“I’d pick you up at the airport.”
“What?”
“If we were normal. I would — have one of those signs, you know. When you came back from your adventures.”
“Oh.” Nico snorts. “I’m still fucking off all the time when we’re normal? And you’re not coming?”
“It is woven within your very soul to fuck off as you please,” says Will sagely. “You get antsy. You know, like a house cat.”
He laughs when Nico shoves him. Less when he loses his balance and rolls into a tree, but he crawls back, anyway, kicking Nico’s ankle as he lies back next to him, folding his hands over his ribs. Nico watches him for a moment, tracing the round edges of his knuckles, until Will’s smile begins to twitch with him knowing, and he looks hastily back to the sky. It’s embarrassing, Will’s snorting huff of amusement, but more than that it’s electrifying, zapping a trail down Nico’s spine and making him shiver.
He can feel the heat Will is always throwing off, blazing every centimetre from his shoulder to his heels, a hair’s breadth away, a millimetre of distance.
“What else would it look like?” He clears his throat. “Our, um. Our normal?”
Will hums. “New York, probably. Big-ass penthouse with your trust fund.”
“I’m a trust fund baby?!”
“Hey, Nico, how much does dish soap cost?”
Nico opens his mouth, and closes it again. Will’s snickers get louder. Is it considered bad etiquette to banish one’s significant annoyance to the Underworld? Only permanently, probably. If he only keeps him there for a couple weeks it should be find. A couple weeks would be appropriately humbling.
“And what do you contribute?” Nico asks, instead of answering. (Not because he doesn’t know. Obviously. Because he is dignified, that’s why.) “Your dimples and boyish charm?”
“Yes, obviously.”
Well.
“…Okay, fair.”
Will snickers triumphantly.
“You still a doctor?”
“Mhm.” Will shifts, mouth curled in amusement. “Paediatric in Mount Sinai. We live close, by the way. You said it’s cause it’s close to Central Park but really you like to hide my lunch in the mornings to have an excuse to come see me.”
“Sounds like you forget your shit a lot, actually.”
“That, too.”
He looks over and smiles at Nico and for a moment he is convinced, wholly genuinely and truly, that the sun that’s been hiding behind the clouds all day has finally peeked out, because he can actually feel his whole body warm, in that slow-rising, penetrating way; he can actually smell the surge of sunshine in the air, feel the red glow in the backs of his eyelids, taste the brightness of the light. Every one of his neurons sinks into his system, sighing, cells reacting to thousands of years of memory of the gentle warm of the Earth’s closest star.
But the sun is not shining, and there is only Will, and his too-big teeth brush against the bottom of his lip, and his dimples show, and his eyes crinkle, and he is more radiant in even his old stained camp shirt and fraying jean shorts than his father has ever been and could ever hope to be. A thousand planets could thrive under a hundred blazing stars and none could come close to him. He knows it, how those ancients felt, the drunken surety as they stood and challenged the gods, swore up and down that their beloveds outshone Venus, Diana, Juno; Will does, Will does, and Nico understands intimately the hubris in a way he scoffed at as a child, because the words bubble and boil and threaten bursting inside of him now. What claim have the Olympians? Over sunlight? Over beauty? Over Will?
“We’re happy?” he says instead, choking hoarsely over the veneer words, over the blocked desperation, truth. “In our normal, we’re happy?”
“Always,” Will whispers. He twists onto his knees, crawling the two inches over to press close, close, closely, hand gentle on Nico’s stomach when he tries to sit up, and presses his lips to Nico’s cheek, dry, twitching with his smile, shaking with his laughter. Nothing is funny, and he isn’t joking, but Nico can feel the giddiness bubbling up and out of him the way sadness flows out in tears; when Will is giddy he giggles, constantly, hiding it barely in his hands, and now he presses it into Nico’s skin, because he knows how Nico aches to hear it, how he watches him like he’s burning it into the ridges of his brain. “I am always happy with you, Niccolò.”
“I love you,” Nico says, fiercely, and it will never be enough, not in English, not in Italian, not in Greek, but he will try. “Te amo. Capiscimi? I love you, Will, I —”
“I know.” The tiny little vibrations of his laughter are — intoxicating; Nico is drunk, ascending. “I know, di Angelo. Sap. I love you, I know.”
He dissolved into giggles into the crook of Nico’s neck, and Nico is lying, still, facing the clouds, and he is warmed, and he is warmed, and he is warmed.
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