Chapter Text
“Old men can make war, but it is children who will make history.”
Ray Merritt
I don’t know what I want (other than the obvious), but my father knows what he wants for me: he wants me to survive. It’s not often he’s able to keep his children in his realm while they’re still alive – at least, I hope he still wants me alive, what with the constant training he’s pushing me towards. From what I’ve been able to piece together, the gods aren’t supposed to reach out to their children in their mortal journeys or else they’d mess up the natural order of fate and destiny, so Hades has never been able to protect his children to the extent he truly wishes to, instead keeping to prompt visits and sending the Furies to do the grunt guard work when necessary.
But a demigod child who was able to figure out how to reach Hades without any of Hades’ interference in the living realm doesn’t break any of the rules.
Like any child’s room, I decorate it with my mythomagic figurines and card decks, displaying the nerdiness proudly on the shelves and bed stand. I push all the weapons to a display rack (why do I need nunchakus?) and ask a wandering skeleton in the palace halls for paint.
Seriously, I’m not emo enough to live in a room with four black walls.
I develop a steady schedule of wake up, eat, train with a variety of poky weapons, eat, learn about historical events, more focused on the underworld and its matters than anything, train, eat, and sleep. My life follows the cycle for perhaps a month, the pain of not seeing Bianca slowly subsiding but always there, a constant, bone-aching memory that pushes me to train till I collapse onto the tangible weapons master ghosts so I forget everything but my name.
“A stick?” I ask.
The jittery skeleton nods, handing me a wooden stick of my own height, smooth and layered with leather for durability.
The skeleton trainer doesn’t talk, but he vibrates his skull in a way I’m sort of beginning to decipher into yes, no, fuck yeah, and fuck no.
He says yes.
I have to become comfortable with the stick despite no one telling me why, so I carry it around wherever I go, keeping it next to my bed at night and lugging it around while exploring the palace, careful to avoid Persephone’s wing.
Hades hadn’t said to avoid her, but there’s always that implication to be careful around a step-mother.
Maybe I’ve been watching too many Cinderella spin-off movies.
I figure out what to do with the tall stick when dozens of skeletons jump out from the walls to attack me with blunt swords and spears – defence. I parry, strike, and jab the skeletons, watching them purposefully stay down once I deliver a knock-down strike, and quickly scurry away from that section of the palace once all the skeletons “die.”
This happens thirty-seven times over a span of five days – and yes, I fucking counted.
I turned eleven in an embarrassing ceremony of me being allowed to sit next to my father while he went over important political information of treaties between certain gods, with myself dozing off and waking up drooling onto his diamond encrusted Cloak of the Damned. I really hope Hades takes it in an endearing way, not out of pure rudeness or boredom.
Spoiler: it was super boring.
Sometimes Hades saunters through the dining hall, as if to check if I actually use it and that I actually need to eat food, sitting down at the head of the table to watch me eat. It’s a little unnerving to be stared down by a primordial god, so I force myself to eat daintily and elegantly to prevent myself from feeling judged or embarrassed in any way. I’m going to have the best fucking manners of all eleven year olds ever, believe it.
I finally run into Persephone towards the end of winter.
She’s tall, possibly as tall as her husband, with golden-bronze skin that doesn’t belong in the cool shades of the palace, bouncing ringlets of chestnut brown falling to her breasts, and gliding so effortlessly in her pink satin gowns she appears to be floating. A crown of pastel blue flowers I don’t know the name of adorns her head, the petals ruffling when I quite literally stop her in her tracks.
There’s no “hello child” or “greetings, demon spawn,” because instead she baulks at me, face twisting into an indeterminable expression, saying, “Why are you here?”
In the underworld? In the palace? Alive?
“The flowers were lonely,” I say, because I’m stupid and I definitely shouldn’t say stupid things about the gardens around the palace directly to the goddess of springtime and flowers.
