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“William Solace, I swear to the gods,
I am going to kill you, no matter what odds.”
Around him, the entire camp is laughing at him. Percy and Jason are collapsed against each other, gasping for breath. Even Will, despite his anger, is clearly trying to fight back a smile.
“I’m glad you’re having fucking fun,” he spits out through gritted teeth. “Change me back, son of the sun.”
“I’m in love with you,” Percy gasps out. “Solace, I’m in fucking love with you. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
“Go ahead, he’s all yours,” Nico is glaring daggers at Will. “I’ll find a way to settle the score.”
Annabeth and Piper are giggling infuriatingly. Will’s arms are crossed and even though he’s laughing at him Nico can still see the anger in his eyes.
“This is your fault, di Angelo,” he says. Nico considers shadow jumping his way into oblivion just to spite the boy in front of him.
“All right, fine, then this is the end,” his voice is so low and filled with rage that the campers around him stop laughing. Many of them begin inching away. “Find yourself a new boyfriend.”
Will seems taken aback at the use of that word. They had never really explicitly said what they were, but Nico was kind of completely at the mercy of rhyme right now. The campers who hadn’t known he was gay stare with wide eyes at the two of them. He can hear a few whispers, some sounding snider than others, and he thinks he sees some people exchanging money. Then he hears an oomph of pain and a shriek from someone else. He looks around just in time to see a son of Ares doubled over and a few campers from different cabins soaking wet. Both Jason and Percy are looking ahead innocently. If Nico weren’t so angry he would have flashed them both a smile of appreciation. As it is, he makes a mental note to thank them later. For now, he just turns around and stomps away, melting into the shadows and showing up a few hours later in New Rome, calling out for his sister and trying to figure out what the hell rhymes with Hazel.
The day before:
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“You have to meet my mother eventually.”
“No, I don’t, and even if I did, eventually doesn’t have to mean this weekend.”
Will exhales angrily and glares at Nico from across the infirmary. “Why are you so insistent on keeping this confined to the goddamn Hades cabin and the infirmary after hours?” Nico is taken aback. Will never swears. “It’s been a year.”
“It has not.” Both of them are sort of right. This complicated relationship between them had been going on for about a year, since Gaea’s defeat, but it had only been a few months since Will had shown up at Camp Half-Blood, a few months before the summer had even started, and yelled at Nico for not even attempting to keep in touch before shoving him against a tree and kissing him angrily. At Nico’s request they had kept it a secret from everyone except their closest friends; secretive by nature, Nico wasn’t technically out yet and Will respected his wishes, so they were friends during the day and something else later, when there was no one around. But he could tell that even though Will understood and respected him, he wanted more. He wanted Nico to meet his mother – needless to say, Nico did not feel the same.
Will rolls his eyes. “Technicalities, Nico. Look.” His expression softens. “I don’t want to rush you. I know you’re not ready and I – I get that. I have no problems going at your pace when we’re here but we… you told me it was okay to tell my mother we were involved. She wants to meet you. And I… I want you to meet her. I want you involved in my life.”
Nico scowls. He doesn’t want to meet Will’s mother. He likes Will, and he wants to keep up whatever it is that they’re doing, but he isn’t exactly the kind of guy you’re supposed to take home to your mother. Sure, he’s gotten better at the whole friend thing. He’s stopped hanging around in the shadows and more often than not he spends his time around his friends and his face has stopped hurting every time he smiles, but he’s definitely not up for meet the parents.
Mostly he’s afraid that if he meets Will’s mother, she won’t like him (because why would she?) and why would Will want to be with someone his mother hates? Will was close to his mother. He respected her opinion. If she didn’t like Nico that would probably be it. And even if it wasn’t, he wouldn’t make Will choose between him and his mother.
But he wasn’t about to say that. Despite how much he’s changed, he still isn’t all that good on the whole feelings front. So instead all he says is, “I don’t want to meet your mother.”
“Nico.” Will’s voice is a hair above pleading. “Please. For me.”
