarse. “What does this mean ?”

Jason finally exhales, though it’s not relief. “It means something’s changed.”

“They’re escalating,” Lou Ellen says, already panicking. “Why are they escalating?”

Will looks to the front desk, where Themis now stands—composed, commanding, her voice low but decisive. The sergeant is nodding, scrambling, a complete reversal of the smug disdain he showed earlier. Will’s seen enough courtroom dramas, read enough true crime transcripts to know: you don’t send in the ADA at three A.M. unless you want someone to bleed for it.

“We just wanted to bail him out,” he whispers. “Why is she here?”

Jason rubs the back of his neck. “Maybe… maybe we’re not the only ones with connections.”

There’s a beat of silence—Lou Ellen frowns into her cup, Piper mutters something under her breath, and Nico sinks back into his seat beside Will, shifting just enough for his knee to brush his. But Will barely registers it.

Will’s gaze slides back to the desk—back to Themis, still standing there like a verdict waiting to be delivered. The sergeant nods—once, then again—and pulls a folder from beneath the counter. A clipboard. A few forms. A sealed evidence bag handled with too much care. Then he gestures, and someone appears to escort Themis down the hall toward a private room.

Then—time stretches.

The lights buzz louder than they should. A printer sputters and chokes somewhere behind the desk. Down the hall, a door slams; laughter flares and dies like a switch flipped too fast. The vending machine coughs out something metallic and unwanted. Every sound feels slightly wrong, like the world is out of tune.

Will shifts. The plastic chair creaks beneath him. Across from him, Jason checks his phone, then pockets it again without unlocking it. Piper scrolls with forced focus. Nico’s fingers brush Will’s sleeve at intervals—absent, but grounding.

And then something changes.

A door creaks open, too slow to be casual. Officers adjust course with the subtle synchronicity of people following an unspoken cue. The desk sergeant moves with intent. A sealed tray of personal effects passes by in someone’s hands. A man in a wrinkled suit—intern? public defender?—slips behind the same door Themis disappeared through.

Another stretch of silence follows. Ten minutes, maybe more, swallowed whole by the fluorescent buzz and the kind of anticipation that feels like judgment wearing a uniform. No one looks directly at them—but Will can feel it anyway: the weight of glances that skate too fast, like people pretending not to see. Like someone’s already decided where they belong.

And then—movement again.

The swinging door groans open, deliberate and slow. ADA Themis steps through first, composed and unreadable, her expression sharpened to a blade’s edge.

Behind her follows a man—tall, pale, unmistakably wealthy despite the scuffle. His suit is designer, creased in all the wrong places from the fight, but still screaming old money and sharper lawyers. A long scratch carves down his cheek, angry and fresh. His mouth is tight, smug, like he’s already won. And his hair—pale gold, immaculate even in disarray—gleams under the fluorescent lights like it’s used to being admired.

He looks like the kind of guy who used to cut up teddy bears just to see what was inside—and then blamed the nanny for the mess.

Will straightens without meaning to, something cold and electric spiking through his spine. Because—gods. The resemblance is there. Not exact, not perfect, but close enough to be unsettling. A watered-down version of him, like someone ran his features through a filter that stripped out the warmth and kept the bone structure. They could pass for cousins. In another life—one with wealth and legacy and doors that opened on command—Will might have looked like that.

Might have been that.

He likes to think he wouldn’t have turned out like this guy. That he’d be like Nico or Hazel—privileged but still kind, still grounded. But there’s something uncanny in the mirror of it. The same blue eyes, only colder. The same blond curls, but glossier, more sculpted. A version of himself raised in entitlement instead of survival.

Lou Ellen goes rigid beside him, then grabs his sleeve—fist tightening hard enough to wrinkle the fabric, like if she lets go, she might fall through the floor.

“That’s him,” she breathes, voice cracking at the edges. “That’s the guy. The one who hit Cecil.”

Everything shifts. The others turn in sync, like gravity just pulled in a new direction.

Jason’s mouth presses into a hard, bloodless line. Piper’s eyes narrow, sharp and assessing, already calculating the fallout. Nico doesn’t say a word—but his whole body tenses, shoulders drawn back, gaze gone dark. There’s something surgical in the way he stares—like a blade waiting for permission.

“Gods,” Jason mutters, too low for anyone else to hear. “Of course it’s him.”

Will stares at them. “Wait—you know that guy?”

Three voices erupt at once.

“From camp,” Jason says, grim.

Piper groans, exasperated. “Oh, that little centurion cosplayer? Of course it’s him.”

“I never should’ve told him his shirt was tangled in the cable machine,” Nico mutters, ice in his voice. “Should’ve let it snap back and launch him across the gym. At least that way, he'd have gone out doing what he loved—pretending he was a war hero.”

Will blinks. “What?”

Jason waves a hand, already spiraling. “He used to go on and on about his bloodline like we were living in Game of Thrones —he said things like legacy unironically. His uncle’s a judge, or a senator, or maybe just rich—but he always made it sound like he had a direct line to the Pentagon.”

Piper talks right over him. “You couldn’t breathe wrong around him without him acting like it was treason. He once threatened to write up a camper code of conduct for fun. ”

Nico crosses his arms. “He called it a 'disciplinary charter.' Had a whole color-coded spreadsheet.”

Jason’s nodding furiously. “And the second-degree charge? The ADA showing up in the middle of the night? Yeah. No coincidence. He lives for power plays. And revenge.”

Piper huffs. “If he'd had a gavel and a little golden laurel wreath, he’d have crowned himself Emperor of Upstate.”

Will runs a hand through his hair, heart pounding. “Okay, but—is he actually dangerous or just a total dick?”

Nico doesn’t blink. “Yes.”

Piper snorts. “He was obsessed with the Romans. Like, full-on ‘when in Rome, conquer everything’ vibes. If he’d had a legion at his command back then, we’d have had a full-blown civil war in the mess hall.”

Jason exhales through his nose, grimacing. “He tried to make us swear loyalty oaths. Over grilled cheese.”

Will waits for the punchline. It doesn’t come.

Jason’s voice drops. “If he’s involved… this just got a lot messier.”

Across the room, Themis is speaking to the sergeant again, and Will can’t help watching them. She’s calm, composed, not wasting a single breath—but the sergeant is practically falling over himself to nod along. He’s deferential in a way he definitely wasn’t with them earlier. No clipped tones or passive-aggressive sighs. No waiting in corners like furniture.

Beside her, the man responsible for all of this lounges like the precinct was built to hold him . Not restless, not nervous— entitled . His gaze sweeps the room without landing, like he’s already written off everyone inside. He is dangerous in the way rich kids are when they know someone’s going to clean up the mess.

Lou Ellen blinks like she misheard. “What kind of summer camp was this? Oaths? Legions ? Are you guys hearing yourselves?”

Will lifts an eyebrow. “Yeah, no, this tracks. Nico told me about the Great S’mores Rebellion and the Oracle of Cabin Seven.”

Piper lifts a shoulder, eyes still fixed on the hallway. “It wasn’t that weird.” A beat. “Okay, no—it was. But not cult weird. More like… militarized theater kid weird.”

Jason mutters, mostly to himself, “Team-building exercises with too many concussions.”

Will glances at Lou Ellen—she’s still clutching her paper cup like it might be the last solid thing in the room, eyes wide and glassy.

“Okay,” Will says finally, his voice tight. “But who is this guy?”

No one answers right away. Then Nico speaks—low, even, and final.
“His name is Octavian.”

And just like that, the room feels colder. Across the precinct, the fluorescent buzz sharpens into a whine, high and needling. The name hangs there, thick in the air, souring it—familiar and poisonous, like the scent of smoke before you spot the fire.

Jason exhales through his nose—slow, deliberate, like he’s trying not to snap. Will sees the twitch in his jaw, the flicker of something sharp behind his eyes as he reaches for his phone.

“I’m calling my father,” Jason says. Quiet. Final. The tone of someone who knows exactly what happens next.

And Will knows—somehow, instinctively—that this is the him Jason meant earlier. The name he didn’t want to use unless he had to. The kind of person whose influence doesn’t just open doors—it makes people regret closing them. This isn’t a plea for help. It’s a warning.

Like drawing a sword and setting it on the table—not to admire, just to see who flinches.

Notes:

okay. so. this is the first chapter in a multi-chapter arc, because (a) we all know I like to yap, and (b) I have A Lot To Say™.

this section has been sitting in my brain for a while because I really wanted to dig into the themes of privilege, wealth, class dynamics, etc., particularly through Will’s POV—but also show how privilege is complicated. like yes, Piper’s a rich kid with powerful connections, but she’s also a woman of colour navigating a space where that absolutely matters. Will, meanwhile, is white and (in theory) straight-passing, but very visibly dating Nico and very viscerally aware of class difference and what it means to not “fit” the system in ways that matter when it counts.

 

I agonised over this chapter trying to get the nuance right, and honestly I don’t know if I landed it—but at some point you have to let go and hit post. this is that moment.

ALSO! Will is overwhelmed, under-slept, emotionally frayed, and mid-finals. everyone is running on adrenaline, trauma, and about four hours of sleep. people don’t always behave perfectly in high-stress situations, and I wanted that to be felt here—especially with the looming weight of how much power can (or can’t) protect you. (please bear this in mind as things progress).

anyway. justice for cecil. more chaos to come.

Chapter 49: Confession Pending: Please Hold for Emotional Damage

They’d been sitting there for a while, long enough for the silence to start feeling heavy.

Jason had stepped out to make a call—just long enough for everyone to pretend not to worry—and returned with tension stitched into every line of his face. Since then, he and Piper had been whispering in low, fast bursts near the vending machine, glancing toward the door like something was coming. Will tried not to eavesdrop. He stayed beside Lou Ellen, who was still curled small on the bench, Nico on her other side, both of them quiet in a way that made noise feel disrespectful. Will didn’t know if they were guarding her or just holding the pieces in place.

Then the air had shifted.

Not dramatically. Subtly. Like the pressure dropped, like the lights buzzed a fraction lower, sharper. Like the room itself paused to take a breath.

The front doors sigh open, and a man steps through—tall, tailored, out of sync with the sleepless hour. He doesn’t walk so much as arrive, like the first crack of thunder after too much silence. The kind of presence that doesn’t chase power, only collects it. Not storming. Not striding. Simply appearing—as if the air parts for him by instinct.

Will doesn’t need to ask. He sees it in the way Jason rises like a weather vane catching a shift in wind, in the flicker of something sharp and braced across Piper’s face. This has to be Jason’s father.

He wears authority like a charged sky—calm, but waiting. His suit is charcoal, cut to precision, the color of clouds right before they break. The coat over his shoulders moves with the weight of thunder, open and effortless, as though gravity minds its manners around him. No sign that it’s nearly four in the morning and everyone else is unraveling. He looks untouched by the hour, immune to exhaustion—like sleep is a mortal thing, and lightning never tires.

Will doesn’t know what he expected. Something older, maybe. Rougher. But there’s no softness in the man’s face. No sleep-rumpled vulnerability. He’s still handsome, in that way old power tends to be—gleaming hair graying at the temples, jaw carved like it was designed for newsprint. His eyes cut through the room like searchlights. Cold. Brilliant. Measuring.

Jason is already moving.

He doesn’t hesitate, just rises from his seat, smooths the front of his blazer like muscle memory, and heads toward the door. The motion is subtle but telling—less like a son greeting his father, more like a soldier  stepping into formation. There’s no hug, no handshake, not even a shoulder-clap. Just an exchange of low words, Jason’s head bowed slightly in deference. Not out of affection. Out of discipline.

They turn together and approach the desk.

The sergeant, to his credit, doesn’t faint. But he does go rigid. Will can see it from across the room—the way his posture straightens like an involuntary salute, the flicker of panic behind his eyes, the almost comedic speed with which he abandons whatever internal monologue he’d been rehearsing.

Jason says nothing. He simply folds his hands behind his back and lets his father speak.

And gods, when he speaks, the room listens.

His voice is deep without being loud, polished without effort. There’s no legalese, no performative charm—just precision. Every syllable lands like a verdict. He doesn’t ask for cooperation. He assumes it.

The sergeant nods. Twice. Fast. Then faster. Somewhere behind him, a phone rings and no one answers it. The booking clerk glances up and immediately glances back down again, as if eye contact might be mistaken for insubordination.

Will watches, transfixed, equal parts impressed and unnerved. There’s nothing chaotic about this power—it isn’t performative, isn’t loud. It’s silent dominance. The kind that doesn’t announce itself because it never had to ask permission in the first place.

Beside him, Piper lets out a slow breath through her nose. “Well,” she murmurs. “Zeus showed up.”

Will glances at her, brows lifting. “ Zeus ?”

“Yep,” Piper says, dragging the word out like it tastes bitter. She doesn’t sound surprised—just tired of being right. “You’ve seen his name on buildings. Probably flown one of his planes.”

“He owns an airline?”

“Several,” Nico says dryly. “Also an energy conglomerate, a security firm, two lobbying groups, and half the legal system from here to D.C.”

Will blinks. “He’s a lawyer?”

“Was,” Piper corrects. “Criminal defense. Scary good. Then he pivoted. Started building an empire instead.”

“He still holds sway,” Nico adds, eyes flicking toward the far hallway where Octavian and Themis just disappeared. “Judges, clerks, prosecutors. They remember who mentored them. Who pulled strings for their campaigns.”

Will shifts in his seat. His hoodie sleeve is bunched around his wrist again, and it feels too warm in here now, too bright. He’s acutely aware of the tension coiled in his shoulders, the dull throb behind his eyes, the way exhaustion clings to him like second skin. His jaw aches from how long he’s been grinding it. His hands won’t stay still. He feels like a college kid pretending not to drown while watching someone who’s never had to learn how to swim.

“He’ll help?” Lou Ellen asks, voice small beside him.

Piper nods once. “He doesn’t like mess. This is a mess. He’ll fix it.”

Will watches Jason as his father leans in to murmur something to the sergeant, who flinches like he’s been slapped without ever being touched.

There’s no satisfaction in Jason’s face. No pride. Just a tightness in his jaw that Will’s only ever seen in moments of pressure—when he’s trying to keep the room from falling apart. He doesn’t look relieved. He looks like someone waiting for the storm to pass before checking for damage.

It’s a while before they return.

Jason appears first. His posture is too straight, too practiced—like he’s still standing for inspection even though the general’s already passed. He doesn’t speak immediately, just sweeps the room with a gaze that gives nothing away. Then he turns slightly, and his father follows.

Zeus does not approach so much as descend. The way he moves is deliberate, not slow but never hurried, as if the world expands to accommodate him. His gaze skims over the group with clinical efficiency—eyes the kind of pale that reads as expensive in boardrooms and cold in courtrooms. 

“Ms. Blackstone,” he says, and Lou Ellen startles like her name was a gavel.

“Y—yes?”

“The sergeant is arranging a room where you can give a full statement. I’ll be present. It should have been done earlier, but your rights were clearly mismanaged.”

Lou Ellen blinks, clutching her paper cup with both hands like it’s the only thing tethering her to the floor. “Oh. Thank you. I—thank you.”

Zeus gives her a small nod. Not warm. Not unkind. Just… sufficient. Efficient. As if her pain is a file he intends to sort.

Will stands beside her, heart still pounding like it hasn’t recalibrated to this new temperature. He offers Zeus a quiet “thank you” as well, but the words feel small, civilian. Zeus doesn’t look at him long—just long enough to register him as someone grateful and, therefore, irrelevant.

Piper crosses her arms. “That’s the first procedure they’ve followed all night,” she says, too sweet.

Zeus turns to her. “They’re correcting that now.”

“Because you walked in,” she says mildly. “Not because it was right.”

Nico says nothing. But he stands beside Piper like a second blade unsheathed, silent and sharp-edged. His gaze never fully lands on Zeus—hovers just beside him instead, like the air’s too charged to look directly at. Cold enough to register. Respectful enough not to provoke. But Will feels it in the way Nico’s shoulder stiffens against his. He’s not neutral.

Jason, notably, says nothing.

The silence stretches, taut and uncomfortable. Then Jason clears his throat. “When can we see Cecil?”

Zeus barely glances his way. “Not yet. I’ll be speaking with the ADA first.”

“And then him,” Jason says, steady. “I want to be there when you do.”

There’s a pause—brief, but charged. Zeus’s jaw shifts, just slightly.

“I’d like to be present,” Jason repeats, voice firm.

Will catches it then—the ripple in the air. The tiny twitch at the corner of Zeus’s eye. Not anger, exactly. Just… irritation. The kind that only shows itself when someone forgets their place.

“Say you’re mentoring me,” Jason adds smoothly, eyes on his father’s face. “It’s perfectly allowable.”

For a beat, Zeus says nothing. His gaze is unreadable. Then, finally, he nods once.

“Very well,” he says. “If you’re so determined to observe, you’ll observe.”

Will isn’t sure what just passed between them—but he feels it, like a draft under the door of a sealed room. Jason’s posture doesn’t shift, but something in his face flickers—just for a moment—like he’s caught between two uniforms and neither one fits anymore.

Zeus turns back to Lou Ellen. “The statement room should be ready in a few minutes. I’ll escort you personally.”

Will watches him, trying to understand the shape of the gratitude rising in his throat. It’s there, undeniably—Zeus is helping, things are moving, someone powerful has decided they matter. But the room is colder now. Tighter. Less theirs.

Piper glances at Jason. “You good?”

Jason nods once. It’s a lie, but a practiced one.

Zeus doesn’t speak again. He simply turns and strides away, pausing briefly to speak with the sergeant, then disappearing through a side door—presumably to check how the statement setup is coming along. Even his departure feels deliberate, like the room rearranges itself around his absence.

Time folds strangely inside the precinct after that.

The clocks tick on, but it feels performative—like they’re measuring the wrong kind of time, something slow and stagnant, unmoored from the outside world. The vending machine hums with mechanical menace. Phones ring distantly and never stop. Every step across the cheap tile sounds like it’s being broadcast over a loudspeaker.

And then there are the others—the other ones waiting for people behind locked doors. Friends, siblings, exes, enablers. The ones who show up at four a.m. with half a plan and nothing left to lose.

A girl in a sequined dress clutches a tiara and mutters he didn’t mean it like that’ll erase the charges. Two guys in Yankees hoodies insist they weren’t at the party while one texts “Ma” every thirty seconds. A woman with a Staten Island accent and an empty stroller yells that her cousin didn’t stab anyone— not this time. A teenager paces near the bathroom, hissing that they better not take his vape.

Will keeps his eyes on the floor. Then makes the mistake of glancing up.

There’s a man leaning against the wall near the vending machine, holding a metal dog bowl and wearing a leather collar. Nothing else about him suggests irony.

Their eyes meet.

The man barks.

Will flinches so violently he nearly drops the energy drink Lou Ellen had thrust at him twenty minutes ago. Piper snorts into her sleeve. Nico, arms folded and radiating disapproval from the next to him, doesn’t even flinch, but mutters dryly, “I told you not to make eye contact.”

A uniformed officer steps into the room, takes one look around, and immediately backs out again.

Will’s not sure time is even moving anymore. Just unspooling sideways, like thread from a fraying cuff.

Zeus reappears just as the sergeant gestures, moving with purpose, coat unbuttoned, one hand resting briefly—but not kindly—on Lou Ellen’s shoulder.

Will watches as she follows him, clutching her phone in both hands like a talisman, her jacket sleeves too long and swallowing her fists. She casts a glance back at Will, at Nico, at the others. Her face is pale, but her spine is straight. Then she’s gone, vanishing down the hallway in Zeus’ shadow, like she’s stepped into a courtroom instead of an interview room.

Time drips past.

Piper checks her phone. Nico crosses and uncrosses his arms. Will doesn’t move. His foot bounces in time with his thoughts, each one worse than the last.

Then the door creaks open, and Lou Ellen is back.

She looks wrung out—like something essential has been squeezed out of her and not yet returned. But she walks on her own. Zeus at her side, unreadable as ever.

Jason meets them halfway. Murmured words are exchanged—too quiet to catch. A nod. Then he falls into step beside his father, and together they head down the same corridor Themis and Octavian disappeared into earlier, toward whatever room now holds the ADA. 

Piper doesn’t speak, but Will sees the muscle jump in her jaw. She’s staring after Jason like she wants to drag him back with both hands.

And when Jason comes back into view—ten, maybe fifteen minutes later—he’s not the same.

His face is pale. Too pale. His jaw tight. One hand lifts to his collar as if it’s suddenly strangling him. His gaze flickers toward the hallway behind him, and something passes over his face—just a second of rawness, stripped and shaking—before it vanishes under steel.

Will’s chest tightens.

He watches as Jason turns away from the interview room entirely and heads deeper into the precinct, where the lights burn colder and the doors look like they lock from the outside. The desk sergeant steps forward, murmurs something about “holding” and “access granted,” just loud enough for Will to catch. A quiet signal.

Nico notices too. “They’re going to see Cecil.”

Will nods, throat dry. “Yeah.”

It’s twenty long minutes before they return—Zeus first, then Jason, a half step behind, shoulders set but eyes too wide. 

Will stands.

So does Nico. Piper’s already halfway out of her seat.

Jason doesn’t even look at them at first. He walks straight to Will, then stops, something unreadable passing behind his eyes.

“We need you to come with us,” he says.

Will blinks. “Me?”

Jason nods once. It’s not exactly a request.

“What’s going on?” Piper asks, voice sharp.

Zeus doesn’t stop walking. “I’ll explain inside. Move.”

Will hesitates only a second—then follows, heart rattling around in his chest like something trying to escape.

They reach the next hallway. The door to the holding wing looms at the end like a threshold. Before they can reach it, Themis steps cleanly into their path.

“I was informed Mr. Grace would be present as an aide,” she says crisply, blocking the doorway with the kind of precision that suggests this is routine for her. “I was not informed about…” She flicks her eyes to Will. “Whoever this is.”

Will opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.

Zeus doesn’t break stride. “Mr. Solace will assist. My client is uncooperative and in emotional distress. You want a statement tonight, you’ll need him.”

“I wasn’t made aware of that,” Themis says flatly.

Zeus doesn’t blink. “Consider yourself informed.”

Beside him, Jason shifts—subtle, but telling. There’s a tremor beneath the calm, like he’s holding something steady by force of will alone.

Themis pauses, just a beat too long, then turns to Will with a look that feels like an appraisal: cold, clinical, as if she’s trying to determine whether he’ll be more liability than asset. “I fail to see how his presence changes anything,” she says coolly. “That boy’s friend won’t be able to help him now—not with what we’re dealing with.”

The words land like ice water down Will’s spine. He goes still, utterly still, caught somewhere between shame and fury. Jason’s hand tightens at his side, and Zeus tilts his head, eyes narrowing just enough to suggest danger. But the damage is already done. The blow isn’t loud or physical—it doesn’t need to be. It’s quiet and precise, surgical in its cruelty.

Themis steps aside, her expression unreadable. “Fine,” she says, voice silked in disdain. “Do what you need to do.”

Will doesn’t speak. He doesn’t ask what she meant, doesn’t trust his voice to hold if he tried. Instead, he follows Zeus through the door, dread curling low in his gut like smoke. He’s been scared all night—tight-chested, strung out—but this is different. This is fear in its purest form. Not for himself, but for whatever waits on the other side.

The door shuts behind them with a muffled click, final and too quiet, like the closing of a vault. The overhead light hums faintly. The room itself is sterile—gray walls, no windows, no clock. Just a metal table bolted to the floor and two plastic chairs that look like they were designed specifically to discourage comfort.

Cecil sits slouched in one of the chairs, cuffs still on, wrists limp on the table like he’s forgotten they’re attached to him.

He looks awful.

The neon clash of the outfit he’d worn out—chaotic layers, glitter-threaded cuffs, a shirt loud enough to drown out sirens—has been reduced to something unrecognizable. His hoodie hangs lopsided off one shoulder, half-zipped and stretched out, one drawstring missing entirely, the other stained with something dark. His curls are flattened on one side, tangled on the other, as if he fell asleep against concrete and never really woke up.

His left eye is swelling, purple and grotesque, the skin beneath it already bruised to hell. There’s dried blood smeared under one nostril and a cut splitting his bottom lip, raw and poorly clotted. He doesn’t look dangerous. He doesn’t even look like himself.

He looks small. Shaken. Young. Like someone who’s been hit too many times in a row and is still counting backward from the last one. Like someone who got knocked down and stayed there—not because he couldn’t get up, but because he stopped seeing the point.

And whatever bravado he wore earlier with his glitter and noise and chaos—whatever armor that was—is gone.

Will’s breath catches in his throat.

“What the fuck,” he says, the words escaping before he can stop them. “He looks like this and they’re charging him?”

Zeus doesn’t flinch. “Mr. Solace.”

“No, seriously—look at him. He’s the one who needs stitches. Where was the medic? Why hasn’t anyone even—”

“Enough.”

Zeus doesn’t raise his voice. The words land like a cleaver, sharp enough to part the air. Will shuts up.

“I’ve already explained this,” Zeus says, looking at Cecil, but clearly speaking for Will’s benefit now. “I am acting as Mr. Markowitz’s attorney. Nothing in this room is being recorded. The confidentiality of this discussion extends to Jason and Mr. Solace, who are present with my approval. What’s said here stays here. Is that understood?”

Jason nods once. Will swallows hard and mirrors him.

Across the table, Cecil doesn’t respond. Doesn’t look up. He just stares at the floor like he’s trying to set it on fire with his eyes—or like he’s waiting for it to open up and take him down.

Will glances at Jason, confused, but Jason avoids his gaze.

Zeus exhales slowly, then sharpens his focus. “I’ve brought your friend in because Jason tells me he’s your best chance at a candid conversation. Right now, you’re giving me nothing. That’s not a strategy. That’s an obstruction.”

Still nothing.

Will clears his throat. “Cecil. Come on. It’s me.”

Cecil blinks, but doesn’t look up.

Will edges closer, folding into the chair across from him. “I’ve seen fights like this. Any decent jury would take one look at your face and know this was self-defense. If we just explain what happened—”

Zeus’s hand lifts, clean and surgical, stopping the sentence cold.

Will tenses, half-turning toward him, but something in Zeus’s expression makes the words stall in his throat.

“There’s more,” Zeus says.

Will frowns. “More?”

Zeus nods, slow and grim. “Octavian provided additional testimony. He claims that Mr. Markowitz has been supplying him with drugs. Regularly.”

Will’s stomach drops.

“No,” he says instinctively. Then, a half-second later, quieter— “Wait.”

The silence in the room changes. Not louder. Denser.

“He’s claiming the two of them had a transaction three weeks ago,” Zeus continues, eyes unreadable. “Class A narcotics. According to him, that was not the first time.”

Will’s heart twists sharply in his chest. He feels it all at once—the sterile lights, the buzz in his skull from lack of sleep, the taste of panic climbing the back of his throat.

He doesn’t need to ask if it’s true.

Because yes—Cecil sells. And not just a little. Will’s well aware of the operation: the late-night exchanges behind the library, the discreet handoffs in campus bathrooms, the constant stream of undergrads texting for a dime bag or a discount. Weed, mostly. Always weed. Good stuff, fairly priced. A reputation built on reliability and chill customer service.

And then there’s the fake IDs, which—blessedly—no one’s mentioned yet.

But this? Class A?

That isn’t a rumor. That’s a felony. That’s prison.

He turns to Cecil slowly. “C?”

Cecil doesn’t lift his head. But something sharp cuts through the stillness in his body, like a spark finally catching flame.

“I don’t sell that shit,” he says, voice hoarse and low. “I’ve never sold anything stronger than weed. Ever. You know that Will.”

Will flinches like he’s been slapped.

Cecil looks up then. Not at Zeus. Not at Jason. At Will. His eyes are bloodshot, one of them swelling shut, but his voice is clear now—furious.

“And I never sold to him,” he spits. “That smug little empire cosplay asshole came sniffing around a few weeks ago, yeah. Asked me if I had anything ‘with teeth.’ His words. Teeth . Like it was a fucking wine tasting.”

Will’s mouth opens, but Cecil’s not finished.

“I told him no. I told him even if I did, I wouldn’t sell to guys like him. Rich kids looking for a thrill they can afford to walk away from. He got pissy. Told me I’d regret being rude.”

Cecil’s wrists clench in the cuffs. “I thought he meant a bad Yelp review. Not a felony.”

The room holds very, very still. Zeus doesn’t speak. Jason doesn’t move. Will looks at his best friend—bloodied, furious, barely holding it together—and feels something inside him curl. Cold. Trembling.

Because this isn’t just a bar fight anymore. It’s power. It’s narrative. It’s someone with a badge and a bloodline deciding how the story gets told.
And right now, that story wants to bury Cecil alive.

Zeus remains standing in the corner, unmoving. Not at rest, but coiled. A monolith in bespoke tailoring—still in the way lightning is still, right before it splits the sky.

“They’re moving fast,” he says, calm as ever. “Octavian’s statement was delivered under oath. That gives them enough for probable cause.”

Will swallows. “So they’re—what, opening an investigation?”

“They already have.” Zeus smooths his cuffs like he’s brushing off dust. “Themis is working with a judge. If she gets what she wants, that warrant could be signed before sunrise.”

Will’s stomach drops so fast it’s like he’s stepped off a ledge.

He looks to Cecil. At the way he sits—spine hunched, shoulders drawn tight, like he’s bracing for a blow that hasn’t landed yet. Not just restrained by the cuffs, but by something heavier. Like he’s already carrying the weight of a verdict no one’s said out loud.

And Will knows awhat’s in the apartment. Not a cartel. Not a criminal empire. But enough.

Enough cash to raise eyebrows. Enough weed to suggest it’s not just personal use. Enough paraphernalia to make everything look calculated. Neatly bagged. Labeled. Stashed in smug little boxes that suddenly feel like evidence.

“There’s weed in the apartment,” Will says numbly. “A lot, actually. And cash. And… stuff.”

His voice falters on the last word—because “stuff” is starting to sound a lot like “probable cause.”

“They’ll search everything,” Zeus confirms. “All shared spaces. Bedrooms. Bathrooms. Anything that can be linked to distribution—bagged product, money, even Venmo histories—they’ll flag it. And if they find anything questionable, they’ll bring charges. Not just for your friend, but for anyone who lives there.”

Will’s blood goes cold.

Lou Ellen. His name on the lease. The grinder under the kitchen sink. The cash Cecil keeps in the jar labeled Emergency Funds in Comic Sans.

“Do you see now why I need your help?” Zeus says. “I’m not building a narrative for the prosecution. I’m building a defense. But I can’t do that if he refuses to cooperate.”

Will turns toward Cecil.

His best friend has barely moved. The cuffs glint under the fluorescent lights, sharp against the scrapes on his knuckles. There’s dried blood on his collar.

“C,” Will tries, soft. “Please. We need to get ahead of this.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Cecil mutters, without looking up. “I didn’t sell that kid drugs. I didn’t start the fight.”

“No one’s saying you did—”

“That’s exactly what they’re saying,” Cecil snaps, voice brittle. “That’s why I’m in here. And now he —” he nods sharply toward Zeus without looking “—wants to clean up my life and sell it back to me in court like a tax write-off.”

Zeus raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t bite.

Will feels his throat tighten. “He’s trying to help.”

“Yeah, because it’ll make him look good,” Cecil says. “Because Jason asked.”

Will’s heart aches with frustration. “Would you rather he didn’t?”

“I’d rather not owe anything to someone who’s spent his entire life on the top floor of the world looking down. I’d rather not have to smile politely while he saves me from a problem I wouldn’t have if I was born with even half the shit Jason was.”

It’s not rage in his voice—it’s something worse. Resentment soaked in exhaustion. Pride and hurt all tangled into one.

Will closes his eyes. He gets it. He does. Cecil’s not wrong. But he’s also bleeding and shackled and maybe ten hours from a full set of charges that could ruin the rest of his life. That kind of ruin doesn’t wait for your principles to catch up.

Zeus sighs—deep, bone-deep—and steps forward.

“What do you do for work, Mr. Markowitz?”

Cecil doesn’t answer.

Zeus turns to Will.

Will shifts awkwardly, already knowing this won’t sound good out loud. “He works at a tech repair place off campus a few nights a week—fixing phones, tablets, whatever people break. But it’s not consistent. Mostly he makes money from selling weed….And fake IDs.”

Zeus’s eyes narrow just slightly, no surprise in his voice—just calculation.

“So he can’t provide proof of steady income. No pay stubs. No contract.”

Will winces. “No.”

Zeus nods once, like he’s filing the answer away in some internal courtroom. “Then let me be clear. If he cannot account for how he’s been paying his share of the rent, or if anything suggests the apartment is being used for illegal activity, the narrative will turn. Fast. You’ll go from kids with bad judgment to a group intentionally facilitating criminal behavior.”

Will looks at Cecil. “Do you understand what he’s saying?”

Cecil stays silent.

Will steps closer, lowering his voice like he’s talking to a wounded animal. “This isn’t about trusting Zeus. It’s about not letting Octavian win.”

Cecil looks up at him then. Just briefly. His lip is cracked. His cheek is swelling. His pride is bleeding in ways that won’t bruise.

“I know the bar,” Cecil says finally, voice low. “Every corner, every camera angle. I’ve… spent time there.” He flicks his gaze up, daring someone to judge. “There’s gotta be footage. The fight—it’ll show what happened. It wasn’t just me swinging.”

Zeus doesn’t react outwardly, but Will sees it—the subtle shift in posture, the recalibration.

Finally.

Will nods slowly. “That’s good. We can work with that.”

Cecil slumps back in the chair. “Just don’t ask me to say thank you.”

Zeus doesn’t blink. “I don’t need gratitude. I need cooperation.”

And the room falls into silence again, thick and humming. Will can feel the warrant ticking toward them like a fuse.

Jason’s eyes darken for a moment—those pale stormcloud eyes catching the harsh glare of the overhead light—as he straightens, steps close to his father, and says, low and steady, “Keep working on Cecil. Do whatever you can to delay that warrant.” He doesn’t plead; there’s no tremor in his voice, only the quiet insistence of a man who refuses to let a friend be swallowed by a system built to grind people down.

Zeus inclines his head, the gesture as controlled as the rest of him. “I can manage that. Every judge in this state owes me a favor or two.” His tone is matter-of-fact, as though he’s discussing last week’s weather rather than wielding the full weight of political patronage.

From his chair, Cecil mutters, voice rough and low, “Privilege and corruption—two sides of the same sick coin.”

The words hit like a slap.

Will’s spine goes rigid. He half-rises before he even registers the motion, breath sharp in his chest, voice clipped harder than he means it to be: “I know , Cecil. But right now—” He cuts himself off, jaw locking so tightly it aches. His hands are clenched in his sleeves. He’s too tired for this. Too stretched thin. Too close to breaking.

Cecil scoffs, hollow and bitter. “Yeah, well. Must be easier to know that now that you’ve got a rich boyfriend and a courtroom escort.”

The silence after is immediate and brutal. Even Zeus looks up.

Will freezes.
And for a second, something flickers across Cecil’s face—panic, shame, instant regret. “Will. Shit. I didn’t—”

“Don’t,” Will says, quietly. No bite. Just final. He doesn’t yell. Doesn’t need to. The hurt is in the stillness. The way his voice thins like it’s being strangled in his throat. “Just—don’t.”

He feels the heat prick behind his eyes before he can stop it, a sting sharp and humiliating. He blinks hard, fast, because the last thing he’s going to do is cry in front of Jason’s father. Not here. Not now.

The words echo back in his mind— rich boyfriend —like something sour. Like he doesn’t already lie awake thinking about the imbalance of it, the shame of it . Like he hasn’t bent over backwards to keep it from feeling like a transaction.

“You think I’ve changed sides,” Will says finally, voice low and flat. “Fine. Maybe I have. Or maybe I’m just exhausted from watching this city eat people like you and spit them back out. Maybe I’m too tired to be righteous about it anymore.”

Cecil doesn’t speak. He looks stricken, guilt swallowing every edge of his expression. But the damage is done. The air between them feels scorched.

And then, like a pressure valve releasing, Jason steps in—gentle but firm, voice cutting through the static. “I have an idea,” he says, quiet enough to steady the room. “I just need to make a call.”

Zeus arches an eyebrow, and Will opens his mouth to press for details—anything, a lifeline, a glimpse of hope—but Jason only shakes his head, a small, rueful twist of lips. “Not yet. Don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.”

There it is: the soldier’s reserve, the practiced restraint of a boy who learned too young how quickly hope can be weaponized against you.

Jason turns, shoulders squared, and leaves the room before either of them can ask again. The door’s click echoes like a heartbeat stopping. And Will is left standing under the flickering lights, throat full of splinters, trying to remember how it feels to breathe.

He glances at Zeus, who meets his eye once, coolly—no invitation, no judgment—before he dips his head. “You’re free to go.”

So Will shuffles out, every step weighed by exhaustion and the ache of unsaid things, and finds Nico, Piper, and Lou Ellen huddled by the vending machine. Their faces lift when they see him—relief and worry tangled in their expressions—but Jason is nowhere in sight.

Before Will can say anything, Nico is already moving—swift and silent, like he’s been holding his breath the entire time Will was gone. He crosses the precinct floor without hesitation, cutting through the flickering fluorescent light and the thick smell of burnt coffee, until he’s in front of him, hands lifting instinctively.

“Hey,” Nico breathes, voice low and urgent, not a greeting so much as a tether. His fingers find Will’s arms—thumb brushing along the seam of his sleeve like he's checking for bruises, for proof that he's still in one piece.

Will means to smile. To say something half-clever, half-reassuring, like it's okay or I'm fine. But the breath sticks in his throat. The words don’t come.

He doesn’t even realize he’s shaking until Nico’s hand finds his waist, anchoring him, and then the other slides around his back, guiding him forward into a half-embrace that doesn’t ask, just holds . Not a performance. Not a fix. Just that quiet, ferocious kind of comfort that says, you’re safe now. I’m here.

Will exhales—ragged and uneven—like something breaks loose in his chest. And then he leans in.

Nico presses a kiss to his shoulder, soft and steady, lips brushing against the worn cotton of Will’s hoodie like a promise whispered into fabric. Then his fingers trail upward, threading gently through Will’s hair, carding through the curls with quiet reverence—like he’s trying to smooth the night itself out of him, one tangled strand at a time.

Will closes his eyes. Just for a moment. Just long enough to let it matter. To let the world fall away until all that remains is the warmth of Nico’s breath near his throat, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat through layered fabric, and the sacred stillness of being held .

Then a voice cuts through the lobby—too loud, too smug, slurred just enough to reek of bad decisions and worse timing. One of the handcuffed perps being dragged through the doors jerks his chin toward them and grins.
“Aww, look at the pretty boys—should we give ’em a minute?”

Laughter follows, sharp and ugly. A whistle. The shuffle of chains and the snap of zip ties.

Will stiffens. Heat flares up his neck, blooming hot across his cheeks, and he instinctively starts to pull away—spine straightening, breath going shallow. Embarrassment curls under his skin like a second heartbeat.

But Nico doesn’t let him go.

He tightens the arm already looped around Will’s back and pulls him closer, pivoting them smoothly—subtly—until he’s positioned between Will and the room. Slim, sharp-shouldered, barely five-foot-seven, Nico di Angelo plants himself like a barrier. It’s almost laughable.

