Chapter Text
Venice had changed entirely and yet not at all. Every time Nico turned a corner he was assaulted by ghosts– but that was normal for him.
Window shutters he remembered being brown were now blue, while the buildings beneath remained otherwise the same. A corner store he recalled selling cigarettes and newspapers had been replaced by a phone store hawking chargers and sim cards. And the Venetians he’d grown up with were gone, replaced by their grandchildren. They wore eerily familiar faces and spoke the same tongue, only now everyone stared at their phones and ignored him, taking him for just another tourist.
He was a tourist, in essence. He hadn’t lived in Venice in nearly a century, and that was in another life, wearing another body. The modern Nico walked the streets and bridges of Venice in disguise. Today he wore blonde hair, blue eyes, a t-shirt and jeans, and a pair of tacky shoes no Italian man would be caught dead in. He didn’t want to be recognized, and so far, no one looked at him as anything but one more tourist among thousands.
On his first long walk around the city center he had to push his way past a throng of people crowded at the side of a canal. Curious, he joined them in order to see what they were all looking at, only to find they were taking photos of a gondolier wearing a striped shirt and singing a barcarolle. Nico scoffed at them disdainfully. All of these people were blocking foot traffic, and for what? A couple of cheesy photos for social media? He’d just gotten here and he was already tired.
Before he walked away, he caught a glimpse of the prices for a short gondola ride and nearly tripped over his own feet into the canal. He had to do a double take. Surely no one was foolish enough to pay so much for a cheesy, brief excursion in a gondola? And yet as he watched, an American couple hopped in, and the hammy gondolier steered the boat away, launching into a pitchy ‘O Sole Mio’.
Nico had decided to start in the epicenter of the tourist mayhem purely in the interest of getting it over with. St. Mark’s square had been just as crowded and partially flooded as he’d feared, but he’d avoided the deeper areas of standing water and hadn’t needed to put his feet in plastic bags. It could have been worse. All the while he’d kept an eye out for Saint Mark, who he feared might be patrolling the square outside his church. Nico’s disguise was thorough enough to fool anyone based on sight alone, but you could never be too careful.
He wasn’t necessarily dreading an encounter with a saint, but he desperately wished to avoid it. He was in Venice to reconnect with himself, with the Nico he’d been before he’d started getting titles and job descriptions and duties and destinies. He needed to find his roots. That meant no contact with Greek gods, no contact with Catholic saints or angels, just normal everyday humans. He was still in his divine body, but he was determined to eat and sleep and avoid magic in order to divest from the aspects of godly life that had so overwhelmed him the past few years. He needed to unplug.
His trip to Venice hadn’t been something he’d thought deeply about before he’d left. The idea had come to him in a flash, an inevitable realization that this was the place he needed to be. Maybe in some naive part of his mind he’d wanted the city to embrace him as a lost son, but he got the same tired stares and curt service that all tourists received in the city due to his foreign disguise. When shopkeepers spoke to him, they used English.
It seemed counterintuitive, but for the first two days he was in Venice he’d been determined to keep the city at arm’s length. Of course part of him wanted to be welcomed home, but another part of him feared that attempting to embrace his old hometown would merely make it obvious that he had been gone too long and his connection to the city had been severed. He hadn’t stopped by his old house or the immediate block he’d grown up on, and there was a deep pit in his stomach when he thought about it. Maybe some places ought to stay memories. If the house was gone, or had changed, would it shatter him?
His first night in Venice had ended with a sleepless night spent tossing and turning in a king-sized hotel bed. He spent every hour gnashing his teeth, looking back on all the long nights and days he’d spent as a saint when he’d been forbidden to sleep and had longed to do so. All those all-nighters had messed with his head somehow. Now, no matter what he tried, sleep never came. Even now, after a few days of trying, he was an unwilling insomniac.
