you were raised in comparison.
it wasn't always obvious (well. except for the times that it was), but you internalized it young. you had to eat what you didn't like, other people are going hungry, and you should be grateful. you had to suck it up and walk on the twisted ankle, it wasn't broken, you were just being a baby. you were never actually suffering, people obviously had it worse than you did.
you had a roof over your head - imagine! with the way you behaved, with how you talked back to your parents? you're lucky they didn't kick you out on your ass. they had friends who had to deal with that. hell, you have friends who had to deal with that. and how dare you imply your father isn't there for you - just because he doesn't ever actually talk to you and just because he's completely emotionally checked out of your life doesn't mean you're not fucking lucky. think about your cousins, who don't even get to speak to their dad. so what if yours has a mean streak; is aggressive and rude. at least you have a father to be rude to you.
you really think you're hurting? you were raised in a home! you had access to clean water! you never so much as came close to experiencing a real problem. sure, okay. you have this "mental illness" thing, but teenagers are always depressed, right. it's a phase, you'll move on with your life.
what do you mean you feel burnt out at work. what do you mean you mean you never "formed healthy coping mechanisms?" we raised you better than that. you were supposed to just shoulder through things. to hold yourself to high expectations. "burning out" is for people with real jobs and real stress. burnout is for people who have sick kids and people who have high-paying jobs and people who are actually experiencing something difficult. recently you almost cried because you couldn't find your fucking car keys. you just have lost your sense of gratitude, and honestly, we're kind of hurt. we tell you we love you, isn't that enough? if you want us to stick around, you need to be better about proving it. you need to shut up about how your mental health is ruined.
it could be worse! what if you were actually experiencing executive dysfunction. if you were really actually sick, would you even be able to look at things on the internet about it? you just spend too much time on webMD. you just like to freak yourself out and feel like you belong to something. you just like playing the victim. this is always how you have been - you've always been so fucking dramatic. you have no idea how good you have it - you're too fucking sensitive.
you were like, maybe too good of a kid. unwilling to make a real fuss. and the whole time - the little points, the little validations - they went unnoticed. it isn't that you were looking for love, specifically - more like you'd just wanted any one person to actually listen. that was all you'd really need. you just needed to be witnessed. it wasn't that you couldn't withstand the burden, but you did want to know that anyone was watching. these days, you are so accustomed to the idea of comparison - you don't even think you belong in your own communities. someone always fits better than you do. you're always the outlier. they made these places safe, and then you go in, and you are just not... quite the same way that would actually-fit.
you watch the little white ocean of your numbness lap at your ankles. the tide has been coming in for a while, you need to do something about it. what you want to do is take a nap. what you want to do is develop some kind of time machine - it's not like you want your life to stop, not completely, but it would really nice if you could just get everything to freeze, just for a little while, just until you're finished resting. but at least you're not the worst you've been. at least you have anything. you're so fucking lucky. do you have any concept of the amount of global suffering?
a little ant dies at the side of your kitchen sink. you look at its strange chitinous body and think - if you could just somehow convince yourself it is enough, it will finally be enough and you can be happy. no changes will have to be made. you just need to remember what you could lose. what is still precious to you.
you can't stop staring at the ant. you could be an ant instead of a person, that is how lucky you are. it's just - you didn't know the name of the ant, did you. it's just - ants spend their whole life working, and never complain. never pull the car over to weep.
it's just - when it died, it curled up into a tight little ball.
something kind of uncomfortable: you do that when you sleep.
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“Come here, you dweeb. Let me fix it.”
Will pouts, dragging his feet over and slumping half on top of him. Nico allows it with a smile and a roll of his eyes, pinching Will’s shoulder. He doesn’t react except for a wounded noise, muffled in Nico’s lap, so the situation is evidently quite dire.
“It’s just hair, Will.”
“But I worked on it!” He shifts around until he’s got his head in Nico’s lap, face turned towards him, body curled up on the grass around him. Nico brushes his tangled bangs off his forehead, meeting his big sad eyes. “I spent forty minutes with a stupid brush! And yet!”
“And yet,” Nico agrees, unable to appropriately school is face into one of somber understanding. Will scowls at him for his lack of proper sympathy, a little bit of genuine hurt in his eyes, so Nico leans down and kisses right between his brows in apology. He seems mollified, if only slightly, or at least he leans into Nico’s touch and stops mumbling quite so much.
“‘S’not fair.”
“Mhm.“
“Your hair listens to your instructions.”
“Yep.”
“Even Cecil’s hair listens to him, and no one listens to Cecil.”
Nico purses his lips thoughtfully. “I think Austin listens to Cecil.”
“Yes, I know. It’s an ongoing issue. I’m trying to train him out of it.”
“And how’s that going?” Nico murmurs, curling a strand of golden blond hair around his finger.
“Oh, well, I’m doing my best, so of course it’s going horribly.”
Nico snorts. He resists the urge to hold his palms to Will’s cheeks and kiss every single freckle at light speed, because he will screech something about how Nico is one-upping him in the romance department or something stupid like that. Instead he settles for looking at his dumb dramatic boyfriend’s face and marvelling over the fact that the cutest boy in the entire world, and Nico is being totally objective, hunts around camp until he finds whatever tree Nico is hiding under and curls up into a ball around him and trusts Nico to hold him while he complains about stupid things that genuinely hurt his feelings a little. It’s nice. So many people at camp are still so rigid around him, like he’s collecting information for their judgement day or something. Will prefers to exercise his lesser-known Apollonian talent of being a bigger drama queen than the god himself.