Will is taller. Broader. He could snap most people in this lobby like twigs if he had the energy. Nico is slight and pale and dressed in a jacket that hangs off him like smoke. He looks like he should be the one hiding behind someone else.

But instead, he’s shielding Will like someone might throw a punch.

Will feels it—how absurd it is, and how much he loves it anyway. Loves the way Nico steps in like a blade unsheathed, all instinct and defiance. Loves the way he’s being protected, not because Nico thinks he can’t handle it, but because Nico won’t let him face it alone.

(And gods, if the roles were reversed—if Nico were the one unraveling—Will would set the world on fire before letting him feel small.)

Nico’s head turns, slowly. His eyes find the perp like a spotlight and fix there—flat, cold, unblinking.

He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t have to.

The laughter falters. Then dies.

One of the officers murmurs something sharp under his breath. The perp stiffens, shoulders jerking like he’s just remembered where he is—and who’s really in charge.

Nico turns back, exhaling through his nose. His hand slides up to the nape of Will’s neck, fingers threading gently through the curls there, grounding and intimate.

“Ignore them,” he says, voice low, voice calm. Deadly calm. The kind of calm that only sounds gentle until you notice what it’s hiding.

Will nods. Tries to breathe. Tries not to lean into it too much. But gods, it’s so easy—this small fortress Nico builds around him without saying a word.

Lou Ellen’s voice breaks softly behind them. “What’s going on?”

She sounds small—like something brittle trying not to crack. Her eyes are wide and wet, her face pale beneath the fluorescent glare, drawn tight with everything she hasn’t said out loud.

Piper stands beside her, one hand steady on her arm, the other clenched at her side. She’s not crying, but her jaw is tight, like she’s holding herself together by the teeth. Her eyes flick to Will, sharp and searching, already bracing for the answer.

So Will tells them.

He keeps it clinical. Detached. He tells them Zeus is buying time, that he’s delaying the warrant by calling in favors that shouldn't exist. That Cecil finally talked—about Octavian, about the setup, about the bar and what really happened. He explains that Octavian's accusing Cecil of selling him drugs. Hard drugs. Something more serious than weed. And that the accusation, coming from someone like him , holds weight in all the wrong places.

He explains—quietly, carefully—that if a judge signs the warrant, the cops will raid the apartment. That anything they find—cash, baggies, Venmo receipts—could be used to charge not just Cecil, but anyone they live with.

Piper’s breath leaves her like a punch. Lou Ellen covers her mouth, shoulders shaking, and Piper pulls her in without hesitation, wrapping an arm around her as she trembles. “It’s okay,” she whispers, even though it’s not. Even though they both know it’s not .

Will doesn’t mention Cecil’s comment. Doesn’t say how the words still sit in his chest like shrapnel. Doesn’t explain why his voice falters halfway through the retelling, or why he keeps blinking like something’s caught in his eye.

But Nico seems to know anyway.

He shifts closer, his hand never leaving Will’s back. “Come on,” he murmurs, voice gentler now. “Let’s go outside. You need some air.”

And Will doesn’t argue. Just nods, grateful for the escape, for the hand at his spine, for the quiet way Nico always seems to know when to pull him out before he sinks too deep.

Outside, the city is caught in that strange, suspended hush between night and morning—the hour that belongs to no one. The streets are mostly empty, save for the occasional cab drifting past and the slow crawl of a delivery truck down the avenue. It’s 4:30 a.m. in mid-December, and New York is bone-cold, sharp-edged, sky washed in steel. The air bites.

Will steps out and immediately shivers, pulling his hoodie tighter around himself. It’s not enough. The wind threads through the fabric, straight to his skin, and he exhales hard, watching his breath cloud in front of him like smoke.

He’s exhausted. Starving. Frayed in ways that don’t have names. His final’s in three days— anatomy, the one he has to do well in—and he’s studied. Gods, he’s studied. Flashcards with hand-drawn muscle diagrams, color-coded notes taped all over the apartment, mock quizzes Lou Ellen made for him at 2 a.m. with commentary that would've made him laugh if he hadn’t been running on four hours of sleep and a granola bar.

He and Nico had studied earlier that night —a quiet, warm blur of whispered questions and mouth-to-skin answers, anatomy dissolving into something messier and much less academic. Nico had kissed his throat and called it practical application , and Will had laughed, breathless, body still humming with it hours later.

Or at least it had been humming.

Now, it feels like that moment belongs to another life. Not earlier tonight— a lifetime ago.

And all the information he thought he knew—every nerve, every bone, every Latin term—has slipped clean from his mind, overwritten by panic.

He starts pacing without realizing it. Just—movement. Like maybe if he walks fast enough, he’ll outpace the chaos. Back and forth in front of the precinct’s side doors, sneakers dragging against the concrete, hands twisting in the sleeves of his hoodie.

His thoughts tangle and snarl. What if the warrant goes through? What if they search the apartment? What if Lou gets charged? What if Jason’s plan isn’t a plan at all? What if this ruins everything we’ve built?

His heart is beating too loud. His mouth feels dry, too dry, and the air suddenly feels thinner than it should. Not cold— hollow.

Nico watches him from a few steps away, leaning against the wall, arms folded—not closed off, not impatient. Just steady. Like a lit candle in a windstorm. He waits a beat, then says, gently but clearly, “Will. Hey. You’re spiraling. Breathe.”

Will flinches like he’s been touched too suddenly. “I am breathing,” he snaps, voice sharper than he means it to be. “I just— I don’t know what I’m doing—”

His voice fractures. His hands are shaking again. He presses his fingers to his temples like he can squeeze the panic out through pressure points, like he can hold the dam from breaking.

But it breaks anyway. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just… a slow leak of tears he didn’t mean to shed, warm and unwelcome, cutting tracks down his cheeks.

Nico is in front of him in a heartbeat. He doesn’t ask. Doesn’t hesitate. He just steps in, takes Will’s wrists in his hands, thumbs brushing lightly along the inside like he’s checking for a pulse. “Look at me,” he says, soft and firm.

Will tries. His eyes are glassy, the world blurring at the edges, breath caught somewhere between his ribs.

“I can’t,” he says, voice hoarse. “I can’t do this. I can’t fix it. I can’t—I’m not—”

Nico shakes his head, gently. “You’re not supposed to fix it. Not alone.” He steps even closer, his hands still warm on Will’s wrists. “Let it be too much for a second. Sit with me. Just… sit.”

Will doesn’t nod, exactly. He just stops resisting. Stops running from the weight.

Nico guides him to a bench outside the shuttered convenience store, the metal slats pulled down, fluorescent sign above them dead. The streetlights hum overhead like they’re trying to fill the silence. Everything else feels far away—cars, noise, time.

.

Will sits hard, elbows on his knees, head in his hands, tears still running. He doesn’t sob—he’s too tired for that—but the broken edges of crying are there, in the tremble of his shoulders, the shortness of his breath.

Nico sits beside him. He pulls Will in with one arm, not saying anything, just holding. And Will goes. He sinks into it—into him —like a wave hitting shore.

It’s freezing out. The kind of cold that makes the tips of your fingers ache, that turns breath brittle. But Nico is warm.

Not burning like Will—Will, who radiates heat and light and frayed intensity like a star ready to collapse.

Nico doesn’t burn. He holds.

He’s steady warmth, quiet and constant, like the glow beneath embers that never goes out. People assume he’s cold, because he’s quiet. Because he’s sharp. Because he doesn’t show what he’s feeling unless he chooses to.

But Will knows better.

Nico is warm in the ways that matter. He doesn’t blaze, but he stays. He wraps himself around you when you’re breaking and says I’m not leaving. And Will melts into him, hands clinging to the folds of his jacket, forehead pressed to Nico’s collar.

Nico smells like soap and city wind, like worn cotton and something darker underneath—like the night itself offered him shelter and he accepted.

Will hiccups out a breath, still trembling. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles into Nico’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Shhh,” Nico murmurs, threading his fingers into Will’s hair again, slow and steady. “It’s okay. You don’t have to be okay right now.”

And for the first time in hours, Will believes him.

They sit like that for a while—just breathing, the city low and distant around them, the cold kept at bay by the way Nico never lets go. Will’s pulse is still a little too fast, but it’s settling, curling into something quieter now that he’s no longer trying to hold the pieces alone.

Eventually, Nico speaks again, voice barely above a whisper. “You know… Zeus has more connections than anyone I’ve ever seen. Judges. Prosecutors. Half the legal system owes him something. If anyone can make this go away, it’s him.”

Will nods slowly against Nico’s collarbone. “I know,” he murmurs. “I know. And I am grateful. I just…” He exhales, the breath shuddering out of him like a weight he’s still not sure how to name. “It’s uncomfortable.”

Nico doesn’t say anything yet. He waits.

Will pulls back just enough to speak, though he doesn’t lift his eyes. “It’s not just me. Cecil—he made this comment, earlier. Said I’d switched sides. That I got a rich boyfriend and suddenly I’m one of them.”

Nico goes still.

Will shakes his head, voice thin. “He regretted it right away. I could see it. But it still—it hurt. Because part of me gets it. It does feel messed up that all it takes is one guy in a suit walking in and the system suddenly starts giving a damn. We were helpless, and now—” His throat tightens. “Now it’s all moving because Jason asked.”

He looks down at his hands. “Cecil’s scared. And angry. And I get that. But I don’t know what to do with the part of me that’s ashamed of needing this kind of help.”

Nico’s quiet for a long moment. Then he reaches out and gently presses their foreheads together.

“I think about that too,” he says softly. “My name opens doors. I didn’t ask for it. But it does. I know what it looks like. And I hate it.”

Will closes his eyes.

“But I also know,” Nico continues, “that if this were me—if I were the one in handcuffs—you’d burn the whole city down before you let them take me. And I would never look at you and say that meant you’d switched sides.”

Will’s breath stutters. The words lodge in his throat like something sharp and holy.

“You’re allowed to want him safe,” Nico whispers. “You’re allowed to want this fixed. That doesn’t mean you believe in the system. It just means you’re not ready to lose him to it.”

Will nods, barely. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t erase the unease, or the way guilt still claws at his ribs. But it helps. Nico helps.

Nico, who is still holding him like Will’s not a mess. Like he’s not crying outside a police station at four-something in the morning while one of his best friends sits cuffed in a cell and the rest of his life dangles over a legal cliff. Like Will is still someone —still worthy of being held, of being steadied, of being loved.

And all at once, the memories come—unbidden, vivid, tender in their clarity. Every time Nico has met him like this: outside, beneath open sky, in the quiet after something. Always after something. The balcony at that awful Stoll party, where Nico had stepped out for a smoke and invited Will with a glance—where Will had followed, scolding him gently about lung cancer, and Nico, exhaling smoke like a shield, had confirmed, almost too cryptically but Will had understood all the same, that he was gay. As if it cost nothing. As if it wasn’t everything.

The terrace at Percy and Annabeth’s, both of them framed by city lights, where Nico had stared down at the glowing streets and spoken of family with a voice stripped bare, sharp-edged and aching. Will had listened, wordless, heart tight in his throat, knowing even then that this—this trust—was something holy.

The cracked pavement outside the bar after open mic night, when Will had thrown up in a storm of nerves and tequila and humiliation, and Nico hadn’t stepped back. Hadn’t laughed. Had just crouched beside him, one steady hand on his back, the other dialing a cab, holding Will close like something fragile, like something worth staying for.

The balcony at the Halloween party, where the air had been sharp with cold and the glitter of distant traffic lights clung to their skin like static. Breath fogging between them, too close, too charged, the moment had cracked open around them—dangerous and inevitable.

Their first kiss hadn’t been soft. It hadn’t been shy.

It had been desperate.

Nico had kissed him like he was starving for it, like the want had been living under his skin for months and finally, finally found the surface. And still, there was reverence in it—hesitation beneath the hunger, a trembling kind of awe, like he couldn’t believe he was allowed to want this, much less have it.

The roof of Will’s apartment building, wind-chilled and sunrise-lit, where Nico had fallen asleep against him, breath soft against Will’s collarbone, and Will—finally, fully—had let himself believe that this might be real.

And now here.

Another threshold. Another moment just outside the world.

Same air, same city, same unbearable tenderness smoldering quietly between them all this time while the skyline blinked on and off like it knew. While the streets they walked and the rooftops they claimed bore silent witness to something slow and sacred and unfolding. The love that’s been burning—soft and persistent, like candlelight in the bones of this city—was always there, in the shadows between streetlamps, in cigarette smoke and shared silence, in doorways and fire escapes and rooftops.

From Will, always. From Nico, he thinks—he hopes.

Gods, he loves him.

The thought hits hard, so sudden and fierce it nearly knocks the air from his lungs. He loves him. Of course he does. How could he not ?

Nico is beautiful—not just in the way people sometimes say like it’s a surprise, not just his dark eyes or the angle of his jaw in the streetlight, but in the way he is . In the way he’s quiet without being cold. Sharp without being cruel. Smart, and clever, and funny in a way that sneaks up on you and leaves you wrecked with laughter. He’s gentle, even when no one taught him how to be. He’s kind, in ways he doesn’t realize. And right now, he’s running his fingers through Will’s hair—slow, soothing, reverent—on one of the worst nights of Will’s life.

And Will loves him so much it’s ridiculous . So much it hurts .

He presses his face into Nico’s shoulder, but it’s not enough. The feeling’s too big for that now, too sharp, too bright. His chest aches with it, like there’s not enough space inside him to contain all this wanting.

He thinks of a few hours ago—of Nico’s body pressed against his, the desire, the weight of it, the way Nico had kissed him like nothing else existed as they moved together in the dark.

Because yes—he loves the sex. He loves the press of bodies, the burn of closeness, the way it feels when they’re so tangled together they might as well be one thing. He loves the heat of it, the intimacy of it, the way Nico looks at him in those moments like there’s no one else on earth.

But what he feels for Nico is so much more than arousal or desire. It's not just physical—it’s molecular. Cellular.

He wants to be nearer than near, closer than even the smallest measurable distance. He wants to crawl inside Nico’s chest and live there, wedge himself beneath his ribcage, wrap himself around the rhythm of his heart like muscle fiber curling around bone.

He wants to dissolve into him, become part of his biochemistry—fold himself into the strands of Nico’s DNA, thread into his synapses, lodge inside every calcium ion and neuron and mitochondrion.

He wants to be the breath in Nico’s lungs, the warmth in his blood, the steady pulse behind every heartbeat. Because this isn’t just want—it’s love, in every form his body knows how to express it. Every cell. Every molecule. Every atom of him aches with it.

The words rise up in his throat like a wave he can’t stop.

It’s the middle of the night. Cecil’s in custody. Everything is chaos.

But Will can’t hold it in.

“I love you,” he blurts, the words raw and unpolished, breaking open in his chest like something he’s swallowed too fast.

The silence afterward is brutal. Cold. A sudden drop in the air, and Will’s breath stutters as panic wells up again, worse than before. Gods, what if he just made everything worse? What if Nico isn’t ready? What if—

But then Nico leans in, slow and deliberate, and presses their foreheads together again.

His eyes meet Will’s—wide and dark and soft —and his voice, when it comes, is barely a whisper.

“ Ti amo anch’io. ”

There’s a beat—just long enough for Will’s heart to lurch sideways in his chest before his brain can catch up.

“…I really hope that means ‘I love you too’ and not, like, ‘you’re making a scene,’” he mumbles, a little breathless, a little wild around the edges.

Nico huffs out the softest laugh, then kisses him—slow and certain, mouth warm against Will’s like he’s sealing something ancient and holy between them. When he pulls back, their noses still brushing, he whispers, “Yes. It means I love you too.”

Will makes a quiet, wrecked noise in his throat—half-laugh, half-sob—and Nico’s hands come up to cup his jaw like he’s afraid Will might shatter from the force of being loved this much.

“I wanted to say it in Italian,” Nico says at last, his voice quiet but impossibly certain—like it’s something ancient, something sacred. “The first time. I wanted it to be… mine. A part of me no one else gets.”

Will doesn’t speak. He couldn’t if he tried. His heart is already unraveling at the seams—coming undone beneath the sheer, aching weight of everything Nico is giving him: not just the words, but the language. The trust. The key to something buried so deep it hasn’t seen daylight in years.

Nico’s spoken Italian to him before—murmured phrases laced with flirtation, with heat, with the kind of intimacy that curls between sheets and teeth and skin. But this isn’t that.

This is a different kind of love. Quieter. Older. Reverent.

Nico glances away, a faint flush rising to his cheeks despite the cold. “I don’t get to use it much anymore. Italian, I mean. Not the way I used to.” His tone softens—melancholy laced with memory. “Sometimes I hear it. In restaurants, or when I’m back in Europe. Maybe in passing. But not at home. Not with people who know me. Not with people who matter.”

The pause between his words feels like breath held underwater.

“Bianca and I—” he starts, and the name lands like snow, soft and devastating. “It was our first language. We always used it. In the kitchen. In bed when we couldn’t sleep. On the train. In letters. In arguments. It was… just us. The way we said I love you. The way we said goodbye.”

Will feels something ache open in his chest, wide and helpless. His fingers find Nico’s and hold on like it might tether him to the moment.

“For a long time,” Nico goes on, voice fraying at the edges, “it hurt too much to speak. Not just because of her, but because I didn’t know if anyone else would ever… earn it. If I’d ever want to say something that mattered in that voice again.”

Will doesn’t even try to stop the tears this time. They slip down his cheeks in steady warmth, carving through the cold like they mean to leave something behind. He’s smiling, trembling, undone from the inside out—because there’s too much in him now. Too much love. Too much gratitude. Too much Nico.

Nico’s voice is barely above a whisper, raw and ragged with the effort it takes to be this open. “She was always the person I loved most, and I haven’t stopped loving her. I couldn’t. But what I feel for you…” He breaks off, eyes flicking up to Will’s like he’s afraid the words might land wrong. “It’s not leftover. It’s not me trying to fill some space she left behind.”

He swallows hard, breath fogging between them. “It’s different. It's new. It’s mine. It scares the hell out of me, because it’s so much. And it doesn’t come with armor, or distance, or grief to hide behind.” His voice wavers, but he keeps going. “But it’s safe too. Like—when I’m with you, I can actually want things. I can imagine… something lasting. A future.”

He shakes his head slightly, like he can’t believe he’s saying this out loud. “Sometimes it hurts—how much it is. How much I want. But it heals too. Like breathing frost and finding it warm.”

Will’s hand curls around the back of Nico’s neck, tugging him close before the next sentence can collapse under its own weight. He kisses him—hard, trembling, reverent—like the words don’t know how to sit in his mouth, but his lips can spell them in touches instead. Nico melts into it, one hand fisting gently in Will’s hoodie, the other threading into his curls, thumb brushing soft against his temple.

Their mouths part, just barely, breath mingling in short, uneven bursts. Will presses their foreheads together, his lashes wet, his nose brushing Nico’s.

“ Ti amo, Niccolò Di Angelo,” he whispers, voice shaking like it might shatter.

“ Ti amo anch’io, William Andrew Solace.”

Nico closes his eyes. Breathes him in like oxygen after a long submersion. He pulls Will in tighter, arms wrapping fully around him now, and Will sinks into the warmth like it’s the only real thing left in the world.

And Will, overwhelmed and still trembling, presses his mouth to Nico’s again, softer now. Just a sigh of a kiss. A promise, shaped in warmth.

Then another—at the corner of his mouth. His cheekbone. The tip of his nose. His forehead. Will’s hands cup Nico’s face like it’s something breakable, something holy, and between each kiss he murmurs, “I love you. I love you. I love you—”

And then, quieter, trembling through the warmth of his breath against Nico’s skin:
“Ti amo.”
A beat.
“Ti amo, Nico.”

Nico makes a sound—half gasp, half laugh, and all heart—as he drags Will back in by the collar, burying his face in his neck for just a second, just long enough to steady himself before pulling Will into another kiss. This one longer, deeper, full of teeth and heat and the kind of hunger that says you’re mine and I love you and you just broke me beautifully.

Will’s hands are in Nico’s hair, Nico’s thumbs are brushing tears off Will’s cheeks even as his mouth claims his again and again, and for a moment there is nothing but warmth and breath and lips and love.

Until—
“AHEM.”

They freeze.

A voice behind them—dry, amused, far too casual for the hour—says:
“Look, I’m super happy for you guys. Big fan of public declarations, love that for you. Very cinematic rooftop angst , very kiss-me-before-the-helicopters-arrive . But we’ve kind of got a prison break situation, sooo…”

They break apart like teenagers caught necking behind the gym and turn to find Leo Valdez standing ten feet away in electric blue pajama pants covered in tiny wrench patterns, a massive shearling coat two sizes too big, and a pair of pink bunny slippers. He’s holding a briefcase. A very suspicious-looking briefcase.

He raises his eyebrows at them like, really? Then gestures vaguely between them. “Seriously, though. Adorable. Deeply inconvenient. We’ve got crimes to commit, people.”

Will stares. Nico sighs.

Leo grins, somehow both proud and feral.
“So, lovebirds—you coming? Or do I have to blow something up myself?”

And just like that, the world crashes back in.

Notes:

Yes, I know this chapter is long. Unreasonably long. Emotionally devastating and chaotic. I could have split it, but... I didn’t. Couldn’t bring myself to. The feelings demanded space and I gave it to them. You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

Also, quick note: after writing the entire Cecil plotline I remembered that weed isn’t actually illegal everywhere. In fact, it’s legal in New York! (Well, mostly—I checked, and yes, weed is legal recreationally in NY, but it’s still illegal to sell without a license.) So just go with it. Either we’re pretending weed is still illegal, or Cecil is dealing so much of it that it has legally become a problem. Either way, chaos reigns.

In more delightful news: my lovely friend Olivia has set up a Discord server for fic updates! She’s posting updates for this fic, the August series by cordeliarose, and the talk you talk and go viral (i just need this love spiral) series by wrongcaitlyn, which I’m currently reading and OBSESSED with—if you haven’t read it, you absolutely should. Immediately.

Here’s the link to the server for anyone who wants to join!

https://discord.gg/KkThDaRw

(Pls let me know if this link doesn’t work lol)

I’ll be in there too, in case you want to:
a) threaten me for the angst I’ve caused,
b) cry about fics together, or
c) scream about Solangelo

Chapter 50: We Fight the Law (And the Law… Gets a Stern Phone Call From Zeus)

Notes:

CHAPTER 50!!! THIS IS CRAZY!!! THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH FOR READING AND STICKING WITH ME!!! I LOVE YOU ALL ENDLESSLY !!! <3

The world reboots in stages.

They don’t untangle right away.

Even with Leo’s voice still echoing in the dark like a slapstick siren, Nico stays curled into Will’s chest, and Will doesn’t let go. The air between them crackles—part static, part disbelief, part the kind of dizzy quiet that only happens after something irreversible. They’re still catching their breath.

Then Leo sighs. The kind of long-suffering sound only someone who’s both third-wheeling and leading a covert operation at four in the morning can make. He pulls out his phone, thumbs in a number without looking.

“Yeah,” he says, already turning away. “I’m here.”

And like he’d been waiting for those exact words—like they were the coordinates he’d needed all along—the precinct doors slam open.

Jason Grace charges into the night, phone still in hand, eyes locked on Leo. There’s tension in his shoulders, urgency in his stride—but the moment he sees him, something eases. Not a smile. Not relief. Just… recognition. Like gravity resetting.

“You’re here,” Jason says, voice low, almost disbelieving.

Leo shrugs, too casual by half. “You called.”

But there’s something else behind the grin—something tight and bright and unspoken. A flicker of emotion held just behind his eyes, like a match too close to the flame.

“It’s four in the morning,” Jason says, still staring like he’s trying to memorize him.

Leo lifts one eyebrow, smile ghosting at the edges. “Yeah, well. You said it was important.”

Jason slows as he reaches him. Stops—close, but not touching.

“I didn’t know if you’d actually come. It was a lot to ask.”

Leo meets his eyes. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything—just looks at him, the way someone might study a burn to see how deep it goes.

Then, lightly—but not unkindly—
“Yeah, you did. You always know. Besides, I wanted to help Cecil.”

And for a moment, neither of them looks away. Jason stands still, barely breathing, and Leo meets his gaze with something unreadable—too practiced to be surprise, too quiet to be defiance. There’s no smile, no tension, just a shift in the air between them, like a page turning mid-sentence. Not a declaration. Not even a question. Just… history. Worn-in and wordless.

Will doesn’t know what passes between them—only that it hums with something lived-in and unspoken, the kind of understanding built in the fallout.

Beside him, Nico—still folded against his side—squints at the scene like it’s a foreign language. “Right,” he says dryly. “Can someone explain what the hell is happening?”

Leo flashes a grin that’s all teeth and adrenaline. “We’re staging a completely legal and definitely morally upright intervention.”

Jason huffs out something that’s almost a laugh. “Did you rehearse that?”

Leo winks. “Nah. I ad-lib genius.”

They head back toward the station in a loose cluster—Jason slightly ahead, Nico at Will’s side, Leo trailing with the casual swagger of someone who knows just how out of place he looks and doesn’t care. The glass doors hiss open again, swallowing them into fluorescent purgatory.

The girls are still waiting where they left them.

Lou Ellen has her knees drawn up on the plastic seat, hoodie sleeves tucked over her hands like armor. Piper stands beside her, arms crossed tightly, gaze locked on the hallway as though she can will the night to make sense. Their faces tighten in relief when they spot the boys returning, but it’s the kind of relief that comes after too many hours of worry—thin, threadbare.

Will’s stomach turns. The cold guilt creeps in before he can stop it. He’s still warm from Nico’s arms. Still humming with the afterglow of a confession that tasted like December air and breathlessness and something dangerously close to hope.

He had confessed his love to Nico outside a police station while Lou Ellen sat here, sick with anxiety.

Jason doesn’t miss a beat. “My dad commandeered a room,” he says, voice low. “Said if the ADA gets one, so does he. He’s setting up camp in the back.”

He glances at Piper, then Lou Ellen. “Come on. You should hear this too.”

He leads them down the hall, past humming vending machines and locked office doors, into a quiet back corridor that smells faintly of stale coffee and power. The room at the end is windowless, institutional, and somehow still feels like it belongs to Zeus.

He is already there, seated at a heavy table strewn with paperwork and legal pads. He doesn’t look up at first—too busy flipping through a document, pen tapping lightly against the margin. When he finally does glance up, the effect is immediate. His gaze sweeps over the group, sharp and clinical.

“Well,” he drawls, setting the pen aside. “Another addition. And who might you be?”

Leo doesn’t miss a beat. “Leo Valdez,” he says, stepping forward and extending a hand. “Resident engineer-slash-crisis mascot. Pleasure.”

Zeus eyes the hand, then accepts it with the cool detachment of someone shaking hands with a stray spark. Polite, but only just. His grip is firm. Brief.

Will watches the exchange closely. Jason is still at Leo’s side, not saying a word—but there’s a tightness to his stance now, something subtle in the way he folds his arms, the slight drop of his shoulders. Will isn’t sure if it’s the situation or the company. Or maybe just the way Leo’s grin sharpens a fraction when he meets Zeus’s eyes, like he knows exactly how much chaos he brings with him and isn’t planning to apologize for any of it.

Zeus finally shifts his gaze to Jason. That same flat scrutiny. Measured. Impatient.

“So,” he says, voice like chilled steel. “This is the brilliant plan you mentioned?”

Jason’s posture changes—not dramatically, but enough for Will to notice. His spine stays straight, but something about the set of his jaw falters, like he’s bracing for impact.

“Leo can help,” Jason says, quiet but steady.

The pause that follows is colder than silence. Zeus blinks, slow and unimpressed, the way one might regard a cracked engine part or a half-finished report.

Will can’t make sense of what he’s feeling. The air in the room seems to constrict, drawn tight by invisible threads. Tension hums in the linoleum, in the cheap overhead bulbs, in the way Piper subtly steps closer to Jason, like her presence might shield him. And Leo—Leo, still grinning—tilts slightly toward Jason too. Not quite touching. Just near. Solid.

Will watches Jason draw breath like it hurts.

“You said the lack of income documentation would be a problem,” Jason says carefully. “Leo’s here to fix that.”

Will blinks.

Zeus raises an eyebrow, more weary than intrigued. “Fix how?”

Jason doesn’t answer right away.

And for the first time, Will realizes: Jason’s stalling.

Not because he doesn’t believe in Leo’s plan—but because he knows his father won’t.

Leo shifts his weight onto one foot, casual as ever, and sets the suspiciously sleek briefcase on the nearest table with a theatrical little click . He doesn’t open it yet. Just lets the presence of it linger in the air like a magician’s hat before the rabbit appears.

“So,” he begins, “fun fact: my dad runs Hephaestus Industries. Maybe you’ve heard of it—engineering conglomerate, global patents, half the city’s tech grid runs on our designs, blah blah blah.” He waves a hand like he’s bored with himself already. “Anyway. It’s mostly mechanical and electrical engineering, but the R&D division has this little side branch focused on systems architecture and hardware integration. Super hush-hush, very shiny. Big on data encryption, secure communications, all that jazz. Needs a ton of computer science know-how.”

Will’s eyes dart to Zeus. He hasn’t moved. If anything, he looks carved from marble. His only reaction is the barest arch of one brow.

Leo beams. “I’ve always thought Cecil would be great for that team. Super smart, little chaotic, morally flexible—exactly their vibe. They even have an office right here in the city. I meant to talk to my dad about openings, but, well… life.”

His grin sharpens. Will gets the distinct feeling Leo’s been waiting all night to drop this next part.

“But then Jason called.” He flicks a glance toward him—quick, charged, more than a youre-welcome and less than nothing. “Explained the situation. So I did what any reasonable person would do in a moment of crisis: I called Annabeth.”

Will’s stomach sinks. “Oh no.”

“Oh yes ,” Leo says cheerfully. “It took her maybe twenty minutes. Contracts, onboarding emails, HR logs, interview transcripts, salary statements, pay stubs—all very legitimate. Not a single font out of place. And voilà.” He gestures at the briefcase like it’s a bomb he’s lovingly assembled.

Piper lets out a noise that might be a laugh or a prayer.

“But wait,” Leo adds, raising a finger, “there’s more.”

Will immediately braces himself.

“On the way downtown, I swung by Frank’s place to execute phase two of the plan—you’re welcome, by the way—and guess who was there? Hazel.” He winces, glancing at Nico. “Sorry about that one.”

Nico narrows his eyes. “Why?”

Leo raises both hands. “Because walking into Frank’s living room was already traumatic enough. Mood lighting. Scented candles. Vibes I did not consent to. I’m just saying—I should stop using the spare keys people give me.”

Will lets out a strangled sound somewhere between a laugh and a gasp.

“Anyway,” Leo continues breezily, “I gave her the key—Cecil gave me a copy forever ago, don’t worry about it, I only use it for emergencies and mild inconvenience. Hey, maybe spare keys aren’t so bad afterall—and they promised to sweep the place for any lingering… botanical contraband. You're welcome. Again.”

Will exhales slowly. “Leo—”

“I know, I know,” Leo says, holding up a hand. “I’m amazing. But—again, sorry, Nico—I really hope you don’t have a stack of condoms sitting in Will’s room because she said she was starting in the bedrooms.”

There is a beat of pure silence.

Then Will makes a sound that can only be described as a strangled wheeze. Nico chokes beside him.

“Oh my god,” Will says faintly.

“ Will ,” Nico hisses, red-faced. “Do we— do we ?”

Will is already covering his face. “I didn’t think anyone would look in the drawer, okay?!”

Leo’s smile goes downright feral.

Jason closes his eyes like he’s rebooting his entire internal system.
Zeus closes the folder in front of him with surgical precision. “Can we return to the matter of the forged employment documents before someone brings up flavored lubricant?”

Jason makes a strangled noise—not quite a protest, not quite a plea. Will can’t decide what’s worse: the image itself, or the fact that Zeus clearly knows what flavored lubricant is. 

Unfazed, Leo flashes a grin like a match being struck. “Right. The documents. They’re good. Industrial-strength good. Annabeth Chase–level good.”

Zeus’s eyes flick toward him, assessing. “Miss Chase has always been… efficient.” He rests a hand atop the closed folder. “If the paperwork holds up, it may be enough. I’ve managed to temporarily delay the execution of the warrant while we review potential mitigating circumstances.”

Will blinks. “You paused the warrant?”

“Temporarily,” Zeus replies coolly. “Enough to stall execution. If the documents hold up and there’s no physical evidence recovered from the apartment, the ADA may reconsider the necessity of pursuing the charge. It’s not a guarantee—yet—but it gives us room to negotiate.”

He leans back slightly, adjusting the cuffs of his suit. “But I don’t think things will even get that far. I still have a card left to play. Just waiting on a call.”

Jason finally exhales. Piper reaches out and brushes her hand against his wrist.

Zeus continues, voice steady, devoid of warmth. “I’m not in the habit of condoning criminal fraud. But I’ve played dirty once or twice, when the stakes were high enough.” His gaze lingers on Jason for a beat too long. “The legal system is not without its shadows.”

Will doesn’t move. Can’t. Because all he can hear—clearer than Zeus’s measured cadence, sharper than the fluorescent buzz overhead—is Cecil’s voice echoing from earlier:

Privilege and corruption are two sides of the same sick coin.

Will wonders, with a strange twist of guilt, how many people have ever had someone with this much power say I’ve bought you time.

Zeus looks back down at the briefcase. “The drug allegations were already tenuous. No substances were found on Mr. Markowitz at the time of arrest. Without physical evidence, and with conflicting witness statements, the case lacks a concrete foundation.”

“So,” Leo says, tipping his head, “he’s not completely screwed?”

Zeus doesn’t dignify that with a response. Just lifts a brow, like that particular phrasing physically offends him.

Jason clears his throat. “It means he has a chance.”

Zeus nods once. “If he cooperates. And if no new evidence surfaces.”

Will glances at the others—at Lou Ellen, still pale but attentive; at Piper, unreadable; at Leo, arms crossed, eyes sharp despite the pajamas. Then at Jason, who finally looks like he’s letting himself hope.

Will shifts, unable to keep quiet. “What about the assault charge?”

Zeus doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, his phone—sleek, expensive, somehow louder than it should be—starts ringing.

He glances at the screen. Then answers with effortless composure.

“Senator Apate,” he says, all warmth and polished charm. “Always a pleasure.”

The rest of the room stills.

Zeus leans back slightly, one hand in his pocket, the other steady on the phone. “Yes, I heard. Nasty business. I’ve been trying to untangle it myself.” A pause. “No, no—nothing serious. Just a misunderstanding that’s gotten a bit theatrical. You know the type—too many egos in the room, not enough sense."

He listens, smile cool and composed, then adds, “We’ve secured proof of employment and income — not grounds to dismiss the warrant outright, but it weakens the basis considerably. If the ADA wants to proceed, they’re welcome to. The search will turn up nothing, and frankly, I doubt a judge will see much merit in pursuing it once this is on record.”

Another pause. The smile sharpens. “I understand you’ve been under pressure lately. Budget reports, committee hearings, staff turnover. If this gets dragged out, it becomes a headline. You don’t want that. Neither do I.”

He nods once. “Exactly. Quiet resolution. No drama.”

He listens, nodding once, then says lightly, “I wouldn’t normally call in a marker, but I believe I’m owed one. From last year? The budget oversight thing?” He chuckles. “Exactly. I knew you’d remember.”

Will looks to Jason in confusion. Jason doesn’t break his gaze from his father, but his voice is low and sure: “It’s the State Senator.”

Leo lets out a soft whistle. Piper raises an eyebrow but doesn’t comment.

“Like I said, I’d appreciate it if this could be handled quietly,” Zeus continues. “Just let it fade, nothing flashy. We don’t need anyone making a martyr out of an overzealous prosecutor.”

He listens again, then smiles—not a pleasant one. “Of course. You have my thanks. Lunch soon? Good. I’ll have my office set something up.”

He ends the call without fanfare and slips the phone back into his coat.

Then, calmly, “The assault charge won’t be a problem.”

Will stares. There’s no celebration in his chest. Just a strange, disorienting quiet. 

Zeus extends a hand toward Leo. “May I?”

Leo doesn’t hesitate. He passes over the briefcase like he’s handing off a bomb, which—given what’s inside—feels about right. Zeus takes it with a nod of vague approval and, without another word, strides toward the door with the same unhurried confidence he’s worn like armor since the moment he arrived.

The door clicks shut behind him.

And then—finally—everyone breathes.

Piper sinks into a chair with a thump. Jason leans back against the wall, scrubbing a hand over his face. Leo flops dramatically onto the edge of the nearest table like a guy who just saved the world and wants someone to thank him for it.

Nico doesn’t sit. He lingers beside Will instead, close enough that their shoulders brush, arms folded tight across his chest. He looks marginally less ready to kill someone—but only just. His presence is quiet, protective. Grounding.

Lou Ellen stays where she is, arms crossed, lips pursed. And Will… Will can’t quite make himself relax either.

He exhales slowly, eyes still on the closed door. “That’s it?” he says aloud, more to himself than to the group. “All that panic, all that stress—and it just… ends with one phone call?”

The question lands in the room with a weight that none of them are quite ready to carry.

Jason straightens slightly. “It’s not nothing,” he says. “We had proof. Leo had documents. There’s strategy—”

“But it’s not a strategy most people have access to,” Will says, not accusing, just… tired. “Most people don’t have billionaire friends with forgery kits and private legal leverage. Most people don’t get their dads calling the state senator at four in the morning.”

Leo winces—just barely—but doesn’t argue.

Piper shifts uncomfortably. “You’re not wrong,” she says, quiet but honest. “It’s not fair. It never was.”

“Power rarely is,” Lou Ellen mutters.

Will runs a hand through his hair. “We were terrified. We were sitting here thinking Cecil’s whole life might be over. And your dad just—walked in, made a call, and now it’s like it never happened.”

“No,” Jason says softly, “it still happened. It just won’t follow him forever.”

“That’s kind of the point,” Will replies. “That’s the difference. It’s not that Cecil didn’t deserve help. He does. But how many people like him get railroaded every day because they don’t have someone with your father’s number on speed dial?”

No one responds right away.

Even Leo, always ready with a quip, just frowns down at his shoes. “You’re right,” he says eventually. “I mean—I’m glad I could help. I’d do it again. But yeah. It shouldn’t take this kind of chaos to stop a system from eating someone alive.”

Will nods. “Privilege and corruption. Two sides of the same coin.”

“Yeah,” Lou Ellen murmurs. “And tonight, we just happened to be holding it.”

The room falls into silence again. Not uncomfortable—just thoughtful. Grateful, maybe. But still marked by the knowledge that this ending, while lucky, wasn’t really just.

Will lets out a breath, quieter this time. “I just keep thinking about the people who don’t get rescued.”

Jason doesn’t look away. “Then maybe we figure out how to become the kind of people who do the rescuing.”

He exhales, slow and deliberate—like something he's been holding back for hours is finally slipping through the cracks. Then he leans against the table beside Leo, arms folded tight, voice low but clear.

“I don’t want to be like him,” he says. “Not just my father. The whole thing. The legacy, the name—the inevitability of it all.”

Will watches his face carefully. The words don’t come easy for Jason—they rarely do—but there’s weight in the effort.

“I used to think if I just did everything right, I could be better. Prove I was more than the name. But sometimes it feels like no matter what I do, I’m just… playing a role someone else already wrote.”

