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“I’ll help you study.”
Will scoffs, only it’s muffled due to the pressing of his face right directly against the battered textbook.
“Ugh,” he groans, or maybe ‘urgh’ or ‘argh’ or just some general kind of growl. Nico is not sure exactly. The paper does a really excellent job of absorbing his misery.
Nico reaches out and very carefully wraps his finger around a curl, and then very carefully tugs Will upright, and out of the book, and then very carefully holds his gaze, and then very carefully, and also slowly, leans in. And smooches him very carefully on his cute little pout.
He goes quite a warm shade of red. Nico, not very carefully, smiles.
“Not helping,” Will complains, although he is fighting a smile also. “See, now I don’t want to study, I want to drive the DeLorean back sixteen years and crush baby me’s skull just a little so I remain illiterate for eternity.”
“You’re so goddamn weird,” Nico says fondly.
“Just a *little*,” Will grumbles. “It’s — ethical if it’s just a little.”
Nico resists the urge to kiss him again. It’ll be a whole thing, he reasons. One kiss will lead to another, and then a third, and then a nineteenth, and then they’ll re-emerge from the Hades cabin in a month to several search parties and Will’s weeping mother again, so best not to. It’s fine. Nico has self control. Nico has discipline.
Will does that thing where he makes his eyes dilate on command and bats his eyelashes just so. Knits his eyebrows so he is on the perfect right side of pathetically needy.
Nico’s discipline laughs all the way out of his body and down the express lane to hell. Rip in peace.
“I don’t even really need a future,” Will reasons. He leans forward hopefully. “You can just buy me a palace somewhere and I can eat grapes in bed forever while you read to me, right?”
Nico swallows. It takes a few tries. His discipline makes a brief reappearance to laugh again, and this time it brings his dignity — impressive, he hasn’t seen that in two years eight months fourteen days and half an hour, not that he has been counting or anything.
“If that’s what you want,” Nico rasps. He quickly tries to recall the various real estate listings Demeter had passive aggressively thrown at him while muttering about millennials these days. There was a palace somewhere in Serra San Bruno, he thinks?? Fuck. That would work. Right? They grow grapes there he is pretty sure.
“You are really very easy to seduce,” Will observes. Some of the exaggerated desolation in his tone has disappeared, replaced instead with the same character his voice gets when he is performing secret and largely immoral experiments on his patients via underhanded waiver he had Connor draft for him. He pokes once at Nico’s cheek. “Like, if I use any of the key sentences you just kind of fold.”
Nico doesn’t know how to respond to the second half of that sentence so he doesn’t. Also, Will smells good.
“Key sentences?”
The light has now fully returned to Will’s eyes. Mostly this is a good thing, except this is also the light Nico has seen reflected in Daedalus’s eyes so there is some concern there. Luckily for Will he’s pretty and Nico doesn’t have principles.
“Yeah! I have a list of phrases I use whenever I need you to do whatever I say.”
Nico ponders this for a moment. He waits for any feelings of disgust or betrayal. When none arise, he accepts the blatant curiosity.
“Really?”
“Mhm! The first one I learned was ‘feel my hands’.”
Nico is yanked roughly back to three years ago on a hill half-dead and heart pounding so loud Lou Ellen side-eyed him from a solid yard away.
“…Ah.” He coughs. “Uh, checks out.”
“I think the main thing is you’re kind of into it when you try to scare someone and they mouth you off instead,” Will continues. “Like, you enjoy snapping at me, but if I roll my eyes your hands get sweaty.”
Interestingly Nico’s hands are currently sweaty. He wonders if Will has any thoughts about the dreams he’s been having where he’s tied to an observation table and completely mute as Will prepares him for dissection. Probably not. Coincidence, as far as he’s concerned.
“I could just like you as a person,” Nico points out. “Maybe I don’t need all the mad psychiatrist shit to get all fluttery. Maybe I just put up with your manipulation because I love you.”
Will levels him with a look.
Nico shrugs.
“Alright,” he admits. “The freak shrink thing is kind of hot.”
Will looks very satisfied. This too must be a carefully planned Pavlov thing, because Nico’s body reacts immediately and viscerally.
“Good,” Will says, with relish. “All the studying I did of you when you first tolerated me was not for nothing, you know. I can track your hormone cycles by sight alone.”
Instead of whimpering, Nico says: “Speaking of studying.”
And Will groans and slumps back on top of his textbook. For extra drama, he keeps sliding until he slides right off the bed and hits the floor. Nico allows this for the drama of it all because if he doesn’t get it out of his system now he’ll start chanting MacBeth’s monologue at three in the morning again, and there are only so many times per months Nico can honestly sit through that.
“You do indeed need a doctorate to do unethical experiments in the name of science,” Nico says apologetically. “Or at the very least your Masters.”
Will makes a very long very deep groaning noise. Nico sighs and tells his body to cool it.
“I don’t *wanna*.”
“You do, really. You keep signing off on deliveries as ‘Dr. Solace’. Oh, yeah, Chiron says quit it, by the way. You’re causing tax fraud.”
“Good,” Will grumbles, into the floor. “Ugh.”
“Come on.” Nico slides on the floor next to him. Will holds out a valiant twelve seconds before sighing and tucking himself into Nico’s side. Nico hides a smile into his hair, gripping him tighter. “I test you, and make out with you for fifteen seconds every time you get one right?”
“…Twenty seconds.”
“Sixteen.”
“Seventeen and a half.”
Nico grins wider, and kisses his hair. He feels Will’s matching grin pressed to his ribs, mostly because it is swiftly accompanied by a bite. “Sold.”