The tiny corner of larkspurs seem to wilt, just a little bit, here in the shade of a quivering demigod and a terrifying goddess. I’d been hanging out with the sparse nature in the quiet corners of the palace in my free time, not wanting to go insane from only being in contact with dead things. I’m half death god, but also half human.
Hades and Persephones’ marriage makes even less sense now.
“That’s why I’m here,” the goddess states.
“And me,” I add quickly. If I self-depreciate enough maybe all my external problems will go away. “I was also lonely. I wanted to see the flowers.”
She’s silent, so I try not to look into her grass green eyes, instead focusing on her chin because looking down at my feet would signal defeat – I don’t want to be so easily cowed in my own home, despite knowing how idiotic it is to go up against a literal goddess and Papà’s wife.
“Hmm,” she says, then leaves.
I don’t stop visiting the miniature gardens scattered around the palace grounds, but I always make sure to be on the lookout for any icy goddesses in the immediate vicinity to avoid dying from a heart attack.
But I’m an idiot with a half-eaten brain, so I seek Persephone out in the days leading up to the start of spring.
The Grove of Persephone, as one ought to expect, is filled to the brim with pomegranate trees and other flowering fruit trees. It might as well be called a thicket , not a grove, but I dutifully follow the pretty cobblestone path through the claustrophobic trees from the palace to her royal gardens, my stick slung over my shoulder in some dreadful amalgamation of a harness that really only works when I’m wearing a toga.
The grove is empty.
I poke my head through the bushes and overgrown tree branches, even daring to climb up a tall apple tree to check the limited horizon – nothing.
Silently, I leave the origami rose I folded on a large, flat rock underneath a willow tree, hoping the impromptu gift won’t irritate Persephone, then I pull up my sleeves and begin cleaning up the place.
The quaint wooden benches lay dusty and dirt-specked, so I brush off the surface with my sleeves, instantly staining them, but not even minding the slightest after a good ten minutes of scrubbing for amazing results.
If only melamine sponges existed in the underworld.
I check the little stream running through the territory, making sure it’s just a normal stream and not some horrible liquid version of literal demons, then begin clearing up the boggy mess. Dead leaves and mulch clog parts of the stream bends, so I gather them up, ignoring the squirmy feeling wriggling in the stomach at how gross it is in my hands, and scatter the debris throughout the garden dirt, knowing something in the soil would eventually decompose it.
The river now runs clear and smooth, playing a light, trickling melody.
The fountain by the willow tree, depicting a hilariously stereotypical cherub angel in the grey centrepiece, actually turns out to be made of marble and jade. I scrub off the grisly dust and fungal growth with a rag I fashioned from the sleeves of my shirt – I’m going to have to burn this article of clothing soon – letting the stone sparkle back to life once I’ve swiped every small little corner and dip thoroughly. My hands smell unbelievably mouldy by the end.
I don’t dare touch the actual blossoming plants, assuming the wild overgrowth to be a stylistic choice by the goddess as opposed to a purposeful carelessness, instead opting to prim the area around the pathways, sweeping fallen leaves, browned petals, and odd bits of gravel out of the way.
By the end of the tiresome chore, the flowers seem to appear almost… shinier? And the waters sort of glow a silvery-blue, but I assume I’m imagining things in the haze of exhaustion, and I trudge back to the palace, unaware of the curious green eyes watching me.
I name my stick “Richard” to remind me of how much a dick the skeleton trainer can be sometimes.
So I can stick Richard on the di-.
Anyway.
The trainer steals my stick and pastes a hollowed out cylinder, a metal tube, on the far end, so when I swing it around again at skeleton dummies, I fall flat on my face from the unexpected weight and break my nose.
A ghost sneers at me from the training hall, saying I’m too young to be training for death weapons, before the trainer jitters his way to the ghost and waves its spiritual residue away. The fact that one side is heavier than the other on my otherwise perfect stick disrupts my balance until the end of the day, when I can finally crack the skeleton dummies in the ribs again with some sort of control.