Nico speaks before anyone else can.

“I get that,” Nico says, his voice quiet but edged with something raw. “I’ve spent most of my life trying to unlearn everything my father ever stood for. I don’t want his legacy, or his power, or whatever twisted version of love he thinks control is.” He hesitates, just a beat too long. “I don’t even want him to be proud of me.”

His voice cracks on the last words—not enough to break, but enough to betray him.

Will glances at him, heart twisting. There’s something in Nico’s posture that’s still closed off, still braced—but honest in a way that cracks through the room. And despite everything he’s said—everything his father has done—Will hears it. That flicker of longing he probably wishes he could bury. The part of him that still wants approval, even if it hurts.

And quietly, privately, Will thinks: I don’t want to be like mine either. All sunshine and prophecy and golden promise—but still just a man. A stranger. An absence. The one who vanished before Will took his first breath, who left nothing behind but a name and the echo of a summer his mother never talks about. He doesn’t say it out loud. But the thought settles deep in his chest like sediment in water—unspoken, unmoving, heavy with the weight of becoming something else.

A knock interrupts the moment. The desk sergeant pushes the door open—stiff-backed, overly formal now, like he’s been coached through a PR disaster in the last five minutes.

“Mr. Grace,” he says, directing his words almost exclusively to Jason. “Just wanted to inform you—and your group—that the ADA has reviewed the new documentation and decided not to move forward. All charges against Mr. Markowitz have been dropped.”

There’s a beat of stunned silence.

The sergeant clears his throat. “He’ll be released within the next few minutes. Apologies for the… earlier misunderstanding.”

Piper levels him with a cool stare. “You should apologize to Cecil,” she says evenly. “And maybe start treating people like they matter before you find out who their parents are.”

The sergeant pales slightly. “Yes. Of course. Absolutely.”

They shuffle back out to the bullpen as a group, trailing behind the sergeant. Will sticks close to Nico, hands in his pockets, the adrenaline still simmering under his skin.

Zeus is already out front, engaged in what looks like a handshake turned power play with a stone-faced Themis. The ADA’s expression is stiff and tight, like she’s been forced to swallow her pride on short notice—and didn’t have water handy.

That’s when Octavian appears.

He rounds the corner like he’s been waiting for a cue and zeroes in on Jason instantly, eyes blazing.

“You think this is over?” he snaps, stepping into Jason’s space. “You think you can just parade your father around and wipe the slate clean?”

Jason doesn’t move.

Will starts forward on instinct, but Nico’s hand closes around his arm—firm, silent: don’t. Beside them, Leo straightens, all casual edges gone. His posture is relaxed, but his eyes track Octavian like a fuse watches flame.

And still, Jason doesn’t flinch.

He stands rooted, the eye of the storm—shoulders squared, spine straight, gaze steady. He meets Octavian’s fury not with heat, but with something colder. Calmer. More dangerous. His voice, when it comes, is low and flat—tempered steel against a grinding wheel.

“You know what your problem is?” he says, quietly enough that the room has to strain to hear him. “You’ve always believed power was something you inherited. Something owed to you. You talk about legacy like it’s armor, but you wield it like a weapon. You make messes and expect your grandfather to clean them up with a phone call and a favor.”

Octavian’s jaw ticks.

Jason doesn’t stop.

“You picked a fight with the wrong person this time. Cecil didn’t come from a legacy—but he’s twice the man you’ll ever be. Maybe this whole night teaches you something. Before it costs you more than a scratch.”

Something in Octavian snaps.

With a snarl, he lunges—fists clenched, fingers bunching in Jason’s collar like he’s ready to swing—

But the room erupts into motion.

The desk sergeant stumbles forward, arms out. Themis moves faster, intercepting from the side with all the sharp efficiency of a woman two steps past her last nerve. And Zeus—Zeus is suddenly between them, one hand on Octavian’s chest, the other raised in a warning gesture so commanding it halts the entire room.

“Enough,” Zeus says, low and final.

Octavian seethes, chest heaving. His hand drops from Jason’s shirt.

Themis clamps a hand around Octavian’s arm and starts pulling him back, muttering under her breath. “I’m calling your uncle. If I have to drag him down here myself, I will. Gods knows someone in your family needs to handle you.”

She all but drags him around the corner.

The moment holds—quiet, stretched thin like tension wire.
Zeus adjusts his cuffs with practiced ease, then turns back to face them. His gaze is unreadable, voice smooth as polished marble.

“Cecil will be out shortly,” he says. “I’d advise against creating any further complications in the meantime.”

He looks at Jason, offers a single, perfunctory nod. Not warmth. Not praise. Just acknowledgment, the way one might nod at a staff member who’s done their job adequately. Then he turns and walks out of the precinct, crisp and unhurried, without so much as a glance over his shoulder.

No hug. No parting words. No gesture that says you did well or I’m proud of you . 

Just silence, and then absence, tailored and deliberate.

Jason doesn’t follow him with his eyes. He just stands there, still and straight, like he’s waiting for something that doesn’t come.

Will watches the lines of his friend’s back—the way his shoulders ease by half a fraction, the way his jaw unclenches like something has slipped loose behind his teeth. It’s barely perceptible, but to Will, it lands like a pressure shift in the room.

Leo steps up beside Jason, not touching him, not pushing. Just close enough to be felt.

For a beat, he says nothing. Then, low—meant only for Jason—he murmurs, “Hey. You didn’t make a mess. You cleaned one up.”

Jason doesn’t answer, doesn’t nod. But his eyes slip shut like the words cracked something open, just a little. Like maybe that’s the only part of the night that makes sense.

The silence breaks with the sharp click of a door unlocking.

Every head turns.

Cecil steps out from behind the booking desk—bruised, rumpled, his hoodie too thin for the hour. There’s exhaustion written into every line of his body, but he’s smiling.

Before the door has even finished swinging shut, Lou Ellen’s already running.

“Cecil!”

She barrels toward him and flings her arms around his neck so hard it knocks him back a step. He catches her with a startled grunt, then hugs her like he’s anchoring himself—lifting her clean off the ground, wrapping both arms tight around her like letting go isn’t even an option.

She’s sobbing. Not the delicate kind. The real, ugly, full-body kind that shakes her shoulders and soaks through his hoodie. Her fingers clutch at the back of his neck like she’s trying to hold time still.

Cecil leans his cheek against her hair and, hoarse but still so Cecil, murmurs, “You’re getting eyeliner on my shirt.”

“Shut up,” she croaks, half-laughing through the tears. “It’s waterproof.”

“Is it?”

“Mostly.”

He squeezes her once more before gently setting her down, hands steady on her arms like he’s grounding them both. She doesn’t let go. Not yet.

“I’m so sorry,” she says again, voice cracking. “Going out was my idea, and I should’ve stopped it, or—or pulled you out before it got bad—”

“Hey,” Cecil cuts in softly, but firm. “None of that. You didn’t throw a punch. You didn’t get me arrested. And for the record? You’ve saved my ass more times than you’ve gotten me into trouble. I’ve got the running tally.”

Lou Ellen huffs a teary laugh, still wiping at her cheeks with her sleeve.

“I’d do it again,” Cecil says. “For you. No question.”

She looks up at him, eyes shining. “Really?”

“Of course really,” he says, bumping her forehead gently with his. “Don’t insult me.”

Only then do they rejoin the others.

Cecil looks around at the group—at Jason, at Piper, at Leo, at Nico—and something in his expression shifts. There’s awe there. Gratitude. But also guilt, still clinging to the edges of his mouth like he doesn’t quite know how to stand in a room that showed up for him this hard.

Then his gaze lands on Will.

And he freezes.

It’s subtle, but Will sees it—the way Cecil’s shoulders inch up, the flicker of hesitation in his eyes before they drop to the floor. Like he’s bracing for impact. Like he’s already halfway through flinching from something he can’t take back.

Will knows exactly what he’s thinking of: that brittle, venom-laced line he’d spat across the holding room like it was self-defense:
Must be easier to know that now that you’ve got a rich boyfriend and a courtroom escort.

The words still echo. They still sting.

But so does fear. And humiliation. And the awful, hollow helplessness of being twenty-one and handcuffed and made to feel like that’s all you’ll ever be.

So Will moves before Cecil can speak.

He steps forward and pulls him into a hug.

Cecil tenses at first—caught off guard—but then something in him gives. He exhales a breath he must’ve been holding for hours, and leans in, arms wrapping tight around Will like he can’t quite believe it’s real.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers into Will’s shoulder, voice cracked and thin. “I didn’t mean it. I just—”

“I know,” Will says. And he does.

It’s not the brittle I’m fine that means I’m not . It’s the kind that means I see you. And I’m still here.

“You’re okay. That’s what matters.”

Cecil nods against him, and Will feels the tremor that runs through him—small, but telling. Like the adrenaline is finally wearing off, and what’s left underneath is just a kid who’s been through hell.

Will holds on a little tighter. Just in case he needs help standing.

Then he pulls back, swiping at his eyes with the heel of his hand and attempting a crooked smile.
“So... does this mean I’m not grounded?”

Lou Ellen punches him in the arm. Hard.
“You’re on probation,” she sniffs, still blotchy from crying. “With biweekly check-ins and emotional damage fees.”

Cecil winces dramatically. “Oof. Can I pay in sarcasm and inappropriate jokes?”

“Unfortunately,” Leo deadpans, “that’s all your credit history shows.”

They start filing toward the exit in a slow, shuffling herd. There’s a sort of gravity to the moment—bone-deep exhaustion tugging at them—but also something lighter now, something like oxygen returning to the room.

 

As they pass through the front of the precinct, Will spots him again—the man from earlier, still posted up on the bench like it’s his throne. The dog bowl remains proudly in his lap, but now he’s accessorized: a cheerful birthday balloon bobs at his wrist, and a slightly lopsided party hat sits atop his head like he put it on with conviction and zero mirrors.

Cecil slows, squinting. “What the actual hell—?”

Will doesn’t break stride. “Do not make eye contact.”

But it’s already too late. The man lifts his chin. Locks eyes with Cecil.
His pupils dilate like he’s just spotted prey.

“Woof,” he says.
Then, louder, with alarming commitment: “WOOF.”

Cecil recoils slightly. Blinks. “…Happy birthday, man?”

The guy nods—serious, almost reverent. Like Cecil just gave the right answer on a pop quiz he didn’t study for.

Then he lets out another bark. Just one. Loud and matter-of-fact.

Cecil freezes, clearly questioning every choice that led him to this moment.

“…Good boy?” he tries.

The man grins wide, eyes crinkling with delight, like someone just handed him cake and told him he won.

They keep walking.

Outside, the early morning air feels sharp and too bright, like the world is daring them to believe everything might actually be okay. But as they cross the sidewalk, Will glances sideways—and his stomach knots.

Cecil’s walking with a slight limp, one hand pressed to his ribs like he’s holding himself together. There’s a bruise blooming along his jaw, and the dried blood at his temple hasn’t been properly cleaned yet.

“You need medical attention,” Will says, already defaulting to the clinical. “Real medical attention. ER. Imaging. Maybe a trauma consult.”

Lou Ellen is instantly on it. “I’ll take him. C’mon, you stubborn idiot.”

“I’ll go too,” Will says, already stepping forward.

But Cecil stops and looks at him—really looks at him.
And Will feels it land before Cecil even says a word.

“You look like death, man.”

Will frowns. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” Cecil says gently. “You’ve got one final left, right? Go home. Sleep. This is the part where you stop taking care of everyone else for five seconds.”

Will opens his mouth to argue—because of course he does—but then Piper pipes up, looping her arm around Cecil’s other side.

“I’ll tag along,” she says. “Make sure he doesn’t charm his way out of the X-ray machine.”

Cecil grins weakly. “Too late. I’ve already seduced the entire NYPD with my pain-addled charisma.”

“Shut up and get in the Uber,” Lou Ellen says, her voice fond and fiercely protective.

They pause at the curb, the routine of parting playing out like a well-worn scene. Will pulls Lou Ellen and Cecil in for one last, tight hug. “Text me,” he says, earnest and low.

Lou Ellen squeezes his shoulder and murmurs, “I will—every minute, promise.”

Without further ado, Lou Ellen, Cecil, and Piper drift toward the waiting cab. As the door shuts behind them, Will stands for a moment longer in the cool night air, phone clutched tight, like he’s already listening for any updates that might come his way.

Will yawns—sudden and wide, like his body has only just realized the crisis is over and it’s safe to shut down. The exhaustion crashes over him in a wave, deep and aching in his bones. Before he can sway on his feet, Nico slides an arm around his waist and pulls him into a side hug, steady and warm.

Across the sidewalk, Jason and Leo are speaking in low voices, close enough that their shoulders nearly touch, heads tilted in. There’s something careful about it—something raw and quiet, like they’re navigating the edges of something too new to name.

Will leans into Nico a little more. “Is… there something going on there?” he murmurs, nodding toward them.

Nico’s mouth quirks. “I think so,” he says softly. “But I don’t want to jinx it.”

Just then, Leo turns. He offers Will and Nico a half-smile—crooked and tired, but genuine. “Night, guys,” he says, voice a little rough around the edges.

“Night,” Will echoes.

Leo hesitates for a breath, eyes flicking between them, and then gives a two-fingered salute before walking off into the dark with his hands in his pockets, looking somehow both defeated and hopeful all at once.

Jason returns a minute later, hands in his pockets, shoulders still drawn tight. “I’ll call a cab,” he says quietly, already pulling out his phone.

Nico watches him for a long moment, eyes dark and unreadable, then quietly asks, “Are you okay?”

Jason doesn’t answer right away. His jaw tightens. He looks down at the ground like the words are somewhere in the cracks. When he finally exhales, it’s sharp—like something’s being forced out.

“There’s just… been a lot,” he says, voice low and thick with something that’s not quite anger but isn’t far off. “Seeing my dad’s never easy. Even when I know what he’ll do. I knew he’d get Cecil out, I knew he’d pull strings, twist arms—but that doesn’t make standing in the blast zone any less… stressful.”

He drags a hand through his hair. “And on top of all that—” He hesitates, like he’s about to swallow the sentence, then changes his mind. “Piper and I broke up. Earlier tonight.”

Will stops walking. “Wait— what ?”

Nico’s brows knit together. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Jason gives a tired laugh—bitter at the edges. “Because I was busy helping get our friend out of jail?”

Will throws up his hands. “Okay, sure, but—she was there . She slept over.”

Jason’s face crumples into something halfway between a grimace and a shrug. “It wasn’t some dramatic blow-up. We both knew it was coming. We talked. We ended it.”

Will stares at him, still processing. “But you still—?”

“Yeah,” Jason says, rubbing the back of his neck. “We haven’t been… y’know, intimate , for a while. That part ended a long time ago. But it’s hard to go straight from dating someone—on and off, for years—to just being friends again. You don’t shut all that off overnight.”

Will nods slowly, still trying to wrap his head around it.

Jason sighs. “We just shared the bed. That’s it. No drama. No weirdness. We just... needed the comfort. And honestly?” He glances between them, tired but sincere. “I’m glad she was there.”

None of them respond right away. There's nothing to say that wouldn’t feel too big or too small. The moment hangs—delicate, worn thin by the weight of the night—then quietly passes.

The ride back is silent.

The city outside the cab window hums with early morning neon and sleepless grit, a blur of yellow light and garbage trucks and people who never went to bed. Will leans his head against the window, eyes half-lidded. Nico sits beside him, their thighs just barely touching. Jason rides in the front, quiet, gaze fixed ahead like he’s still somewhere else entirely.

By the time they reach the apartment, the sky is starting to lighten. Just barely. That faint, gray-pink bruise before dawn that feels neither night nor morning, just the liminal in-between. Jason unlocks the door with muscle memory and a tired grunt. Will steps inside and heads straight for the bathroom, not saying much beyond a quiet thanks.

He doesn’t realize how much the precinct clung to him until the hot water hits his skin. Until the scent of floor cleaner and adrenaline and cold sweat begins to wash down the drain.

He feels grimy. Not just in the physical sense—though his clothes reek of stress and that awful artificial lemon smell—but in a way that’s harder to scrub. The memory of Cecil’s bruised face. The coldness in Zeus’s voice. The way the desk sergeant looked at him. Like he was nothing more than a problem to be solved. Or ignored.

Will scrubs his skin until it turns pink. Washes his hair twice. Stands under the stream until the water runs cold and his hands stop shaking.

When he finally emerges, towel around his shoulders and curls still damp, he hears hushed voices in the living room. He stops just outside the door.

Jason and Nico are sitting on opposite ends of the couch. There’s something intimate in the quiet—two people who know each other too well, who can speak with very few words. Jason’s voice is low, thoughtful. Nico’s sharper, but not angry. Names drift in and out of Will’s half-aware hearing. He catches fragments.

“—not just about him—”

“—I know. I just—”

“—you’ve got to let yourself—”

Nico looks up when he sees Will, and something in his expression tightens. A tug of conflict behind the eyes. His hand twitches like he might stand, then doesn’t.

Jason glances back, catches the exchange, and gives a soft smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Go,” he says to Nico, waving him off. “I’m fine. Seriously.”

Nico hesitates for a heartbeat. Then he stands.

He doesn’t say anything. Just crosses the room, silent as a shadow, and wraps Jason in a brief, firm hug. Jason exhales into it like he’s been holding his breath for too long.

Then Nico lets go, nods once, and follows Will down the hall to the bedroom—shoulders still tense, but eyes fixed only on him.

Will’s already halfway under the covers by the time Nico shuts the bedroom door.

The sheets are cool against his skin, the kind of softness that only feels this sacred after a day that tried to ruin him. He burrows into them with a sigh, muscles heavy, but not relaxed. Not yet.

Nico moves around the room with quiet efficiency—shrugging out of his jacket, peeling off his jeans and shirt, slipping into an old black t-shirt and pajama pants that hang low on his hips.  He slides in behind Will and immediately pulls him close, tucking them together like puzzle pieces. Will lets out a breath, the kind that shudders on its way out, and leans back into the warmth of Nico’s chest.

Will’s phone buzzes against the nightstand.

He groans, half-buried in Nico’s chest, and reaches out blindly to grab it. The screen lights up with a new group chat photo—Cecil, in a hospital gown, a thermometer sticking out of his mouth like a cigar, eyes dramatically crossed. Lou Ellen stands behind him, arms raised like she’s summoning a demon, hair wild, expression wilder. A scrawled caption reads: healthcare is a myth but my vibe is immortal.

Will huffs a laugh and shifts to show Nico. “I don’t know what’s worse—the fact that he’s still trying to meme his way through this, or that Lou’s genuinely about to go feral.”

Nico squints at the image, then snorts. “Is that a party hat on the IV stand?”

Another message pops in—this one a blurry photo of Piper standing over Cecil with a marker, proudly admiring the curly mustache she’s drawn on his face. In the background, a nurse is very clearly trying to shoo her away.

Will smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He sighs and settles back down, resting his head against Nico’s collarbone. “He’s playing it off, but… I know him. He’s not okay. Not really.”

Nico’s hand moves again, unhurried, familiar, threading through Will’s curls like he’s reading something sacred in the shape of them. He trails his fingers along Will’s scalp, slow enough to soothe, sure enough to anchor. 

Will curls in closer, fists a hand in the hem of Nico’s shirt, but the tension in his shoulders won’t leave. His voice is a whisper, cracked and guilt-heavy. “I hate that I didn’t answer Lou’s call. I keep thinking… if I’d picked up sooner—”

“Hey,” Nico cuts in gently, tugging him in tighter, grounding him. “No. None of that.”

Will exhales, breath shaking against Nico’s collarbone. “It’s just—he was scared. I could see it. Even when he was laughing. I know him.”

“I know you do,” Nico murmurs. “But he’s okay now. And he’s not alone. He has Lou Ellen. He has Piper. He has you.”

Will doesn’t answer. Just presses his face into Nico’s neck like he wants to disappear inside him.

And still, Nico keeps stroking his hair—soft, careful, reverent. Presses a kiss into Will’s temple, then his curls, then just rests his chin there, voice barely above a breath.

“Ti amo.”

Will blinks hard, lashes damp against Nico’s skin.

“I love you,” Nico says again, steady and certain. “Ti amo. I love you. I love you, amore mio.”

He says it like an oath. Like it’s something Will has earned. Like it’s something Will gets to keep.

And Will lies there, trembling a little, thinking— How is this mine? How am I allowed to have this? To be held like this? Loved like this?

Nico’s voice hums through his bones. “I love you.”

Will swallows hard, chest rising and falling against Nico’s. His voice is barely a whisper, raw with too much feeling. “I love you too.”

Nico’s arms don’t tighten—because they’re already wrapped around Will like a second skin, warm and protective, like he’s trying to shield him from the world itself—but his thumb brushes the soft curve of Will’s ear, then drifts down into his curls again, slow and deliberate. He scratches lightly at the spot just behind Will’s ear, the one that makes Will go boneless, makes him let out that soft, involuntary whimper Nico would never tease him for. He presses a kiss to Will’s temple, lingering, then murmurs something low and wordless into his hair—nothing specific, just a sound, a hum of comfort that says mine in a language older than speech.

Will exhales, long and shivery, but the tension hasn’t left him. His body’s half-melted into Nico’s chest, but his mind is still pacing like a restless dog behind his ribs—tail down, ears back, hackles raised at every imagined danger. Guilt nips at his heels. What-ifs gnaw at the corners of his thoughts. He’s too tired to think straight, too wired to sleep.

But Nico doesn’t let go. Doesn’t flinch or falter. His fingers stay steady in Will’s curls, petting him slow, scratching gently, just the way he knows Will loves. Like he’s calming a skittish puppy after a storm. Like he’s saying I know. I’ve got you. You’re safe.

“You’re okay,” Nico murmurs, voice low and patient, a thread of steady warmth through the dark. “Cecil’s okay. Lou’s with him. You did everything you could.”

Will doesn’t answer. Just presses in tighter, tucks himself into Nico’s chest like he could disappear there, like he wants to. His fingers twist into Nico’s shirt—desperate, clinging—not like he’s trying to hold on, but like he doesn’t know how to let go.

Nico kisses the top of his head. Soft. Lingering. “You’re allowed to sleep, you know.”

Will makes a sound against his collarbone—somewhere between a laugh and a sob, like he can’t decide which one he needs more.

“You are,” Nico says again, firmer this time, but still gentle. His fingers never stop moving—stroking slow through Will’s curls, scratching lightly behind his ear in a way that makes Will melt without meaning to. “You’re allowed to turn your brain off. Just for a while. You’re safe. I’ve got you.”

He presses another kiss into Will’s hair, then leans in to whisper it again, close and quiet like a lullaby: “Ti amo. I love you. I’ve got you.”

Will still feels the ache in his chest—Cecil’s bruised face, Lou’s tear-streaked smile, the looming shadow of the final he’ll never feel like he’s studied enough for—but it dulls under Nico’s touch. The world slows. The storm in his head quiets. And eventually, with Nico’s hand still moving through his hair and the words I love you spilling soft into his ear like prayers, Will drifts into sleep.

Notes:

Okay so—yes. I’m aware that some of the legal logic in this chapter is about as sturdy as Will’s emotional stability. Please bear in mind that this arc was one of the first ideas I had for the fic, and then I accidentally built like… everything else around it. So we’re rolling with it. I needed Leo to be there for Valgrace reasons, okay??

Is an employment record enough to nuke a criminal case? No. Is it enough if Zeus has the State Senator on speed dial and a divine poker face? Absolutely. Just trust the vibes. Zeus is playing 5D legal chess, and we are merely watching the pieces move.

Also, if you’re wondering about the return of Dog Man… don’t. The voices in my phone told me to do it. He’s canon now. Happy birthday to him, I guess. And this chapter is dedicated to him <3 I love you dog man <3

Chapter 51: Shopping, Sexuality, and Other Seasonal Shenanigans

The apartment smells like pine needles, cinnamon, and cheap tape.

Will rubs the heel of his palm against his eye socket, squinting against the pale winter light leaking through the crooked blinds. His backpack is still slumped by the door, anatomy flashcards half-crushed inside like battlefield relics from a war already won. The exam was a few days ago now, but the relief still lingers in his chest, slow and quiet. He actually feels… good about it. Not invincible, not euphoric, but solid. Like maybe the hours spent memorizing cranial nerves and muscle insertions actually stuck somewhere between his overworked synapses.

What he feels less good about is the twelve-hour double he pulled at the restaurant yesterday. Holiday season at a high-end place where entrées cost more than his weekly grocery bill is, unsurprisingly, hell. The dining room is all glassware, candlelight, and passive-aggressive tension. Guests expect mind-reading. Timing is sacred. Presentation is religion. Will, as a server, is both priest and punching bag.

He hadn’t meant to take the extra shift—he’s barely had time to sleep, let alone think—but Rachel had cornered him two days ago with paint in her hair and a manic glint in her eye. She needed the time, she said. He owed her.

And he did. Big time.

So he said yes. Pulled the shift. Smiled at stiff-lipped CEOs and couples who treated him like wallpaper. Came home aching, starving, and smelling like truffle butter and burnt espresso. His entire body still feels like it’s been rung out and hung to dry.

In the living room, Cecil is covered in glitter. It’s in his hair, smudged across his cheekbone, and clinging to the hem of his sweatshirt like he wrestled a craft store and lost.

The apartment is still half-exploded from the decorating spree they’d gone on a few nights ago—an impromptu celebration Lou Ellen had insisted on the minute Will staggered home from his final exam. “We’re doing Christmas now,” she’d said, dragging boxes out from under her bed before he could argue. Then, more quietly, she'd pulled him aside in the kitchen, fingers tugging at her sleeves. “I’m worried about Cecil,” she’d said. “I think it’d be good if we were all just… together for a bit.”

So they’d spent the evening hanging string lights with frayed wiring and mixing tinsel with extension cords.

Now, a three-foot artificial tree leans slightly in the corner beneath the window, strung with mismatched ornaments and two different colors of lights because they blew a fuse halfway through and had to improvise. Strands of blinking lights droop unevenly from the ceiling, and tinsel has somehow migrated into the curtain rods. Someone—probably Cecil—has zip-tied a Santa hat to the smoke detector. The place looks like Christmas was run through a blender, but it’s theirs, and it glows.

“This,” Cecil declares, slapping a floppy gold bow onto the top of a crushed cereal box, “is innovation.”

He holds it up like it’s a masterpiece. The cartoon bee is still visible on the side, grinning beside the nutrition facts.

“That’s a Cheerios box,” Lou Ellen says, deadpan, not looking up as she slices through candy-cane-striped wrapping paper with a pair of scissors that probably shouldn’t be trusted in her hands. “You are wrapping a gift in someone’s breakfast.”

“It’s called upcycling,” Cecil huffs, scandalized. “Recycling is sexy. Will, back me up.”

Will pulls on a sweater—cream, cable-knit, slightly oversized—and shrugs. “I support sustainability. I don’t support glitter in my coffee.”

He lifts his travel mug, peers inside, and sighs. There is glitter in his coffee. Of course there is.

Cecil beams. “Festive!”

Will sips anyway. There are worse things than glitter.

Cecil’s bouncing too hard, pretending too much. He hasn’t stopped talking for days—not since the arrest. Not since the night Will had to sit in a station lobby while Jason summoned his father like lightning and Nico stood like a shadow carved from marble. Not since Cecil, shaken and red-eyed, had muttered, “Must be easier to know that now that you’ve got a rich boyfriend and a courtroom escort.” and Will, exhausted and scared and furious, had said too sharply, “Don’t. Just—don’t.”

He apologized. Will forgave him.

But it still echoes sometimes. Especially in the quieter moments. When Will looks at Cecil laughing, loud and overcompensating, and remembers how small he looked cuffed to a table in a holding cell.

Will slings his scarf around his neck, watching his friends under the soft chaos of fairy lights and shredded wrapping paper. Lou Ellen is humming aggressively off-key to Mariah Carey. Cecil is taping googly eyes to a present. They’re so them, and for a moment it’s enough to anchor Will.

“You look like a hot librarian,” Cecil says, nodding approvingly at Will’s sweater-and-scarf combo from his spot on the floor.

“Thanks,” Will says dryly, adjusting the scarf. “That’s what I’m going for. You know. For the shopping trip I never consented to.”

“You’re shopping for the gala outfit today?” Lou Ellen asks, dropping the googly eyes she was trying to glue to a gift tag. “That’s cutting it close, babe.”

Will sighs, grabbing his coat off the back of the chair. “I’ve been a little busy. You know. Studying. Working. Handling… unexpected legal drama.”

Cecil flinches. Just for a second. Then he grins—wide, bright, and a little too fast. “Well, now that I have a record, I’m the edgy one in the group. You’re welcome.”

Will doesn’t reply. He just pats Cecil’s shoulder as he walks past—quick, firm, almost thoughtless. Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting. But it does mean showing up. Being here. Letting the tension hum in the background while you wrap presents and pretend everything is fine.

And today, showing up also means stepping out into the cold, trying on too-expensive blazers, and pretending you know what you’re supposed to wear to a gala where your boyfriend’s father is basically the CEO of death.

Behind him, he hears Lou Ellen shriek, “NO, you can’t use the menorah as a gift tag holder!”

Will smiles, just a little, as he pulls the door shut behind him.

***

Will tugs his scarf tighter against the cold as he rounds the corner onto Fifth Avenue, the wind biting at his cheeks like it has a personal vendetta. The sidewalks are packed—glossy with slush, glittering with storefront lights, and loud with the impatient shuffle of holiday shoppers. A brass quartet is valiantly trying to play “Silent Night” over the bleating of car horns and an angry cyclist screaming about jaywalkers.

The doorman at Bergdorf Goodman doesn’t blink when Will walks in—doesn’t look twice at the fraying cuff of his coat or the faint glitter still clinging to his scarf. Maybe because it’s New York. Maybe because it’s December, and everyone looks a little frayed at the edges.

Inside, it feels like a different universe entirely. Warm lighting glows off polished floors. Every surface gleams. The air smells like cedar, leather, and whatever cologne costs more than Will’s rent. Christmas music plays softly—jazzy and unobtrusive—and garlands wind elegantly around mirrored columns like someone staged a winter wonderland photo shoot and forgot to clean up.

Will nearly turns around. He’s still deciding whether to bolt when he spots Nico, already waiting by the stairwell.

Black wool coat. Dark turtleneck. Hair windswept from the cold. He looks like he belongs here—like the store dressed itself around him. One gloved hand is tucked in his coat pocket, the other holding two coffee cups. He offers one to Will without a word.

Will takes it. The heat seeps through his gloves and into his fingers like relief.

“Hey,” Will says, breath clouding in front of him.

Nico meets his eye, and something in his expression softens. “Hey. You made it.”

“I had to elbow three Santas and a woman with antlers just to get here,” Will mutters, stepping into Nico’s orbit. “If I die, avenge me.”

Nico smirks. “I’ll bury them myself.”

Before Will can say something dumb in response, Piper appears—all leather jacket, fur-lined boots, and windblown hair, like she just stepped out of a winter fashion spread and possibly fought off a snowstorm on the way.

“There he is!” she says brightly. “Our beautiful disaster. You didn’t really think we’d let you show up to the gala in a bookstore sweater, did you?”

“I—okay, rude. This sweater is a classic.”

“A classic what, exactly?”

Nico makes a sound suspiciously close to a laugh, and Will flips them both off with half-frozen fingers.

Then Nico clears his throat. “I have to go… take care of something.”

Piper arches an eyebrow. “Cryptic.”

He shrugs, the collar of his coat shifting with the motion. “I’ll catch up with you guys in a bit. Promise.”

Before Will can ask what “take care of something” actually means, Nico pulls out his wallet and offers him a sleek, black credit card.

Will stares at the card like it might bite him.

“I can’t take that,” he says, voice low.

Nico doesn’t flinch. “It’s just for today.”

“That’s not the point.”

Piper takes a delicate step back, holding up her hands like she’s preparing to referee. “Should I... give you two some privacy? Or is this about to become a full-blown class war?”

Will exhales sharply through his nose but doesn’t look away from Nico. “This feels like charity.”

“It’s not.” Nico tucks the card back in his gloved hand and offers it again—gentler this time. “It’s me wanting to buy my boyfriend something nice.”

Will swallows, hard. The weight of old habits—pride, fear, shame—settles in his chest like cold stone. It’s not just about the suit. It’s everything the suit represents: money, ease, a life lived in soft lighting and expensive fabrics. A world where people assume you belong because you’ve always belonged. Will grew up watching it through glass, pressing his face against it from the outside, learning early that needing something too badly only made you look desperate.

He hates needing things. Especially this.

Taking Nico’s card would be crossing a line. A quiet, invisible one, but real all the same. It would mean admitting that Nico can give him things he can’t give back. That Will has limits. That love can’t level every playing field.

Nico sees it. Of course he does.

He shifts closer, just slightly, the card still held between them like a peace offering. His eyes don’t waver. He doesn’t push, doesn’t sigh in frustration or try to argue his way through Will’s resistance. He just waits.

Then, softly, “Will. Look—I get it.”

His voice is quieter now, almost careful. Not the kind of careful that implies walking on eggshells, but the kind you use when you're trying to hold something delicate without breaking it.

“I know this feels weird. I know you’ve spent your whole life doing everything on your own, proving you don’t need help, that you can stand on your own feet no matter how much it costs you.”

His thumb rubs the edge of the card once, thoughtful.

“But you don’t have to do that with me. You don’t have to earn things with me. I’m not giving you this to fix something or because I think you need it. I’m giving it to you because I want to. Because I care.”

Will’s throat tightens, but he doesn’t move. Nico’s words land gently, like snowfall, soft but steady, settling on all the places Will keeps raw and hidden.

Nico lowers his hand just a bit—still offering, but not demanding.

“I want you to have something that makes you feel good. That fits. That makes you feel like you belong, because you do.” He hesitates. “And because I like doing things for you. I like seeing you taken care of.”

There’s a pause, stretched and quiet, and Will feels something in him begin to bend.

Then, Nico adds, more wryly, voice dipping toward a smirk:
“And so I can enjoy taking it off you after the gala.”

Piper groans and dramatically turns in a slow circle like she’s trying to physically rotate away from the sexual tension. “You two are insufferable,” she announces, but doesn’t move an inch.

Will flushes so fast it feels like his entire bloodstream forgets how to regulate temperature. He glares—at the floor, at the card, at Nico’s completely unrepentant expression. “You’re an asshole,” he mutters, snatching the card before his pride can stop him.

Nico just smirks, sharp and satisfied. “You’re welcome.”

Piper reappears at Will’s side like she never left, clapping once with a little too much force. “Perfect. Now that we’ve emotionally and sexually manipulated you into accepting basic luxury, let’s find something that makes you look hot enough to ruin a trust fund.”

Will’s still mid-glare when Nico’s hand brushes his arm—just a fleeting touch, enough to make him look back.

“I really do have to go,” Nico says, quiet now, almost apologetic. 

Will nods, not trusting himself to speak. He watches Nico go, coat flaring with each step, until he vanishes between mirrored columns and mannequins in tuxedos that cost more than Will’s monthly rent—like a shadow being swallowed by the store’s marble elegance. Will stares after him, card still clutched in his hand, unease tugging at the edges of his chest.

“What’s he doing?” he asks, glancing sideways at Piper.

She shrugs, flipping her braid over her shoulder. “No clue. You think he tells me things? Half the time I find out Nico’s plans after he’s executed them and vanished into smoke like a goth magician.”

That… does track. Still, Will’s stomach twists.

But he doesn’t have time to sit with the feeling, because Piper is already grabbing his wrist and dragging him deeper into the store. “Come on, no brooding allowed. We’re on a mission.”

“What kind of mission?”

“The hot kind,” she says, scanning racks like she’s preparing for combat. “You need to look like you belong at an event where the champagne flows like water and three women nicknamed after goddesses are expected to show up in couture.”

Will blinks. “I—wait, actual goddesses?”

Piper snorts. “No. Just terrifyingly powerful women with stylists, inherited PR teams, and at least one art auction scandal each. Everyone calls them Nyx, Hebe, and Selene—but their real names are probably Madison or Jessica. And Melinoë might show, if she’s back from Milan in time. You know how dramatic she gets about Italian winters.”

She’s moving so fast Will has to jog to keep up. Her hands skim along velvet and silk like she’s tuning an instrument only she can hear.

“This isn’t just some cocktail party. It’s a full black-tie gala, and they’re turning the rooftop into a ‘Garden of Olympus’—lots of gold, florals, dramatic uplighting. There’s going to be a harpist. A real, living harpist, Will. And not even, like, background music—this one gets a spotlight.”

“I don’t think the harpist being alive is the shocking part here.”

“You’d be surprised.”

She spins, holds up a navy blazer with gold piping, studies it, makes a face, and dumps it back on the rack like it personally insulted her.

“There will be photographers. Ambrosia’s handling the food. The lighting installation was commissioned from that experimental sculptor—what’s-his-face, the one who did the molten glass labyrinth at the Met gala pre-party last year? And according to Leo, there’s going to be a floating marble bar with dry ice and cocktails named after famous tragedies.”

Will snorts. “Can’t wait to drink an ‘Oedipolita’ and cry in the bathroom.”

Piper grins. “Exactly. And you, my beautiful anxious medical intern, are going to look like you were born to be there. You’re going to make jaws drop. You’re going to make at least one Vogue editor cry. Nico won’t know what hit him.”

Will tries to respond, but she’s already holding up three more jackets and launching into a monologue about lapel structure and the politics of pocket squares.

He lets her. The knot in his chest doesn’t fully loosen, but it shifts. The weight of Nico’s absence remains, tucked behind his ribs, quiet and watchful—but Piper’s voice is like static drowning it out.

***

The next several hours are a blur of fabric, lighting, and relentless commentary.

Will is ushered in and out of the changing room like a mannequin on a luxury conveyor belt. Piper prowls the aisles like a general surveying her troops, issuing instructions to the sales assistant—a tall, alarmingly handsome man named Paris, who looks like he was sculpted by a Renaissance master and wears his tape measure like a sash of nobility.

“This one’s Dior,” Paris purrs, straightening the collar of a midnight silk jacket on Will’s shoulders. “Limited run. Very... Orpheus at the Underworld Gala.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Will mutters, staring at his reflection. “But I think this jacket costs more than my liver.”

Paris just smiles like that’s charmingly rustic of him and flutters off to fetch loafers “worthy of Apollo.”

Piper is already frowning. “It’s too shiny. You look like you’re hosting the Oscars, not infiltrating Mount Olympus.”

“That’s definitely what I’m doing,” Will says, stepping down from the platform and almost tripping over a rogue shoehorn. “Just out here infiltrating. I feel like a Barbie whose job is... Gala Ken.”

“You’re doing great, Gala Ken,” Piper says, waving him back into the fitting room. “Now go try the charcoal wool with the asymmetrical lapel.”

“Piper,” he groans, “are you—are you enjoying this?”

She pauses, one hand trailing thoughtfully along a rack of bow ties in violent jewel tones. Then she shrugs, casual. “Maybe. It’s nice. Spending time with you. And, you know—having fun. Given... everything.”

Will hesitates, suddenly unsure what to do with his arms, or his face, or the cufflinks currently pinching his wrists. “Right. Yeah. I—uh. I’m sorry, I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about... you know... the thing.”