Luckily sleep was a want and not a need. He got up in the morning and spent another day exploring, trying to pretend he was seeing Venice with a fresh and unbiased pair of foreign eyes. He failed miserably, but he’d spent long enough in town that he was beginning to warm to the idea of soft-launching his old identity, at least in a small way. The first step would be connecting with the locals. Only they could tell him what it really meant to be Venetian now.
Dusk was beginning to fall, and the reflection of the sky in the water took on deep shades of pink and purple. Nico strolled down the street, whistling as he walked to a small hole-in-the-wall bistro. He remembered chasing pigeons outside this restaurant, which had once gone by another name. He was standing outside reading the menu pasted in the window when a woman bumped his shoulder. Turning to look, he saw that she was carrying an enormous garment bag, one that surely contained a costume.
Carnevale began tomorrow, and the air buzzed with excitement and tension. Costume and mask shops were sold out and banners and decorations were being put up. Nico remembered how it had felt to be a child in Venice, looking forward to the festivities every year, delighted by the magic of the costumes, the parties, and the shows. It felt fated that he’d made it back to Venice in time to celebrate with his people. What better way to connect with his inner child than to don a costume and have a little fun?
He walked inside the sandwich shop and greeted the woman at the counter in the local Venetian dialect. He waited for her to give some form of recognition that he was a native to the area, but instead she responded in English.
“How can I help you?” She asked, gazing at him with a bored expression.
“I’d like a table for one, please,” Nico said, attempting to brute-force the conversation back to Venetian. “Can I sit by the window?”
“Order at the counter, then sit where you want,” she said, still in English. “Or leave.”
He glared at her.
“I’ve never been here before,” he said, glancing at the menu and trying to sound as local as possible. “What do you recommend?”
“It’s all good,” she said, looking down at her phone and ignoring him.
Nico huffed. He scanned the menu, wondering if there was anything he could order that would earn back her respect and cement him in the category of a non-tourist. Maybe for that he’d have to go off-menu. But what if the food he remembered from the 1940’s wasn’t available any longer? Maybe his favorite variety of clam had gone extinct or something. He started overthinking, spiraling into a sandwich-induced panic.
Why was this so difficult? He’d wanted to reclaim his identity as a Venetian for the first time in two days of wandering the streets. Now he wasn’t even reading as Italian to this woman. What was he doing wrong?
The door jingled. A middle-aged man walked in behind him, getting behind him in line.
“Go ahead and order, Adriano,” the woman said in Venetian. “Mickey Mouse over here is taking his sweet time.”
Nico looked down at his shirt. He’d totally forgotten that he’d deliberately picked a tacky tourist shirt to wear all day. It had ‘Proud Disney Adult’ emblazoned across the front. To make matters worse, he was also wearing Crocs with socks.
He walked out of the restaurant, humiliated beyond comprehension. The Crocs had seemed harmless and funny that morning, but he should have changed clothes before trying to pass for a local. In fairness, they’d been the most comfortable pair of shoes he’d ever worn.
He magically changed into a collared shirt and dress pants, practically running around the corner to get away from the site of his fashion faux pas.
As he speed walked along the canal he questioned his own actions. What difference did it make what he was wearing or what dialect he spoke? He hadn’t been to this city in nearly eighty years. What right did he have to think he belonged here? The only true home he had now was in the Underworld, and this trip to Venice to ‘find himself’ was mostly just a bullshit excuse to avoid moving back home with his mother. The discomfort he felt now was nothing when compared with how it would feel to walk the halls of the palace that overlooked the fields of Asphodel. It would look exactly the same– but it would never feel the same again. Too much had changed.
Nico hopped lightly across the canal, traveling further in one leap than any human would be able to. He looked up to see his old home staring back at him. After all these years, he was finally back again to the place where it had all started.
Someone had repainted it. He remembered it being a respectable shade of yellow. Now some lunatic had repainted his old house a garish periwinkle blue.
He fell to his knees.
His world was gone now. Venice was sinking, and everything was worse. Nothing would ever be okay again.
Something hard and pointy rapped him on the shoulder.
“This is private property,” someone croaked hoarsely.