It’s late March when I realise I’ve grown at least two inches, compact with wiry muscle, and that Camp Half-Blood probably assumes I’m dead after having disappeared into a hearth before their eyes.
Hades also happens to be the god of wealth, so I take a single drachma from the basin in my bedroom that never goes empty no matter how many times I tried dumping it out to see the bottom, and head for the most neutral lands in my father’s realm – the grove.
Persephone left on the spring equinox, and I think it’s fair to assume that she won’t smite me for encroaching upon her territory for non-nefarious reasons.
I settle on an ivy infested bench next to the quiet bend of the stream and toss the coin into the spray.
“Nico?”
I blink, forgetting how to interact with real people for a moment. “Hello Percy.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to people who weren’t half-dead, mostly-dead, all-dead, or literal gods.
“Y-you,” he stammers, lunging out of bed. My sense of time in the underworld is a bit different from the world above, but they share a similar enough timeline that I can mostly keep track of the hour and the day. As it turns out, living in a world where there’s no actual sun or moon messes with my ability to detect a proper schedule. “You’re alive?!”
It looks dark where he is. Was he just sleeping?
“Does everyone think I’m dead?” I ask.
Percy ignores it, scrambling out of the sheets to come uncomfortably close to the rainbow mirage. “Where are you? Are you alright? Where did you go? And why are you…”
He stares at my clothes.
Ah, oops.
I’m beginning to run out of the clothes from my backpack, either because I don’t fit in them anymore or because the fabric keeps splitting apart from all the physically intensive training. Greek tunics and sandals started to appear in my closet after a while, and I didn’t have the guts to complain to my father about era-appropriate fashion when he was even thinking about providing clothes in the first place.
Besides, they’re not all black! I smooth out the wrinkles in my white tunic, suddenly realising that it’s not a great idea to wear white clothes whilst in the bowels of nature.
I see the gears of his mind turning, his head jerking left and right to examine my surroundings.
“I’m alive,” I say after another drawn-out moment. “And safe. Listen, I need to tell you something.”
Wait, no I’ve only a few minutes left, if that. I have to be quick. Dammit, I should've brought another drachma.
Percy stares intently, fully awake and comprehending.
“I mean it, really, that I’m safe. No, I’m not with Luke or any of the other titans; I’m with my father. Don’t search for me, I mean it – it’ll only lead to trouble. I will eventually visit Camp Half-Blood, but I can’t be a normal camper anymore.” As an Ambassador of Hades, sure. As some normal demigod kid? Absolutely not – everyone’s too afraid of dead things. “And listen, about my sister…”
My throat chokes.
Nope, nope, nope. It’s been months by now. I can – I can do this.
Percy’s expression shatters. “Nico, oh gods. You weren’t… The Stolls said you somehow sensed her death.”
He explains the quest, in depth, as I gather my senses. He details the part where Bianca went into the burning metal instead of him, and how it should’ve been him, how they all should’ve paid attention to their surroundings, how horrible he feels that he let her die instead of him.
And then when the group arrived back at camp, I was gone.
“You sensed her death,” Percy repeats out loud, brows knitted together. He resembles Annabeth when he’s like this, somehow.
“She chose rebirth,” I explain, as if it’ll make everything better. “It’s not your fault she died. It’s no one’s fault.”
The Iris message flashes.
I hear Percy yell “wait!” just as the message fades away.
Ah, shit.
Catharsis is a bitch.
I wipe the tears away, taking every bit of willpower not to stomp around like a toddler throwing a tantrum while within my step-mother’s sacred gardens. It was nice to see a human face attached to a living body again, even if the entire purpose of that meeting was to inform a concerned camper that I was not, in fact, dead.
Maybe I should’ve called some other half-blood, someone who won’t literally walk into a sword for his friends if he thinks they’re in trouble.
I head back to the palace I call home now, tip-tapping my stick against the rocks down the trail.