Piper raises an eyebrow. “You mean the breakup?”

Will rubs the back of his neck, suddenly very interested in the cuff of his sleeve. “I just—yeah. I mean. I wasn’t sure if—like, I was allowed to know.”

Piper snorts. “Of course you’re allowed to know, you’re part of the group now. You can’t get rid of us that easy.”

There’s a pause. The air between them shifts—less sharp, more thoughtful.

“I did love him,” she says quietly, turning over a cufflink in her palm. “Still do, in a way. It’s not like something just turns off. But I’ve been... figuring some stuff out. About myself.”

Will looks up. Piper’s voice is careful now, like she’s testing the weight of each word before letting it fall.

““It’s weird,” she says, softer now, like the sharp edges of her voice have been sanded down. “I used to think sexuality was this one big neon sign—like you’d just know, right? But it turns out you can be in love with someone, genuinely, and still feel like… maybe you weren’t the whole version of yourself yet. That there’s something else you’ve been ignoring or not letting yourself explore because it didn’t fit the picture you’d already painted.”

Will stills. The rack of blazers beside them fades into background static. He hears her, fully hears her, and understands immediately—this isn’t just about Jason. Not really.

She’s telling him something real.

Her eyes flick to his, open and unsure. “Did you always know?”

Will exhales slowly, lowering himself onto the bench beside her. His knees brush against bolts of cashmere and wool, but all he can feel is the heavy quiet settling between them like snowfall.

“Kind of,” he says, trying to find the right tone. Not too casual. Not too weighted. “I liked boys before I even knew I was ‘supposed’ to like girls.”

Piper tilts her head, attentive in that way only a friend trying to be brave can be.

“I knew ‘gay’ was a bad word before I knew what it actually meant,” Will continues, his voice gentling. “People whispered it like it was dirty. Like it could stick to you if you weren’t careful.”

And god, he remembers—how he used to flinch when he heard the word. How he learned to hate the way his heartbeat quickened around boys before he even knew why.

“By the time I figured out the definition, I’d already been in love with, like, three different boys at school. And I liked girls too, so it got… messy. I didn’t know what I was allowed to say, or feel. I just kept it all locked up tight. No one ever told me that ‘bisexual’ was an option too, I had to figure that one out on my own.”

He glances over, and Piper is still watching him. Not with pity, but with a kind of soft awe. Like she’s trying to memorize the shape of his courage in case she needs to borrow it later.

“When did you finally tell someone?” she asks.

Will swallows. “Lee. He was my neighbor growing up. Bit older. Basically a brother.”

The memory cracks something in his voice.

“He was the first person I ever told anything real about myself. I was fifteen and terrified, but he just—he made it easy to be honest. Like the world wasn’t going to end just because I said something out loud.”

Piper doesn’t answer right away. She just shifts a little closer, casual but careful, until their shoulders are just barely touching. It’s a silent offer of presence, not comfort. Will appreciates the difference.

“I miss him,” he adds quietly, and the ache in his chest flares in that way grief always does—sharp, sudden, oddly familiar. He blinks once. Twice.

Piper doesn’t push. She just fiddles with a price tag like it has answers she hasn’t earned yet.

“Thanks for telling me,” she says finally, voice quieter than it was before. Not small. Just real.

And Will realizes—really realizes—how hard this must’ve been for her. How much unlearning she’s probably had to do. How many months, maybe years, of letting silence settle in all the places that didn’t quite feel right. He’s never thought of Piper as hesitant before, but now, with her fingers twitching at the hem of her jacket and her gaze fixed on the middle distance, he sees the bravery in it. The cost.

“I know I’ve been kind of… off lately,” she says. “I think I spent so long trying to be the right person for someone else that I didn’t notice how much I’d bent myself out of shape to make it work. And now I’m just trying to figure out what’s actually me.”

Will breathes out slowly. Relief, yes—but also reverence. He reaches out and covers her hand with his, just for a second. Solidarity in skin and silence.

“Yeah,” he says. “That makes sense.”

And it does.

In the hush between suit jackets and scattered price tags, Will understands they’ve both been something for other people—golden boy, loyal girlfriend, dependable, digestible, careful. And now, here they are: trying to carve out space for something honest. 

Piper nudges him gently with her shoulder. “Anyway, sorry for turning your gala prep into a therapy session.”

Will snorts. “Please. I’d take this over Paris trying to sell me a minotaur brooch any day.”

From somewhere across the store, Paris calls, “It’s still available, darling!”

Piper snorts, and Will laughs for real this time—quick and surprised and bright. The knot in his chest doesn’t fully untangle, but it loosens, just enough to breathe.

“Okay,” Piper says, standing and offering him a hand. “One more round. And then we’re getting chocolate croissants. For courage.”

Will takes her hand. “Deal.”

***

Will blows on his coffee, trying not to think about how much the suit cost—or how easily the sales assistant had smiled once he handed over Nico’s card. The whole thing had shifted like magic: suddenly he was Sir Guest of Honor instead of Slightly Sleep-Deprived Pre-Med Student #3. They’d whisked the outfit away for express tailoring—“We’ll have it delivered to your apartment by tomorrow afternoon,” Paris had said, with the kind of elegance that made it sound like a blessing.

Will had nodded mutely, already imagining the bag showing up at their apartment, where the tree was still shedding tinsel into the kitchen sink and Cecil had glued googly eyes to all the empty wine bottles on the windowsill. A designer suit arriving into that chaos felt like putting a tiara on a raccoon.

Now, seated outside a pastry shop that smells like cardamom and sugar and probably charges twelve dollars for hot chocolate, Will takes a bite of something flaky and vaguely almond-shaped while Piper launches into what he’s quickly realizing is a full-on briefing.

She’s perched across from him sunglasses pushed up into her hair even though the sun is mostly symbolic today. Her coffee is untouched. Her energy is not.

“Okay. So. Gala guest list. Buckle up.”

Will raises an eyebrow. “Should I be taking notes?”

“Probably,” she says seriously, then starts counting on her fingers. “First up: Percy’s dad, Poseidon and Annabeth’s mom, Athena. They will both be there, and they haven’t spoken since that joint panel on sustainable urban planning imploded over zoning rights. There was a PowerPoint sabotage. It was vicious.”

Will blinks. “Wait. Percy’s dad and Annabeth’s mom hate each other?”

“Like, full academic blood feud,” Piper says. “Percy’s dad is all free-spirited maritime architecture. Athenais... not. Last year at a fundraiser she said something about ‘coastal decay as a metaphor for intellectual decay,’ and Poseidon hasn’t forgiven her.”

Will sips his coffee, trying not to laugh. “And they’re both just... showing up?”

“Oh, it’ll be fine,” Piper says. “As long as no one mentions the Grecian bathhouse incident.”

He doesn’t ask.

Piper continues, “Jason’s dad probably won’t come. He hates Nico’s dad. And hings are still tense after... you know. With Cecil.”

Will glances up, brow raised. “Right. That.” He stares into his cup, watching the foam swirl like storm clouds. “Yeah, I figured he wouldn’t be rushing to attend.

Piper shudders theatrically. “If there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s Zeus and Hades in the same room. Last time, the valet stand caught fire. No one knows how.”

Will grins. “Is that metaphorical fire or...?”

“Unclear.”

She stabs her fork into a tiny croissant and lowers her voice. “Now, my turn for psychological damage. My mom is probably bringing Frank’s dad. Again.”

Will chokes on his coffee. “Wait, what?”

“Yup,” Piper says, casually popping the croissant into her mouth. “Aphrodite and Mars. The world’s most exhausting on-again, off-again situationship. They've been orbiting each other for years. It’s like some tragic romantic epic, except instead of Helen of Sparta it’s a cosmetics mogul and a weapons-tech billionaire with a shared beach house in Montauk and absolutely no concept of boundaries.”

Will stares. “I thought your mom was dating that art critic from the Times.”

“She was. Until Mars showed up at a fundraiser with a motorcycle and a speech about fate.” Piper rolls her eyes. “Frank and I literally did DNA tests last year, just to be safe and make sure we’re not somehow related. We’re in the clear, but emotionally? Debatable.”

Will bursts out laughing, shoulders shaking. “That might be the most high-society soap opera thing I’ve ever heard.”

Piper raises her pastry like a toast. “Welcome to Olympus.”

All around them, the city pulses with holiday energy—shop windows glitter with lights and impossible price tags, car horns harmonize with a Salvation Army bell down the street, and snow begins to fall in tentative, half-hearted flurries. Will pulls his coat tighter and watches the flakes land on Piper’s hair, on her smile, and thinks for a moment how surreal this all is: tailor-made suits and complicated family trees and people who speak in allegories even when they don’t mean to.

Then—

Nico slides into the seat beside him like a shadow suddenly given shape. His coat is dusted with snow, cheeks flushed pink from the cold, dark curls wind-tossed and damp at the edges. His nose is red. His gloved hand brushes against Will’s under the table.

Will forgets how to breathe.

“Gods,” he says without thinking, voice rough. “You look—cute. Really cute.”

Nico blinks, clearly caught off guard, and the color in his cheeks deepens alarmingly. “Shut up.”

Will grins. “No, seriously. You’re like some kind of adorable gay Christmas postcard.”

Piper groans, rising from her seat and slinging her bag over her shoulder. “Okay, and on that note, I’m officially the third wheel again.”

“Sorry, Pipes,” Will says sheepishly.

“It’s fine. I do have my own outfit crisis to manage. And beauty prep.” She rolls her eyes. “If I don’t show up looking like a handcrafted editorial spread, my mother will haunt me from across the room all night. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“You always look beautiful,” Nico says simply.

Will nod. “Seriously. You could show up in sweatpants and still look better than all of us.”

Piper narrows her eyes, mock-suspicious. “Are you two ganging up on me with sincerity?”

“Maybe,” Will says.

She huffs, but her smile softens. “Ugh, fine. Hug me and I’ll let you live.”

They both stand to comply. Piper squeezes Will first, then Nico—who tolerates it with minimal grumbling—and then she’s off down the block, boots clicking against wet pavement, disappearing into a blur of snowflakes and taxi exhaust.

Will sits back down, brushing a few stray snowflakes from his sleeve, only to find Nico already leaning across the table, fingers creeping toward his half-eaten pastry like a thief in plain sight.

“Hey!” Will protests, but it’s too late—Nico plucks the last buttery triangle off the plate and pops it into his mouth with the casual confidence of someone who’s absolutely going to do it again.

Nico chews with infuriating slowness, dark eyes narrowed just slightly in challenge. “You weren’t eating it.”

“I was savoring it,” Will grumbles, pulling his coffee defensively closer. “There’s a difference.”

“Mmm.” Nico hums in response, then promptly leans over again and lifts Will’s cup right out of his hands. He takes a sip, lips brushing the rim with theatrical nonchalance, then makes a face like it personally offended him. “You always let things go cold.”

“That’s because I was talking!”

“You were making heart eyes at Piper,” Nico says flatly, wiping a stripe of foam off his upper lip with his thumb. “I thought you’d forgotten about it.”

Will glares, but there’s no heat behind it—not when Nico’s sitting there looking like a walking snow globe, cheeks flushed pink from the cold, the collar of his coat still frosted at the edge. His lashes are wet from melted snow. There’s a smear of sugar just below his mouth.

“You’re the worst,” Will mutters.

Nico just shrugs, unapologetic, and shifts closer on the bench seat. The motion is subtle but unmistakable—his thigh brushes against Will’s under the table, and stays there. The contact is small but electric, grounding them both amidst the swirl of holiday chaos just outside the café windows.

“You like me anyway,” Nico says, voice soft now, teasing edged with something quieter.

Will means to roll his eyes. To argue. But instead he just looks—at Nico’s half-smile, the slant of his posture, the way he’s slowly warming from the outside in. Snow still clings to the shoulder seam of his coat, melting in slow rivulets.

Unfortunately, Will thinks, heart stuttering in his chest as he watches him, that’s the problem.

Will leans back just enough to see Nico clearly, taking in the wind-chapped flush still lingering on his nose, the damp curl of hair falling across his forehead. “So,” he says, trying for casual and missing by a mile, “where’d you disappear to?”

Nico’s expression immediately shutters, that familiar flicker of evasion sliding across his face. “Nowhere important.”

Will raises a brow. “Is it something bad?”

“What? No.” Nico’s eyes go wide, alarmed, and he rushes to correct himself. “No, not bad. It’s good. I mean—probably. Hopefully.” He scratches at the back of his neck, suddenly sheepish, like someone who hadn’t planned on being asked.

Will tilts his head, curiosity catching like static. “So?”

Nico sighs, like someone surrendering a state secret. “I was picking up your Christmas present.”

That short-circuits Will’s brain for a beat.

“You were—wait. Seriously?”

Nico nods, looking down into his coffee like it might save him from further emotional exposure.

Immediately, Will’s eyes dart around the café in a panic of hope. His whole body straightens with purpose, scanning every corner—under the table, behind Nico’s coat, toward the counter where a barista is juggling espresso shots like it’s a contact sport.

Nico watches him with a look of affectionate disbelief.

“Where is it?” Will asks, voice rising like a child realizing Christmas is real and it’s now. “Is it here? Is it behind the counter? Did you bribe someone? Is it alive? Is it—oh my god—is it a cursed artifact that can't be carried by mortal hands?”

“No,” Nico says dryly. “Though I’m adding that to my list for next year.”

Will’s not convinced. He twists in his seat to peer at a pile of messenger bags stacked near the door like he’s seconds from launching a full search party.

“I will find it,” he mutters. “I’ve dissected a cadaver blindfolded. I can crack this.”

“It’s not here,” Nico says, reaching out to physically pull Will back by the sleeve. “I had it sent to my apartment, Sherlock.”

Will flops back down with a dramatic sigh, the kind only someone defeated by logistics can produce. “You’re cruel. You’re withholding joy.”

“I’m preserving the element of surprise.”

“You’re the worst,” Will mumbles—but his heart isn’t in it. Especially not when Nico shifts closer again, their coats brushing, their knees knocking beneath the table like a secret handshake.

“You’re so impatient,” Nico says, his voice low and pleased.

Will swallows, trying to ignore the fact that Nico smells like cold air and warmth, like the inside of a wool scarf and something just a little bit expensive. “I’m always impatient around you.”

It slips out too fast, too easy—and Will feels the weight of it immediately, the flush rising to his ears, the electric hum that seems to settle between them whenever they’re this close.

And it’s true—his hands ache with it, with the want to touch, to press his mouth to Nico’s and see if he still tastes like stolen coffee and powdered sugar. He wants to chase the way Nico’s voice goes quiet when he gets flustered, to unspool the mystery of him in a place that isn’t so public, so loud.

But the café hums with conversation, packed with shoppers ducking in from the cold, cheeks pink and laughter rising like steam. PDA is still new territory for them—both of them unsure where the boundaries are, where the safety ends and the vulnerability begins.

So instead, Will exhales and slides an arm around Nico’s waist, pulling him in until they’re pressed together, side to side. Nico goes without resistance, leaning in like he’s been waiting for the invitation.

Will rests his chin briefly against Nico’s shoulder and murmurs, “You’re lucky I’m in love with you, di Angelo.”

Nico hums, soft and smug and dangerously fond. “I know.”

Nico shifts closer, his arm brushing Will’s as he angles Will’s coffee cup for one last sip. “So,” he says casually, “how’s the suit?”

Will raises an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“I would,” Nico deadpans. “That’s why I asked.”

Will takes a slow, smug sip of his own drink, now lukewarm and slightly stolen from. “You’ll see it at the gala.”

Nico narrows his eyes. “You’re being mysterious on purpose.”

“Maybe,” Will says, leaning into the game. “I figure after all that effort today, you deserve a little suspense.”

Nico hums. “We do have a hotel room at the venue. So unless you plan to arrive in a full garment bag, I’ll probably see it before the gala.”

Will shrugs, faux-casual. “Guess I’ll keep it zipped in the dust cover until the last possible second.”

Nico smirks. “Wow. A whole hotel room with you and no clothes. How will I survive.”

Will pretends to think it over. “We’ll leave a window open. Ice bath. Cold shower. Divine intervention.”

“None of those are strong enough,” Nico mutters, stealing the last crumb of Will’s pastry like it’s proof of his moral superiority. “I’ll have to suffer.”

Will laughs, warm and a little breathless. But then he shifts slightly in his seat, reaching into his coat pocket. “Hey—speaking of suffering.”

He pulls out the black card and sets it gently on the table between them.

Nico blinks. “You could’ve kept it till the gala.”

“I didn’t want to.” Will nudges it closer. “It felt… heavy.”

Nico picks it up without fanfare, sliding it into his wallet like it’s nothing. Like it’s not the kind of thing that could buy out a penthouse or a person.

Will exhales, and it surprises him—how much lighter he feels, just from handing it back. He hadn’t realized the weight of it, the way it pressed against the corners of his pride. Not just money, but legacy. Status. Influence passed down in marble buildings and old names and backroom deals. Things Nico wears like a coat he didn’t choose.

And he thinks—not for the first time—how strange it is, to carry that kind of power and still look like a boy with snow melting in his hair.

“I meant what I said. I wanted to do this for you.”

Will glances at him, caught off guard by the sincerity in his voice, the way his fingers still linger on the edge of his wallet like he’s holding onto something fragile.

“It’s not about money,” Nico continues, eyes trained on the slow snowfall outside. “It’s about showing up for someone. And I know you’re not used to that.”

Will huffs a laugh, but it comes out softer than expected. “What gave me away? My constant spiraling? My allergic reaction to help?”

Nico smiles, faint but fond. “You don’t have to prove anything with me. I know you can handle yourself. That’s not why I wanted to do this.”

Will studies him, the way his lashes cast shadows over his cheeks, the way his hand curls around his coffee cup for warmth he probably doesn’t need. Then, quietly: “It’s just… hard. Letting someone in without bracing for the fallout.”

“I know,” Nico says. “But I’m not going to drop you.”

The words settle between them like a blanket, warm and unshakable. Will feels them wrap around something in his chest he didn’t realize had been shaking. He doesn’t say anything for a moment—just lets the silence stretch, full and steady, while the snow softens the edges of the city outside.

“Okay,” Will says finally. “Okay.”

Nico leans into him, shoulder pressing against Will’s, casual and certain. Will lets his body tilt back, not all the way, but enough. Enough to say: I feel it too. Enough to say: I want this.

They sit like that for a while, knees touching under the table, coffee gone lukewarm between them, the outside world fading behind the café’s fogged windows and twinkling lights. The city hums on—horns, bells, laughter in the distance—but in this small pocket of warmth and wood and snow-dusted coats, time slows.

Will watches the way Nico’s lips part slightly with each breath, the way his dark hair curls damply over the collar of his coat, and thinks—not for the first time, and certainly not the last—that he could fall in love with him a hundred different ways

Notes:

Hi everyone! Sorry for the radio silence, life has been a lot lately. I’ve been busy juggling other projects (I’ve posted a few one-shots recently if anyone’s curious 👀), and on top of that, the infamous ao3 curse finally caught up with me after ten solid years on this website. Long story short: I got really sick and ended up in the hospital with kidney issues. All is well now, but that’s where I’ve been!

As for this chapter: it feels a little chaotic to me in places, but I really wanted to hit a few key beats—Cecil still not being fully okay, Piper offering more insight into the breakup, Will getting his suit, and a few hints about the Christmas presents that’ll come up in the post-gala chapters. I also felt like we couldn’t jump straight from the arrest drama into black-tie glamour without a breather, so… this is that breather. A bit of a bridge chapter. It feels a little “filler-ish” to me, but trust me when I say I tore my hair out trying to shape it right. Hopefully the fluff at the end makes up for it

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed, and buckle up, because the next few chapters are all gala chapters. Things are about to get fancy.

Chapter 52: Jason Gets Sent on a Quest by the Daughters of Wisdom and Love While I Trauma Bond With Frank About Meeting the Lord of the Dead

Notes:

Hi everyone! At long last, here’s the first of the gala chapters! I originally hoped to have the next one ready too for a double update, but there are a few details I’m still not happy with and since I’m heading to London on Tuesday, I won’t have time to polish it before I go. So in the meantime I wanted to give you this chapter to tide you over.

The next one will finally include that long-awaited moment: Will meets Hades (!!). But for now, enjoy the pre-gala chaos and a scene near the end that’s been haunting my brain since I first started planning this fic.

I hope you enjoy it!

The thirty-fourth floor of the Beekman Hotel has been temporarily claimed by college students, empty champagne bottles, and the pervasive scent of hairspray.

Somewhere between the Louis XVI hallway sconces and the chrome ice buckets collecting condensation like a nervous tic, Olympus University's most mythically dysfunctional cohort has set up camp. Every door is open. Music blares from three different rooms and blends into a kind of Dionysian chorus—Beyoncé from Piper’s suite, ABBA from Annabeth’s phone in the bathroom, and Leo’s aggressively autotuned SoundCloud playlist from the hallway where he’s trying to fix a curling iron with a wrench.

Will tries not to look directly at the curling iron. Or the wrench. Or Leo.

There’s an open bar someone has cobbled together on Hazel and Frank’s dresser using stolen room service miniatures, hotel ice, and a suspicious amount of La Croix. Percy is shirtless and drinking prosecco straight from the bottle. Frank is earnestly trying to herd everyone into hydration, offering plastic water cups like communion wafers. Piper is already radiant, lounging on the window seat in a robe and a full face of glam makeup while Hazel crouches behind her, hair pinned between her teeth and a can of glitter spray in one hand.

The group’s managed to take over nearly the entire floor—four suites total, each in varying stages of pre-gala disaster. Percy and Annabeth are sharing one (against the hotel’s better judgment), as are Frank and Hazel. Will and Nico have the corner suite, currently serving as a shrine to chaos and suppressed panic. Piper was meant to share with Jason, but the break-up happened last week with the quiet finality of a closing door, and now she’s flying solo while Jason bunks with Leo, who has taken over an entire loveseat with tools, wires, and what might once have been a clothes steamer before it combusted.

No one seems to mind the reshuffling. Piper’s suite has become the girls’ base of operations—Hazel, Annabeth, and Piper all getting ready together while sending the boys out across Manhattan on increasingly bizarre errands.

“Annabeth!” Piper calls, flinging out an arm. “We’re out of boob tape!”

“I sent Jason for boob tape twenty minutes ago!” Annabeth yells back from the bathroom, voice echoing through the tile. “If he comes back with toupee glue again, I’m hexing him.”

Will sits on the bed in the room he’s sharing with Nico, still in sweatpants, his dress shoes ominously polished and waiting by the minibar like tiny tuxedoed judges. Nico, barefoot and grimacing, has been glaring at a pair of cufflinks as though they personally offended him.

“So, uh,” Will says, watching a puff of glitter float past the open door like airborne syphilis, “how’s your emotional stability holding up?”

Nico doesn’t answer right away. He’s sitting cross-legged on the edge of the bed, still in black sweatpants and the faded t-shirt Will likes because it clings to Nico’s shoulders when he stretches—though there’s no stretching happening now, just brooding. His speech cards lie face-down like a bad tarot reading.

Nico exhales through his nose. “I had brunch with my father and Persephone.”

Will winces. “Right. That bad?”

“My father rewrote my entire speech in the middle of Balthazar’s over eggs Florentine. Hazel tried to defend it—said it sounded like me—and he just laughed. Called it ‘quaint.’”

Will raises an eyebrow. “What was wrong with it?”

“It had opinions,” Nico says bitterly. “Apparently I’m meant to sound ‘gracious’ and ‘respectful of legacy,’ not ‘emotionally volatile with socialist undertones.’”

Will snorts. “God forbid you imply the underworld has class politics.”

Nico throws himself backward onto the bed with the melodrama of a dying poet. “He’s turning my own words into a eulogy for himself. I don’t even recognize what he wants me to say. It’s like I’m expected to thank him for being a cold, emotionally unavailable megalomaniac with excellent taste in pocket squares.”

Will leans on one elbow beside him, voice gentler now. “You don’t have to say what he wrote.”

“I do,” Nico mutters. “Or I get disinherited in front of six hundred people and a magazine photographer.”

There’s a beat of silence, broken only by a shriek of laughter from Piper’s room and the unmistakable hiss of another can of glitter spray being deployed.

“And Persephone?” Will asks carefully.

“Flirted with the waiter, ordered a bellini flight, and told Hazel she should drop out of college and move to Paris to ‘find her season.’” Nico’s voice is flat, but the corner of his mouth twitches. “Then she asked if the hotel ballroom could be lit entirely by candlelight and was deeply offended when the fire marshal said no.”

Will stifles a laugh with the back of his hand. “Okay. That’s incredible.”

“Oh, and my father brought a lapdog. In a stroller.”

Will blinks. “What.”

“It had a velvet blanket and a crown. The waiter addressed it as ‘Your Grace.’”

Will loses it. “Gods. That’s how the rich show love, I guess.”

“I don’t want love. I want plausible deniability.” Nico closes his eyes. “I want someone to fake a bomb threat. I want the ceiling to collapse. I want to be struck by a tasteful bolt of lightning before this night begins.”

Will watches him quietly for a moment. Nico’s eyeliner from earlier is still faint beneath his eyes, smudged and half-worn away. His hair’s a little mussed from running his hands through it. His mouth is downturned in that particular, exhausted way Will recognizes—when the weight of being seen starts to feel heavier than being invisible.

“You know,” Will says, voice low, “he doesn’t get to decide what kind of heir you are. Or how your story’s told.”

Nico opens one eye. “Are you going to get sentimental about my inner light again?”

“Gods, no,” Will says dryly. “Your inner light is terrifying. I just think maybe you shouldn’t let a man who dresses a dog like European nobility edit your speech.”

Nico snorts despite himself. “That’s dangerously close to encouraging rebellion.”

Will shrugs. “We’re college students. Isn’t that our whole thing? Besides, this is your night to be honored. Maybe you’ll enjoy it more than you think.”

“I don’t want to be honored,” Nico mutters, voice rough at the edges. “I want to be ignored.”

“You are being ignored,” Will assures him gently. “By everyone except me. And Leo, who thinks we’ve secretly already changed into our suits and is mad you won’t let him see them.”

“Because they’re a surprise.” Nico’s tone sharpens like a blade being drawn. “And because he’d immediately tweet about it with seven hashtags and a stupid pun.”

“He’s already guessing,” Will says. “I heard him tell Percy it’s probably matching skull-print velvet, and that we’ll make a dramatic entrance with fog and organ music.”

Nico looks momentarily pleased. “Not bad.”

“Except the organ would definitely be Leo,” Will adds, “with a keyboard and no rhythm.”

Hazel yells something unintelligible from Piper’s room and Percy reappears in the hallway holding three fake eyelashes, a travel-size bottle of tequila, and what looks like a deflated balloon.

“Emergency,” he says, poking his head into Will and Nico’s room. “Do either of you know how to apply glitter without looking like you’ve been mugged by a unicorn?”

Will stares. “What part of me screams I know how to do glitter?”

Percy tilts his head, studying him. “Your eyes?”

“Get out.”

Percy disappears with a wink. From the bathroom across the hall, Annabeth yells, “You better not be using my Sephora highlighter as body shimmer again, Percy!”

“I asked!” Percy calls back. “Hazel said it was fine!”

“That’s because Hazel is delirious from glitter fumes!”

The entire hallway descends into overlapping arguments. Leo is singing what he claims is an “experimental glam rock anthem” about power tools, Jason stumbles in with a pink shopping bag and a sheepish expression, and someone’s just knocked over the makeshift bar. Frank sighs like a soldier about to die nobly.

Will watches the chaos unfold with a kind of fond, horrified awe. He leans back against the headboard and lets his shoulder press lightly against Nico’s.

“This is a disaster,” Nico says quietly.

“Yeah,” Will murmurs. “Kind of beautiful though.”

Nico doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t move away either.

Somewhere beneath them, the Beekman’s ballroom is being transformed into a Greco-Roman fantasyland with obsidian candelabras, Persephone-inspired floral chandeliers, and subtle underworld motifs—the kind of party Gatsby would’ve thrown if he’d been raised on The Iliad and had a flair for necromancy.

And up here, their friends are painting their faces with gold, duct-taping themselves into dresses, and sipping tequila from hotel mugs. The air smells like perfume, citrus, and anxiety. The music is loud, the floors are sticky, and Nico di Angelo has not yet put on his suit.

But when he does, the world might actually stop.

Will just hopes he’s wearing something that can survive it.

***

Time slips like steam off the bathroom mirror. The glitter-slick chaos of pre-gala preparation has shifted into something quieter, more focused, like the last deep breath before a curtain rises. Music still plays, but lower now—Piper’s playlist has gone orchestral and dramatic, Annabeth’s sharp voice has softened into laughter, and Percy has finally found a shirt.

The hallway smells like perfume, hot hair tools, and champagne.

Everyone is nearly ready.

The gala’s theme—A Night Among the Gods—has brought out the best and most absurd instincts in their group. Somehow, somehow, Olympus University’s most mythically dysfunctional cohort has pulled together a vision of black-tie god-tier drama. The outfits aren't just formal—they're divine tributes in fabric form.

Annabeth’s dress gleams with bronze threads, her hair swept into a crown-like braid that says war goddess more than beauty queen. Leo’s black suit has embroidered solar flares and tiny gears running along the cuffs—just enough Hephaestus to be obnoxious, not enough to get kicked out. Piper wears Aphrodite like a birthright: crimson silk, sharp eyeliner, and enough presence to start a religion. Hazel is opulence incarnate in layered black and gold, her jewelry antique and heavy, like something rescued from a Roman tomb.

Will is still in his undershirt and slacks, standing in front of the full-length mirror in his suite with Frank, who has been dressed for a while and somehow looks both calm and like he’s bracing for a fire alarm.

Will frowns at his reflection. “This tie looks stupid.”

Frank gently re-knots it for the third time. “It looks fine.”

Will sighs. “Too much?”

Frank tilts his head. “Not at all. You’ve got the sun motif in the cufflinks—that’s subtle. Gold trim in the lapel, marigold boutonnière. Very understated child of Apollo. It says ‘I’m a beam of light but also I respect indoor voices.’”

Will huffs a laugh. “Leo tried to give me a sun cape.”

“Of course he did.”

Will breathes in, then out. The jacket is midnight blue, tailored just right—clean lines, gold thread that catches the light only when he moves. He looks like someone who belongs at a gala hosted in a luxury hotel transformed into a mythical dreamscape. Like someone who might actually survive meeting Hades.

Except that’s still the part making his chest feel too tight.

“I’m meeting Nico’s dad tonight,” Will says, voice lower. “Officially. I think I’m gonna throw up.”

Frank nods, unsurprised. “Yeah. That’s fair.”

“I mean, he’s Hades. Like—glares, silence, glowering. Nico told me he once made a maître d’ cry because his water wasn’t cold enough.”

“Yeah, he does that,” Frank says.

Will blinks at him. “Wait—you’ve met him, right?”

Frank smiles, faint and a little nostalgic. “Yeah. Hazel and I, we’ve been together since we were basically still kids. Camp summers, family holidays, occasional surprise visits. Hazel’s pretty good at giving me advance warning when we’re gonna be in the same room.”

“And you’re still alive?”

“Somehow.” Frank smooths Will’s lapel with the calm of a man who’s seen Percy light fireworks indoors. “It’s intense at first, sure. But he doesn’t hate you. He just makes you think he does so you panic and reveal your weaknesses.”

Will exhales hard. “That’s reassuring.”

“You’ll be fine. Don’t apologize. Stand up straight. Don’t try too hard. He respects calm. And confidence.”

Will glances back at the mirror. The sunburst cufflinks glint. His hair looks like he tried. The suit makes his shoulders look broader, his waist more defined. He looks—good. Grown-up. Elegant. Like someone who chose to wear this, not someone who got shoved into it by chaos and fear.

And across the hall, Nico is still getting dressed in Jason’s room, because they agreed—cheesy or not—they wanted a real reveal. A moment.

Will swallows. His throat’s dry. But his hands have stopped shaking.

“I look okay, right?” he asks.

Frank eyes him in the mirror, then nods. “You look good, Will.”

Will flushes, not used to hearing it out loud.

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “I do.”

Frank gives Will’s shoulder a final pat before slipping out into the hallway. Will lingers a moment longer, alone in the mirror’s reflection, then draws a breath, squares his shoulders, and follows.

Outside, the hallway has transformed. The chaos is gone—or at least contained. Makeup bags zipped shut. Hair curled and lacquered into place. Suits adjusted. Dresses arranged. Piper is adding one last clip to her braid, Annabeth’s heels click sharply as she paces while texting, and Leo’s fiddling with the hem of his jacket like it’s going to start sparking if he stops moving.

Frank rejoins Hazel’s room first. Hazel isn’t there—her garment bag still hangs empty on the bathroom door, forgotten in the rush—but Frank looks solid beside it, elegant and a little old-fashioned in a charcoal suit that somehow makes him look taller. The lining is deep red, a subtle nod to Mars and battlefields and quiet strength. There’s a slim golden pin at his lapel shaped like a laurel branch.

Jason appears next, running a hand through his neatly styled hair, tie already slightly askew. He’s in a classic black tux but his pocket square is electric blue, matched perfectly with the lining of his jacket. Lightning bolt cufflinks wink at his wrists. He looks like a GQ model who might also bench-press a building.

Percy, naturally, appears late and underdressed and still manages to look unfairly good. His suit is midnight black with seafoam stitching that glimmers subtly when he moves—like waves under moonlight. His tie’s long gone. His hair’s damp. The ocean’s favorite.

Will joins the others, hands clasped behind his back to keep from tugging at his sleeves. “Is Nico—?”

Jason shakes his head, mouth tight. “No. Hades sent someone up about ten minutes ago. Said he wanted Nico and Hazel downstairs early. Something about greeting the first wave of donors.”

Will tries not to show how much that knocks the breath out of him. “Right,” he says. “Makes sense.”

Jason eyes him, but doesn’t push.

And it does make sense. Of course it does. This is their world. The empire, the legacy, the cold-blooded grandeur of it all. Nico belongs to it, even if he hates it. Hazel was born to shine in it. Will is—what? A pre-med student from Texas with two jobs and a sun-shaped inferiority complex. He’s proud of Nico, obviously, but some small part of him—the part that aches whenever he’s left behind—tightens in his chest.

He pastes on a smile.

“Shall we?” he says, voice light.

And with that, they descend.

The elevator glides down, quiet and gold-trimmed. Piper is checking her lipstick in the reflection of her phone case. Annabeth’s adjusting Percy’s collar with the exasperated care of someone who’s done this for years. Frank stands beside Will, calm and grounded. Jason presses the elevator button like it wronged him.

When the doors open into the main lobby of the Beekman Hotel, it feels like stepping into a myth retold in marble and champagne.

The entire space has been transformed. Obsidian pillars draped in ivy. Enormous floral arrangements in bronze urns spill peonies, poppies, and laurel leaves. A string quartet plays something dark and orchestral beneath the chandelier. Waiters in gold-trimmed black uniforms move silently through the crowd with trays of nectar-colored cocktails and gleaming hors d'oeuvres.

And the guests—gods, Will thinks, or people playing the part too convincingly.

A woman in a silk rainbow-shimmering gown, trailing a sheer cape the color of oil slick and sky. Iris, probably—or just a fashion editor with taste and a stylist who did her homework.

Two men, one in gold, one in dusky red, standing too close to be platonic. One wears a chestplate motif stitched into his blazer, the other has laurels carved into the buttons of his coat. Achilles and Patroclus, if Will had to guess—or a very bold art history couple.

Another guest glides past with a cane shaped like a serpent, silver twining up black wood. Someone else wears a collar of pearl-dipped feathers. No one’s in costume, exactly. But they aren’t just people, either. They're archetypes draped in wealth, myth walked through modernity.

Will scans the crowd for Nico, for Hazel, for anyone who could pass for Persephone in couture or Hades in a cashmere coat—but finds nothing. Just strangers lit like gods and the echo of his own pulse, louder now than the music.

Lou Ellen and Cecil would be losing their minds. They’d be making up identities for every guest, assigning secret powers and petty grudges. Will feels the ache of their absence like a phantom limb. Piper, Percy, Annabeth, Leo, Jason, Frank…these are the people he loves too, but not the ones who anchor him like they do. 

Still, he stands tall. Adjusts his cuffs. Steps into the golden light of the lobby like he was born for it.

Because somewhere in this palace of obsidian and storybook splendor, Nico is waiting. And when Will finds him, the world might actually stop.

A waiter approaches with a silver tray of champagne flutes that catch the light like captured stars.

Will accepts one out of reflex, murmurs a thank you before he remembers—he’s not the one working. He’s the one being served.

The realization sits strangely in his chest, like swallowing something meant for someone else. The crisp stem of the glass, the taste of effervescent peach and money—it’s too elegant, too effortless. Not what his hands are used to. Not what his muscles remember.

He watches the staff slip soundlessly between the guests, their faces polite and unreadable, hands practiced, timing immaculate. Will can almost feel the chaos happening somewhere just behind the curtain—someone shouting for more ice, someone else crying in a linen closet, a dishwasher steaming up the walls, the head chef threatening to commit arson with a crème brûlée torch.

He knows that rhythm. The dance of it. Orders barked, shoes scuffing tile, the slight relief of movement overtaking thought. When you’re busy—really busy—you don’t have time to spiral, to measure your worth against the weight of a room. Part of him wishes he were back there, sleeves rolled up, feet aching, distracted into peace.

Instead, he’s in a suit that cost more than his rent, under chandeliers that drip with light, watching the people he loves scatter into the arms of families that look like they stepped out of operas.

Annabeth is the first to go. She straightens her spine like a blade being drawn and walks toward a severe-looking woman in ivory silk with a jaw so sharp it could cleave marble. 

“That’s Athena,” Jason murmurs to Will, as if identifying constellations. “Her mom.”

They don’t hug.

Percy mutters something under his breath and follows, approaching a man with sea-green eyes and sun-worn skin who’s already undoing the top buttons of his shirt like he’s trying to sneak out for a smoke.

“That’s Poseidon,” Jason adds, nodding. “Percy’s dad.”

Poseidon looks barely older than Percy and somehow more unruly. When Athena catches sight of him, her mouth tightens, and Will doesn’t need a background in divine politics to know a storm’s coming.

Piper and Frank slip into the crowd next, drawn toward a pair who look like they just stepped off the set of a war epic. The man is massive, his posture military, his suit as blood-dark as Mars himself; the woman beside him, impossibly lovely and wine-slicked in something sheer and rose-gold, is laughing at something only she finds funny. They don’t touch, but their energy crackles—Aphrodite and Mars, no question.

Piper groans under her breath and shoots Frank a look. He gags theatrically, and they part ways like doomed soldiers.

Leo drifts toward a man in gold sneakers and a vest made of what appears to be circuit boards—his father, obviously, who looks like he could build a rocket in his sleep and then forget where he put it. He claps Leo on the back like he’s trying to reboot him and immediately launches into a monologue about combustion ratios or cryptocurrency. Possibly both.

Will stays exactly where he is.

Jason lingers beside him, also unapproached. No booming patriarch in a thunder-patterned blazer. No grim father in a corner, arms crossed. No godlike expectations circling overhead. Just Jason, hands in his pockets, gaze steady, breathing like the only person here who isn’t waiting to be struck down by disappointment.