Nico looked up and saw an old, withered-looking man glaring at him, brandishing a cane in his face.
“Right,” Nico said. “Sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“Scram, brat!” The old man shouted.
Great. Now he was being kicked off his own doorstep. He stood to leave, and then realized he couldn’t.
His old house was only accessible by boat. He’d been able to jump across the canal easily to land on the stoop, but jumping back the way he’d come wasn’t an option with a mortal watching, unless he wanted to look like he was part kangaroo.
The old man seemed to notice at the same time Nico did that he had nowhere to go.
“How did you get here? Did the gondola drop you off at the wrong address?”
Nico snorted humorlessly.
“Yeah,” he said. “I was looking for the di Angelo residence. But they’re all gone now. I’m sorry to disturb your evening,” he said dramatically, turning away with a flourish.
He’d have to jump and just let the Mist handle it, but he needed to get away from that house. He didn’t want to cry in front of this nasty old man.
“Gone?”
Nico turned back to look at the old man, who was leaning on his cane. He had a thick, short-trimmed white beard and beady black eyes set in a prodigiously wrinkled and liver-spotted face.
“I’m a di Angelo on my mother’s side,” the old man said, still gruff, but now with an air of curiosity. “My name is Giovanni Rossi. I own this home. What do you want?”
Nico stared at him in silence, the moment stretching out across the decades, back to the last time he’d seen his little cousin. Gio had been a few years younger than him, making him roughly ninety years old right now.
“It’s really you?” He asked, stunned into disbelief. He struggled to reconcile the image of his goofy little cousin with the creaky old geezer in front of him. Yet the longer he looked, the more he caught glimpses of the little boy he’d once been. Gio’s eyes were the same, and he had the same stubborn set to his chin.
“I just told you who I was,” Gio said, his overgrown white brows furrowing with irritation. “Now tell me what business you have here or be on your way. I can have my housekeeper call you a water taxi.”
“I came here to see you,” Nico said, leaping to his feet. He felt like he was having an out of body experience. His family– his only remaining family on his mother’s side– still existed. He was so old that he was practically fossilized, but Gio was here in the flesh. Whether it was the work of God or the will of the Fates, he hardly cared. He was getting a miracle, right when he needed it the most.
“Gio– I mean, Giovanni,” he added, not wanting to appear inappropriately familiar. “It’s so great to meet you.”
“Why’s it so great, huh?” Giovanni asked. “Damn! You’re a tax collector, aren’t you? You’ll have to pry those back taxes out of my cold, dead hands, leech!” He jabbed Nico with his cane, hard this time.
“I’m not a–”
“Leech! Leech, government leech!” Gio said. “Off my property! I have rights!”
“I’m a health worker sent by the government!” Nico blurted out. “I’m from the, uh, the anti-elderly-loneliness committee!”
“The anti-elderly what? You got something against the elderly?” Gio asked, cupping his hand around his ear.
“No, no, I’m just here to hang out with you,” Nico said. “I’m a government mandated social support worker. Or something.”
“Another one?” Gio asked, frowning. “Ah, what does it matter? You might as well come in.”
Nico followed Gio into his old house, stepping foot across the threshold for the first time in almost a century.
“What’s your name?” Gio asked.
“Domenico Esposito,” Nico said. “But you can call me Nico.” He allowed himself the indulgence of using his old name, primarily because he wanted to hear Gio say it again after all these years, and because his name was very common and wouldn’t arouse suspicion. As expected, Gio appeared to think nothing of it. Nico’s appearance, too, was different; it hadn’t occurred to him to return to using his normal face before he’d met Gio, and after that it had been too late. Gio wouldn’t notice any family resemblance.
He followed Gio through the entrance hall, past the living and dining rooms and into the kitchen. Nico was quiet, walking slowly and taking in all the changes. It was a skeleton of the home he remembered. Entire rooms had been emptied of furniture, while others had sheets over everything. It was dusty and smelled like mildew, and half the lightbulbs in the place weren’t working.