Nico feels incredibly guilty but all he can think of is Will’s mother, probably bright and sunny just like her son, the kind of woman who could make the sun god fall in love with her. He imagines standing in front of her, small and dark, the exact opposite of Will. Who would want their son dating someone like Nico?
“No,” is what he says, avoiding Will’s eyes. Will breathes in sharply, as if he hadn’t really expected Nico to say no.
“Do I mean anything to you?”
“What?” Nico looks up. Will’s eyes are steely and his fists are clenched.
“Do you even give a shit? Or is this just some way to pass the time now that the world has decided it doesn’t want to kill us for a little while?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Us, di Angelo. This. Me. Do you even care? Who are you trying to keep secret – you or me?”
Nico’s mouth opens and closes a few times before he manages to get words out. “I – you’re – I’m not ashamed of you, Solace.”
“Could have fooled me,” Will says angrily. Nico sighs.
“What do you want from me, Will? Do you want me to strip naked and run through camp with your name written across my chest? Do you want me to jump up and down and bring you flowers every day and write you fucking poetry? You knew how I was before this whole thing started, it’s not my fault you decided too late that you couldn’t handle it.”
Will raises an eyebrow. “I want you to meet my mother and you interpret that as me saying I want you to undergo a drastic personality change? Jesus Christ, Nico.”
“I don’t meet parents, Will. I didn’t sign on for that.”
“This isn’t a goddamn job contract, you don’t sign on for anything.”
“I’m not meeting your mother.”
Will shakes his head. “Do you get a kick out of trying to push people away? Do you get a little thrill every time you make me angry?”
“Of course, didn’t you know? Being a miserable asshole is a fetish of mine, I just love watching people walk away from me.”
“Nobody walks away from you, you push them there.”
Nico glares at him with the ferocity that scares the younger campers but Will doesn’t budge, just stands there with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face that perfectly matches Nico’s own.
“I don’t have to listen to this bullshit,” Nico says. “Fuck this.” Then he stomps away.
Presumably, that was when Will cursed him.
It takes him a while to realize what happened. He doesn’t notice until Jason knocks on his door in the morning so they can head over to breakfast together.
“You look awful,” he says, looking at Nico, who hadn’t slept all that well last night.
“Thanks for the compliment, Jason Grace,
Now shut up or I’ll punch you in the face.”
Nico stops, eyes widening in horror.
“Did you just… rhyme?” Jason is looking at him in a mixture of confusion and glee. “You just rhymed.”
“No, I didn’t, why would I?” Nico looks at Jason in horror. “I’m not a rhyming kind of guy.”
Jason laughs. “That much is obvious. You’re definitely not Shakespeare, or anything. You’re not even Dr. Seuss.”
“Jason, help me, I can’t quit,
This isn’t funny, not even a bit.”
Jason is collapsed against Nico’s cabin, clutching his stomach and laughing. “This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
Nico’s mind is working a mile a minute, trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, when he finally realizes the only thing that could cause this.
“Will,” is what he tries to say through clenched teeth, but what ends up coming out is, “It was Will that did this, only he could; we just fought, so only he would.”
“You fought with Will?” Jason probably means to sound comforting, but that meaning is lost amidst his snorts of laugher. Nico glares. He wants to yell at Jason, but he also doesn’t want to fucking rhyme.
Will had mentioned this, one time, when they had been hanging out in Nico’s cabin late one night. Nico had made a comment about the creative capacities of children of Apollo, and Will had shaken his head. “I suck at poetry,” he had said. “I can’t really sing, either. Pretty much the only thing I got from my dad is my healing. I can curse people to speak in only rhyming couplets, though,” he had grinned at Nico when he said this, tongue poking out between his teeth. For his part, Nico had laughed. “I’ll be on my best behaviour, then.” Then Will had kissed him, and Nico had forgotten all about that particular talent; he tended to forget things whenever Will kissed him.