That illusion shatters when a couple glides toward them with the smooth confidence of people who’ve never stood in line for anything. Their clothes are understated in that violently expensive way—dark, tailored, and impossibly well-fitted. The man’s cufflinks probably cost more than Will’s monthly rent. The woman wears emeralds like they’re casually inherited, like gravity doesn’t apply to her collarbone.

She’s smiling, perfectly pleasant, perfectly poised—and Will freezes.

Red hair. Green eyes. Familiar in the uncanny, skin-prickling way that makes something in his chest twist sideways.

He’s seen her before. Or seen through her, somehow.

But something is off. The eyes too cold. The smile too controlled. Not quite the person he’s remembering—but undeniably cut from the same bloodline.

“Jason,” the man says, extending a hand. “We were hoping we’d run into you. How is your father?”

Jason’s polite smile flickers just slightly. “Doing well, last I heard,” he says smoothly, accepting the handshake. “Keeping busy.”

“Of course,” the woman says with a melodic laugh that sounds like crystal breaking. “He always is. My husband’s firm has worked with him before. International development, infrastructure. You know how it is.”

Will does not know how it is. But Jason nods, all smooth confidence and careful diplomacy.

“I remember,” he says. “You were at that climate gala in Geneva two years ago. My father mentioned the partnership. Briefly.”

“Briefly,” the man echoes with a small, polished smile. “Yes. He tends to be efficient with his words.”

The man launches into a vague but polished spiel about overseas business, New Corinth developments, and a rail project that Will’s pretty sure destroyed half a wetland. Jason responds in careful, noncommittal phrases. Will doesn’t interrupt—doesn’t want to interrupt—but he can feel the edges of Jason’s discomfort radiating beneath the surface.

It’s the same strain Will sees in himself sometimes. The practiced smile. The tightening shoulders. The little performance of neutrality that keeps you from drowning in someone else’s expectations.

They speak for a few minutes more before Jason blinks, as if surfacing from a too-long meeting.

“Sorry,” he says, suddenly turning. “I haven’t introduced you. This is Will Solace. Will, Mr. and Mrs. Dare.”

And just like that, it clicks.
The name detonates in Will’s chest like a flashbang.

Dare.

It  reverberates—sharp, familiar, wrong. Will stares, blinking, as memory scrambles into place. Rachel. She’d told him her parents would be here tonight, but he’d been too tangled in his own spiral—Nico’s speech, the suit, the looming threat of meeting a god disguised as his future father-in-law—to remember that detail until now.

But now, standing in front of them, it all lands at once.

These are the people she’d told him about. The ones who’d pulled the plug on her tuition when she declared as an art major. Who called her mural work "performative" and her street projects “unbecoming.” The ones who said they supported creativity—as long as it made a profit. As long as it fit their version of what art was: sterile, tasteful, gilded and hanging in the right kind of museum.

They said you can do whatever you want and meant as long as we approve.

Will’s fingers tighten around the stem of his champagne glass. He’s suddenly too aware of his suit, his shoes, the collar pressing against his throat. The careful performance of worth. He chokes on the air. “Dare,” he repeats, too quickly.

The man smiles—wide, vaguely smug. “Yes. Dare Enterprises. You may have seen our name on half the buildings in the city.”

Will shakes his head, heartbeat skipping, throat dry. “That’s not— That’s not how I know it.”

Both Dares tilt their heads in practiced unison. Amused. Curious. Not kind. Their attention sharpens, suddenly more focused than friendly.

“I know your daughter,” Will says, and there’s no taking it back. “Rachel.”

The air shifts. The woman’s smile doesn’t vanish, but it stiffens, its edges crystallizing. The man’s amusement cools into something quieter—assessing, careful, vaguely disappointed, like Will just dropped red wine on an expensive rug.

Beside him, Jason doesn’t move, but Will feels the change in his posture—a subtle realignment, the kind of quiet shift you learn from years of watching people prepare for impact. A silent check-in. You good?

Will lifts his chin, determined not to shrink beneath their gaze. The heat in his throat presses upward, but he swallows it down. “She mentioned you’d be attending tonight,” he says, and keeps his voice steady.

That’s all he says. He could say more—could tell them Rachel is still painting, still scraping together grants, still building something bright and bloody and real with her bare hands—but he knows it wouldn’t land. These are people who wouldn’t recognize their daughter unless she was framed and hanging on a wall they paid for.

Mrs. Dare’s smile flickers, brittle around the edges. “How lovely,” she says. “And how is Rachel?”

Will smiles with all his teeth. “Brilliant,” he says, voice honey-smooth and unshakable. “As always.”

There’s a pause, and then Mr. Dare’s head tips just slightly, as if recalibrating. “And what is she doing these days?” he asks, casual but pointed. “She can be... hard to keep track of.”

Will stiffens.

He can’t help the way the anger rises in him, slow and sure and burning at the edges of his vision. How could they ask that? How could they not know?

“She’s managing the restaurant where I work,” Will says, sharper than he meant to, but he doesn’t walk it back. “It’s a busy place—packed every weekend. She’s the best manager I’ve ever had. Keeps the place running like clockwork and still makes time for her own projects.”

Mr. Dare’s expression doesn’t change, but there’s a slight stillness to him now. Calculating. Will knows he’s exposed something—his job, his class, the fact that he isn’t like the people in this room—and he doesn’t care. Not tonight.

“She’s also still making art,” Will adds, his voice low and clear. “She’s had pieces shown in three different galleries this year alone. Her last show sold out in two days. She’s building something real, something hers, and she’s doing it without help. Without—” He stops himself, barely.

Mrs. Dare is no longer smiling. Her expression has gone soft in a way that isn’t quite sadness, but it’s close. Her gaze drops to her hands, one thumb rubbing over her wedding ring.

But Mr. Dare just hums, noncommittal. “Rachel always had potential. It’s a shame she didn’t pursue something more... stable.”

Will’s composure cracks.

“She didn’t want to be a commodity,” he says, quietly furious. “She didn’t want to rot behind a desk pretending her life was art when she could make it instead.”

Jason shifts beside him. “Will—”

But Will’s already in motion, the words sliding out like blood from a reopened wound. “She had the guts to choose something hard. Something honest. And you—you’re standing here pretending you don’t even know who she is. Like she’s a disappointment for not turning out the way you wanted.”

There’s a beat of silence, brittle and aching.

Mr. Dare’s jaw tightens. “I think you’re out of line.”

“I think you lost the right to draw lines a long time ago,” Will snaps.

Jason steps in now, a calm, practiced hand on Will’s arm. “Hey. Let’s—take a breath, yeah?”

Will doesn’t move, but his chest is heaving, rage and loyalty vibrating under his skin like static. He can’t remember the last time he got this angry on someone else’s behalf. Maybe never.

Mrs. Dare is watching him now with something close to grief in her eyes. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. It’s all there—in the faint wrinkle between her brows, in the way her mouth wavers at the corners, in the way she’s suddenly very, very still.

Will swallows hard and steps back, the adrenaline flooding out of him all at once, leaving him lightheaded and exhausted.

Jason gently but firmly guides him away. “Come on,” he murmurs. “Let’s get some air.”

Will lets himself be led, but not before he throws one last look over his shoulder—at Mr. Dare’s icy detachment, and at the sadness curling at the edge of Mrs. Dare’s silence.

Rachel deserved better than them.

And he’s not sorry they know it now.

They drift away from the Dares and into the warm, glittering current of the gala. The ballroom blooms open before them like some decadent dream—arches draped in ivy, candles floating in glass bowls, a ceiling painted with stars that shimmer and rearrange when Will blinks too long. It smells like roses, citrus, and candlewax. The music swells, low and lush.

Guests move through the space like constellations in motion—gods in human skin, or just people who’ve spent enough money to look divine. A woman in a gown that shifts between violet and midnight as she walks could be Nyx herself. A man with silver-streaked hair and antlers stitched into his lapels laughs beside someone in a floor-length cloak made entirely of feathers. Another pair dances past—one in gold, one in scarlet—laughing like immortality is just an inside joke they haven’t let anyone else in on.

Jason returns from the bar with another glass of champagne, handing it to Will without a word. Will takes it gratefully, lets the fizz burn down his throat before exhaling a shaky breath.

“Sorry,” he mutters. “For the scene. I didn’t mean to—well. I meant it. I just probably shouldn’t have said it.”

Jason shakes his head. “You did the right thing.”

Will looks over, brow furrowing. “I just… Rachel’s one of the best people I know. She never asks for anything. And they looked at me like I’d spit on the floor when I said her name.”

“They did,” Jason agrees, voice calm. “And you didn’t back down.”

Will lets out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, well. I’m used to being underestimated. It helps with the righteous fury.”

Jason’s quiet for a moment, then says, “You were brave.”

Will blinks. “I’m sorry, what? You’re Jason Grace. You can recite court precedent from memory and deadlift a grown man. You’re—like—a myth. I’m just Will Solace.”

Jason smiles at that, but it’s crooked, wistful. He looks away, his gaze sweeping the ballroom, watching as another woman passes in a gown the color of honey and wind, crowned in delicate sunbursts.

“I don’t know if I am, though,” he says softly. “Jason Grace. Whoever that’s supposed to be. I’m still trying to figure it out. Who I am outside of the legacy. The expectations. It’s like I was born with a prophecy stitched into my spine and everyone expects me to speak in godsdamned riddles.”

Will blinks, caught off guard by the admission.

Jason shrugs, still watching the crowd. “You stood up to people with power and money and a name. Because it was the right thing to do. That’s not small. That’s not nothing.”

For a long moment, Will doesn’t know what to say. The noise of the gala seems to drift outward, like someone’s turned the volume down just for them.

“I didn’t feel brave,” he says finally.

“You never do,” Jason says gently. “That’s how you know it’s real.”

Will looks down at the glass in his hand. The gold thread in his sleeve catches the light. Somewhere in this room, Nico is probably smiling through his teeth, posing for photos, listening to donors talk about legacy like it’s a blessing and not a chain.

Will lifts his chin. “Still. I probably shouldn’t have said ‘you lost the right to draw lines.’ That was… kind of a lot.”

Jason grins. “It was exactly the right amount.”

And then—
Everything stills.

Will doesn’t hear footsteps, doesn’t see anyone part, doesn’t feel the brush of air that should precede a presence. Nico just appears.

Like he always does.

One second Will is blinking at the crowd—and the next, Nico is standing across the ballroom floor, haloed in golden light, looking like something carved from midnight and old myth.

He’s always beautiful. Will has known that for a while now. The sharp planes of his face, the gravity of his presence, the tension in his mouth like every thought might kill him before he speaks it. But this—this is something else. Mythic.Blessed by Aphrodite, kissed by shadow, dreamt up by a god who liked secrets and silk.

The suit is perfect. Jet-black, tailored within an inch of its life. Not trendy—timeless. The lapels catch the light in the softest gloss of matte satin, and his shirt is buttoned all the way to the top, collar crisp beneath a perfectly knotted black tie.

Their eyes meet across the room, and it’s electric. Everything else disappears. The music dulls, the lights dim, the crowd melts away like mist retreating from a fire.

For a heartbeat, they just look at each other.

Will feels the breath leave him like he’s been punched gently in the chest. Nico’s eyes are wide, dark, locked onto him like a compass needle that’s finally stopped spinning. There’s something raw in his expression—astonishment, hunger, reverence.

Then Nico crosses the space between them in long, unhurried strides, and when he finally reaches Will, he exhales like it’s the first breath he’s taken all night.

“You look…” Nico pauses, visibly struggling. “You look good.”

Will can’t help the slow, stunned smile that spreads across his face. “So do you,” he says. “Seriously. You look—like you just stepped out of some old painting. One of the intense ones. With shadows and swords.”

Jason, still lingering nearby, raises his glass. “Wow. That’s a lot of tension for two guys in neckwear.”

Nico doesn’t look at him. He just glares.

Jason grins. “I’m gonna go not be here.”

He retreats with excellent timing, vanishing into the crowd before either of them can react.

Nico turns back to Will, and some of the tension bleeds into a softer sort of shyness. “Sorry I disappeared,” he says. “My father sent someone to get us early. He wanted us downstairs before guests arrived, do the whole ‘heir apparent’ thing. I didn’t get a chance to text. I hope…” He hesitates. “I hope everything’s been okay.”

Will thinks of Mr. and Mrs. Dare. Of Rachel’s name on his tongue like a battle cry. Of Jason’s hand on his shoulder. Of his heart pounding the second Nico walked in.

He smiles, easy, even. “Everything’s been fine.”

Nico studies him like he’s not sure if he believes it, but doesn’t push. He just nods once, hands tucked into his pockets like he doesn’t trust them.

“My father is ready to meet you,” Nico says quietly. “If… if you’re ready.”

Will’s mouth goes dry. Ready? No. Of course not. He’ll never be ready. Not to stand in front of the man who raised Nico, who built an empire out of grief and old money and marble tombs. Not to be weighed and measured and silently dissected by a man who can break silence like glass.

But he’d follow Nico anywhere.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m ready.”

Nico’s hand brushes his lightly—just once, barely there—and then they’re moving. Together. Across the gleaming floor of the Beekman Hotel, through the crowd of gods and ghosts, toward whatever waits next.

And Will walks beside him, heart steady, gaze forward. Not ready. But willing.

Chapter 53: Dinner with Death: An Intimate Evening of Trauma and Hors d’Oeuvres

Notes:

ahhhhhhhhh!!! i cant believe this fic hit 30k hits that is insane to me. im so sorry in advance for these next two chapters

The ballroom flickers with lamplight and candlelight—gold mirrored against marble floors, casting everything in the dusky glow of an underworld caught halfway to heaven. Will barely registers the clink of crystal and soft trill of harp strings. All he can focus on is Nico’s hand at his elbow, warm and certain.

Ahead of them stand a couple who could silence a war room with a glance.

The man is dressed in black that’s not just tailored—it’s sculpted, severe, precise. His shirt gleams like polished bone beneath a coat so dark it seems to bend the light around it, swallowing color, swallowing warmth. Obsidian cufflinks catch in the candlelight, twin sharp glints like teeth. At his collar rests a silver pin shaped like an antique key—ornate, old, and quietly terrifying. When his gaze lifts to Will, it isn’t piercing. It’s consuming. Like the gaze of something that has seen every ending and remained unmoved.

Will searches his face for something familiar. The dark hair, the pale skin, the shadow-dense presence—they echo Nico, vaguely. But that’s all it is: an echo. There’s no softness here. No flicker of adolescent vulnerability, no irony, no anger struggling to become articulation. This is not the boy who kisses Will like he’s afraid it might ruin him. This is death, curated and incorruptible, wearing a human face.

And beside him: Persephone.

She is the opposite in every way and yet somehow more unnerving. Her gown blooms around her like a poison garden—layered silks in the colors of spring soil, blood-warm rust, and ripe pomegranate flesh. Gold thorns glint in her dark hair, and her jewelry is all delicate chains and tiny blossoms in full, defiant bloom. Her lipstick is the color of secrets never confessed, and her perfume smells like lilies left too long in a crypt.

Everything about her is soft at first glance—light, fragrance, color—but it’s the softness of rot beneath petal. Beauty sharpened into a trap. Her smile is that of a diplomat trained in high-stakes funerals. Polished. Pleasing. Slightly dangerous.

Will thinks, unbidden, of the cursed production of Macbeth they saw in the fall—how Nico, dressed like a Victorian ghost in black-on-black layers, had slouched into the seat beside him. Will had spent the first act trying not to stare. At the shape of his hands. The flick of his gaze. The sharp line of his collarbone beneath all that darkness. And sometime during the second act, he’d realized—horrifyingly, breath-stealingly—that Nico had seen him looking. 

Lady Macbeth had said it then: “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t.”

Nico stops just short of them, posture straight but not rigid, chin lifted in quiet defiance. There’s something measured in the way he holds himself—like a blade sheathed not for surrender, but ceremony. His hand stays on Will’s arm, steady and warm through the fabric of his sleeve, as if to say: I’m still here. You’re not alone.

“Father. Persephone,” Nico says, voice low and composed, each syllable shaped with care. “This is Will Solace. 

My boyfriend.”

The world tilts.

It’s not the word that unsteadies Will—it’s the way Nico says it. Without flinching. Without hedging. Like it’s not a confession but a coronation. Like he’s waited his entire life to speak it aloud in front of the only people who ever made him feel small. There’s no room for doubt in his tone. Only a steady, quiet claim.

Boyfriend.

It lands like a banner planted in hostile ground. A charm against silence. A declaration carved into marble.

Persephone is the first to move.

Her dress shifts like wind through a flowering graveyard. She studies him with eyes that seem to bloom and burn all at once.

“So this is the boy,” she says, voice low and lightly amused, as though tasting the word for sport.

Will flinches inwardly. Boy. The word hits somewhere deep in his ribs—diminishing, deliberate. Not cruel, but knowing. Like she’s already decided exactly how small he is. Like she’s weighing his worth in a language he doesn’t speak.

Still, he straightens, nodding stiffly, trying not to drown beneath the force of her gaze. “It’s an honor. Ma’am.”

She smiles—something pale and practiced, more symbol than sentiment. “You’re in school, aren’t you?” she asks, casually—too casually. “Pre-med, if I recall.”

Will startles, just slightly. Of course she knows. Nico must’ve told her. Nico told them about me. That thought flickers through his chest like a match, bright and dangerous.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, grateful to anchor himself in something concrete. “I’m hoping to become a trauma surgeon.”

Persephone hums, the sound velveted and knowing. “A healer,” she says, the word like a leaf pressed into an old book—elegant, delicate, flattened by time. “How noble.”

And then Hades speaks.

He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. It rolls out slow and weighty, with the cadence of an oracle and the gravity of sealed stone. “Do you plan to make a career of death, then?”

Will’s breath sticks in his throat. “I—I plan to fight it. When I can.”

Hades lifts a single brow. It’s barely a movement, but it feels like a tectonic shift. “Hm.”

There’s no obvious judgment in his voice. No threat. But his eyes strip Will to bone—measuring not intent, but worth. The look of someone examining a coin that’s been plucked from the River Styx: tarnished, heavy, potentially useful.

Will wants to disappear. Or evaporate. Or burst into flames and be reborn in a less mortifying form. His fingers twitch by his side.

Before he can say something humiliating—like I promise I’m not trying to steal your son—Nico speaks again. His voice is quieter now, meant only for them.

“He’s good at what he does,” Nico says, steady and sure. “He works harder than anyone I know.”

Will’s throat closes around something sharp and bright. He doesn’t look at Nico. He can’t. Not with that warmth in his voice. Not with that unbearable faith.

Will thinks it’s over.

But then Hades speaks again—not hostile, just level, like a man resuming a conversation that began long before Will ever entered the room.

“So you study medicine,” he says, not as a question but as confirmation. His gaze sharpens, just slightly. “Your grades are strong?”

Will stiffens. “Yes, sir,” he says, voice tight but honest. “I—I work hard. I’m doing well in all my science modules and labs. I’ve—uh—volunteered at a few campus blood drives and vaccine events. Health fairs. First aid workshops.”

He doesn’t mention the bookstore job. Or the restaurant. Or the scholarship. Not because he’s ashamed—just because it feels like the wrong battlefield. He’s already bleeding enough.

Nico shifts beside him, subtle but sure.

“He’s being modest,” he says, coolly. “Will doesn’t just study—he breathes this stuff. I’ve seen him ace anatomy tests with terms I didn’t even know had vowels.”

Will flushes so hard it burns. Anatomy should not be allowed to carry this much emotional weight—especially not when his brain, traitorous and unhelpful, conjures the memory of Nico calmly quizzing him on obscure internal structures mid-blowjob last week.

Specifically: “Can you name the full Latin term for the prostate?”

Which Nico had asked while he was three fingers deep in him—while Will was so blissed out he could barely remember his own name. Still, he’d answered. Correctly. Because Nico thinks intelligence is hot, and because Will is, unfortunately, a very dedicated student.

He risks a glance at Nico, mortified. Nico meets his eyes with the serene smugness of someone who absolutely remembers saying it—and is not even a little bit sorry.

Persephone hums, the sound low and amused, like she’s privy to some secret no one else is wise enough—or brave enough—to ask about. There’s something unsettlingly graceful in the way she tilts her head, as if weighing the poetry of Will’s life against the reality of it and finding the tension charming.

Hades, for his part, does not blink. “A noble path,” he says again. But this time, the words carry a shift in register. Not approval—something colder, keener. Interest. Calculation. The kind of attention that turns men to myth or memory.

“Most men run from death,” Hades says. “Few choose to meet it head-on.”

Will’s throat tightens, but he forces himself to hold the god’s gaze. “I don’t want to conquer it,” he says, more calmly than he feels. “I just want to keep people on this side of the river a little longer. If I can.”

The silence that follows stretches a little too long. Not heavy—measured. Like Hades is weighing the words, testing them for sincerity, or maybe comparing them to something he already knows.

Then, slowly, Hades inclines his head. Just enough to register. Not quite approval. Not quite dismissal. Just... noted.

Will doesn’t feel reassured. If anything, the gesture makes him feel smaller, like he’s been filed away for later review. Evaluated, but not fully understood. Or worse—understood too well.

Persephone lifts a glass of garnet-dark wine from a passing tray, her rings catching the light like weaponry. The thin clink of her bracelets is high and silver and soft—funeral bells at a distance, the kind you hear in dreams and forget upon waking.

“How romantic,” she says, smiling over the rim of her glass. “How very... foolish.”

It doesn’t sound unkind and somehow, that’s worse.

Will forces himself not to squirm. Every inch of him feels too visible, too examined. His collar is too tight, his suit too stiff, and the air around them hangs heavy with expectation. He’s not sure if he’s meant to bow, speak, vanish, or simply survive. His stomach twists with the distinct, nauseating knowledge that no one here would blame him for doing the wrong thing—only for doing it poorly.

Then Nico’s fingers graze his wrist. It’s nothing, barely a touch, but Will feels it all the way to his ribs. Deliberate. Steady. Present. Something solid to hold onto in the slow undertow of the moment.

“Still,” Hades says at last. His voice is quiet, unhurried, unreadable. “It’s not an unworthy ambition.”

The words fall like stones into a deep well—impossible to know how far they sink or if they hit anything at all. Not approval. Not disdain. Just... observation. 

Persephone places her now empty glass on a passing tray, her smile lingers, cool and perfectly composed.

“We won’t keep you,” she says. “There are other guests we must attend to. But we’ll catch up later.”

Will swallows, spine instinctively straightening. It’s not a threat, not exactly. Just a certainty with edges. A reminder that their attention may leave—but it never strays far.

Hades inclines his head. The gesture is small, but final. “Stay sharp, Nico.”

Will feels the shift before he sees it. The subtle tension in Nico’s shoulders, the way his jaw tightens just slightly, like something pulled too taut.

“Of course,” Nico says, voice flat and practiced, but not quite indifferent. There’s something else there, just beneath the surface—fatigue, maybe. Resentment, definitely.

Hades watches him for a long moment. “Stick to the agreed-upon speech.”

That’s when Nico looks down. Not out of shame—Will’s seen Nico ashamed before, and this isn’t that. This is something heavier. Resigned. Like a coin pressed into his palm that he doesn’t want but knows he has to carry. His fingers tighten where they still brush Will’s.

“Nico,” Hades says again. “Look at me.”

A breath stretches long between them.

And then, slowly, Nico lifts his head. His gaze meets Hades’s with the cool, dark glint of a blade that’s been sharpened for years. There’s defiance in it—but caution, too. As if he’s weighing something behind his eyes, turning it over in silence.

“Fine,” he says at last, low and reluctant. Not surrender. Not really. Just a temporary truce.

Persephone smiles once more as they turn to leave—something polished, radiant, and almost cruel in its composure. Together, they disappear into the sea of guests with the effortless grace of practiced royalty, leaving the scent of pomegranate wine and expectation in their wake.

Nico lets out a slow breath. His hand shifts to Will’s elbow, firm and urgent.

“Bar. Now,” he mutters. “I need something stronger than champagne before I throw myself into traffic. Or commit a minor felony.”

Will doesn’t argue.

They make a beeline for the open bar—Nico all sharp lines and quiet fury, Will still feeling like his lungs haven’t caught up with the rest of him. Nico orders bourbon, neat. Will goes for the same, needing the burn. The bartender doesn’t blink, just slides two glasses across the counter with the practiced efficiency of someone who’s seen worse nerves on better-dressed people.

Drinks in hand, they slip away from the main floor, weaving through the glittering crowd until they find a semi-secluded alcove near a tall window, partially veiled by velvet drapery. It’s quieter here—if not private, at least less exposed. The hum of the gala softens into something distant.

Nico sinks into the booth with a sigh and leans into Will’s side. Will, grateful for the contact, wraps an arm around him without thinking.

He’s aware of the stares. Of camera flashes winking like distant stars through the dark. Of whispers that stir like dry leaves in the background. Eyes track Nico di Angelo wherever he goes—because of who he is, who he belongs to.

And now, they linger on Will too.

It makes his skin itch.

But Nico—gods, Nico—just tips his glass back and says nothing. Like the whole world can watch and he won’t flinch.

Will clears his throat, still feeling like one wrong word might crack him in half. “So,” he says, aiming for casual and missing by a mile, “your dad and Persephone? Totally normal. Super chill.”

Nico snorts into his drink. “Yeah, they really know how to make an impression.”

“They said they’d catch up later like they were planning a hit job.”

“That’s their version of being polite.”

Will laughs, shaky. “Your dad looked at me like I was a stray relic someone dragged in from a dig site. Like, Hm. Interesting. Potentially cursed.”

Nico lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug that brushes against Will. “Honestly? That went better than I expected.”

Will leans into him a little more, their knees bumping under the table. “You mean because I made it out without being turned to stone?”

“Something like that.”

“Probably only because he doesn’t know I’ve got two jobs, student loans, and a mattress that physically injures me.”

He glances over. Nico’s gone quiet—not checked out, just... inward. The way he gets when his thoughts turn sharp-edged. One hand on his thigh, the other wrapped around his glass, thumb skimming the rim. That nervous tap of his ring against glass, just loud enough for Will to notice.

Will reaches under the table and laces their fingers together. A steady touch. Soft and anchoring.

“You good?” he asks, gentle.

Nico doesn’t answer right away. His eyes stay on the window for a beat too long.

Then, quietly: “Not really.”

Will doesn’t rush him. Just waits—silent, steady—like a harbor waiting for the tide to come in.

Nico exhales, slow and shaky, his gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the gilded room, beyond the crowd and music and glass. “I’m nervous about the speech,” he says at last, voice barely above a whisper. “I’m always nervous about speeches. But this time it’s worse. It’s not just stage fright—it’s...”

He trails off, fingers curling slightly around the curve of his glass. “There are things I want to say. Things I’m not supposed to say. I don’t know if I’ll say them. I might. I might not. I guess... I’ll see how it feels when I’m up there.”

Will shifts closer, the movement quiet and careful. He lets their shoulders brush, lets the warmth between them speak before he does. His hand moves to Nico’s knee, thumb sweeping a slow, soothing arc across the fabric of his slacks. The kind of touch meant to steady, not stir.

“You don’t have to be what he wants,” Will murmurs, soft as a promise.

Nico’s breath hitches. “I know,” he says quickly, like it’s a reflex he doesn’t believe. Then, quieter: “I know. But sometimes it’s easier than being what I want. It feels safer. Less like... a gamble.”

Will sets his drink down, ignoring the cold bloom of nerves still unfurling in his chest. He turns toward Nico fully and slides his hand up, fingers brushing along the curve of Nico’s arm before settling just above his elbow. His touch is light, but firm enough to anchor.

“Whatever you say—or don’t say—I’ll be there,” he says, low and certain. “You’re not standing up there alone. Not really.”

Nico looks at him then. Really looks at him. His expression doesn’t crack, but something in his eyes shifts—like a held breath easing. Like a dam lowering its walls, just enough to let the light in.

Will leans in, his forehead resting lightly against Nico’s temple. He doesn’t say anything else right away, just breathes with him, steady and sure, letting the silence settle like a blanket around them both.

Will squeezes his arm gently. “Also,” he adds, quieter now, with a smile just this side of teasing, “you’re kind of absurdly hot when you’re angry at powerful men in suits. Just putting that out there.”

That earns him a huffed laugh, small but real. Nico ducks his head, and there’s the faintest flush rising at his cheeks.

“Noted,” he mutters, and leans into Will just a little more.

Before Will can say more, a soft chime echoes through the ballroom—delicate and final, like the toll of a crystal bell. A staff member appears at the edge of their alcove, hands clasped, her expression serene in the way only someone paid very well to interrupt important people can manage.

“Dinner is being served,” she says with a graceful nod. “If you’ll follow me.”

Nico stands first. He drains the last of his drink and sets the glass down with a click, then turns back to Will and offers his hand.

Not casually—not like it’s nothing. He offers it the way a prince in a very haunted fairytale might: pale wrist, silver rings, posture etched in old iron and defiance.

Will takes it without hesitation.

Because whatever comes next—speeches, stares, legacies heavy enough to crack marble—he’s walking into it with Nico’s fingers wrapped around his own. That’s enough.

They follow the staff member through the ballroom, past towering pillars and walls carved with mythic reliefs—gods and monsters and mortals locked in frozen struggle. The path winds into a grand dining hall so elaborate it borders on the surreal: vaulted ceilings painted with stars, candelabras flickering like constellations brought to earth, tables dressed in obsidian and gold. It feels like sitting down to feast inside a myth.

There’s a seating chart, of course—calligraphed place cards in front of polished black plates rimmed in silver, more art than dinnerware. Will scans the names and feels his shoulders drop, just a little, when he finds his.

He’s seated at a long table near the center—more visible than he’d like, but flanked by familiar names: Hazel. Frank. Annabeth and Percy. Jason, Piper, Leo.

And Nico. Right beside him.

He glances over, a little stunned. “You’re—sitting with us?”

Nico shrugs, feigning nonchalance, though Will catches the slight lift in his chin. “I negotiated.”

Hazel, already sliding into the seat beside her brother, grins. “One of Nico’s terms for showing up tonight was that we got to sit with our friends,” she says, tugging Frank down beside her. “The rest of the table placements were a battlefield.”

Annabeth leans in from across the table, arching a brow. “You made Hades redo the layout?”

“I made him an offer,” Nico says dryly, pulling out Will’s chair for him. “He didn’t want to find out what the alternative looked like.”

Percy lets out a low whistle. “Okay, that’s kind of hot.”

“Stop flirting with my boyfriend,” Will mutters as he sits, unable to keep the grin out of his voice.

“Yeah, yeah,” Percy says, already reaching for the bread basket. “Gods forbid I admire the dark prince of our social circle.”

Piper smirks, stealing a roll off his plate. “You’re just bitter because your place card wasn’t centered.”

Leo, across from them, raises his wine glass. “To divine threats, family diplomacy, and table rebellion. May we survive the main course.”

Will catches Nico’s eye as they all lift their glasses. There’s a flicker of something there—not a smile, not yet. But the edge of one. Like light touching the rim of something long hidden.

They clink glasses. And for a moment, despite the weight of the night still pressing in, it feels like they’ve already won something.

Dinner arrives in courses so delicately arranged they might as well be spellwork—each dish a small, edible sculpture, crowned with edible flowers or gilded with gold leaf. Waitstaff glide silently between tables, placing plates with the reverence of a religious offering.

Will recognizes almost every item before it hits the table. Seared duck breast with pomegranate molasses. Saffron-poached pears. Braised short rib with celeriac purée, shaved truffle dusted like snowfall. The kind of menu that would have half the kitchen staff at his restaurant swearing under their breath and plating with surgical precision.

He murmurs each name to Nico as they arrive, half amused, half automatic. Nico listens with an eyebrow raised and a crooked smile on his face, like he’s never heard someone say “confit” with such heartfelt contempt.

Hazel leans over, smirking. “You two are the worst dinner guests. Nico, eat your caviar. Will, stop doing play-by-play like we’re in a food documentary.”

“You wound me,” Will says, stealing a bite of Nico’s foie gras. Nico glares but lets him.

Despite the luxury, Nico only picks at his food. He tries to look composed, chatting with Frank about the museum exhibit they saw last week, nodding along when Annabeth starts dissecting the architectural symbolism carved into the crown molding overhead. But his fork never quite settles in his grip, and his foot taps lightly beneath the table—a barely-there rhythm that Will can feel against his own ankle.

Will reaches under the table and squeezes his knee. The tapping stops.

Hazel, seated on Nico’s other side, watches the motion out of the corner of her eye. She doesn’t say anything. But she reaches for her brother’s water glass and switches it with a fuller one without comment, brushing his shoulder gently in the process. Nico glances at her. She nods once, subtle, and he nods back.

It’s an old language, Will realizes. The kind built between people who’ve survived each other.

The rest of the table descends into its usual brand of chaos. Piper is across from Jason, but they’re buffered by Leo and Annabeth, and whatever awkwardness lingers from the breakup is softened by distance and distraction. Jason laughs too loud at something Leo says. Leo grins like he’s just stolen fire from the gods and gotten away with it.

Will watches Jason’s hand as it lands on Leo’s arm during a joke—how it lingers just a beat too long. Leo’s ears go pink. Piper notices. Will notices that Piper notices.

Annabeth, to her credit, is attempting to rein in Percy, who has started ranking the wine pairings based on how much they taste like mouthwash, grape juice, or "unholy nectar.” Frank just keeps eating quietly, which seems like the safest option.

Will leans in toward Nico, his voice low. “How you holding up?”

Nico doesn’t look at him. Just pushes a piece of duck around his plate with his fork.

“Fine,” he says. Then after a beat: “Lying.”

Will brushes their knees together. “You’ve still got time. You don’t have to know what you’re going to say yet.”

Nico finally looks at him. His eyes are dark and thoughtful, quieter than the rest of his face. “Yeah,” he says. “I just hate the part before.”

Will nod, then flicks his gaze to the head table.

Hades and Persephone sit side by side beneath a chandelier the size of a chariot. They speak to no one, not even each other. Hades’ expression is unreadable, all hollow angles and marble stillness, a statue come to life just long enough to judge everyone in the room. Persephone lifts her wine glass and sips like she’s draining something far more dangerous than merlot.

They haven’t looked over. Not once. But Will knows they’re aware of everything.

Nico follows his gaze. “Don’t let them get to you,” he says, voice soft.

Will gives him a sideways smile. “Was about to say the same thing.”

Nico snorts. “Too late.”

Will touches his pinky to Nico’s beneath the table, a silent promise. Nico doesn’t pull away.

The next course arrives. And beyond the soft clink of silverware and the low hum of conversation, Will can feel it—that slow, mounting pressure in the room. The part before the speech. The quiet breath before the fall.

As dessert plates are cleared—molten chocolate tarts with candied violets and pistachio dust—an invisible shift ripples through the room.

The music fades. Conversation dwindles. A single note chimes through the crystal-lit air, drawing every gaze to the podium now illuminated beneath the high arch of the ballroom’s ceiling.

Hades rises.

He doesn’t need to signal for silence. The room hushes as though it has always belonged to him.

He crosses to the podium with the deliberate weight of someone accustomed to being watched. Will feels the collective breath of the crowd suspend as the king of the Underworld empire steps behind the microphone.

“Good evening,” Hades begins. His voice is calm and resonant, neither loud nor forceful, and yet somehow impossible to ignore. “Thank you all for joining us tonight as we mark a season of transition for our family and the legacy we steward.”

Will shifts slightly in his seat, watching Nico from the corner of his eye. His posture has gone taut. Not quite shrinking, not quite braced—more like the stillness of someone waiting for the axe to fall.

Hades continues, his cadence smooth, detachedly reverent. “For generations now, this company has served as both guardian and curator of memory. Through our funerary arts, through historical preservation, through the work of our museums and antique collections—we safeguard the spaces where the past breathes.”

There’s an eerie stillness to the room now, like everyone’s listening just a little too closely.

“This evening’s gala,” Hades says, “is not simply a fundraiser, but a celebration of legacy. And legacies must be carried forward.”

He turns his head. Not dramatically. Just enough.

“I am pleased to introduce my son,” he says, the words weighted with intent, “Nico di Angelo—my heir apparent—to speak on behalf of what comes next.”

Polite applause fills the room, echoing too long in the vaulted ceiling. Will doesn’t clap. He turns toward Nico.

Nico is pale. Not the fashionable kind of pale—this is the kind born of nausea and pressure and the sensation of every eye in the room tightening around your ribs like a vice.

Will leans in close, their shoulders pressed tight. He covers Nico’s hand beneath the white linen of the tablecloth, thumb stroking softly over his knuckles. “You’ve got this,” he whispers.

Nico swallows hard. He doesn’t speak, but he nods. Just once.

Then, with the kind of fragile poise Will’s only ever seen on trauma patients walking out of burning wreckage, Nico stands.

His chair scrapes softly against the polished floor. His steps toward the podium are quiet but sure. And Will watches him go—heart pounding, breath caught in his throat—as if Nico were carrying something far heavier than a speech in his jacket pocket.

And maybe he is.

As Nico reaches the podium, Hades clasps a hand on his back—firm, brief, weighty. A gesture meant to look paternal, maybe even proud. But Will sees the way Nico’s shoulders tighten under the touch, the barely perceptible flinch before he schools himself still. Then Hades returns to his seat, the room shifting again with his absence, and all the eyes that followed him now turn toward Nico.

The podium is tall, the spotlight cold and exacting. Nico steps up to it like someone walking into open flame.

Will holds his breath.

“Thank you,” Nico begins. His voice is even, low but clear. “And thank you all for being here tonight. It means a great deal to my family—and, despite what certain members of the press might assume, it means a great deal to me.”

A few polite laughs ripple through the room. Will catches a flash of amusement in Percy’s face, a barely-hidden grin from Hazel.

Nico’s fingers graze the edges of his note cards like they might anchor him. He clears his throat. “I’m supposed to talk about legacy,” he says, gaze flicking down, then out over the room. “Family history. The privilege of inheritance.”

Will watches the line of his back, the way Nico holds himself like a soldier under inspection. It’s too poised. Too still. Like he’s bracing for impact.

“And I will,” Nico adds, quieter now. “I will.”

His voice is steady, words well-rehearsed. But Will sees the flicker—small and sharp—beneath it. The telltale shift in Nico’s weight, the twitch in his fingers like they’re fighting the urge to curl into fists. He’s holding himself together too hard. Like if he lets one word slip, he might fall apart.

“I was named after a history I didn’t choose,” Nico says. “A legacy that stretches centuries behind me. One of grief and grandeur. Of empire, tradition, duty. A name people whisper like it should mean something.”

He pauses. The silence grows heavier.

“For a long time,” he says, “I thought legacy was just a nicer word for burden. A way to dress up grief in marble and gold. Something you carry because you’re expected to. Not because you understand it.”

He looks down at the cards in his hand—then, after a breath, sets them aside. The gesture is slow. Final. His hands tremble once before he clasps them in front of him.

Will’s breath catches.

Nico exhales shakily. Looks back up. There’s no more polish in his voice. Just something raw. Stripped bare.

“But none of that’s what I actually want to say.”

The air shifts. Will feels it in his chest—like the moment before a thunderclap.

“I want to talk about death,” Nico says. “And about what it leaves behind.”