“Do you live here alone?” Nico asked, thinking that it seemed as though Gio had been housekeeping all on his own at age ninety. It was no wonder routine maintenance had been neglected– his poor cousin shuffled along with his cane, moving at a snail’s pace.
“Just my housekeeper,” Gio said.
“It doesn’t look like she’s been doing her job very well,” Nico said, wrinkling his nose.
“He’s actually a home health aide from the government,” Gio admitted. “Say, if you’re from the government too, how come you didn’t know that?”
“We’re from different departments,” Nico said. “You must be categorized as someone who needs a lot of help,” he added, hoping Gio bought his obvious fabrication on the spot.
“Bah! Nonsense,” Gio scoffed. “It’s true that I was diagnosed with dementia a few months ago. But they don’t know what they’re talking about. My mind’s sharp as a tack. I put the other fellow to work cooking and cleaning and handling my medications. But half the time he sits around doing nothing. I certainly have no use for you.”
Nico was devastated to hear that his cousin had dementia. He couldn’t blame him for being in denial. It must have been terrifying to learn that his own mind was starting to betray him. Maybe it was fate that Nico had arrived just in time to be of some help.
“Go ahead and fire that guy,” Nico said. He would be able to cook and clean for Gio more easily without another human bumbling around the house asking questions about why food magically appeared in the fridge. “Hire me instead. I’ll be your aide, your housekeeper– whatever you need.”
“I can’t pay you anything,” Gio said, shaking his head. “I only keep Adriano around because he’s free.”
“I’ll do it for free too, and I’ll do it better,” Nico offered. “Just get rid of that other guy.”
“And why should I do that? You two from competing departments or something?”
“Well, not exactly–”
“You’re too eager. I don’t like it,” Gio said, his eyes narrowing. “How do I know you’re not here to try to swindle me out of my fortune?”
Nico glanced around at the house, looking at the scant furniture that remained. The couch in the living room was a futon, and the kitchen table looked like it came from Ikea. All the walls were bare save for a few family photos and a calendar from 2004. At some point, someone had sold all of the art and antique furniture that had been passed down for generations. That in itself was a tragedy, but it made Nico wonder whether the house was in danger of being sold, too.
“You’re broke, or you wouldn’t be living like this,” Nico said. “Also, based on your behavior earlier, I strongly suspect that you owe back taxes.”
Gio snorted.
“Well, at least you’re not stupid,” he said. “Do you know how to use a blender?”
“Absolutely!” Nico said confidently.
“Fine. You can tell Adriano he’s fired. I never liked him anyway. You can take his room. It’s the little one off the kitchen.”
“Okay!” Nico said brightly.
“If he asks why, remind him about the milkshake incident,” Gio said, his dark eyes flashing. “And tell him not to let the door hit his ass on the way out.”
Nico couldn’t help but smile. Gio’s facial expressions reminded him vividly of their grandfather. He’d grown up to look just like him. With a pang, Nico wondered what he might have looked like if he’d grown old alongside his cousin.
At least they were together now before it was too late. Nico was over the moon with happiness. From now on, they’d spend every moment together until the day Gio died.
It was still early in the evening, but Gio went straight to bed upstairs, riding on a little motorized chair to get to the top of the grand old marble staircase. On the ground floor, Nico located the little room off the kitchen that Gio had told him about, the room he and Gio both would have remembered as the maid’s quarters. He’d never been allowed in the maid’s room as a child, and he found it funny that it had taken him almost a hundred years just to see inside.
He’d been feeling a bit overexcited about the new positive twist his life had taken, but when he opened the door, he was hit with a jolt of reality. The room was sparsely furnished, with two identical metal-framed twin beds on opposite walls, almost like a college dorm room setup. There was a single desk in between them where he could see Adriano’s things laid out neatly– a pair of reading glasses, a tablet plugged into a charger, a pile of books, even an unfinished mug of tea. The poor guy would come back from wherever he was to find his room occupied by a stranger, and he’d get blindsided by the news that he was unexpectedly unemployed.