They had never fought like they had last night. Will was tiring of him, just as Nico had always feared he eventually would. Just like everyone always did.
Anger settling deep in his heart, Nico storms off to the Apollo cabin, ready to raise an army of the dead if he has to.
“Nico!” Jason shouts, running after him. “Is this really a good idea? You can’t really… talk normally, right now.”
Nico shakes his head and knocks angrily on the door of the Apollo cabin.
“Will Solace, get out here now!
You can’t hide from me, you wretched cow.”
And that is how the entire camp found out that Will Solace had cursed Nico di Angelo to speak in rhyming couplets, so by the time Will opened the door (looking infuriatingly good) with an angry glint in his eye and a bitter smile on his face, half the camp was standing around the Apollo cabin, while the other half were on their way.
“Yes?” He says, eyebrow arched. Nico wants to kiss him and punch him, not necessarily in that order. It’s very difficult, he is realizing, being angry with someone he is so attracted to.
And that is how Nico somehow ended up breaking up with Will Solace, in front of the entire camp, speaking only in rhyming couplets.
Give him Kronos and Gaea any time over the complexities of a relationship.
Hazel only laughs a little bit before they find a secluded spot and sit down.
“How long is this supposed to last?”
Nico shrugs, angrily pulling up grass. Hazel sighs. “Do you at least know if it wears off or if he has to… de-curse you?”
He shrugs again. “I like to think that if it were up to Will,
Then by now he would have chilled.”
Hazel grimaces. “They’re not very good rhymes.”
“Runs in the family I guess,
Apollo doesn’t exactly have rhyming finesse.”
Hazel smiles. “You can stay here until it rubs off, if you’d like. I’ll send an Iris message to Jason and let him know.”
“Thanks, Hazel, you’re a good sis,
To take care of me when I’m like this.”
Hazel giggles. “I can’t say I don’t like you like this. You’re much freer with your feelings.”
Nico rolls his eyes, smiling.
Before Hazel goes to bed, she kisses her brother on the cheek. “Goodnight, Nico.”
Nico waves. “I’ll tell you what happened another time,
When I’m able to speak without having to rhyme.”
Reyna comes to see him. He glares at her and shakes his head.
“Oh come on! Everyone else gets to hear the amazing rhyming talent of Nico di Angelo except me?”
Nico sighs and slumps against the wall. “All right, fine, here you go,
Hope you enjoy the goddamn show.”
Reyna laughs and Nico glowers. He had hoped it would have worn off by now.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Come with me. Hazel messaged Camp Half-Blood, they want to talk to you.”
Nico wants to refuse, but he would ideally like to keep the rhyming to a minimum, so he just follows Reyna in silence. When they find Hazel he waves at Jason, Percy and Annabeth through the Iris message.
“Hey,” Percy says. “We talked to Will.”
“Talked is putting it mildly,” Jason says darkly, and Nico is reminded of the injured Ares kid and the other soaked campers and feels a weird surge of appreciation towards the two of them.
He looks at Hazel who, bless her, seems to understand what he wants to ask and says, “What does that mean?”
Annabeth smirks. “Jason told him that his little trick was cute, and then he said, ‘would you like to see what happens when children of the Big Three team up? We have neat tricks too.’”
Despite everything, he can’t help but feel the slightest bit guilty when he thinks of Jason and Percy teaming up on Will. The whole thing had been Nico’s fault; Nico and his dumb need to overthink everything and his fear of being deserted. All Will had wanted was for Nico to be more involved in his life.
“Anyway, he says the curse should wear off in no more than a day or two. Probably.”
Nico raises his eyebrows. “Probably?” Reyna asks.
“Er, yeah. He says normally it’s no more than a day or two but that he was really, really angry at you and depending on what kind of mood Apollo was in it might last a bit longer.”
Nico stares at the two of them in disbelief. “He said he prayed to his dad to lift it but who really knows with the gods,” Percy says. Nico sighs, then smiles at them slightly in appreciation.