“Stay still,” Nico says softly, moving Will around so he’s laying perpendicular to Nico, now, head centered in his lap and staring up at the sky. Will sighs and squirms a little and turns his head to press a kiss to Nico’s knee, scrunching up his face and releasing it, and then settles in the position.
Humming something soft that exists on the fringes of his foggy memories, he sinks his hands into Will’s hair.
“It’s not that bad,” he promises, moving slowly and pausing whenever he comes across a knot.
Will harrumphs.
“I mean it, Marilyn Monroe. You can tone down the histrionics.”
“I used gel.”
Nico flicks a dried clump of it onto Will’s forehead, amused. “I can see that.”
“I followed every single one of Mitchell’s instructions!”
“I bet.”
“And yet!”
“And, yet.”
Nico has a sneaking suspicion that someone made a comment about Will’s hair, in the last few weeks. He can never confirm it and Will has been shifty about it every time he asks, but Nico has noticed the uptick in hoods and hats the past month and his little flinches every time Nico reaches up and tugs on it. Despite being oddly confident about the oddest things — why he is so proud of being able to fit his fist in his mouth, Nico will never know — Will is very sensitive to how people think of him. He needs to know he’s liked, and when people don’t like him, he gets…desperate, pleasing. The opposite of Nico, who becomes worse in an attempt to push them away on his own terms.
Nico leans down and presses a long, lingering kiss to his forehead.
“I like your hair, you know.”
“It’s a stupid mess.”
He smooths down a handful of it, pressing it over Will’s eye. He manages to keep a straight face for one, two, three seconds before he huffs a laugh, batting Nico’s hands away. Nico grins.
“I like the stupid mess.”
“Yeah, well, you like a lot of weird things.”
“Like you?” Nico suggests, pressing another kiss to the tip of his rounded nose.
“Shut up.”
Another strange thing about him, that Nico has to duck his head to hide his automatic smile: he gets embarrassed easily.
Nico never expected it of him, with all the dorky, medical-themed pickup lines and general shamelessness in his affection towards everybody on Earth, but especially Nico. When the poking, prodding attraction is turned on him, however, he shuts down like an overloaded Playstation. Nico can sometimes see the error messages playing behind its eyes. It’s hilarious.
“Will.” He pokes him in the cheek. “Hey.”
“What,” Will grumbles.
“I think you’re beautiful.”
Watching the slow spread of red from below the collar of his shirt to the roots of his hair is a delight. Nico watches in glee, wrestling Will’s hands away when he tries to slap them over his face.
“Shut up! Leave me alone! Go — flirt with somebody else!”
“You’d curse them to speak in rhymes for ten years,” Nico teases.
Will makes an agonised noise. “Who! Asked you! Shut up!”
“You’d sic Kayla on anyone who so much as winks at me, you jealous bitch.”
“I would not!”
“You would so. You rolled your eyes at everything Percy said for three weeks when you found out I used to crush on him —”
“I did not!”
“— and you didn’t even have the balls to ask me out, back then.”
“You are a — peddler of falsehoods! A prevaricator, a perjurer, and a fabulist!”
“And you sound like you swallowed a thesaurus,” Nico snickers. He catches the hand Will flails at him, pressing a kiss to the wrist, which only serves to fluster him more. He decides to take mercy when the kisses he trails down his arms result in one loud, long, tortured screech, pulling back and giving him some space.
Notably, he doesn’t move from Nico’s lap.
“I like it,” Nico admits, once Will has calmed down some. “I like that you’ve liked me for so long.”
Will peeks through the fingers he has covering his eyes. “It’s embarrassing.”
“Yes.” Nico squeezes his shoulders. “And endearing, which seems to be your sweet spot.” He presses a much softer kiss to the underside of Will’s ear, lingering there until he sighs, slumping under all the tension finally leaving his body. “I love you, Will. I love your clumsiness and your rambles and your nose and your freckles and your awkwardness and your jealousy and your hair and I love you, Will, all of you. Even the embarrassing weird parts.” He kisses him again. “Especially the weird parts.”
Will breathes slowly, carefully, evenly, face pressed to the inside of Nico’s thigh. His long eyelashes tickle his skin. Nico can feel the press of his Adam’s apple when he swallows, pulsing against his calf.
“I never thought you were a freak.”
Nico brushes his knuckles over his cheek. “I know.”
“I used to — talk about you. All the time. And your oxytocin levels.”
He smiles.
“I know.”
“Lee had a — chart.” Some of the flush rises back up in his cheeks. “A ‘Days Since We’ve Heard About Di Angelo’ chart.”
Nico bites his lip. Hard.
“The number never got higher than six.”
“…I am trying really, really hard, Will.”
Will sighs.
“You can laugh.”
Nico cracks up, trying desperately to muffle his giggles in his bitten fist. It doesn’t work very well, but the glare Will sends him is somewhat softened by the smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.
“Gods, you are — a mess.”
“Mhm.”
Nico cups the side of his face. Will turns, slightly, enough to press a kiss to the centre of his palm and then stay there, eyes closed, breathing against his sword-callused skin.
“I love you too, by the way. Obviously.”
“I know.”
“Don’t Han Solo me, you bastard.”
“Go ahead and try to stop me,” Nico challenges, grinning into the passionately indignant kiss Will presses to his lips, finally, letting Nico curl his hands in his hair.
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