His voice is quiet, but it carries. It cleaves through the room like a blade.

“My mother died giving birth to me. I never knew her. I never even heard her voice. I’ve spent my entire life trying to build an image of her from the pieces other people gave me—fragments, photographs, guesses. Grief I inherited before I even knew what it meant.”

Will stares, heart in his throat. Nico’s shoulders are tight, but he doesn’t falter.

“My sister, Bianca, died when I was ten. She was—she was everything. My world. My anchor. And when she was gone, it felt like someone had torn a page out of me that I’d never get back.”

A muscle jumps in Nico’s jaw. He swallows hard. His hands are clenched now, white-knuckled.

“For years, I didn’t know what to do with that kind of loss. I thought if I just kept moving, if I got quieter, if I became useful enough or invisible enough, it would hurt less.”

Will grips the edge of the table. He wants to stand, to go to him, to do something—but he knows better. Nico doesn’t need rescuing. He needs to be heard.

“But it never went away,” Nico says, voice rougher now. “And I realized—it wasn’t supposed to.”

A hush spreads, sharper than before.

“Grief doesn’t disappear. It becomes part of you. It teaches you how to hold people when they’re no longer there to be held. It teaches you how to remember.”

He scans the room, but it’s not the crowd he’s looking for. When his gaze finds Will—just briefly—Will feels it like a hand closing around his heart.

“Legacy, to me, isn’t an empire. It isn’t a business or a vault of antique coins. It’s a memory that refuses to vanish. A love that endures. A name said out loud when no one else is saying it.”

Will sees the tension in Hades’s jaw at the head table. The tight grip of Persephone’s hand on her wine glass. But he only has eyes for Nico.

“I know what’s expected of me,” Nico says, a hint of steel beneath the ache. “And I know what’s at stake. But if I’m going to carry this name—this family—I want it to mean something real.”

He steadies himself, breath held.

“I want it to mean remembering the ones we’ve lost. I want it to mean honoring the people who built us, even if they’re no longer here to see it. I want it to mean building something kinder. Something true.”

Another pause. Not because he’s afraid. Because this is the part that costs him something.

“If I inherit this legacy,” Nico finishes, softer now, “I want it to stand for more than silence. I want it to stand for memory. For truth. For the ones we carry, even when the world forgets them.”

And then, with the quiet grace of someone laying flowers at a grave, he steps back. No bow. No flourish. Just a nod. Small. Solemn.

Will’s chest aches. Not just with pride. But with the terrible, beautiful knowing of how much it took for Nico to say that out loud. How close he was to silence—and how bravely he chose otherwise.

Applause begins—quiet at first, like the crowd isn’t sure if it’s allowed. Then it builds. Scattered. Earnest. Hazel claps first at their table, eyes shining. Annabeth follows, then Frank. Even Jason straightens a little with something like pride. Leo lets out a low, stunned whistle.

Will doesn’t clap at all. He just watches Nico step down from the podium—jaw tight, hands shaking slightly, but still upright. Still here.

Still Nico.

Nico barely makes it back to the table.

He sits down like something’s come undone inside him—bones turned soft, strength siphoned out through the soles of his shoes. His shoulders drop, breath shallow and uneven, and then he’s turning, folding into Will with no hesitation, like the weight of the moment has finally caught up with him and there’s nowhere else he can put it.

Will reacts instantly. One arm goes around Nico’s back, the other curling protectively over his shoulders. Nico’s head finds the hollow between Will’s neck and collarbone and just stays there, breath warm against his skin. It’s not performative, not even purposeful. It’s instinct. Like he’s spent everything he had just to say those words, and now he needs somewhere to fall.

The others are talking—soft congratulations from Hazel, murmured awe from Percy, Leo exclaiming something like “Holy shit, bro, you made my ancestors cry,”—but Nico doesn’t respond. Doesn’t even look up. He only leans further into Will, like he’s trying to disappear into his ribs.

Will feels it then—Nico, trembling. Not just a shiver. Not adrenaline. A full-body tremor, tiny but relentless, as though every nerve ending is still ringing from what he just did. Will tightens his grip, presses his lips to Nico’s temple in a wordless promise: I’ve got you. You’re okay. You did it.

The lights shift slightly, warmer now, and a man in a velvet suit appears at the podium with a bright smile and a polished accent. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “we now move into the fundraising portion of the evening. All proceeds tonight will benefit the Antiquities Trust and its preservation initiatives across the Mediterranean…”

Will half-listens as champagne is topped off, spotlights shift, and ornate glass cases are wheeled onto the stage, each containing some rare object—funerary coins, oil lamps, bits of obsidian jewelry that still gleam like freshly spilled blood. It’s theatrical, macabre, undeniably beautiful. Somewhere, the string quartet resumes a mournful waltz.

Nico hasn’t moved. Will strokes his thumb slowly across his shoulder, offering whatever anchor he can, eyes flicking toward the head table.

It’s empty.

Hades and Persephone are gone. Just—gone. No speech, no parting words, no fanfare. Will doesn’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad one, but he feels a whisper of relief slide beneath his skin like a cool cloth. Maybe they slipped out quietly. Maybe that was enough for them.

But the thought barely settles before a presence draws up beside the table.

He isn’t wearing staff livery, but he moves with that same eerie confidence. Polished shoes. Neat lapels. A gloved hand resting lightly on the back of Nico’s chair.

“Your father is waiting,” the man says.

Nico stiffens.

Then the man’s eyes shift to Will—cold, colorless. Not quite a threat. Not quite anything. But it makes Will’s pulse jump all the same.

“And he said to bring the boy.”

The boy.

Will doesn’t need clarification. His stomach drops. The tremble he felt in Nico’s body now starts in his own.

He nods numbly. Gets to his feet. And all he can think, as he slides his hand into Nico’s for the second time tonight, is that it feels like walking into a trap. Like stepping past a line that’s been drawn in salt and bone.

Like an animal about to be led to slaughter.

Chapter 54: I Face Divine Judgment and Somehow Still End Up Slow Dancing With My Boyfriend

The room they’re led into is quiet and cold, tucked behind the hotel lobby like some kind of executive oubliette. Everything is gleaming marble and polished wood, dimly lit by an ornate chandelier that casts long shadows across the walls. It doesn’t feel like a waiting room. It feels like a judgment chamber.

Persephone lounges on a velvet settee near the fireplace, cradling a crystal glass in one hand, her expression unreadable but far from warm. Hades stands behind her, hands clasped neatly in front of him, looking like a statue carved from disdain and funerary stone. His dark eyes are focused directly on Nico—and they do not waver.

“Sit,” he says.

The command slices through the room like a guillotine. Nico doesn’t flinch, just leads Will to the low couch opposite and sinks down, posture tense but defiant. Will follows, but every step feels like walking into a crypt. His mouth is dry. His heart has begun its slow climb up the back of his throat.

Hades waits until they’re seated before speaking again.

“I warned you,” Hades says, voice low and cold. “I told you not to speak of your mother. Or Bianca.”

Will barely has time to register the shift in Nico—shoulders going rigid, jaw clenched—before the anger flashes.

“Because it’s easier for you to pretend they didn’t exist?” Nico snaps. “Because if no one says their names out loud, maybe the guilt disappears too?”

Persephone sips her drink, expression balanced delicately between curiosity and caution.

Hades’s mouth presses into a hard line. “You’ve lost sight of what matters. Of what this family represents. You’ve allowed grief to cloud your judgment.”

“No,” Nico says, fire in his voice. “I’ve allowed it to inform my judgment. That’s the difference. You want me to inherit this empire without ever naming the people it was built on. You want a legacy of silence. I won’t do that.”

Hades narrows his eyes. “You think this petulant rebellion makes you wise?”

“I think refusing to forget the people I loved makes me human.”

Will doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe. He wants to reach for Nico—needs to—but there’s something sacred and furious vibrating off of him. Will doesn’t dare interrupt it.

Hades steps forward, gaze slicing toward Will like a scalpel.

“And this is what started it,” he says, quiet but razor-sharp. “Cheap sentimentality. Romantic delusion. You were more focused before he came into the picture.”

Will stiffens, but Nico moves first—pure, blistering fire.

“Don’t you dare put this on him,” he snarls. “I’ve never agreed with you. Not once. Not before Will, not after. He didn’t make me this way. He just—he sees me. And maybe that’s what scares you.”

The room holds its breath.

Then Hades smiles, thin as ice. “Do you think I’m unaware of who he is? Of what he is?”

Nico’s face goes still. “What are you talking about?”

“I had him looked into,” Hades says, almost bored. “Of course I did. The moment you mentioned his name at Thanksgiving. Alecto was very thorough.”

Will’s heart stutters. The room shifts sideways.

Nico stares, horror blooming across his face. “You what?”

“I needed to know if he posed a risk,” Hades says coolly. “His background is unimpressive, but expected. Struggling. Resourceful. Stubborn. Predictable.”

“You had him investigated?” Nico repeats, incredulous. “Like he’s some kind of threat?”

Persephone remains silent, still sipping her drink, as though this is all just business as usual.

Will can’t move. Can’t speak. The words unimpressive, struggling, predictable echo in his head like funeral bells. He feels flayed open. Like a list of private facts has been peeled from his bones and held up for appraisal. He’s sitting here in this immaculate room, raw and exposed, painted in someone else’s research.

“You had no right,” Nico says, voice like broken glass.

“I had every right,” Hades answers, cold enough to burn. “You are my son. I will not see you manipulated or distracted by someone—”

“Someone?” Nico cuts in. “You mean Will. The person I chose. The one who shows up. Who’s never once treated me like a pawn in your legacy parade—”

Hades lifts a brow. “Your emotional attachment doesn’t change his background.”

Will’s breath catches like it’s snagged on barbed wire.

Before Nico can answer, Will hears himself say, voice faint and uneven, “What is so damning about my background?”

He doesn’t know why he says it. Maybe he’s waited his whole life to. Maybe the words have always been sitting just under his skin.

Hades doesn’t hesitate.

“You were raised by Naomi Solace. Unmarried. Nineteen when you were born,” Hades says, his voice flat and clinical. “A minor career in alt-country music. Known for instability. She never listed your father’s name—not on any hospital forms, not even the birth certificate. But there are always trails, Mr. Solace. She told someone. Left it on a hospital form. An apartment lease. A government file. It was all there—just hidden deep enough that you wouldn’t find it.”

Will’s breath stutters.

Hades continues, unmoved. “You lived in seven different cities before the age of ten. The addresses were inconsistent. One was condemned for black mold. Another had no heating in winter. Your mother’s income fluctuated wildly—bar shows, backup gigs, short-lived retail jobs. At one point, her bank account balance remained under twenty dollars for three consecutive months. She received several overdraft notices. Utilities were frequently shut off. You went without hot water for over six months.”

Will’s chest tightens like a vice. His fingers tremble in his lap.

Hades doesn’t stop.

“There was a referral made when you were five. A neighbor reported suspected neglect—thin frame, frequently alone, coming to school without lunch. When you were eight, she missed a court date for unpaid parking tickets, and the case escalated. Child Protective Services opened an inquiry. You were this close—” Hades holds two fingers apart, no more than an inch “—to being placed in emergency foster care.”

“I didn’t know—” Will croaks. His voice barely exists.

“Of course not,” Hades says. “Your mother made sure of it.”

Will stares at the floor like it might anchor him. But everything inside him is tilting. He had known it was hard. Of course he had. The pawn shop guitars, the secondhand shoes, the nights she wouldn’t eat dinner and claimed she wasn’t hungry. But she always made it feel like a choice. Like they were broke but fine. Poor but safe. Like it was just a phase.

He had no idea how close he came to being taken from her. No idea she was drowning that badly.

A thick, hot pressure builds behind his eyes.

Naomi, with her chipped nail polish and her cracked voice and her stubborn, blinding love—she’d been so young. She hadn’t had help. And still, she had fought for him. Shielded him. Lied to him, maybe. But only so he wouldn’t have to carry the weight of how close everything came to falling apart.

“She was doing her best,” Will whispers, like it’s a prayer. “She was trying. She never let me feel unsafe.”

Hades tilts his head. “And yet you were. Often.”

Will flinches like he’s been slapped. But he doesn’t back down.

“She kept me,” he says, voice low and steady, though it scrapes a little. “She could’ve given me up. But she didn’t. She raised me on music and stretch-thin paychecks and love she refused to ration, no matter how little we had. So yeah, I wore donated sneakers, learned how to boil pasta before I was ten, started working shifts at fifteen—but I was never alone. Not where it counted.”

His hands curl into fists at his sides. There’s a tremor in his breath, not quite a crack, just the weight of years pressing behind his ribs.

“Her family was around. Eventually. Once the shock of the pregnancy wore off and the scandal faded, they came back—but it was never warm. I always knew what I was to them: the bastard kid, the mistake they didn’t talk about. They sent Christmas cards with Bible verses about forgiveness, always addressed to Naomi. Never Naomi and Will.”

He glances away, eyes flicking toward the wall, like maybe if he doesn’t look at anyone, the words will hurt less.

“And when it became clear I wasn’t the kind of boy they could explain away at church—that I liked other boys, that I didn’t fit into the neat little boxes they prayed over—things changed. The coldness got sharper. The space got wider. My mom kept me away from them after that. Said it was to give me space.”

He swallows hard. “But I think she knew. I think she was trying to protect me.”

His voice goes quieter, almost reverent.

“She did everything by herself. She chose me. And I’ll never stop being grateful for that.”

There’s a pause. Hades regards him, expression unreadable.

“A child,” he says finally, “needs more than love. They need order. Discipline. A father. Someone to shape them before the world does.”

Will goes still.

It’s not new—not really. Will has heard versions of it all his life, folded into the sighs of teachers, the forced smiles of neighbors, the tight-lipped silences between his mother and her family. It’s the kind of judgment that never needs to be spoken aloud to leave a mark. But something about the way Hades says it—calm, definitive, like a law etched into stone—makes Will want to snap the legs off his chair and hurl them at the nearest marble wall.

He wants to scream. To tell him to shut the hell up. That Naomi was the anchor. That she didn’t need a man to steady the ship because she was the ship, keeping them both afloat with nothing but grit and lullabies.

But the words lodge somewhere in his throat.

Because something colder is rising.

Hades speaks of fathers like a man who’s read the last page of a book Will’s never been allowed to open. Like someone who’s filled in the blanks Will has spent his whole life scribbling around.

Will sways, unsteady. Then—Nico’s hand. Solid and warm around his own, grounding him. A tether.

And just like that, Will is still upright. But only barely.

“You think you’re protecting me?” Nico growls. “You think controlling who I love is a strategy?”

“I think,” Hades replies, “that if you intend to carry this name, you need someone who will not crumble under the weight of it.”

“So you don’t think Will is good enough,” Nico says.

Hades doesn’t blink. “You are my only son. No one will ever be good enough.”

Nico gives a short, bitter laugh. “That’s not the compliment you think it is. You act like this is about love. Like you’re trying to protect me. But this isn’t about me. It’s never been about me.”

Hades’s expression darkens.

Nico doesn’t back down. “You don’t care who makes me happy. You care who fits the image you’ve spent years building—cold, untouchable, obedient. You want a perfect heir. Someone who never stumbles, never disobeys, never embarrasses you by… feeling anything.”

Hades doesn’t hesitate. “You’ve brought someone into your life who benefits from your status. Who moves in circles he never belonged to.”

Will stiffens, heart thudding like it’s trying to escape his chest.

Hades’s eyes flick to him, unreadable and cold. “He works two jobs. One in food service. One in retail. His credit is modest at best. His rent is always just barely on time. He’s missed three medical bills in the last year. Utilities have lapsed. Twice.”

Will’s mouth goes dry. His fingers curl against his knee, trying to hold onto something—anything—but the room is spinning.

Nico’s entire body is coiled tight beside him, a storm barely leashed.

And then Hades delivers the final blow.

“That suit,” Hades says, voice low and precise, with a faint, disdainful nod toward Will’s lapel. “Designer label. Tailored. Hand-stitched silk blend.”

He turns, almost casually, to Persephone. “What would you say it’s worth?”

She glances at Will, then at the fabric, tilting her head. “Six, maybe seven thousand.”

The silence that follows is brutal.

Hades looks back at Will. “You could never afford it.”

Will flinches, heat crawling up his neck like shame set on fire.

It was expensive. It was a gift. From Nico. Something Will tried to refuse more than once—until Nico insisted, quietly, that he wanted Will to feel comfortable. That he deserved to walk into a room and not feel like he didn’t belong.

And now it feels like a spotlight. A mark. Like Hades peeled off the tag and pinned it to his chest in front of everyone.

He wants to disappear. But before he can even blink, Nico is on his feet.

“Enough.” His voice cracks like a whip through the air.

Persephone sets her glass down slowly, eyes fixed on her stepson, unreadable.

“You want to talk about manipulation?” Nico spits. “Let’s talk about how you tried to shape me into something unrecognizable. Let’s talk about how you spent years pretending I was a replacement for Bianca—like you could mold me into the child you didn’t lose.”

“Nico—” Hades starts, low and dangerous.

“No. You don’t get to speak like you’ve earned the right.” Nico’s whole body is shaking, but his voice is steady—like steel pulled from flame. “Where were you when I couldn’t sleep without hearing the sound of water? When I stopped eating? When I couldn’t look at a lake without wanting to crawl into it and disappear?”

A muscle in Hades’s jaw twitches.

“You were silent. Always silent. Until now—when I finally have someone who makes me feel like I’m not drowning all the time. When I found someone who saw me, and didn’t flinch. When I finally started to want to live again.”

Will’s breath catches.

“I don’t give a damn what family Will comes from,” Nico says, voice thick. “I don’t care if he’s rich or if he’s barely holding it together. He’s kind. He’s brave. And he is good. He made me want to be a person again. Not your heir. Not your project. Just—me.”

Will can’t speak. His chest aches so deeply it feels like something sacred is breaking open inside him.

He’s never been defended like that. Never seen like that. Not fully. Not without conditions or cost.

Nico turns to him, eyes fierce and burning. “You don’t have to prove anything. Not to him. Not to anyone.”

And Will—quietly, breathlessly—falls in love with him all over again.

The moment stretches, trembling on the edge of collapse, before Persephone stands and steps forward with a sigh that sounds too graceful to be real.

“Darling,” she says, all patience and porcelain, “I think it’s time to take a breath. This isn’t helping anyone.”

Nico doesn’t even blink. “Don’t.”

Persephone lifts a brow, mild as spring rain. “I’m only trying to keep the peace.”

“There is no peace,” Nico snaps, voice rising sharp and cold. “Not when he’s doing this.”

He jerks his head toward Hades, eyes blazing. “You think I don’t see what you’re doing? You think I don’t get it by now? You can’t stand the fact that you’re losing control. That I’m not letting you mold me into whatever curated heir you keep trying to carve out of me.”

“Nico—” Persephone tries again, voice gentling.

“No,” he cuts her off. “Let me say it. Because this has nothing to do with Will. Or Naomi. He’s dragging them through the dirt because it’s easier than looking in a mirror. This was never about background checks or bloodlines. It’s about power. It’s always about power with him.”

Hades doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. But the shadows in the corners of the room seem to lean in, listening.

“You talk about legacy like it’s marble and empire,” Nico continues, breathing hard now. “But what about her legacy?” His voice wavers. “What about my mother? What about Bianca? You won’t say their names unless someone forces you. You won’t grieve. You just build walls and order people around and pretend that means you’re strong.”

His fists tremble. “I’m done pretending it doesn’t matter. I’m done pretending you’re not hurting just like I was. You can call it rebellion if you want, but I call it surviving.”

The silence that follows feels ancient—deep and cavernous. Will’s heart hammers behind his ribs. Nico is breathing like he just surfaced from deep water.

For a moment—just a flicker—Hades looks almost… sad.

It’s gone as quickly as it appears, like a shadow caught in the corner of the eye. But Will sees it. The faint tremble at the edge of his mouth. The weight behind his eyes. It’s like watching a statue crack from the inside—just enough to glimpse the grief buried in the stone.

And against every instinct for self-preservation, Will feels something shift in his chest.

Because what must it be like to lose a wife? A daughter? Not in myth or metaphor, but in blood and time. To have loved and failed and buried them both. Will thinks of Bianca’s name, still sharp like broken glass in Nico’s voice, and of the woman Nico never speaks of except in brief, reverent echoes. He imagines what that grief must look like, stretched out over decades. How it must rot into control, calcify into cruelty.

He still thinks Hades is wrong. Still hates what he’s said tonight. But for a second, he understands the shape of the wound beneath it.

And more than that—he aches for Nico.

Because this is his father. This is the silence he grew up inside. The pressure. The weight. The cold. And suddenly Will wants to take Nico’s hand again—not just to comfort him, but to tether him, to promise him that love doesn’t have to feel like this. That family can be something else.

Will’s throat tightens.

He thinks of his mom—of warm car rides with the radio too loud, of late-night diner breakfasts when there was nothing left in the fridge, of her dancing barefoot in the kitchen to old Emmylou Harris songs. He thinks of how tired she was and how hard she tried. How she never made him feel like a burden, even when they had nothing. How she shielded him from judgment, from shame, from truths too heavy for a child to carry.

And for the first time, Will is glad she raised him alone.

Because if his father had been anything like this—this cold, calculating god of a man who sees love as a liability—he knows exactly what he would’ve grown up to be: afraid, bitter, hollow. He wouldn’t be here at all.

Not like this. Not with Nico.

Will looks at him now, still standing firm, still breathing hard, still burning with a fury that feels too big for someone who’s spent a lifetime being told to stay small. And it hits him—not for the first time, but deeper now—how strong Nico is. How he clawed his way toward decency and gentleness, toward kindness and loyalty, even when he was offered nothing but silence and control. How he still manages to love like it’s a rebellion. How he let Will in, even with every reason not to.

And Will thinks: thank the gods I found him.
Thank the gods he let me stay.

A silence settles—thick, dry, almost static-charged—the kind that makes your ears ring. Hades shifts first. Just a shift of weight, the faintest adjustment of his cuffs, like someone realigning a mask. He smooths his tie with the clinical precision of a man preparing for court, not conversation.

“We have obligations to return to,” he says at last. No emotion, just a closing statement. “Our absence will already have been noted.”

Persephone doesn’t respond. She glances at Nico—just once, like muscle memory—but her expression isn’t indifferent. If anything, it’s tired. Like someone who’s been trying to fight a tide that never turns. She gathers her gloves and shawl with slow, practiced hands, the way you pack up after a show that didn’t go the way you hoped.

Nico doesn’t say a word. He’s still standing, stiff and taut like he’s holding up some invisible scaffolding. But Will can feel it—that hum of fury starting to dim, settling into something heavier. Older. Not rage, exactly. Just the ache that comes after.

Hades turns toward Will. His gaze lands hard, and stays.

“This isn’t personal,” he says, his voice like glass cooled too fast. “It never is. It’s family, it’s business.”

Will meets his eyes, heart rattling behind his ribs.

Family. Business.

To Hades, the two words are synonymous. Will can see it now—how it all slots neatly in the man’s mind: loyalty, potential, influence, liability. Love doesn’t factor in. It’s not a value. It’s a vulnerability. Nico’s joy? A rounding error. A margin he’s always trying to tighten.

Will doesn’t argue. What would be the point? To tell this man that love is personal? That Nico isn’t an heirloom or a brand, he’s a person—a person who breaks, who rebuilds, who bleeds and dares to hope anyway?

Hades wouldn’t care. Or worse—he would understand and still find it irrelevant.

So Will just nods. Once. Not in agreement, but in acknowledgment. A full sentence, compressed into a gesture.

Persephone brushes past them. Her look lingers for half a second—soft, unreadable. Like there’s something she mighthave said, if there’d been a sliver more time. But there’s not. She disappears into the hall, heels echoing in brisk, symmetrical beats.

Hades stays a moment longer.

“Nico,” Hades says again, softer this time. His voice catches—not enough to call it regret, not enough to call it a warning. Just enough to sound like he almost meant it.

Nico doesn’t move. Doesn’t look at him. He keeps his eyes fixed on the floor like it’s the only thing holding him upright, jaw locked, hands curled tight at his sides.

Hades waits a beat. Then turns and walks out.

The door clicks shut behind him. Not loud, not dramatic. Just a soft, certain sound—the kind that doesn’t echo, but still manages to stick in your chest..

Will turns. Nico’s still frozen in place, hands clenched like anchors.

“Nico,” he says, barely above a whisper. “Hey. Look at me.”

Nico does—and Will forgets how to breathe.

His eyes are brimming, lashes wet, the tears just barely holding—sharp and bright, like glass catching the light before it shatters. And Will has never seen Nico cry. Not like this. Not even after nightmares or whispered memories of his mother. Not even when he spoke about Bianca, or the lake, or that terrible, bleeding kind of loneliness he used to carry like a second skin.

Will’s heart splits clean down the middle.

He’s on his feet before he knows he’s moving, crossing the room in a heartbeat. He doesn’t hesitate—just wraps his arms around Nico and pulls him in tight, like he’s trying to shield him from the world.

For a moment, Nico doesn’t respond. He just stands there, stiff and shaking. Then he lets out a ragged breath—barely a sound, more collapse than exhale—and falls into Will’s chest. His fingers fist in Will’s shirt like he’s trying to hold on to something solid. And then he breaks.

Not loud. Not dramatic. Just silent, heart-wrecking sobs that wrack through him like his body’s been waiting years for permission to fall apart.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out, the words cracked and raw. “I’m so sorry, Will. I didn’t know he—he had you investigated. I should’ve known. I should’ve seen it coming.”

“Hey, hey,” Will murmurs, one hand cradling the back of Nico’s head, the other curled protectively around his ribs. “It’s not your fault.”

“I feel so stupid,” Nico gasps. “I wanted—I was just so happy. You made me so happy. I thought maybe... maybe if I showed them that, they’d understand. That they’d see you and they’d see what you mean to me and for once they wouldn’t try to ruin it.”

Will presses his cheek to Nico’s temple, eyes burning now too. “You don’t owe them anything, Nico.”

“I thought it would be different this time,” Nico whispers. “When we talked earlier, it almost felt like—like maybe we could have that. A real family moment. Like maybe it wasn’t completely broken.”

He pulls back just enough to look at Will, tears slipping freely down his cheeks now. His expression is devastated. “I should’ve stuck to the speech. I should’ve stayed cold. I should’ve known better. If I had, none of this would’ve happened. He wouldn’t have hurt you.”

Will cups his face with both hands, gentle and unshaking even though his own heart is trembling.

“You didn’t mess anything up,” he says softly. “You were brave. You stood up for yourself. For your mom. For Bianca. You said what they never gave you space to say, and you said it beautifully. And gods, Nico, I’ve never been prouder of you.”

Nico’s breath catches, lower lip trembling. “But he looked at you like you were nothing. Like you were... expendable. And I let that happen.”

Will leans forward until their foreheads touch, voice thick but unwavering. “He can look at me however he wants. I don’t care. You’re the only one who gets to define what we are. And I know what we are.”

He strokes Nico’s cheek with his thumb, brushing away a tear. “I love you. That’s all I care about. Not your father. Not his empire. Just you. Just this.”

Nico stares at him, unblinking, like he’s seeing something he doesn’t know how to accept. Then he crumples again, burying his face in Will’s shoulder, hands curling into the fabric at his back like he’s afraid to let go.

“I’m sorry,” Nico says again, so small this time it’s almost nothing.

“You don’t have to be,” Will murmurs, pressing a kiss to his hair. “You don’t have to be sorry for loving me.”

And he holds him. Through the shaking. Through the silence. Through the pieces of pain Nico doesn’t know how to name. He holds him like a promise, like an anchor, like a future no one else gets to take from them.

Eventually, the tears slow. Nico’s breathing evens out, though he stays tucked against Will’s shoulder, still holding on like he’s not ready to rejoin the world just yet. Will doesn’t rush him. He strokes his back in slow, steady circles, breathing with him, grounding them both.

When Nico finally pulls away, his eyes are red, face blotched and tear-streaked, but something about him looks clearer. Like he’s scraped down to the truth of himself and is trying to rebuild from there.

“I want to go,” Nico says, voice rough from crying. “I just—I want to be anywhere else. I can’t stay here.”

Will nods, thumb brushing lightly along the edge of Nico’s jaw. “Okay. We can go.”

But then—faintly, through the walls—they hear it. Music. Strings swelling and golden. The low murmur of voices rising into laughter. The dull thud of feet on marble.

Dancing.

Of course. The performance has resumed.

Will glances toward the door, then back at Nico. And he feels it, then—that flicker of something fierce and certain, blooming in his chest like defiance with a heartbeat.

“We’ll leave,” Will says, softer now. “But I want one thing first.”

Nico frowns. “What?”

Will lifts his hand, brushing a curl back behind Nico’s ear. His smile is gentle, but there’s steel beneath it. “I want to dance with you.”

Nico blinks, clearly caught off guard. “What?”

“Out there,” Will says, tilting his head toward the ballroom. “In front of them. Your father. Persephone. Every guest in that ridiculous palace of a room.”

Nico stares at him like he’s lost his mind.

Will’s voice drops, tender but unwavering. “I want them to see. I want them to know. That whatever Hades said about me—whatever he thinks of me—it doesn’t scare me. He doesn’t get to shame you for loving me, and he doesn’t get to scare me off either. I want to dance with you, Nico. Just once. So they understand that you’re not alone. That I’m not going anywhere.”

Nico is quiet for a long moment. His brows draw together, his lips part like he’s about to protest, and then close again. Will can see it—the war behind his eyes. Pride. Fear. The instinct to run. The ache to stay.

“I don’t know if I can,” Nico says eventually, voice small. “Everyone will be watching. And I—I still feel like I’m made of glass.”

“I know,” Will says. He cups Nico’s face again, holding him steady in the moment. “But I’ll be holding you the whole time. If it gets too much, we leave. No questions, no apologies. But I want to give you this, if you’ll let me.”

Nico swallows hard. The hurt is still there, tucked in the corners of his expression, but something else is beginning to form—something like belief. Or maybe courage wearing a borrowed face.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay. One dance.”

Will smiles—soft, slow, full of so much love it could level kingdoms.

“One dance,” he echoes. “Let’s give them something they won’t forget.”

They slip back through the doors into the ballroom, the sound of music greeting them like a warm tide—slow, lilting strings that swell and twist into something golden. The lights are low and soft now, strung in sweeping arcs overhead like constellations, casting the whole room in a gentle, celestial glow. For a moment, it doesn’t feel like a palace or a battleground. Just a room filled with people in motion, hands joined, hearts unguarded.

Will’s eyes scan the floor.

Percy and Annabeth are already dancing, pressed close, Annabeth’s head resting against his chest while Percy sways with the half-grin he saves only for her. Nearby, Frank is holding Hazel like she’s made of music, his movements careful and practiced, his eyes only for her.

Leo is twirling Piper with exaggerated flair, both of them laughing too loudly, spinning off-tempo just enough to turn heads. They aren’t dancing like lovers—more like conspirators trying to prove they’re not the story. Jason lingers by the edge of the floor, hands in his pockets, watching them with an unreadable expression. 

Hazel catches sight of Nico and Will stepping onto the floor. Her face shifts—relief first, then concern. Her brows knit in question, in quiet protectiveness. But Nico shakes his head before she can ask, a small, firm gesture.

Will gives her a gentle smile in return, the best he can manage. She watches them a beat longer before returning her attention to Frank.

And then it’s just the two of them again. In the middle of it all. Alone, somehow, in a room full of motion.

Will turns to Nico and takes both his hands, slow and careful. “Okay?” he asks, just loud enough to be heard over the music.

Nico nods, barely. His fingers are still trembling a little.

Will slides one hand to Nico’s waist and draws him closer, the other folding into Nico’s hand. He moves with quiet confidence—the steps soft, practiced, steady—just like Rachel taught him. He leads without force, just enough structure to let Nico rest inside it.

The world narrows.

Will doesn’t look at the guests watching them. He doesn’t look for Hades or Persephone. Doesn’t care if they’re being whispered about. All he sees is Nico.

Nico, in soft black and bruised plum, with the low light caught in the dark waves of his hair, his lashes long and damp from crying. Nico, who looks like something carved out of twilight and shadow, and who is, somehow, still the most beautiful thing Will has ever seen. Not because he’s polished or poised—but because he’s real. Because he’s here. Because he let Will bring him back to the dance floor.

They sway, slow and close, the band playing something old and aching, something that loops like a ribbon through the air. Around them, couples spin and drift—one woman in a flowing gold gown with ivy pinned in her braids, her partner in deep green, echoing Demeter and Iasion. Another pair mirrors Achilles and Patroclus, though softened by modern lines and gentle smiles. A girl in gauzy white with a silver arm cuff twirls her date with theatrical flourish, laughter trailing behind them like a veil.

But Will only has eyes for Nico.

He tilts their foreheads together and whispers, “You’re safe.”

Nico’s breath hitches, but he doesn’t pull away. His eyes flutter shut. And slowly—so slowly—his body begins to relax into the rhythm.

Will pulls him closer, one hand splayed gently across the small of his back. They move in small, unhurried circles, the rest of the ballroom fading into blur. This—this is what Will wanted. Not revenge. Not a scene. Just this quiet, impossible thing: Nico in his arms, the music rising like a vow around them, their love laid bare and undeniable in the middle of a room that once tried to make him feel small.

Let them watch, Will thinks. Let them see.

Because this is what love looks like. Not a scandal. Not a mistake. Just a boy holding the boy he loves beneath a sky made of light, swaying to a song only they really hear.

They keep dancing, even after the song fades. Will waits for Nico to step back, to slip away like he always used to—but instead, Nico pulls him closer.

The next song begins, a slower jazz rhythm curling through the air like silk. Nico doesn’t speak, doesn’t look up, just shifts his weight and keeps moving, their bodies swaying gently in time. Will closes his eyes for a moment and lets it sink in: this warmth, this closeness, this boy in his arms who once wouldn’t let anyone touch him.

And when he opens his eyes again, he sees them—the other guests watching.

Some discreet. Some curious. Some clearly confused.

Will wonders what they see.

Do they see two boys in love, or do they see a scandal in soft focus? Can they tell he doesn’t belong here, not really? That his suit was bought for him and his bloodline doesn’t trace back to anything but stubbornness and grit? Can they tell that Nico’s father had him investigated? That he works two jobs, that he’s not supposed to know how to waltz in a room like this?

Do they care that they’re two men?

Can they tell how much he loves him?

And yet, as Nico fits so perfectly in his arms, as the music rises and their feet glide along polished floors beneath a ceiling of artificial stars, Will finds he doesn’t care.

Because how could this be wrong? How could love between two men—this love—be anything but holy? When it feels like safety and firelight, like skin warmed by sun, like the quiet click of a door unlocking after a long winter?

How could it be unnatural when it blooms so easily in the space between heartbeats, when it fills Will’s lungs like oxygen and makes Nico’s eyes soften into something that could change the weather?

No, this isn’t wrong.

This is sacred.

This is them.

The tempo changes. The band strikes up something brighter, sharper, the kind of tune that begs for laughter. Will grins before he even knows what he’s doing, and without warning, he twirls Nico in a full circle. Nico yelps, stumbling, eyes wide as Will catches him again—then bursts into unexpected, unguarded laughter.

“You’re going to make me fall,” he says, dizzy and breathless.

“You won’t,” Will promises, pulling him back into the rhythm. “I’ve got you.”

They spin again, this time in sync. Nico’s cheeks are flushed, his hair tousled, and when Will looks at him, it feels like the whole room tilts toward him, like gravity itself knows who Will Solace was meant to orbit.

But then Nico shakes his head, still smiling. “Too warm,” he murmurs. “I need air.”

Will doesn’t question it. He just takes his hand and leads him gently away, slipping through the crowd, past the lingering stares and parted silks, out the front doors and into the winter night.

The cold hits them like a baptism.

Their breath curls white into the air, visible in the glow of thousands of tiny lights strung up along the grand hotel facade. The outdoor Christmas display glitters in deliberate excess—gold and crimson, silver doves, baubles like frostbitten pomegranate seeds, a towering fir wrapped in lights shaped like constellations. Icicles hang from the archway in elegant symmetry, framing the bronze statue of Persephone and Hades at the entrance, her hands outstretched toward spring while he looks forever away.

And yet, in the hush of night, it doesn’t feel so theatrical. It just feels quiet. Real.

Will exhales, his hand still warm in Nico’s.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, watching the lights reflected in the frost-glazed sidewalk.

Nico hums. “A little too on the nose.”

Will laughs under his breath. “A little.”

They don’t move for a while. Just breathe. Just exist. Just let the night wrap around them like a blanket that still carries the echo of music, the scent of pine and cold stone, the pulse of something unspeakably alive.

The peace doesn’t last long.

The doors swing open behind them with a theatrical crash, and suddenly the night is flooded with laughter and voices—Percy’s unmistakable cackle, Leo practically shrieking, Hazel gasping for breath between giggles.

“Oh my gods,” Piper wheezes, stumbling out in heels she’s clearly regretting. “Leo, I swear to everything, if that ends up on Instagram—”

“Too late,” Leo beams, holding up his phone. “It’s already on Annabeth’s story. With a slow-mo replay.”

Annabeth strides out behind them with a kind of queenly exasperation, tugging her hair out of its pins. “Only because it’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all year.”

“You slid under a waiter, Leo,” Frank adds, still laughing. “How is that even physically possible?”

“It’s called style,” Leo says. “Look it up.”

Hazel breaks away from the chaos and drifts to Nico’s side, tucking herself under his arm. She’s still smiling, but her eyes search his face, always attuned to the undercurrents he hides from everyone else. “You okay?” she asks softly.

Nico hesitates, then leans his cheek against her hair for a moment. “I’ll tell you in the morning,” he murmurs.

She nods, no pressure, just presence.

Jason joins them a moment later, eyeing Nico with a subtle tilt of the head—the kind of unspoken check-in only brothers by bond know how to make. He doesn’t push either. Just says, “This place is overrated anyway. We could find somewhere better.”

Nico glances up, surprised by the offer, and the flicker of relief in his expression is hard to miss.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I’d like that.”

“Girls, upstairs,” Piper announces, already halfway toward the entrance. “You know the plan.”

“Oh, we planned for this,” Annabeth says, flashing a grin. “We brought backup dresses.”

“Cocktail dresses, actual mobility,” Hazel confirms, linking arms with them.

They disappear in a flurry of glitter, satin, and high-heeled urgency.

The boys linger downstairs. Jason’s already on his phone, pulling strings like it’s second nature. Frank and Percy are debating whether they can find late-night tacos near whatever club Jason’s picked, and Leo’s trying to convince them to let him DJ from the car’s aux cord.

Amidst the noise, Nico leans into Will’s side, grounding them both in the quieter rhythm they’ve made together.

Will turns to him, soft in the shadow of the glittering lights. “Thank you,” he says quietly. “For the dance. For… defending me. Back there.”

Nico shakes his head, brushing a thumb lightly against Will’s wrist. “You never have to thank me.”

Will smiles, cupping Nico’s jaw. “I know. But I still want to.”

Nico meets his eyes. There’s no hesitation now. No mask. Just him.

“I would do it a thousand times,” he says. “I’ll defend you until my last breath.”

Will’s heart stutters.