“Are you going to stay at Camp Jupiter until it wears off?” Annabeth asks. Nico nods.
“Well, make sure you come back when it does,” Percy says. “It’s our last year here before we head to New Rome for school. Gotta make the most out of this summer.”
Nico just nods and waves as the Iris message ends.
Will must have been really mad, because the curse doesn’t wear off for another two days. He wakes up every morning and tries to say a simple word, and it isn’t until his third day in Camp Jupiter that when he wakes up and says hello that he doesn’t suddenly talk about how angry he is with his beau.
“Thank the gods,” he mutters.
Truthfully he wants to hide out at Camp Jupiter until summer is over and Will goes back home, but he remembers what Percy had said, about it being his last summer. So he says goodbye to Reyna and Frank, gives Hazel a hug and thanks her for not mocking him mercilessly, and then gears himself up to shadow travel his way back to New York.
He gets there later that night. Everyone is sitting around the camp fire; he can hear the Apollo cabin singing and the Ares cabin threatening to rip out their vocal chords if they don’t stop.
It’s good to be home.
Taking a deep breath he heads to the campfire. Will, who had been strumming a guitar, sees him first; he freezes, almost dropping the guitar in surprise. Piper looks up and smiles.
“Nico!”
Jason, Percy, and Annabeth look up and spot him, smiling widely.
“What’s up Dr. Seuss? You all de-rhymeified?”
Nico sits down next to Jason. “Call me Dr. Seuss again, Grace, I fucking dare you.”
Jason laughs. Percy holds out a branch and Nico takes a half-melted marshmallow off of it.
“Thanks. Hazel says hi. So does Frank.”
The Apollo cabin starts up their sing-along again but Will hands the guitar to one of his sisters. Nico avoids his eye the entire time. At one point Annabeth leans over. “He’s been staring at you the whole night, you know.”
Nico scowls. “Yeah. I know.”
She smiles kindly at him. “Percy wanted to drown him. Never let him and Jason be alone together, we’ll have another war on our hands.”
The corners of his mouth twitch up. “I never –” He shakes his head.
“What?”
“I just… I never figured I’d have people ready to commit murder for me.”
Annabeth laughs. “That’s what friends do, Nico.”
Percy, who had been having an animated conversation with Jason about the new Spider-man, leans back over to Nico and Annabeth.
“What’s this about committing murder?”
Nico snorts. “Sound a little happier about it, Percy.”
Percy grins, kisses Annabeth, winks at Nico, and then goes back to talking to Jason. Annabeth rolls her eyes.
When the campfire is done Nico says goodnight to his friends and makes his way back to his cabin. He collapses into his bed and then stays awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to shake the feeling that he fucked up for good.
Later there’s a knock on the door. He hears it, but he doesn’t get up to open the door.
“Nico,” he hears Will’s voice on the other side, quiet so he isn’t caught after curfew. “I know you’re in there. Please. I want to talk to you.”
He still doesn’t move.
“Nico, please. I’m going to be eaten by harpies, and if I die when we’re fighting I don’t think your dad will let me in.”
He bites his cheek to stop from smiling. With a sigh he pads over to the door and opens it, revealing a very stressed out Will Solace.
“Hi,” Will says. Nico jerks his head to indicate that Will can come inside.
He closes the door and turns around. Will is standing in the middle of the room. The wrap bandage he usually carried around with him is being repeatedly wrapped around his wrist, his telltale sign that he’s upset.
Nico, unsure of what to say, stays silent.
“Are we broken up?” Is what Will says after a few moments of painful silence. Nico is confused until he remembers that he sort of broke up with Will before he left.
With rhyme.
“I don’t know,” is his super lame response. “Uh. Do you… want to be?”
Will sits down on the empty bed Hazel stays in when she’s at camp. “No,” he says, very quietly. Nico stays standing, looking around the room. He always forgets how gloomy it is until Will is here. The dankness of the Hades cabin was accentuated whenever the son of Apollo was in it; Nico had been meaning to decorate for ages, now.
