“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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I actually really like the messed up skeleton Dracula design, it conveys that he’s not at full power yet pretty well :3. More explanations and two unfinished doodles under a cut—
Close up on Drac’s upper half cause the drawing was way too big for one photo of it. Something that I noticed while staring at his sprite for a while is that he’s probably not wearing a hood, but chainmail armor with a helmet on top :O!
Entire page view to get all the Dracula in frame lol. His armor isn’t falling off btw, everything is rising into place from the altar. Hopefully he’s not too gorey for general tags uhhh yeah d(TwT ).
This is him when he’s done coming together. He’s still not fully powerful or physically all there yet, but it’s just enough to be able to troll Simon at the end 💀💀💀. Anyway yeah he’s totally me when my arch nemesis doesn’t find my teeth and accidentally summons me before I’m ready lol.
Simon is literally so fun to just put in poses. He is almost always my model for drawing poses because his big thighs kinda force you to make his pose even more exaggerated to get the same amount of open space and ratio of things— yeah idk it’s fun. He’s also allowed to have some sass sometimes I think. Fun fact! I didn’t use a reference for these :3. I’m so proud! Angles like this are usually hard!!! Oh and rare family heirloom sword moment. I’m taking this as a nod to the recent Haunted Castle remake now, which was so out of no where like (*o* ). I’ll take it!!! Simon game!!! A win!!! Hopefully the next collection they put out has Adventure Rebirth in it X3.
Simon but he is staring at you with the saddest pouty wet cat eyes. Tbh I think this general kinda neutral/resting sad expression is what I draw him with the most.
Which is why I also tried drawing him with other expressions!!!!!! In this one he is surprised and awkwardly responding to being told something so negative it’s almost comedic 💀💀💀. I was imagining the one town in Simon’s Quest with some bangers like “after Castlevania I told you never to return” and “you’ve upset the people now get out of town” X,,,,,D. He’s a little taken aback and was gonna try to defend himself, but he just leaves anxiously.
Please imagine that in this one he is saying that one meme that goes “it is hot as hell in this fucking ass hot ass room I’m in… IS THAT THE GRIM REAPER⁉️⁉️⁉️”.
Yay! Putting him on furniture for background practice!!! He is sitting on a church pew, having a couple micro sleeps cause he’s sleep deprived. He may fall off cause that armor is a little too heavy when sitting down I’d imagine.
These last two are for the images below. First one is just him kinda tweakin idk, he’s been awake too long and seen too much, somebody direct him to the nearest church, bro needs rest 💀. His hand shaking reminds me tho, a couple days ago I played the jojo fighting game so hard I had to put ice on my hand 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀. It SUUUCKED like take it from me don’t play as Polnareff in story mode if you’ve already been playing for a long time 。゚(゚´ω`゚)゚。
This one is just general anatomy practice, just doodling his proportions to keep the skill of being able to draw them d(^^ ). I ended up really liking how I drew his hair in this one though, it’s cute :3.
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