The moment stretches—unhurried, quiet again despite the noise. Nico presses a kiss to the corner of Will’s mouth, barely there and devastatingly gentle.

And across the sidewalk, Percy yells, “Frank, you are not allowed to ride the hotel luggage cart into traffic again, I don’t care how much Leo dares you!”

“Hypothetically,” Leo says, grinning, “what if we just—”

Will laughs under his breath, forehead resting against Nico’s for a beat longer.

Will brushes his thumb across Nico’s knuckles. “Let’s not give this place another second it doesn’t deserve.”

Nico exhales, almost a smile. “Fine by me.”

And so they wait—on the edge of marble and memory, beneath strings of borrowed starlight, their fingers laced and shoulders brushing. Out into the cold, where their breath clouds the air and their friends are laughing too loudly and nothing is perfect, but everything is real. 

Chapter 55: Hazard Pay and Hazardous PDA

The December air still stings with the echo of Hades’ voice, but outside, the city is fever-bright—horns blaring, laughter knifing through the cold, rainlight puddling on the street like molten glass. Will lets himself be carried in the slipstream of his friends, careful not to meet Nico’s gaze for too long, terrified that every raw nerve—humiliation, anger, the old shame of being examined and measured—will show on his face. Nico’s posture is all shadows and self-defense, shoulders hunched high, eyes shuttered, but the others—mercifully oblivious—are high on survival, letting the night fill the cracks.

Jason breaks the hush with a sideways glance at Leo, voice pitched low but mischievous: “Who’s taking bets on how fast Percy gets kicked out for dancing on the tables?” Leo grins back, looping his arm through Jason’s with a theatrical flourish. “Ten bucks says Annabeth tackles him before security does.” 

Piper drifts behind, her silence sharp in the chaos, fingers catching Hazel’s wrist—clinging, just for a heartbeat, to something steady. Annabeth and Percy are already arguing at the door about which mythical monster would make the best bouncer (“Chimera, obviously.” “Minotaur. All muscle, no subtlety—perfect for club security.”).

Inside, the club is steam and staccato noise—bodies pressed close, velvet sweat and spilled gin, Frank weaving through the crowd to claim a corner booth while Hazel flags him down, Percy spinning Annabeth straight into the throng. Will moves numbly at the edge of all this—grateful for the riot, for the distraction, for the anonymity of noise and light that keeps the acid burn of shame at bay.

Leo materializes with drinks, arms precariously full, the energy between him and Jason jittery and bright. “Don’t say I never buy you anything nice,” Leo offers, nudging a glass into Jason’s hand. 

Jason—stiff, just a hair too tense for the room—manages a crooked smile. “Is this going to kill me?” 

Leo’s eyes dance, hopeful and a little reckless: “Only if you trust me.” 

Their hands brush—just for a second, just enough for Will to notice, to feel the hush and static in the moment, the way they orbit closer without meaning to.

Hazel’s voice slices through the chatter, bright as ever. “Let’s toast to surviving another family gala!”

“Speak for yourself,” Percy calls from the dance floor. “I think I blacked out during dessert.”

Annabeth, not missing a beat: “That was the only edible part, Seaweed Brain.”

Frank, deadpan: “At least nobody set anything on fire.”

Leo, clutching his heart, mock-offended: “Hey. The night is still young.”

Piper turns her glass slowly in her hands, manages a wry smile. “Don’t jinx it, Leo.” Jason doesn’t quite meet her gaze. Hazel’s hand slips to Piper’s wrist, anchoring her in the swirl of laughter and neon.

Will sits silent at first, letting the group’s chaos rattle around him, grateful for the camouflage. He finds himself watching as Nico slips into the booth beside him—close enough their thighs brush, both of them rigid with leftover nerves, pretending not to need each other’s closeness. For a while, Will only listens—the pulse of the music, the clatter of ice in glasses, the comfort of voices that will never know what happened in that marble hall. He lets the noise fill him, tries to let the warmth of his friends bleed into his skin, to become soft and ordinary again, someone who belongs.

Only after a while—after Leo launches into a saga about the world’s worst Uber driver, after Frank knocks his drink and everyone dives for napkins, after Hazel leans in and whispers something that makes Nico’s mouth twitch, almost-smiling—does Will let his hand drift beneath the table, fingertips seeking, brushing against Nico’s knuckles. The touch is hesitant, hidden, as if conjured by hope alone. Nico’s fingers curl back, the gentlest acknowledgment: not calm, not fixed, but here. Still wanting, still choosing.

Across the table, Jason laughs at something Leo says, but his eyes dart to Piper, quick and rueful. Piper looks away, glass raised, her smile like a shield. The music shifts, swelling brighter—Annabeth stands, already tugging Percy back to the dance floor, Frank and Hazel tumbling after, leaving Will and Nico in the hush of the booth, the club’s bass a pulse beneath their ribs.

Will turns to Nico, words stuck in his throat, letting the press of their joined hands speak in the language he trusts most. For the first time since the gala, he lets himself breathe.

“You doing okay?” Will asks—quiet, just for them, not prying, not needy, only honest.

Nico lets out a breath, almost a laugh, except it catches and softens into something smaller, gentler. He glances sideways, eyes still rimmed red but shining now, mouth quirking in that rare, private smile meant only for Will. “Yeah,” he says. “I am now.” His knee bumps Will’s beneath the table, almost shy. “Thanks for making me dance. I didn’t think I could, but that… that helped. It was good.”

For a moment Will is overwhelmed by the memory of Nico in his arms beneath the chandelier—how fiercely Nico had clung to him, as if they could anchor each other against the world—and his chest aches with the tenderness of it. He wants to say, I’d dance with you anywhere, but words always fail him when it matters most.

So instead, he smiles—warm, crooked, honest. “You were the best thing about that whole circus,” he says, letting the affection show. “Well, besides Percy almost taking out a ten-thousand-dollar ice sculpture.”

Nico huffs a real laugh this time, teeth flashing as he bites back a grin. “He was so close. I think Annabeth would’ve actually murdered him.”

Will leans in, lowering his voice until it’s a thread between them. “If you want to leave, we can. Just say the word.” Even as he says it, he notices the difference in Nico—the way he sits taller, the way the shadows have eased back, how he looks at Will now instead of the door.

“No,” Nico says, voice steady, clear as glass. “I want to stay. With you.” There’s nothing shy in it now, nothing trembling—just a promise, quiet and certain.

For a heartbeat, the world recedes: it’s only them—hands finding each other in the half-light, a thumb tracing over knuckles, the hush of two hearts remembering how to be brave together. Will squeezes Nico’s hand—small, fierce, grateful. He thinks, not for the first time, about what it means to be chosen, not just survived, and lets the joy of it settle deep.

“Good,” he says, meaning it. And when Nico leans in—not quite a kiss, but almost—Will lets himself imagine closing that last inch, right here in the golden noise, where it wouldn’t be spectacle or secret. Just love: ordinary and extraordinary, all at once.

It happens quickly—one moment Will is basking in the hush between himself and Nico, the golden noise blurring at the edges, the next he’s being hauled upright by Percy, who appears in a whirlwind of limbs and laughter, shirt unbuttoned nearly to his waist and hair wild, somehow pulling off the look with that infuriating, effortless surfer-boy ease. Percy grins at Will and Nico, eyes bright with mischief, and shouts, “Let’s go! The dance floor is tragically undersea-themed and I refuse to face it alone!”

Annabeth is already out there, cocktail dress swirling as she laughs, shaking her head while Percy attempts a spin that nearly wipes out a passing waitress. Hazel follows with Frank in tow, joy undimmed by Frank’s two left feet. Piper hesitates on the edge, uncertain, tugging at her hem, eyes scanning the room for something she can’t name. Jason and Leo trail behind, close but not quite together, something fidgety and unfinished shimmering between them—Jason smoothing his hair for the thousandth time, Leo never quite meeting his gaze.

Nico groans, but there’s no protest in it. Will can feel the tension uncoiling in both of them, replaced with something reckless and giddy as Percy pulls them into the thick of it. The dance floor is packed, lights strobing pink and blue, sweat and cologne and the sharp tang of gin turning the air electric. The music pounds—something shamelessly pop, the kind that leaves no room for dignity—and suddenly they’re surrounded, Annabeth looping an arm around Nico’s shoulders, Hazel tugging Will’s hands into the air.

Off to the side, a man in leather shorts and a rhinestone collar works the crowd, playfully panting at the beat, letting random strangers scratch his head for selfies and barking out requests at the DJ between songs. Every time someone tosses a glowstick his way, he catches it and wags it between his teeth, earning a round of applause. Percy clocks the whole thing, shakes his head in disbelief, and grins at Will: “Only in New York, man.”

Frank and Percy attempt a dramatic dip and nearly go down in a heap, Hazel dissolving into laughter as Annabeth shouts, “That’s not regulation ballroom!” Leo and Jason circle at the edge, Jason stiff at first, Leo’s hands never still—tugging his jacket, glancing at Jason with a dare that doesn’t quite land. Will catches the way Leo bumps Jason’s arm, casual but hopeful, and Jason’s lips twitch, caught somewhere between a smile and the urge to bolt. Even Frank, beaming and oblivious, seems to notice, a flicker of concern and understanding in his eyes.

Out of nowhere, Piper is caught by the wrist—gently, confidently—by a girl with a sleeve of bright tattoos and a halo of copper hair, laughter in her eyes, like she’s seen every secret in the room and decided Piper is her favorite. “You know, I had to come over,” the girl says, leaning in so Piper can hear her above the music. “You’re the most magnetic thing I’ve seen all night.”

Piper—who is always quick, always in control, who could talk her way into or out of anything—just stares, lips parted, for once entirely, beautifully undone. The moment hangs, suspended and golden, like the world is waiting on her answer. Piper, usually the one doing the charming, is now the one being charmed—and she is utterly, joyously helpless against it.

Will watches, caught by the vulnerability and the way Piper’s composure wavers, then melts. Then her laugh bursts out, bright and a little shaky, her cheeks flushed. She glances at Will, and he gives her a gentle, conspiratorial smile, a silent I see you. Go.

Piper recovers enough to say something back—Will can’t hear it, but it’s softer than her usual bravado, and for a moment the two are wrapped up in their own orbit, the club’s lights flickering across Piper’s shining hair, her whole posture answering the stranger’s attention. For the first time in ages, Piper lets herself be the one swept off her feet.

Nico presses close, a hand settling at Will’s waist under the pretense of squeezing through the crowd. Will lets himself lean into it, soaking in the contact, the dizzy safety of it all—music thundering, friends colliding in laughter, the wild, temporary miracle of belonging. Percy’s spun himself into another disaster, Annabeth is howling, Leo shoves Jason into the center of the floor, Jason’s eyes wide and bright, for once letting himself be pulled into the spotlight. Piper and her new friend disappear into the crush of bodies, Hazel just shakes her head, smiling as she tugs Frank closer.

It’s chaos, it’s heat, it’s home. Will can feel Nico’s breath against his jaw, hears his low, steady laughter, and thinks, for the first time in a long time, he doesn’t want the night to end—not when everything impossible feels, for a heartbeat, so close it almost seems ordinary.

Then—because some cosmic law requires it—Leo decides to escalate.

It starts with him clambering onto one of the glowing acrylic cubes scattered around the club—half table, half dance stage, pulsing with colored light. “All right!” Leo shouts, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Make way for the firebird!” The DJ, catching the chaos, kills the beat and flips a spotlight onto him. For a second, everyone’s watching—drinks paused, conversations stilled.

Leo bows with a flourish, flashes the crowd his most outrageous grin, and—because it’s Leo—starts to unbutton his shirt with over-the-top drama, winking at Jason, whose expression is a complicated storm of horror and awe. Someone in the crowd whoops. There’s scattered applause as Leo whips his shirt overhead and tosses it into the mob, then attempts a half-baked moonwalk across the cube, arms windmilling, before nearly tipping off and landing in the arms of a surprisingly entertained bouncer.

Will doubles over, laughing until his sides hurt, the whole room spinning with music and shouts. Across the dance floor, he catches Jason’s face—caught between wanting to hide and wanting to join in, his affection and longing completely, painfully transparent. For a moment, Will is struck by how much Jason seems to want to be reckless too—how badly he wants to follow Leo, to let go, even just for tonight.

But even as chaos sweeps around them, Will can feel another kind of attention skimming at the edges. It’s Nico—beautiful, impossible, like some myth out of place, pressed into a suit and set loose among mortals. Eyes follow him: girls in velvet, boys with lazy grins, even an older man at the bar—each glance lingering, hungry, hopeful. Will notices every look, and it tugs at him, not overly sharp or possessive, just a gentle, ridiculous envy. Who could blame them, really? He’s been staring at Nico all night, too.

He leans in, dropping his voice into Nico’s ear, half-mocking, half-awed: “You know you’re the main event, right? I think you just caused three separate existential crises over by the bar.”

Nico ducks his head, ears pink, and scowls at his shoes like they’ve personally betrayed him. “Shut up, I’m not,” he mutters, the words tripping over themselves. “They’re probably looking at you. Or—I don’t know. Maybe I have something on my face.”

Will grins, delighted. “You do, actually. It’s called ‘jawline carved by the gods.’ Honestly, it’s criminal. You’re making the rest of us look bad.”

Nico’s blush deepens, and he bumps his shoulder into Will’s side, trying (and failing) to sound put out. “You’re just making stuff up again.”

“I’d never lie about a scientific phenomenon,” Will replies, mock-solemn. “It’s observable in the wild—see, that guy in the red shirt just walked into a table. You’re a public safety hazard.”

Nico finally laughs, quiet and breathless, but he still half-hides behind Will, pressing in close as if the crowd might swallow him whole. His hand slips into Will’s, fingers cool and shy, and for a moment he lets himself stay tucked there—awkward, flustered, adored.

The envy softens, curling warm inside Will’s chest. He squeezes Nico’s hand, leaning into him, letting the world stare if it wants. There’s only this: Nico blushing and ducking his head, Will’s own heart thrumming bright with pride and affection, and the golden chaos of a night that feels—for once—entirely theirs.

On the other side of the dance floor, Leo howls, “Top that, losers!” and, to everyone’s shock, Jason hesitates only a moment before Annabeth and Percy team up—whooping, determined, a little reckless—and actually hoist him onto the glowing cube beside Leo. The crowd roars, phones flashing, and even Leo looks a little stunned by his own success.

Will is barely breathing by the time he and Nico make it off the dance floor, flushed and a little dizzy, Nico’s hand warm and constant at his lower back. They weave through the crowd, past the neon-lit circle where Leo is still holding court and Jason, to Will’s quiet delight, is now attempting a hesitant—if wobbly—dance, Annabeth and Percy egging him on. Frank and Hazel are dancing slow at the edge, wrapped up in their own world, while Piper is nowhere to be seen, vanished into some new orbit.

At the bar, everything slows—the music a distant thump, the marble cool under Will’s arms. He glances sideways at Nico, who’s fidgeting with the cuff of his sleeve, eyes darting anywhere but at the crowd.

Will leans in, voice pitched low, teasing but fond. “You realize people are still staring, right? I think we might be ruining someone’s night just by existing over here.”

Nico’s mouth twists in a skeptical half-smile, but he keeps his gaze down. “They’re probably just wondering who let me in,” he mutters, half-joking but a little too earnest. “Or if I’m going to spill something on myself.”

Will’s chest aches—how does Nico not see it? All this light, all this pull, and Nico honestly thinks he’s invisible. He bumps their shoulders together, gentle. “Trust me, they’re not looking at you like you’re a disaster. More like… like they’ve never seen anyone quite like you before.”

Nico huffs, clearly unconvinced, still hiding in the shadow of his hair. “You’re terrible at lying,” he grumbles, but there’s color high on his cheeks and a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Will squeezes his hand beneath the bar, thumb running slow circles over Nico’s knuckles. “Guess you’ll just have to stick close,” he says softly, a grin flickering there. “I’m not letting you get mobbed by admirers. It’d ruin my whole night.”

Nico snorts, finally looking up, eyes bright with something softer than belief—something like hope. “Yeah, well. I’d rather hide here with you anyway.”

And for a moment, all the looks, all the noise, fall away—leaving just the two of them, sharing a secret, safe in the center of it all.

Then a voice from the other side of the bar cuts through. “Gods,” a girl says, mascara slightly smudged, drink dangling from her fingers, “I love when hot people date each other. I mean, look at you two. I’d write fanfic if I could spell.”

Will snorts, nearly choking on his drink. Nico flushes, ducking his head and hiding a smile against Will’s shoulder.

The girl raises her glass in a lazy salute, still grinning, then turns away without another word.

For a second, Will and Nico just look at each other, caught between laughter and something softer. Nico squeezes Will’s hand, cheeks still pink, and mutters, “Didn’t think we were that obvious.”

Will presses a kiss to Nico’s temple, his earlier envy dissolving into something bright and fierce. “Doesn’t matter,” he whispers, grinning. “Long as you’re mine, they can write whatever they want.”

They don’t go back to their friends right away. Instead, Will and Nico linger at the edge of the dance floor, propped against the slick metal railing with their drinks—something clear and sparkling for Will, lime bright against the glass; whiskey, neat, for Nico, who sips it like he’s got all the time in the world. The pulse of music washes over them, every thump sending a little shiver through Will, making the city’s lights blur and pulse around the edges. Everything feels a bit unreal: too bright, too full of promise, too easy to believe in.

Nico leans beside him, composed as ever, but there’s a softness in his eyes—the kind he reserves for these rare, stolen moments. Will lets himself look, lets himself get a little lost in the line of Nico’s mouth, the way his lashes catch the neon, how their hips and shoulders brush with every breath. They drink, silent for a while, letting the chaos riot around them, content to orbit outside it all.

Finally, Will glances at his glass, swirling the ice, courage humming beneath his skin. “You know,” he says, nudging Nico’s arm, “I was just thinking about that Stoll party where we first talked. The one where I—” He breaks off, grinning, “—completely destroyed your shirt.”

Nico’s eyes spark, mouth curving in a small, private smile. “You mean when you dumped an entire rum and coke down my front before even saying hello?” He bumps Will’s hip, voice low and teasing.

Will groans, hiding his face in Nico’s shoulder. “God, don’t remind me. I was sure I’d blown it. I could barely look at you—I thought, well, there goes my one shot.”

Nico turns, so their foreheads almost touch, his whiskey forgotten for a moment. “You were such a disaster,” he says, but there’s so much tenderness in it that Will’s heart trips over itself. “But honestly? I’m glad you did. If you hadn’t spilled that drink, I don’t think I’d have managed to talk to you. You made the first move. In the most Will way possible.”

Will snorts, helpless. “You mean clumsy and humiliating?”

Nico shrugs, eyes bright and steady. “I mean the cute way. Honest. Real.” He catches Will’s hand beneath the rail, hidden from view, fingers squeezing. “Sometimes I think about it, and I’m stupidly grateful. If you’d been smooth, I’d have been too nervous to say anything. But you made it easy to want you. You always do.”

Will blinks, suddenly more lightheaded from Nico’s words than the drink. The club, the noise, their friends all seem impossibly distant—there’s only Nico, looking at him like he’s something extraordinary, like a secret he wants to keep.

He leans in, nose grazing Nico’s cheek, voice all soft mischief. “Guess I’ll have to ruin your clothes more often,” he murmurs, just loud enough to thread between bass beats.

Nico laughs, bright and unguarded, but Will tugs him closer, tipsy on the golden rush of the night—everything glimmering, endless, a little bit unreal. The music thickens, syrup-slow with bass, and Will can feel it everywhere: under his skin, tangled with every place Nico’s body touches his. He’s not sure if it’s the vodka or Nico that’s making him float, or just the way Nico looks at him—eyes dark and hungry, smile curled with secrets.

For a heartbeat, the world falls away. All that matters is Nico’s hand on his hip, the heat pooling there, the way Nico leans in, lips brushing Will’s ear. “You really are hopeless when you drink,” Nico murmurs, low and wicked. “It’s a good look on you.”

Will grins, dizzy, bold. “Not hopeless,” he counters, voice rough, “just out of practice around you. I mean, it’s hard to remember what I’m supposed to do when you keep looking at me like—” he falters, can’t quite finish, but the meaning hangs there, obvious, electric.

Nico’s lips curve, eyes dragging slowly over Will’s mouth, his throat, then back up. “Maybe you should stop trying so hard, Solace,” he teases, quiet, soft as velvet. “I like you better like this—off-guard. A little bit messy.”

Will lets out a breathless laugh, some stubborn, reckless spark catching in his chest. He slides his hand down, slow and deliberate, fingers curling around Nico’s thigh. His thumb draws lazy circles against the fabric, daring. Nico’s breath hitches, and he leans in, crowding into Will’s space, their faces so close now Will can taste the promise of it.

“Careful,” Will whispers, his voice almost lost in the music. “You keep looking at me like that and I really will embarrass myself. Again.”

Nico’s eyes spark, dark and intent. “Maybe that’s what I want.”

The song swells, bodies pressing in all around, but for a moment it’s just them, every inch between them a live wire. Will’s lips ghost along Nico’s cheek, not quite a kiss, and Nico’s fingers dig into his hip, urgent, grounding.

Will’s brain is a pleasant blur of heat and want and Nico, but somehow he manages to lean in, words brushing warm against Nico’s ear. “Let’s sit down,” he murmurs, wicked, “before I start living up to my reputation—right here.”

Nico laughs—low, dangerous, knowing—and lets Will guide him away from the railing. They move through the crowd with practiced ease, hands linked, shoulders bumping. The club’s lights paint Nico in shifting golds and blues, cheekbones sharp enough to wound, and Will can feel every gaze that follows them. For once, he doesn’t care. He might even like it: the heat in his stomach is equal parts want and pride.

The booth is half-abandoned, their friends scattered, the world suddenly small and private. Will slides in first, leaves a gap that Nico immediately closes, their thighs pressed tight under the table. The air between them hums—almost, almost, the possibility of touch vibrating in every breath.

Neither of them speaks at first. Nico draws lazy shapes on the table, Will watching him, heart pounding, every inch of him tuned to the heat where their bodies meet. The club falls away; there’s only Nico’s hand against his, the echo of Nico’s breath, the memory of every almost-kiss.

Nico glances over, hair falling into his eyes, mouth soft with the threat of a smile. “You know,” he says, barely audible beneath the music, “if you’re going to keep looking at me like that, you’re going to have to kiss me at some point.”

Will’s lips curve, the challenge going straight to his chest. “Maybe I’m waiting for you to kiss me,” he says, teasing, but his breath is unsteady, anticipation crackling just beneath his skin.

Nico’s hand finds Will’s under the table, fingers lacing tight, thumb stroking over his knuckles. “Maybe I’m just trying to decide how obvious I want to be,” he murmurs, gaze never leaving Will’s mouth.

The lights shift, everything washed in gold, and for a second the world sharpens to just this: Nico, so close Will can count the freckles on his nose, every unspoken promise burning between them. There’s laughter from the bar, a shout from the dance floor, but none of it touches this small, golden hush.

Will tips his head, lips barely an inch from Nico’s. “Make it obvious,” he whispers, the words pulled straight from the center of him.

Will’s breath is short and thin, blood thrumming wild in his veins. For a moment, he’s a teenager again—heart stuttering with hope and panic, the old, hardwired fear of wanting too much in public pressing in. He’s never really liked being stared at. He’s always noticed it—the sidelong glances, the curiosity and envy, the occasional edge of danger that comes with being too visible in a crowded room. Being with Nico has only sharpened it: the campus gossip, the photos, the whispers that trailed them down hallways, making Will want to shrink, to tuck what mattered most safely out of sight.

But now, with Nico pressed to him—flushed, wild-eyed, wanting—something shifts. Maybe it’s the alcohol burning warm in his chest. Maybe it’s the leftover adrenaline from surviving Hades, from surviving every old, terrible story that told him he shouldn’t want like this. Or maybe it’s just the way Nico looks at him, greedy and adoring, like Will is the only thing in the world worth touching. And suddenly, the fear goes up in smoke.

Nico leans in, slow at first, giving Will a chance to pull away. Will doesn’t. He couldn’t if he tried. He wants this—Gods, he wants this more than his next breath.

When Nico kisses him, it isn’t careful, isn’t practiced. It’s hungry, electric—a press of mouths that’s all confession and possession at once. Will’s hand finds the sharp edge of Nico’s jaw, thumb brushing over skin gone hot, dragging Nico closer until there’s no space left. Their knees knock, Nico half-tangled in Will’s lap, hands clutching at Will’s hair, desperate, like he’s afraid to let go.

The kiss is messy—teeth and lips and the faint taste of whiskey and lime. Will forgets everything but Nico: the press of his body, the breath caught between their mouths, the small, helpless sounds Nico makes when Will deepens the kiss. The world is riot and blur, but here in this narrow booth, it’s just them—want and relief and all the wild hope that survived the night’s storms.

Nico pulls back just enough to breathe, forehead pressed to Will’s, eyes dark and shining with something sharp and bright. “I love you, you know,” he whispers, words pressed between them like a secret and a dare.

Will’s lips are already chasing his. “Yeah,” he says, dizzy and breathless. “I know. I love you too.”

Nico kisses him again, harder this time—open-mouthed, urgent, a little wild. Will feels the club tilt around them as heads turn, conversations falter, eyes catch and linger. For once, the attention doesn’t sting. It sparks something reckless in him. He wants them to look. He wants them to see Nico’s hands in his hair, Nico’s thigh wedged between his knees, the messy, hungry way they reach for each other.

He grins against Nico’s mouth, breathless and wicked, and lets his hand skate up the strong line of Nico’s back—fingers splayed, daring, almost smug. “Let them watch,” Will whispers, and the words startle him, but they come out smooth as a dare.

Nico shudders, laughing, half feral, all pride and mischief. “You want an audience now?” he teases, voice rough, lips brushing Will’s jaw as he speaks.

Will kisses him again, rougher—teeth catching Nico’s lower lip, just to hear that sound he makes—and pulls back only long enough to catch the flicker of envy in strangers’ faces. “See that?” he murmurs, mouth brushing the shell of Nico’s ear. “All of them wishing they were me.”

Nico’s cheeks are pink, lips swollen, pupils dark and huge. “You’re ridiculous,” he says, but his hands are twisted in Will’s lapels, holding him in place, breath hot against Will’s cheek. “Kind of love it, though.”

Will laughs, low and triumphant, and leans in, crowding Nico against the booth, voice a rumble in the charged air. “They should be jealous. Look at you.”

Someone whistles from the dance floor, followed by a chorus of drunken cheers and a slurred “Get a room!”—but Will just grins, pressing his mouth to Nico’s temple, totally unbothered.

“Let them watch,” he says again, softer now, mouth close to Nico’s ear. “Let them see how much you’re mine.”

And in that moment—with Nico practically in his lap, the whole club spinning mad around them—Will feels untouchable. Wanted. Brave. The center of everything, with Nico burning in his arms.

Then the spell shatters with a shriek so loud Will nearly bites his tongue.

“OH, COME ON! AGAIN?” Leo’s voice slices through the haze, followed by a theatrical gag. “Seriously—twice in two weeks? First you’re making out on the bench outside the police station, now you’re putting on a show in the middle of the club. I came to bail out Cecil, not get front row seats to the Will and Nico PDA tour! Tonight I came to dance, not watch you two swap spit on every available surface. You people are going to give me actual trauma!”

Jason’s there too, cheeks red, eyes locked somewhere safely above Will and Nico’s heads, his posture a masterclass in secondhand embarrassment. “Do you have to do this where people can see?” he groans, pinching the bridge of his nose, though the corners of his mouth twitch like he’s fighting a smile.

Leo flops onto the opposite side of the booth, sprawling as if he needs to put physical distance between himself and their PDA, still muttering, “I need hazard pay. Or at least, I don’t know, a club with a no-kissing policy. I’m never going to recover from seeing you two draped over each other on a police station bench, or whatever this is.”

Will, grinning, tries to untangle himself from Nico—who at least pretends to look sheepish, though he’s mostly just grinning like he’s won something. “We could’ve put out a warning,” Will offers, his voice still a little unsteady with laughter. “But I guess you’d just ignore it.”

Jason waves a hand, eyes squeezed shut. “Don’t even start. Nico, you’re basically family. This is—” He shudders, “—like walking in on a sibling. I need to wash my brain out with gin.”

Nico, completely deadpan, rests his chin on Will’s shoulder. “You’re the one who told me to ‘open up’ and ‘be vulnerable,’ Jason. I’m just following directions.”

Leo points his straw with mock accusation. “Next time, just text the group chat. Some of us need warning, or maybe therapy. Also—public spaces are for the rest of us mortals. Go find a supply closet, at least.”

Will laughs, feeling Nico’s arm still tight around his waist, Nico’s fingers tracing lazy circles just beneath his jacket, mischief glinting in his eyes. “No promises,” Will says, voice pitched lower, meant just for Nico, “but I’ll consider the closet.”

Nico’s lips curve, his voice soft and dry, “I don’t think you could handle the janitor’s closet. Besides, you’d ruin your suit.” He bumps his nose lightly against Will’s, grinning. “Let’s not traumatize the cleaning staff—Leo’s enough.”

Jason groans, Leo pretends to faint onto the table, and Will, despite it all, feels impossibly happy—Nico still pressed against him, the club wild and bright around them, both of them untouchable for just a little longer.

“Fine,” Will says, winking at Nico. “Next time, you get a thirty-second warning. Or maybe a safe word.”

Leo doesn’t miss a beat. “The safe word is ‘GET A ROOM!’” he shouts, then promptly dissolves into wheezing giggles. 

The moment dissolves into laughter, the kind that leaves everyone a little breathless. Leo rallies first, launching into an over-the-top story about nearly getting thrown out for “creative” dancing, while Jason makes a show of ordering the most non-alcoholic drink he can find, claiming he’s just here to supervise the children. 

Frank and Hazel drift back to the booth, Hazel with two drinks in hand, Frank already waving off Leo’s offers to join him on the dance floor. Piper is nowhere to be seen—though Will catches a glimpse of her in the neon haze, dancing with the tattooed girl from earlier, both of them spinning and laughing like they’ve been friends forever.

Percy and Annabeth materialize in a whirlwind of glitter and sweat, Annabeth crowing about how Percy almost won a dance-off against a pair of drag queens before wiping out spectacularly on the last beat. Percy just grins, unbothered and a little dazed, and collapses beside Jason, immediately stealing sips of his drink.

All around, the club pulses with life—music swelling, lights flickering gold and blue, laughter rising and falling like surf. It’s easy to get lost in the movement, in the comfort of friends, in the wild permission the night offers. But even surrounded by the chaos, Will is always aware of Nico at his side—of the way their knees bump beneath the table, of Nico’s thumb tracing gentle circles on his wrist, of the heat shimmering between them every time their eyes meet.

At some point, someone drags the whole group out for another round on the dance floor, and Will goes—caught in the thick heat of bodies and light, Nico’s hand never once letting go of his. For a while, it’s all laughter, shouting lyrics, friends pressed close on every side, the club lights painting the world neon and unsteady.

But it doesn’t last—not really. The longer Will and Nico stay out there, the closer they get, every accidental touch turning deliberate. Will feels Nico’s hands skimming up under the back of his shirt, sliding along his spine, fingers hungry and possessive. Nico’s body is everywhere—hip to hip, thigh to thigh, chest to chest, the space between them burning away with every pulse of the bass. Their friends are somewhere nearby, but Will couldn’t care less; the only thing that matters is Nico, pressed so close it’s almost dizzying, the two of them moving together, locked in their own orbit.

Will’s breath catches every time Nico’s mouth brushes his ear—just a laugh, or maybe a whisper that gets lost in the roar of the music, but it leaves Will trembling, desperate. Nico’s laugh is different now—low, private, barely more than a growl against Will’s neck. Will’s hands can’t stay still; he traces Nico’s waist, grips his hips, tugs him even closer until there’s nothing between them but heat and want.

Every time their eyes meet, it’s like a dare. Will can feel himself coming undone, the need in him sharp and overwhelming, nearly painful. The noise of the club fades away. The only real thing left is the slick heat of Nico’s hands, the wild look in his eyes, the two of them pressed together in a way that makes Will feel like he could burst.

Finally, it’s Nico who breaks—leaning in so close their mouths nearly touch, voice rough with want, words meant for no one else: “Let’s get out of here.”

Will doesn’t even pretend to think about it. “Yeah. Now.”

They don’t say goodbye. They barely manage to keep their hands off each other long enough to shove through the crowd, out into the cool wild night, hearts pounding, club music still humming in their bones. And for the first time all night, there’s nothing left to keep them apart.

Notes:

Thanks so much for reading this chapter, especially if you’ve made it this far into the fic and are still putting up with my endless ensemble chaos! Sorry if this one felt a bit filler-y or all over the place, my brain can only do “plot” or “Will/Nico pining and disaster group vibes,” never both at once. Mostly, I wanted to show some of the other group dynamics bubbling under the surface (yes, that includes the obligatory Valgrace crumbs, consider this my formal apology and/or promise for more in future).

And for anyone patiently (or not-so-patiently) awaiting the smut: as promised, there is a smut outtake that picks up right after this chapter! It’s now up as the next work in this series: it’s chapter 4 of Extra Credit. Go forth and enjoy Nico learning new things about himself, Will being a menacingly supportive boyfriend, and more psychological nonsense than is strictly necessary for fanfic.

As always, thank you for the comments, kudos, bookmarks, and general existence—you lot make writing these disasters so much more fun. See you in Extra Credit!

Chapter 56: Breakfast Is the Most Humiliating Meal of the Day

Notes:

sorry this one took forever, I started a new job while still working my old one (i am a workaholic) and things have been kind of non-stop. also been writing other stuff and honestly I hate this chapter so motivation was low. but it’s here now !!!

re: Valgrace, if it feels like it’s moving fast, don’t worry. it’s about to come to a very awkward standstill (to be resumed later).

thanks for being patient <3

Will wakes to a silence that feels too intentional, like the whole room is holding its breath, as if even the walls know better than to interrupt. The curtains are still drawn, slicing the morning into shadows, and the city hums below them like a half-remembered dream. The air is hotel-stale—too dry, too warm—scented with the ghost of champagne, cologne, and something softer that Will suspects might just be Nico.

Nico, who is still asleep beside him. Not the wary half-sleep Will has glimpsed before—the kind that’s all tension and teeth, where Nico’s body rests but his mind stays braced for a fall—but something deeper. With Will, he sleeps unguarded. He’s slack-limbed, surrendered.

There’s eyeliner smudged beneath his lashes, fading like dusk along the edges of his eyes. His hair has fallen messily across his forehead, one pale hand curled against the pillow as if he’s still holding something from a dream he won’t admit to having. With the sharpness gone from his mouth and shoulders, he looks startlingly young. Not innocent, but maybe softened. Like he hasn’t yet remembered all the things he’s supposed to protect himself from.

Will’s own body aches faintly, a ghost-hangover rising like low tide. There’s music in his bones, a phantom bassline thudding somewhere in his ribs. The tux jacket lies abandoned like evidence. His tie is near the minibar, Nico’s black shirt half-swallowed by the edge of the bed as if it tried to flee sometime after midnight. He should get up. He should shower. He should go join the world.

Instead, he lets his hand drift, thumb brushing lazily along the thick fold of the duvet that hides Nico’s hipbone—a motion too reverent to be casual. Nico makes a sound—not quite a sigh, not quite awake—and burrows closer without opening his eyes.

“You’re staring,” he mutters, voice ruined with sleep and muffled by Will’s collarbone.

“You’re hallucinating.”

A beat of warmth. Then Nico shifts infinitesimally closer, tucking the top of his head beneath Will’s jaw like a habit. The duvet shifts with him, heavy with heat and unspoken things, keeping him hidden everywhere but his face.

Will forgets, for a second, that anything outside this bed exists.

Until the knock comes—soft but decisive, like a crack forming in still water.

Nico groans immediately, low and vengeful, and drags the blanket completely over his head like a curtain against the world. He presses closer, spine curling toward Will like gravity.

Will smooths a hand down the slope of the blanket where Nico’s spine must be, fingertips tracing each imagined vertebra like a path he’s memorized in the dark.

“You okay there, Dracula?” he murmurs, soft against the crown of Nico’s head.

“Tell them to go away,” Nico mutters into his collarbone, voice thick with sleep and menace. The words barely qualify as speech. Mostly it’s a complaint wrapped in velvet and spite.

Then—

“Nico? Will?”

Hazel’s voice cuts through the stillness like a note slipped under the door—gentle, unobtrusive, but undeniably present. “Sorry to bother you, but… have you seen Jason or Leo?”

Will blinks at the ceiling. Jason and Leo? That’s not balance, that’s apocalypse. One is the human equivalent of a controlled burn, the other is the match you’re not supposed to strike indoors. If both have gone missing, the universe is already three steps past intervention.

He glances down at the duvet lump currently trying to fuse itself with his sternum. “Have we?”

“Not unless they’re in the minibar,” comes Nico’s voice, muffled and deeply unbothered. There’s a pause, and then a small, almost imperceptible nudge of his head deeper into Will’s chest. Like if he can just sink far enough into him, the morning won’t count.

Hazel laughs, untroubled. “Pretty sure they’d have to be contortionists for that. They definitely came back from the club—we all walked in together—but they’re not in their room now. I’ve checked the obvious places. I’m not panicking. Yet. They’ve gotta be somewhere in the hotel. Just figured I’d ask.”

Will draws slow, aimless circles through the blanket along Nico’s shoulder blades, letting the silence stretch just long enough to feel like a decision. He imagines Leo sprawled across a hallway bench like a Renaissance corpse painting. Jason asleep in a potted plant. It’s too early to think about either for too long.

“Nope, haven’t seen them,” he calls back, voice syrupy with sleep.

Another pause. Then Hazel again, cheerfully diplomatic: “Alright. We’re heading down to breakfast in a bit. You coming? And before you ask—no, Dad and Persephone won’t be there. They’re having room service upstairs.”

And just like that, something in Nico loosens.

Will feels it—the small, unmistakable shift of relief, like a tide going out. His spine unwinds. His shoulders settle. The tension that lives in him like second nature finally retreats for the morning.

A moment later, Nico pokes his head out from under the duvet, blinking like he’s just emerged from some long, glamorous hibernation. The rest of him stays hidden, cocooned tight. His hair is doing terrible things. Will’s heart clenches in the most humiliating way.

“Fine,” Nico grumbles, squinting at the door as if Hazel might still be standing there with a clipboard and a judgmental smile. “We’ll be down soon.”

“Got it,” Hazel says, pleased. “See you two in a few.” Her footsteps retreat, soft and unbothered, down the hall.

The quiet returns like a held breath being released.

Will shifts just enough to see Nico’s face properly, tugging the duvet so it frames him without slipping further. He presses a kiss to his temple—light, reverent, unspoken.

“You do realise she could hear how grumpy you were from three feet away, right?”

“Good,” Nico mutters, eyes already slipping closed again. “Keeps expectations low.”

He leans in, speaking softly, like coaxing a cat from beneath the bed. “Come on, death boy. Breakfast.”

Nico answers with a noise so pitiful it might qualify as a final curse—something ragged and unholy, scraped up from the depths of exhaustion. Instead of moving, he yanks the duvet higher, sealing himself inside like a monk retreating behind stone walls. Only the dark mess of his hair remains visible, a flag of defiance poking from the fortress.

