#weird solangelo

[mediumgayitalian]

“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.”

[luvingsolace]

Will Solace calling Octavian an anemic loser as if his boyfriend hasn’t like 50 undiagnosed conditions

[boymeetsluve]

Another freak4freak solangelo headcanon I have is Will being soo morbidly obsessed with Nico’s biology.

Like I HC that Nico’s regular waking/resting heartbeat is everyone else’s sleeping heartbeat and when he’s asleep he’s physically closer to a coma patient. I think once Will gets comfortable with this and realizes it’s not a reflection of Nico’s poor health but just How He Is he is soooo curious and obsessed with figuring out what makes Nico tic physically.

I also HC that Nico is unvaccinated and as someone who travels the world he should be dead 7 times over but he’s never so much as caught a cold. Will pokes and prods and realizes that Nico’s predisposition to the sphere of Death extends beyond rotting food and killing plants — it also means that virus/bacteria/whatever Science shit can’t fully incubate in his system, he kills them before they can manifest into a sickness. (Also, sub HC here that this is how Will eventually becomes comfortable learning to use his plague powers. Between Nico understanding the weight of wielding power that not only CAN seriously harm/kill but is MEANT to seriously harm/kill and being nearly incapable of harming him and being a good enough healer to fix him even if things go wrong, Nico is the only person who knows for a long time and is the only person Will uses that power around).

Beyond their dissection dates, when the infirmary is slow Will takes blood, runs test, and generally turns full Dr. Frankenstein on Nico to understand what being a death-related child of Hades means for the physical body (another sub HC that demi-god bodies are Strange and can vary based on who their godly parents are — I.e. Apollo kids being abnormally warm). Nico loves every minute of it and comes up with half of the experiments himself.

[alnair-jpg]

Solangelo Week?! Day 2- archery :)

@solangeloweek

[pestopastaenjoyer]

there is something so funny abt nico leaving camp bcs ‘no one wanted me there im too freakish for them blah blah blah’. will (aka the cutest boy at camp) was absolutely writing ‘william di angelo’ over and over again in the margins of his top secret diary (gelly roll glitter pen as his weapon of choice) kicking his feet and blushing hearts scribbled all over the pages planning what he wanted to name their kids ‘i think we would have two girls they would call me dad and him papa i think two is the perfect amount maybe three if he really wanted i wouldn’t mind at all whatever would make him happy’. are you serious

[jztr-77]

it's ok nico your crush is actually kinda freaky

[aroaceleovaldez]

I was reading a post about CoTG and I realized: Rick has seemingly started to write every character pairing with the exact same dynamic, and he's not good at writing that dynamic and it doesn't make sense for 90% of the characters he writes it for.

It's that very specific dynamic of one half of the pair who is almost aggressive to the other party - "teasing" them constantly/insulting them, affectionately punching/judo flipping/maiming/etc, seemingly almost always exasperated with the other - and said other party usually just accepts this treatment or blanketly views it fondly, and may generally be framed as more incompetent than their partner and a little bit of a doormat (particularly relating to being insulted/teased/etc by their partner).

We start seeing this dynamic in HoO with Percy and Annabeth, as a sort of semi-inconsistent twist on their rivals-to-friends-to-lovers dynamic from the first series. Then the dynamic pattern develops further with Leo and Calypso. Then Magnus and Alex. Then Nico and Will, particularly in TSATS. And now in CoTG, it's Percy and Annabeth again but even more in this direction.

I know people have talked about Nico and Will's relationship over the series rapidly being shoehorned into Percabeth Two™, and it's extremely apparent in TSATS that Rick's doing it on purpose (including directly quoting Percabeth scenes but minorly tweaking them to be Solangelo). But recognizing it as an overarching trend in Rick's later books honestly reminds me a lot of how Rick started trying to apply the "Percy Formula" so-to-speak to nearly every protagonist in HoO (and then try to replicate similar character archetypes with Magnus and Apollo's narrations - moreso Magnus in being jaded and sarcastic, very much trying to be first series Percy. He only sounds unique because Rick failed at making him Percy 2. Apollo is more akin to later-series Percy characterization of being goofy and incompetent. Apollo [and Zeus] even got retconned to give Apollo a more similar backstory to Percy's). Rick seems to have decided that he thinks the audience wants this specific dynamic but 10 times over, except he's not good at writing it the first time because it's a bastardization of the time he did a different thing okay.

And Rick also seems aware of that too! Because he retconned Calypso and Leo at the end of TOA, probably because he realized how absolutely awful it was reading when they were written with that dynamic of Calypso just functionally hating Leo and constantly being aggressive towards him! The only time Rick's actually made the dynamic even semi-successful was with Magnus and Alex, because it actually fits within their characters, their dynamics with each other, and their environment. Alex beheading Magnus on the regular works out fine because there are no repercussions to that in Valhalla, Magnus will be fine, so it does genuinely come off as humorous. And Alex has been effectively established to be abrasive at times but have her genuine feelings shine through regularly, and that meshes well with Magnus' jaded-and-aloof-but-quietly-very-empathetic character. And Magnus has been established to, yes, not be great at combat, particularly compared to Alex. They are the only time that flavor of dynamic in that form was effective and cohesive.

Percabeth is no longer rivals-to-friends-to-lovers badasses on equal levels with shaky pasts who finally found some form of permanence with one another. Now it's super smart doting and affectionately aggressive girlfriend and her silly goofy 50%-of-the-time incompetent boyfriend who she judo flips/pushes off cliffs/etc - but affectionately~! Solangelo is trying to riff off of the early series "Poseidon & Athena are enemies" dynamic that Percabeth had but with Apollo & Hades being "opposites" but learning to accept each other, except it ends up with Will just coming off as a huge asshole and Nico being retconned to a complete doormat about it - when prior to that those characterizations would be completely contrary to their established characters (even just from TOA!). Calypso in HoO gets retconned from her PJO characterization to being snooty and aggressive, and Leo's false persona gets merged into his just normal personality except he just also becomes a doormat but more goofy than Nico with occasional haha-dark/depression-humor! Which Nico also got. Which was also a bastardized Percy trait that got redistributed.

It's exhausting. Rick write more than one relationship dynamic you can do it I promise

[skysmadness]

i get physically sick when i remember nico's internal monologues when he looks at will

[ashpkat]

excuse me sir . he asked for no pickles

[fairybonesandstardust]

nico: damn whats the weird apollo kid doing here?

also nico: oh shit he has crush on me

will twirling his hair applauding himself because he’s just SO subtle

[gatesofember]

I think Nico should do some kind of Pavlovian conditioning on Will so that he starts glowing every time Nico claps twice

[luvingsolace]

I think we as a society should stop considering Nico di Angelo as cool and accept he’s actually a fucking loser

[snoelledarts]

✨ It has been done!! ✨

My Percy Jackson and co. stickers are here : D Grab Percy smokin' a joint or "WHO SAYS I AM GAY" Nico vs Ally Jason today! Here!

(Was that good? Am I doing this right?)

the girlies are next I PROMISE

Nico and Will "Save a horse ride a cowboy" "Be Gay Do Crime" are ALSO up!

[imobsessed123]

I’ve convinced myself I’m solangelo’s kid sorry everyone

[yourelocaltransdude]

IM FINALLY DOING AN ART DUMP

the ones with the wood background (minus the sketchbook) are presents for my friend there rest is for me (I made all of them)

Also

@xerogravityorange

I made your child in this

[where-is-the-angst]

as promised, here’s my first time drawing solangelo!