Nico channeled a little bit of Christian charity, realizing that Adriano was getting royally screwed over by this situation. He’d let the guy get a good night’s rest and tell him about his lack of employment in the morning.
Nico spent a couple of hours wandering the house waiting for Adriano to get home, but the night crept on with no sign of his arrival. In the meantime, Nico examined every nook and cranny trying to piece together what had happened in the house while he’d been away.
Gio’s family pictures on the wall told a short, sad story going back in time. The most recent photo was tacked up on the fridge, a photograph of Gio and an old woman standing on a bridge together. On the wall outside the bathroom Nico found family photos of Gio with a wife and a teenage daughter on vacation in Capri, taken sometime in the seventies, if his daughter’s bell bottom jeans were any indication. In a drawer in the kitchen, he found a stack of prayer cards left over from a funeral. The woman in the photo matched the woman on the fridge, and the birth and death dates made it clear that she’d been Gio’s daughter, and she’d died six years earlier. Her name had been Bianca Rossi.
His heart heavy, Nico tucked a prayer card in his pocket and put the rest back in the drawer. Gio’s Bianca hadn’t had any children or siblings, he suspected. Otherwise Gio wouldn’t have been left to rot alone in a big, empty house.
Luckily, Gio wasn’t alone anymore. Maybe Nico couldn’t explain it to him for fear of giving the old man a heart attack, but he was Gio’s last living relative, and he was gonna stand by his side until the end. It was a clear goal, with an even clearer end date. Gio was destined to die in a few weeks. Nico looked forward to shepherding his cousin into the afterlife painlessly and making his remaining days on earth as happy as possible.
It began to grow quite late, and Adriano was still not home. Nico couldn’t wait on him; he needed to take the opportunity to try to sleep, just in case tonight was the night it finally worked. He had an entire routine built now to try to urge sleep to find him; an eye mask, noise cancelling headphones with white noise, and a mantra he repeated in his mind: ‘Sleep, idiot, sleep’. He crawled under the blankets of the spare bed in the maid’s room, put his head on the pillow, and repeated his mantra over and over, trying to quiet his mind and drift away.
Sleep didn’t find him. Instead, the moment he was getting close to relaxing, he imagined he heard Max Volume, the angel he’d sent to torment Zeus, singing right into his ear. It was like a bell ringing right next to his ear drums, like a crashing wave and a boom of thunder and a crying baby all at once.
He sat up immediately, scared for a moment that Max had somehow ended up in the room with him. He yanked off his sleep mask, but there was no fiery wheel-creature in the small bedroom.
There was a new person in the room, though. While he’d been trying to sleep, Adriano had finally returned home. He was snoring loudly in the bed across from Nico, blankets piled high over him. His snoring was loud and obnoxious. Nico’s brain must have subconsciously transposed it into angel song.
Annoyed with this turn of events, Nico listened to music for the rest of the night, trying to fill his head with something other than screams and snores. He gave up on sleeping and just laid there miserably for the next few hours. Not for the first time, he considered calling Hypnos and asking him to just knock him out cold, no questions asked. The problem with that idea was that it didn’t solve the root cause of the issue. It would just make him dependent on Hypnos every time he wanted so much as a nap, and Nico and Hypnos weren’t friendly enough for that dynamic to be comfortable. Nico was determined to re-learn how to sleep on his own, no matter how long it took.
He had a lot of podcasts to catch up on, and he was in the middle of a juicy episode of Gossip Goddess when a ray of sunlight peeked through the side of his eye mask. He pulled the mask off and turned over to find Adriano sitting on the edge of his bed and staring at him. The home health aide was a thin middle-aged man with glasses, a sharp beak of a nose, and a very shiny bald spot wearing button-down blue plaid pajamas.
Nico recognized him. Adriano had been in the bistro the day before, waiting in line to order a sandwich. He’d been there for the Disney shirt incident and the Crocs with socks. A grim resignation settled in Nico’s stomach. This man had witnessed him wearing an embarrassing outfit. Therefore, he needed to leave immediately and never return.