Will lets out a breath that’s half amusement, half surrender. He could stay here, suspended in this strange, holy pause of morning—the curtains pulled tight against the city, the sheets still warm with sleep, the only sound Nico’s low, obstinate breathing. The whole world could tilt and slide away and he would not notice, not with this cocoon pressed against him, radiating both heat and quiet menace.

But then he can already imagine Percy’s texts: smug selfies with a short stack, Piper’s running commentary, the inevitable group chat conspiracies. And that’s enough to tether him back to the hour at hand.

“You know if we don’t show up,” he murmurs into the wild thatch of Nico’s hair, “Percy’s going to decide we eloped.”

The duvet twitches faintly, like the word itself offended it. From somewhere inside, Nico’s voice emerges—muffled, disdainful. “Then let him.”

Will huffs a laugh, sliding his palm across the thick ridge of blankets until he finds the slope of Nico’s spine and begins to trace slow circles there, a rhythm more coaxing than insistent. “Up you get.”

“You’re warm,” comes the groan, scratchy with sleep. “The bed’s warm. The rest of the world can rot.”

“Flattering,” Will says, grin tugging at his mouth. His thumb presses into the duvet at what must be Nico’s hip, a silent bribe. “Still—coffee.”

The cocoon shifts, tilts, and then Nico peels back just enough fabric to reveal his face—creased with sleep, lashes smudged he fixes Will with the kind of glare that might have brought ancient cities to their knees.

“You’re supposed to protect me from the others,” Nico mutters. “Not drag me into public at—” He squints at the clock. “—this ungodly hour.”

“It’s almost ten.”

“Exactly.”

Will tilts his head in mock consideration. A spear of light has managed to slip through the curtains, catching in Nico’s hair and turning black into burnished metal, molten at the edges. The sight of it is so startling, so arresting, that he has to force himself not to lean down and kiss him on instinct.

“Okay,” he says finally, measured, like striking a treaty. “But if you want me to kiss you before breakfast, you’ve gotta brush your teeth first.”

There’s a pause. A blink. The expression that blooms across Nico’s face is equal parts betrayal and disbelief, like Will has just rewritten the rules of gravity.

“You’re bribing me.”

“I’m motivating you,” Will corrects, lips twitching.

The silence that follows feels like its own negotiation. Will can almost hear the calculus happening behind Nico’s eyes—the tug-of-war between stubbornness and the promise of his mouth. At last, Nico exhales the kind of sigh usually reserved for funerals, gathers the duvet tightly around himself like ceremonial robes, and swings upright.

“Fine.” The word lands like defeat, but Will knows better. Knows how often Nico says fine when he really means I’m letting you win.

Nico drags himself out of bed like a man marching to his execution, muttering something in Italian that Will doesn’t catch and probably doesn’t want translated. His footsteps are heavy against the carpet, the door clicking half-shut behind him.

Will doesn’t open his eyes. He only sinks deeper into the pillows, tracing the warmth Nico left behind in the sheets, letting it seep into his skin like sunlight. His heart feels ridiculous in his chest—untidy, overflowing—because happiness shouldn’t be this simple, and yet here it is.

“Don’t think this means I’m talking to anyone at breakfast,” Nico calls, the tap squealing as it turns.

Will smiles into the dark behind his eyelids, quiet and secret. “Noted. But you’ll have coffee. And me. So it’s a win.”

Nico huffs without turning, but there’s a thread of laughter caught in it—thin, almost hidden, like light glinting from the bottom of deep water.

By the time Will has sweet-talked Nico into the shower, the minutes have turned syrup-thick, stretching with the kind of lazy weight that belongs to no real morning. The room still carries the scent of hotel sheets and the faint ghost of whatever cologne Nico had worn to the gala—something sharp, now blurred into warmth, softened into human.

Will perches at the edge of the bed to pull on his socks, every motion oddly careful, like even dressing might disturb the fragile spell that still clings to the air. His eyes are heavy, lids dragging; he’s content to sit in the half-dark with the hush of water against tile, Nico’s sighs breaking through now and then like punctuation. The kind of sighs that say clearly: I am awake against my will, and you will pay for it.

When the bathroom door opens, Will almost doesn’t look. He could stay folded in the warmth Nico left behind, let the moment blur and pass. But his head tips anyway—tired eyes flicking up, just once, because Nico had always been the one thing he can never look away from.

And it nearly undoes him.

Nico’s hair is damp at the ends from a rinse that can’t have lasted more than thirty seconds, sticking out in sleep-soft chaos, gravity-defiant and impossible. His shirt hangs loose around his shoulders, still clinging damp in places, collarbone briefly caught in the slice of light that sneaks through the curtains. It feels criminal, Will thinks, for someone to look like this and still complain about mornings.

Then Nico bends his head—just a small motion, reaching into his bag, shaking his hair from his eyes—and that’s when Will sees them.

Marks, scattered like spilled ink across the back and sides of his neck. Wine-dark bleeding into plum, the faint halo of fresh bruises blurred at the edges. Some high enough to vanish into the shadow of his hairline, others curling just beneath the hinge of his jaw, bold and unashamed. They bloom there, vivid and sprawling, like a strange, dark garden only Will has ever walked through. No two alike. Some sharp-edged, others smudged into watercolor. All of them laid bare against his winter-pale skin like confession.

Will’s breath catches low in his throat.

They don’t look accidental. They don’t look secret. They look deliberate. Not something that happened, but something made. A language of mouths and hands. A map written in heat and teeth and the trembling hush of midnight.

Memory surges up to meet them: the flicker of Nico’s pulse beneath his tongue; the soft gasp when Will kissed just below his ear; the way Nico had leaned into him like surrender wasn’t a choice but a law of gravity. He’d melted, sharpness dissolving, body yielding into Will’s hands like it was instinct, like it was holy.

For one dazzling second, pride swells in Will’s chest like a tide. Not because he owns Nico—he doesn’t, Will would never claim that, would never try to—but because this is proof of something. Because Nico wanted him. Because Nico let him. Because for a handful of stolen hours, Nico had kissed him back like drowning, like hunger, like he wanted to vanish into the moment and take Will with him.

The thought glows in him, warm and radiant, too real to dismiss.

And then, just as quickly, it ices over.

Because Hazel is going to see.

Hazel, who is technically younger than both of them but has always carried herself like the eldest—calm where Nico is jagged, steady where the rest of them are chaos. Hazel, who took one look at Will months ago and decided, without ceremony, that he was safe enough to keep. Hazel, who still says his name with that quiet note of approval, like she’s letting him know he’s passed some invisible test.

And she is going to glance across the table and—

Oh gods.

Will goes stock-still, a sock half-pulled over his foot, panic unspooling in slow, luxuriant horror behind his eyes. Because there’s no way she won’t notice. There’s no turtleneck. No miracle. No divine intervention on standby.

Just Nico, marked up like the world’s most disreputable Renaissance painting, and Hazel—serene, younger, and somehow still possessed of that terrifying big-sister gravity—capable of flaying him alive with nothing more than a single, surgical so.

He drags a hand down his face, already watching the breakfast scene spool out in his imagination: Piper choking on her coffee. Frank studying the ceiling with saintly determination. Percy making some Twilight joke that gets him exiled from the group chat.

And Hazel. Just—Hazel. Looking disappointed.

Will doesn’t think he’ll survive it.

“Oh no,” Will breathes, the words shattering the hush of hotel heat and running water—too loud, too sharp, cutting against the fragile quiet of morning.

Nico stills mid-motion, one hand caught on a shirt button, eyes half-lidded and hair stubborn with sleep. Slowly, with the weary suspicion of someone who’s been dragged from a dream and now regrets the entire enterprise of consciousness, he turns his head toward Will.

“What.”

Will can’t bring himself to point directly. His hand flutters instead—vague, helpless—toward the back of Nico’s neck.

“You look like you were attacked,” he manages, voice cracking on the word. “By something. Possibly… several somethings.”

Nico squints, then shifts his weight onto one leg, unhurried, and reaches for the sweater draped across the chair. “A vampire?” he offers, flat.

“A very determined vampire,” Will says, panic starting to fray the edges of his voice. “Or—or an octopus with a grudge.”

He drags both hands through his curls, sock half-on, sitting hunched at the edge of the bed like a man awaiting trial. “This is bad. We need scarves. Do you have a scarf? No—do you have ten scarves?”

Nico snorts. Actually snorts. Pulling the sweater over his head, he deadpans, “You’re saying all this like it’s my problem.”

“It is your problem!” Will’s voice leaps higher, his hands slicing frantic shapes in the air like he’s trying to conduct his way out of a panic attack. “Your sister is going to see, and then I’m going to—”

“Spontaneously combust?” Nico cuts in, tone flat as ever, but the faint twitch at the corner of his mouth betrays him. He’s enjoying this.

“Die of mortification,” Will hisses. “She already had to cover her eyes at Halloween when she walked in on us kissing—”

“She didn’t walk in. We were on a balcony. Outdoors.”

“There was witnessing!”

Nico yawns as if this whole debate bores him, tugging the hem of the sweater into place before crouching to lace his boots. “She’s not stupid, you know. She probably already knows we’ve slept together.”

Will makes a noise that cannot be categorized by modern science—part wheeze, part wounded animal, part Victorian maiden fainting at the glimpse of an ankle.

“You can’t just say that, like—like—”

“Like it’s true?” Nico says, glancing up, voice still rough with sleep, smugness now in full bloom. “Relax. She’s not going to faint.”

Will groans, a sound dragged straight out of his soul, and buries his face in his hands. The sock is still only half-on. He resists the overwhelming urge to collapse back into the duvet and dissolve entirely. “I’m doomed.”

“Mm.” Nico straightens, smirk sharpened to full weaponry. “Probably. But at least you’ll be memorable.”

Will drops his hands at last, peeking through his fingers like a man staring down fate. Nico, fully dressed now, stands at the mirror, coaxing his damp hair into reluctant order. He smooths one side, frowns, rakes his fingers through again. The sweater hangs just right, his boots are already laced, and his smirk—visible even in reflection—has been honed to something lethal.

Will, by comparison, sits slouched on the bed with half a sock and uncontainable dread.

The bruises haven’t vanished. They sit bold against pale skin, all the worse for the neatness of his collar, framed like they were meant to be noticed. Will’s stomach twists. He can already imagine Hazel’s eyes flicking once, catching, and knowing.

“You should—” Will clears his throat, gestures vaguely at Nico’s neckline, desperation bleeding into every syllable. “You should flip the collar up.”

Nico’s hands still in his hair, a stubborn curl caught between his fingers. In the mirror, his eyes lift—slow, suspicious—as if Will has just suggested something unspeakable.
“What.”

Will shrugs, trying for casual even as his gaze catches again on the bruises glaring out from the edge of Nico’s collar. “Just—cover the evidence. Unless you want to walk in looking like you got mauled.”

Nico lets his hand fall, turning just enough to face him. “You want me,” he says flatly, “to flip up the collar of my shirt. Under a sweater.”

“It’s a good sweater,” Will insists, scrambling. “Fashionable. Preppy. Hot, actually.”

Nico gives him a look that suggests any compliment from someone who has willingly worn cargo shorts in public is null and void.

“I’m trying to protect your reputation,” Will protests.

“My reputation already survives your wardrobe on a daily basis,” Nico says, tone flat but eyes glinting. “I think it can handle this.”

Will has no counter for that. He adjusts his cuffs with the air of a man retreating from a losing battle. At the mirror, Nico gives his hair one last perfunctory sweep into place before turning, sharp and sleepy and still somehow devastating. Will has to physically restrain himself from leaning over and putting another mark there, just for spite.

“Stop staring,” Nico mutters, reaching for the keycard.

“Stop being stare-worthy,” Will shoots back, too fast, already regretting it.

Nico rolls his eyes, but there’s the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth as he pulls the door open.

They step into the hallway together, the door clicking softly shut behind them.

Hazel and Frank are waiting just outside, leaning against the wall with the casual ease of people who absolutely saw them leave early last night and have chosen silence over spectacle. Hazel looks fresh-faced, hair pinned back, a mystical aura of younger-but-scarier radiating from her. Frank is sipping hotel coffee from a plastic cup and looks as close to serene as anyone sharing a floor with Percy Jackson is ever going to get.

“Morning,” Hazel says with unearned innocence, her eyes flicking—just for a second—to Will, then to Nico’s neck, then back again.

Will suppresses the instinct to throw himself headfirst into the nearest elevator shaft and let gravity solve his problems.

“Hey,” Frank says, nodding like this is all perfectly normal and no one in this hallway is harboring visible proof of debauchery.

Then the door across the hall swings open and chaos spills into the corridor.

Annabeth appears first, eyes squinting against the hallway light like she’s spent twelve hours in a sensory deprivation tank. Her braid is unraveling like a siege casualty. Behind her, Percy stumbles out in flip-flops, clutching a water bottle like it’s a sacred relic. He looks personally victimized by the concept of air.

And then there’s Piper.

Piper is wearing sunglasses indoors. Her hoodie is definitely not hers—it’s probably Jason’s, judging by the sheer width of it—and she is sipping something unidentifiable from a protein shaker. When asked, she’ll claim it’s electrolytes. It smells aggressively like tequila.

“Ugh,” she says, peering over her glasses. “You two look suspiciously alive for people who were at the same club as us.”

Nico, to his credit, doesn’t say anything. Just raises one elegant, judgmental eyebrow and leans the smallest fraction closer to Will, like he’s testing how much homicide the morning can hold.

Annabeth groans and covers her face with both hands. “Is anyone else vibrating at a frequency only dogs can hear?”

“Yup,” Percy says, rubbing his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. “Also—I lost my phone. Again.”

Piper pats his shoulder. “It’s in the mini-fridge.”

There’s a beat of silence.

“Why,” Annabeth says slowly, “is Percy’s phone in the mini-fridge?”

“Because I put it there,” Piper says, as if that explains everything.

“I’d have suspected Leo,” Nico mumbles, voice low enough to cut through the hangover haze.

Will leans against the wall, arms folded, the ghost of a grin tugging at his mouth though it feels more like defense than amusement. “Speaking of,” he says, glancing at Hazel, “any update? Heard from Jason? Or Leo?”

Hazel shakes her head, composed as ever, though Will thinks there’s something a little too careful in the way she says, “No. Still nothing. I checked my phone again—no texts. They still  haven’t come back to the room.”

Frank lifts his cup of hotel coffee like it might count as evidence. “I even looked in the stairwells. And under the dining tables in the event space. Still no sign.” His voice is steady, but it carries the edge of someone filling silence with action.

Piper sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose like she could erase the thought before it lodges. “They were very drunk,” she says, measured.

“Yeah,” Percy agrees, nodding with the solemnity of a man delivering a weather report. “And dancing together. A lot.”

Something flickers across Piper’s face at that—too quick for most to notice, gone almost before it lands—but Will sees it. Nico too. He feels it in the subtle shift beside him, the sharpened quiet of Nico’s attention.

Annabeth clears her throat, brisk, practical, already redirecting. “Well, Leo disappearing isn’t exactly new. He probably convinced a concierge to let him sleep in a linen closet.”

“Or a chandelier,” Nico says, voice flat as stone.

Frank blinks. “A chandelier?”

“He’s flexible,” Nico replies. “And dramatic.”

The laugh doesn’t quite come. Piper’s grip tightens around her drink. Hazel’s calm feels practiced, too smooth to be entirely natural. Frank sips his coffee like it’s a shield.

And Will—Will is already imagining breakfast stretching long and unbearable, every minute without Jason and Leo pressing heavier against the silence beneath their jokes.

Theeir group drifts toward the elevators in a silence that feels stitched together out of mismatched threads. Will keeps close to Nico, their shoulders brushing as if proximity might count as reassurance.

The elevator doors part with a chime too bright for the hour, ushering them into mirrored walls that reflect their wreckage back at them from every angle. Will resists the urge to laugh—it feels cruel, somehow—but the sight is undeniable: Piper leaning on her to-go cup like it’s a life-support machine, Annabeth grim with precision behind sunglasses large enough to qualify as armor, Percy staring down at the floor buttons like he expects divine intervention somewhere between “Lobby” and “Mezzanine.”

The descent rattles out beneath them, too smooth, too quick. Nobody speaks for five floors.

The Beekman’s restaurant is hushed when they arrive, the kind of quiet that belongs to places where everyone is recovering from the same excess. Silverware clinks softly. Voices murmur low, reverent. The air still carries the ghost of the gala—the floral arrangements sagging under their own perfume, a scatter of sequins and stray feathers near the velvet ropes. Coffee. Hotel carpet. Perfume grown tired overnight. A chapel to overindulgence.

They claim a table by the window. Hazel, composed as ever, folds into her chair with the poise of someone who slept eight uninterrupted hours (Will finds it vaguely offensive). Frank sits down with the serenity of a man who has somehow escaped the worst of it. The rest collapse gracelessly: Percy lowers his forehead to the blessed chill of a water glass and stays there, unmoving. Piper pushes her sunglasses onto her head only to immediately regret the light, Annabeth presses the heel of her hand against her temple like she’s warding off a siege. 

It’s Percy who cracks first. His head snaps up, eyes fixed on the buffet spread across the far wall—silver domes lifted to reveal towers of pancakes, glistening trays of bacon, fruit carved into improbable geometry. His reverence borders on religious.

“Oh, thank the gods,” he mutters, fumbling for a plate he doesn’t yet have. “I was about ten minutes from dying from lack of hash brown.”

Hazel glances toward the buffet, lips twitching into something that almost passes for a smile. “My father would find this distasteful.”

Will swallows down a laugh. Of course he would. Old money rarely likes to see its excess laid bare—the sheer piles of food, the fluorescent light catching grease. Hades prefers velvet dining rooms and quiet decadence, not a crowd elbowing for scrambled eggs.

Annabeth doesn’t even look up from her coffee. “You mean the overabundance or the lighting?”

“Both,” Hazel replies smoothly.

Will lets the moment sit, but the reprieve is thin. He’s been waiting for it—the slip, the glance, the inevitable comment. Nico’s collar covers less than it should, and Will knows exactly what’s blooming there: the marks he left, too many to be dismissed as chance, bold enough that anyone with eyes would’ve noticed by now. Everyone has simply been too polite—or too hungover—to bring it up.

Until Percy, who has never once in his life known the meaning of restraint, leans forward with a grin that makes Will’s stomach seize.

“Dude,” he says, drawing the word out, a low whistle following. “Did something bite you, or…?”

And there it is. The moment Will’s been bracing for. His mug halts halfway to his mouth. His soul tries to evacuate his body via the nearest exit.

Percy gestures toward Nico’s neck, where the evidence sits clear as sunrise: not one bruise but several, scattered like ink stains just above his collar, each one damning in its own right. A pattern. A language. A map Will remembers writing in heat and teeth and trembling breath.

“That’s some serious damage,” Percy adds, positively gleeful. “Should we be worried?”

The table goes taut with silence but Annabeth doesn’t miss a beat. “Maybe it’s a gala injury,” she says, voice flat, not looking up.

“I knew those shrimp skewers looked dangerous,” Piper mutters into her palms.

Heat surges up Will’s throat, fire licking into his ears, humiliation a steady roar. He is seconds from combusting where he sits when Nico, unbothered, infuriating, takes a deliberate sip of coffee and replies, calm as winter and smug as sin—

“I’ll never tell.”

Will chokes.

Percy leans back in his chair, grinning like he’s solved some great mystery. “So… not a shrimp skewer, then.”

Will coughs into his sleeve, dragging air back into his lungs, desperate for any exit. “Speaking of worrying,” he says, voice pitched a little too bright, “should we… actually be concerned about Jason and Leo?”

That cuts through what’s left of the laughter.

Hazel sets down her cup, her composure slipping just enough to show the thought has been with her all along. “I was hoping they’d turn up by now,” she admits, quiet but steady.

“Leo disappearing, sure,” Will goes on, words tumbling because silence feels worse. “That’s… expected. He thrives on chaos. But Jason—he’s never late for anything. He’s always exactly where he’s supposed to be.”

At that, Nico stills beside him. Not outwardly, not in any way the others would see, but Will feels it—the subtle drop in his posture, the way his hand curls tighter around the mug. Jason is his constant, his anchor, and even Nico can’t quite disguise the shift.

Frank clears his throat. “It’s… getting to a point, isn’t it?” He glances at Hazel, who nods once, decisive.

“I’ll ask at reception,” she says. “See if they can check the cameras. Someone must have seen where they went after last night.”

No one argues.

Will leans back in his chair, a fresh weight settling in his chest. He can already picture it: Hazel at the desk, her voice calm, her name alone opening doors. The staff will bend without question, hand over footage, answers, anything. Because of who she is. Because of what her father paid for the gala last night. Because some families walk through the world expecting compliance, and the world delivers.

And all Will can think, hot and bitter, is how differently that equation tilts for the rest of them.

Hazel and Frank don’t linger. With the decision made, they rise almost in unison—Hazel smoothing her braid, Frank setting down his empty cup with quiet resolve—and head toward reception. Their absence leaves the table thinner, the scaffolding of calm pulled away.

Percy groans into his water glass like a man in crisis. “Okay, that’s enough doom talk. Pancakes.” He nudges Annabeth, who mutters something murderous but follows him to the buffet.

Silence settles over what’s left. Piper keeps her sunglasses perched uselessly on her head, fiddling with the plastic lid of her cup. Will can see the tension coiled in her shoulders—not a hangover slump, but something tighter, the kind of weight you don’t shake with coffee.

“You okay?” he asks carefully.

She doesn’t look at him. “I’m fine.” Too quick, too even.

Nico studies her for a long moment, dark eyes sharp. Will sees the calculation happen in real time—the recognition that Piper doesn’t want to say more while he’s here, that his presence is a wall she won’t climb with Jason’s best friend sitting across from her. He stands without a word, shrugging into his jacket. “I’m going for a smoke.”

Will watches him go, chest pulling tight with the knowledge it’s a lie. Nico’s been cutting back for months; he only smokes when something claws too close. This isn’t about nicotine. It’s about giving Piper space.

The moment the door swings shut behind him, Piper exhales, her shoulders dropping like a cord’s been cut. She twists the cup lid once, twice, and then says, voice low: “I was with a girl last night. At the club. Dancing.”

Will nods—he knows, he saw—but he doesn’t interrupt.

“It felt good,” she says slowly, like the words themselves are new in her mouth. “Better than I expected. And that should be simple, but it isn’t. Because I did love Jason. I still do, in some ways. But when I look back at it now…” She shakes her head, frustrated. “It doesn’t feel the same as this. With her, it was—different. Right. And I didn’t always know, not for sure. I kept telling myself I was imagining things, but last night made it harder to keep pretending.”

She goes quiet for a moment, thumb tracing the rim of her cup. “And then seeing Jason with Leo, even if it’s nothing yet—it just stirred everything up. It’s not jealousy, exactly. I want him to be happy. I really do. If it’s Leo, then great, I’ll root for them. But…” She exhales, searching for the right shape of the thought. “It’s weird, watching him move on so fast. We only just broke up, and now he looks like he’s already leaning toward something new. And he seems—” she falters, then finishes, softer, “—more certain of himself than he ever was with me. Like he’s figured it out.”

Her fingers tighten slightly on the cup. “And I haven’t. I’m still confused. And it makes me feel… lesser, somehow. Like I’m behind.”

Will shakes his head, leaning forward on his arms. “You’re not behind. You’re just… you. Jason’s journey doesn’t make yours wrong. People figure things out at different paces, in different ways. There isn’t a scoreboard.”

She huffs a laugh that isn’t quite humor. “Feels like there is.”

“I get it,” Will says gently. “But you don’t owe anyone certainty. Not yet. Not ever, if you don’t want. You get to take your time.”

Piper studies him, the tension around her mouth easing just a little. “Thanks, Solace. You make it sound less terrifying.”

Before Will can answer, the sound of metal clattering explodes across the dining room. Percy stumbles back to the table, balancing a plate stacked so high it could be structurally condemned, a fork skittering across the floor in his wake. “Behold,” he announces, loud enough to make three tables turn, “the Mount Olympus of scrambled eggs.”

Annabeth follows two steps behind, carrying her own plate with surgical precision and looking like she’s one more mishap away from strangling him with a napkin. “You are an embarrassment,” she mutters, sliding into her seat. “Sit down before you cause an international incident.”

Piper snorts into her cup. Will shakes his head, tension bleeding out with the ridiculousness of it.

“Come on,” Piper says after a beat, pushing back her chair. “If we don’t get food now, Percy’s going to wipe out the entire buffet.”

They cross the room together, filling plates in easy silence. Will makes sure to grab an extra portion—toast, eggs, the coffee Nico likes—and by the time they return to the table, Nico is back in his seat, jacket draped over the chair, as if he’d never left.

Will sets the plate down in front of him without comment. Nico glances at it, then at Will, and though his expression barely shifts, Will catches it—the flicker of something softer, wordless, grateful.

Breakfast drifts by in a slow, uneven tide. Plates clatter, coffee refills appear and vanish, conversation weaves between silence and the kind of jokes born from exhaustion. Percy powers through enough bacon to alarm the waitstaff. Annabeth keeps her sunglasses on indoors and still manages to look terrifyingly competent. Piper leans easier in her chair now, her edges smoothed by food and caffeine.

Time drips forward. The restaurant hums.

And then—Hazel and Frank reappear, shepherding behind them two figures who look like they’ve just crawled out of the underworld. Jason’s hair is a disaster, his shirt wrinkled, his expression caught somewhere between sheepish and unamused. Leo, by contrast, looks smugly unrepentant despite the bags under his eyes, like he’s already drafting the story for future retellings.

The table goes still, a hush spreading like someone’s pulled the plug on the entire room.

“We found them,” Hazel says at last, tone breezy but eyes sharp, the kind of sharp that misses nothing.

Jason drags a hand down his face. “We were in our room.”

“Uh-huh,” Percy says, leaning in like a man circling fresh prey. “And then?”

Jason’s mouth flattens, the muscle in his jaw ticking. “And then we realized we could… hear things. From the other side of the wall.”

The words drop like glass, shattering across the table.

Will’s stomach free-falls. His fork slips from his hand with a clang, the sound too loud in the hush that follows. Heat floods up his throat, volcanic and relentless, crawling into his ears, his chest, everywhere. He doesn’t have to look around to know every eye has turned; he can feel the weight of understanding settle, precise and merciless. Everyone knows Jason and Leo’s room shares a wall with his and Nico’s. Everyone knows who the “things” belong to. There is no plausible deniability. No half-truth. It was them.

And like a traitor, his mind offers the memory in perfect, merciless detail: Nico pressed against the mirror, lips parted, eyes blown wide. The way he’d actually looked at himself for once, stunned and wrecked and unbearably beautiful while Will whispered praise into his skin. Look at you. Look how good you are for me. His own voice, low and certain. Nico’s broken sounds, echoing louder than either of them had realized.

Gods. Jason had heard that. Jason—Nico’s best friend, practically his brother—had heard it. And now so has everyone else, if not with their ears, then in their imagination, filling in the blanks with the kind of accuracy Will will never recover from.

Beside him, Nico goes utterly still, so rigid it feels like he’s trying to separate his soul from his body. Will wishes he could do the same. He imagines flinging himself into the nearest decorative centerpiece, diving headfirst into the flower arrangement and suffocating among wilting roses. He imagines divine smiting. He imagines switching timelines entirely.

“Oh my gods,” Piper breathes, half-horrified, half-thrilled, the words cutting sharp into the silence.

Leo lights up instantly, grinning like gasoline catching fire. “Yup. Couldn’t un-hear it. Trust me, I tried. Jason here almost jumped out the window.”

“I wasn’t—” Jason groans, tipping his head back to the ceiling like he’s praying for a lightning strike. “I just wasn’t going to stay in the room for that.”

Annabeth pinches the bridge of her nose, tone flat as stone. “So where exactly did you go?”

“The roof,” Frank supplies, deadpan as ever. “Door locked behind them. Phones dead. Security footage confirms the whole thing.”

Percy snorts so hard juice nearly sprays across the table. “You guys slept on the roof? Because Nico and Will were—” He breaks off into a hand gesture so obscene and so vague it makes Will want to dissolve into the carpet.

His chest feels tight, lungs refusing to cooperate. He’s seconds from clawing his way under the tablecloth and hiding there forever. He pictures the headline: Pre-Med Student Dies of Shame at Upscale Hotel Breakfast, Survived by Boyfriend and Hash Browns.

Nico mutters something vicious in Italian under his breath, low and dark enough to curdle milk.

Jason groans again, voice muffled in his hands. Leo beams like Christmas has come early and he’s unwrapping it right here at breakfast.

***

The walk back upstairs tastes like defeat.

Breakfast hadn’t ended with Jason’s confession—it had only gotten worse. Percy had discovered a new hobby in miming increasingly obscene hand gestures every time Will reached for the salt. Leo had offered to draw schematics for “soundproofing solutions” on the back of a napkin. Even Annabeth, who had the mercy of rolling her eyes through most of it, had muttered something about poor architectural planning that set Percy off all over again.

Hazel, to her credit, had tried to cut the teasing short, but Frank’s poorly stifled laughter hadn’t helped, and Piper’s single raised eyebrow had been lethal on its own. Nico hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even looked up from his coffee, just radiated a stillness so sharp Will kept expecting the mugs on the table to frost over.

And Will—he’d sat there red to the roots, trying to disappear into his eggs while feeling every joke like a fresh bruise. Every time Jason groaned into his hands, every time Leo smirked, Will’s humiliation doubled. He’s not sure what kept him breathing through it—probably Hazel’s calm voice, or maybe just the promise of eventual escape.

Now, in the hallway, escape feels too generous a word.

The group scatters in small clusters—Hazel steering Frank toward their room with quiet efficiency, Annabeth dragging Percy by the wrist like he’s a reluctant child, Piper vanishing behind her door with sunglasses still on. Jason and Leo disappear into their shared disaster zone, still arguing in low voices about whose idea the roof was.

Which leaves Will and Nico.

Their room is dim, curtains still drawn against the morning. The bed looks like the site of a natural disaster, clothes and sheets tangled in testimony to the night before. Nico drops his sweater onto the nearest chair and moves toward his bag with the resigned air of someone condemned to the indignity of packing.

Will exhales slowly, dropping onto the edge of the mattress. His bones ache with exhaustion, with embarrassment, with the memory of half the group looking at him like he’d personally violated the sanctity of hotel architecture. He scrubs a hand over his face and mutters, mostly to himself, “I’m never eating breakfast again.”

Nico doesn’t bother looking up as he folds a shirt with neat, deliberate precision. “You survived. Barely. That still counts as victory.”

Will groans, dragging a pillow over his face. “They’re never going to let it go. Percy invented, like, three new hand gestures just for the occasion. And Leo—gods, Leo’s going to make a PowerPoint.”

Nico snorts—an actual snort—as he smooths the fabric into place. “Leo doesn’t need slides to humiliate you. He’s perfectly capable without them.”

Will pushes the pillow aside, watching Nico for a moment. Then he rises onto an elbow and leans in, aiming for a kiss against his jaw. Nico turns just enough to glance at him, unimpressed.

“Really?” Nico says, dry as kindling. “The entire elevator ride up, you kept telling me I needed to pack. Now you’re the distraction?”

“I’m versatile,” Will says, mouth brushing against the line of Nico’s cheekbone.

Nico sighs, long-suffering, but doesn’t move away. He finishes folding the shirt with military precision, slips it into the suitcase, and only then nudges a pair of socks into Will’s chest as retaliation. “If you’re so desperate to contribute, start with those.”

“Domestic partnership. This is what they mean by romance.”

“Idiot,” Nico mutters, but the corner of his mouth betrays him, twitching upward.

Will steals the kiss anyway, quick and reverent against his temple. Nico exhales, not quite a sigh, not quite a protest, and lets it happen. He lingers close as Nico tucks another shirt into the suitcase, brushing their shoulders together as though the contact is accidental. Nico glances at him sidelong, already suspicious.

“You’re hovering,” Nico says without looking up.

“Helping,” Will corrects, sliding a hand to rest lightly at his waist, thumb brushing just above the waistband of his jeans.

“You’re—” Nico starts, but the protest unravels when Will presses a kiss just beneath his ear, deliberate as a secret. Nico exhales sharply, the shirt in his hands going slack for a beat before he manages to fold it into something crisp again.

After that, packing is mostly a lie. Nico keeps working with mechanical precision, but Will keeps leaning in, stealing space where he can—pressing kisses along his jaw, the corner of his mouth, down the line of his throat until Nico finally tilts toward him, inevitable as gravity.

The sound Nico makes when Will grazes the hollow beneath his ear is low and unguarded, a groan he doesn’t catch in time. It vibrates against Will’s lips, startling and intoxicating.

Will grins there, breath warm against his skin. “Careful. People might hear.”

Nico doesn’t retreat. Instead, he hooks a hand into Will’s shirt and pulls him closer, kissing him harder, steady and insistent, until Will has to brace one palm against the dresser to keep his balance. The world narrows to heat and breath and Nico’s hand sliding up the back of his neck, holding him exactly where he wants him.

Will laughs into the kiss, muffled, helpless, and Nico swallows it without breaking stride. For all his folded edges and deliberate calm, he tastes like something reckless, like a secret too sharp to share.

By the time the bags are zipped, Nico straightens, hair falling into his eyes, a faint flush rising at the edges of his cheekbones. He looks collected, but the pink at his ears gives him away.

Will, still catching his breath and trying not to smile too hard, decides not to gloat. Not out loud, anyway.

The hallway is alive with the low chaos of departure—zippers rasping, bags thudding against carpet, the muted shuffle of too many people trying to occupy the same square of space. Annabeth already has her suitcase upright, perfectly packed, posture crisp despite the faint hangover dragging at her expression. Percy trails behind with his bag bumping along like he’s dragging a corpse to burial. Piper’s sunglasses have returned, armor against the fluorescent lights. Hazel and Frank stand ready with practiced ease, while Jason and Leo hover nearby, both projecting the studied innocence of people who have definitely committed crimes.

“Ah,” Leo says, the moment he spots them. His grin ignites immediate dread. “The newlyweds emerge.”

Annabeth pinches the bridge of her nose. “Don’t start.”

But Percy’s already leaning against the wall, looking like the cat who caught the canary. “Pretty sure I heard a suspicious creak from your room,” he says, far too innocent. “Rhythmic creaking. Should we call maintenance? Should we—?”

Will nearly loses his grip on his bag. “Percy—”

Nico doesn’t even give him the chance. One sharp look, dark and lethal, and Percy shuts his mouth so fast his teeth click. “Don’t finish that sentence,” Nico warns, voice like frost.

Hazel clears her throat, calm but firm. “Some of us would prefer not to imagine hotel furniture in that much detail.”

Percy throws up his hands in mock surrender, grinning like a kid caught with a slingshot. Leo, however, is undeterred, clearly winding up for something catastrophic.

“Not a word,” Nico says flatly, before Leo can even breathe. His tone carries enough promise of violence that, miraculously, Leo actually hesitates.

The procession spills toward the elevators in uneven bursts, a herd too large for a single trip. Bags thud, wheels catch, curses echo off the wallpaper. It takes three rounds to ferry everyone and their luggage to the lobby: Hazel shepherding Frank in the first wave, Annabeth muttering under her breath while Percy leans dramatically against the mirrored wall in the second, Jason and Leo arguing about the roof incident all the way down in the third.

The lobby is all marble and velvet hangover. Piper drapes herself across an armchair like a fallen starlet, sunglasses still in place. Percy immediately collapses onto a couch, limbs sprawled like a corpse staged for comedy, while Annabeth commandeers the nearest end table for her coffee cup and laptop. Hazel perches with quiet composure, Frank steady at her side. Nico chooses a shadowed corner, arms folded, unreadable. Leo stretches across too much furniture with the air of someone hoping to be forcibly removed by management.

Check-out divides them further: Jason handling his room, Piper hers, Annabeth precise with hers, Frank patient with his. One by one, keys clink onto the marble counter, names are given, bills confirmed.

Will is last. His shoes echo on polished tile as he steps up to the desk, already rehearsing his polite nod, his carefully neutral voice.

The receptionist smiles in professional recognition. “Mr. William Solace?”

Will blinks, startled by the formality, but nods.

She slides a key card envelope toward him—only it isn’t the hotel’s standard white and gold. It’s plush, deep red, the weight of the paper itself a kind of decadence. The edges are pressed with floral motifs that curl into skulls if you look too long, petals and bone intertwined in impossible detail. His name is inked on the front in black, precise hand.

It doesn’t look like an envelope. It looks like an omen.

The receptionist is already moving on, professional smile offered to the next guest, leaving Will alone with the thing.

At last, he picks it up. The paper yields soft against his fingertips, but the ink of his name rises faintly, sharp and deliberate: William Solace. Nothing casual. Nothing warm. Just his name—formal, final—as though it belongs to someone else entirely.

The flap breaks cleanly. Inside, the card is cream, thick with the kind of weight that means it was chosen, not bought. The handwriting is sharp and elegant, every letter carved into permanence.

William,

I expect you to join me for lunch tomorrow. Consider it an opportunity for us to become better acquainted. Nico need not be troubled with the details; you understand how delicate he can be.

—Persephone

The words sit heavy, lined with the kind of courtesy that feels more like a blade than an invitation. It isn’t a request. It isn’t even particularly about him. It’s a reminder: she holds the power, she knows his name, and she is already pulling him into her orbit.

Will’s first instinct is to stand, cross the lobby, and put the card straight into Nico’s hands. To confess immediately, to make the secret shared, because Nico is the one person who makes the unbearable a little lighter.

But he doesn’t move.

Because the gala still lingers like smoke in his lungs—Hades, voice calm as cut glass, admitting he’d had Will investigated. That he already knew things Will had spent his whole life aching for. The father his mom never named. The man who lived only as absence, as a gap in Will’s chest. His mom filled the silence with scraps—half-jokes, vague stories, tired smiles—but never substance. Never truth.

And Hades had truth. Which means Persephone might too.

He doesn’t know if that’s what the lunch is about. Maybe it’s nothing more than theater, another play for control. But it could be more. It could be his chance. His one chance to prise open the silence and find out who he comes from, what kind of man his father was, if he left behind anything worth holding onto.

The possibility roots itself deep and won’t let go.

Nico would never approve. That’s the other reason Will keeps still. Nico hates Persephone’s intrusions, hates the way she drapes herself over their lives like silk concealing knives. He would tell Will not to go, not to give her ground, not to let her turn curiosity into leverage. And Will—gods, he wants to listen. He wants to be good for Nico, steady for Nico, enough for Nico.

But he has wanted this longer. Longer than he’s even had the words for it.

A name. A story. A face. The smallest thread of truth in place of silence.

So he says nothing. Not yet. Not until he knows what waits on the other side of her smile.

The envelope burns in his hand, weighty and damning. He turns it over once, twice, as though stalling could change the words written inside. Then, finally, he slips it into the inside lining of his jacket, tucking it flat against his chest where no one—not even Nico—will see. The motion feels deliberate, secretive. Like hiding evidence.

He fixes his eyes on the patterned carpet, as if the swirl of reds and golds could anchor him, as if that alone could keep Nico from looking too closely and seeing what he’s already chosen to hide.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 2 of Will Solace And The Socialites Of Olympus University