“I’m really, really sorry.” Nico can barely hear him, he is speaking so quietly. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
Nico fights back the urge to be sarcastic – ‘no, please, I really enjoyed it, please do it again’ – and instead glances up at the ceiling. “It’s my fault, Will.”
“Even if it was, I never should have cursed you. And I never should have pushed you to meet my mother before you were ready. I keep forgetting that you’re new to this stuff.”
Shaking his head, Nico sits down on his bed, facing Will. “No, it was my fault. You were just – you wanted something normal and I don’t know how that even works so I threw a temper tantrum and I’m sorry. I was just… I was afraid your mother wouldn’t like me.”
Will sits back and blinks. “Why wouldn’t my mother like you?”
Nico scoffs. “Have you seen me?”
Will, who always hated when he made any type of self-deprecating comment, glares at him. “Yes, I have. So why wouldn’t my mother like you?”
“Oh come on, Solace. I’m not exactly the kind of person you want to take home to meet your parents.”
“I want to take you home to meet my parents. Well. My mother, at least.”
“And what exactly is she going to say when she sees you, all fucking… tall and tan and golden standing next to the son of fucking death?” Nico exhales angrily. “I’m too thin and angry and constantly melting into goddamn shadows and not the type of person your mother would want you to be with!”
“My mother wants me to be happy. You make me happy. That’s all that matters.”
“This is happy? All we ever do is fight –”
“Gods, Nico. That’s not all we do. And anyways, people fight. So yes. This is happy. I am happy. You make me happy.”
Nico scowls down at his bed. “We shouldn’t… I’m not… this isn’t.” Nico lets out a strangled noise of frustration. “We are too different.”
Will rolls his eyes. “That’s a bullshit excuse and you know it.”
Nico slumps back against the wall. “What do you want from me, Solace?”
“I told you.” Nico looks up. Will is smiling softly at him. “I want you to meet my mother.”
“You can’t diminish this whole thing into just that.”
“No, you’re right, because this is some weird convoluted mixture of your trust issues and the fact that you’re nothing but a crotchety old man at heart and you’re still pretty rusty at this whole other people concept,” Will laughs and Nico smiles the slightest bit, “but right now all I want from you is to meet my mother.”
Nico rolls his eyes and mumbles something under his breath.
“Pardon?”
He mumbles again, slightly louder. Will stands up and crosses the room, leaning down and theatrically cupping his hand over his ear. “Sorry? What was that?”
Nico glares at him. Will sits down and leans closer. “What was that?”
“Okay!” Nico shouts. “Okay, I said okay!”
Will puts a hand under Nico’s chin and tilts his head to look him in the eye. Will is smiling, his eyes bright. Nico scowls.
“Oh, stop pretending to be miserable,” he says. “We fought, you had a brief stint as a poet –” Nico glares furiously – “I felt awful and sulked in my cabin for three days straight, I promise to never curse you again, and then we made up.”
“I don’t recall us making up.”
“One of these days you’re going to get tired of pretending to be Mr. Doom and Gloom.”
The corner of Nico’s mouth turns upwards. “I doubt it.”
Will kisses him, finally. Nico grips the front of his shirt so tightly it hurts his fingers. “Do you really think your mother will like me?” Nico asks, sounding far more desperate than he had intended. Will grunts against his lips.
“Really don’t want to talk about my mother right now, di Angelo.”
“You cursed me to speak in rhyming couplets over that and now you don’t even want to talk about it? Seriously?”
Will presses harder into him. “Yes,” he mutters, his hand finding its way to the bare skin on Nico’s stomach (Will is always warm, a stark contrast to Nico’s normal temperature. Will kept threatening to hold Nico in the infirmary until he was able to convince him that it was just a thing, another side effect of being a child of Hades. Will had grudgingly agreed but still usually complained whenever Nico touched him). “Seriously.”
Then he bites Nico’s lip. Nico shivers.
“Okay. Fair enough.”