“Uh, hi. Good morning,” Nico said, taking his headphones out. “Sorry to catch you by surprise like this. Gio said I could move in here.”
Adriano blinked at him owlishly, appearing to be at a loss for words. He had dark circles under his eyes like he hadn’t slept, though Nico had heard him snoring like a freight train for the last eight hours, so he knew that he’d slept like the dead.
“You’re fired, by the way,” Nico said. “Sorry. He said it was something about a milkshake?”
Adriano’s confused expression quickly transformed into rage.
“What? That was one time!” he spluttered. “I’m going to speak to Gio about this,” he added, walking out of the room.
Nico finished listening to his podcast before he got dressed and headed out to the dining room. He found Gio sitting at the dining room table reading a newspaper with his coffee.
“Good morning, little princeling,” Gio said. “Did you have a restful night?”
“Very restful, thank you,” Nico said, sitting at the table beside him. “What’s for breakfast?”
Gio shook his head, chuckling and turning a page in his paper.
“I take my breakfast at six o’clock on the dot every morning,” he said. “You’re a few hours late to preparing it for me.”
“Oh,” Nico said. “Whoops.”
“Adriano goes to the bakery every morning at five forty-five to get me a pastry,” Gio said. “He always has a hot coffee and the day’s paper waiting for me when I come downstairs.”
“Good for him,” Nico said.
“I told him he could keep his job,” Gio said disinterestedly. “I don’t think you’re cut out to be an aide.”
Nico’s jaw fell open. He couldn’t have possibly known the expectations without being told them. And he hadn’t even technically slept in, since he hadn’t slept in the first place. This was totally unfair.
“I’ll call a water taxi for you after breakfast. You know, they’re always hiring down at the cruise ship port.” Gio said with a smirk.
“The cruise ship port?” Nico said, his hackles rising. “Those cruise ships are an infestation. The only reason I’d go anywhere near them is to sink them. Only I think they’d pollute the lagoon too much if I did!”
Gio chuckled, putting his paper down.
“Wouldn’t want the canals to get clogged up with American tourists,” Gio said. “They’re all so fat, it wouldn’t take much. I can’t stand them. That’s why I always give them wrong directions if they ask.”
“That’s brilliant!” Nico said. “Send them in circles for a few hours.”
Gio gave him a nod of approval.
“You do have a certain charm to you, Nico,” he admitted. “I suppose it would be a shame to get rid of you, since you don’t cost me anything. But I really don’t need two aides. Besides, it doesn’t seem right to keep you and Adriano cooped up together in that little room, but none of the other bedrooms have any furniture.”
“What happened to firing Adriano?” Nico asked. “Can we get that option back on the table?”
“I heard that,” Adriano said, entering the kitchen. He refilled Gio’s coffee, then handed him four large pills and a glass of water. Gio downed the medication with a grumble. “You must think a lot of yourself if you believe you can take my place that easily,” Adriano said, glaring at Nico down the bridge of his nose. “I’ve been doing this for six months and you’ve just arrived.”
“What can I say?” Nico shrugged. “I’m gifted.”
“Then you can prove it!” Gio said, a mischievous gleam in his eyes. “I’ve just had an idea. If both of you want this job so badly, you can fight for it. You can both work here for the next ten days. On the last day, when Carnevale ends, I’ll choose a winner. Whoever does the best job of taking care of me, wins!”
Adriano took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes.
“That sounds incredibly degrading and unprofessional,” he said.
“I’m in!” Nico said excitedly. “You’re so going down, dude,” he said, grinning at Adriano wickedly. Adriano just stared back at him. For a moment, Nico felt a flash of recognition, like he could read Adriano’s mind. In that instant of eye contact, he knew with certainty that Adriano was thinking, ‘Nico, you are hopelessly stupid.’
That was weird, Nico thought to himself. Maybe he was developing psychic powers?