“Woah, hey, I wanna try.”
Nico startles at the voice, tiny bone falling from his hand and sinking back into the dirt.
“Aw.” Beat-up flip-flops slow to a stop right next to him, and Will plops himself down. He shoots a bright, too-wide smile in his direction, eyes crinkling. “Hi!”
“Hi,” Nico says warily, subtly inching away. Will, either oblivious or uncaring to his intention, just leans in closer, blue eyes watching him intently. “…What are you doing here?”
“Hanging out with you. Duh. How did you do that?” He points to Nico’s hands.
Confused, Nico re-summons to the squirrel femur, dragging up the rest of the skeleton too. It chitters to life, nosing at the sliver of bare knee out from Nico’s ripped jeans, before bounding over to Will. He doesn’t even flinch, laughing as the little thing scampers up his arm and rests in his hair. Nico’s mouth twitches.
“I don’t actually know? I guess I can do it the same way you can heal. It kind of just happens, I can’t really teach you.” He pauses, squinting. “Unless…necromancy is healing, technically. Can you do necromancy?”
Will shakes his head, wincing as one of the squirrel’s ribs gets catches a curl of his hair, tugging it as it moves. “No, the other thing. The spinny thing.” He gestures towards Nico’s hands, wiggling his own in explanation. “With the — bone.”
“Oh! Oh, that.”
Closing his eyes, Nico lays his palm flat on the packed dirt, feeling around under it. He can’t see it, exactly, but he can feel buried things the same way you might feel the air shift when someone comes in an empty room. Things take up space, and there’s a record of that you can feel. Nico’s ability just extends underground, and bones, especially, are like someone entering a room loudly. He’s directed to them almost automatically.
He feels around until he gets pulled towards another buried dead. A mouse, this time, or at least a part of its skeleton. Nico leaves it. The bones are too small for his purposes.
He keeps searching until he finds a raccoon’s ulna — perfect. He drags it up, patient as it worms its way around rocks and through clay and even, notably, a snake’s burrow, and finally breaks through the surface, right up into his waiting palm. He taps it twice on the ground, shaking off the excess dirt, then poises it deftly in between his right middle and pointer figure.
Then, aware of Will’s intense gaze on him, he starts to fiddle with it.
So fast the movement looks fluid, he passes the thin bone along his deft fingers; in, out, in, out. He bends it under his hand back into the looped curve of his pointer finger when it reaches his pinky, starting the cycle all over again. The bone makes tiny swishing sounds as cuts through the air.
“Woah,” Will breathes, eyes wide, pupils wider. “That’s so cool.”
Nico shrugs, embarrassed. “It’s just — twirling. It’s not hard.”
“It’s like the bone is moving itself, though! That’s so sick!”
Nico has never had anyone look so — delighted at him, before, at his magic. Not that this even counts — he did this with sticks, when he was a kid, with pencils. It’s just a fidget, but Will grins at him like Nico’s turning straw into gold.
“I can — show you, if you like.”
Will cheers, scooting somehow closer. Their knees touch, and Nico has to bite down a gasp; somehow, even that touch is hot, even through his jeans he feels like he’s been shocked. His hands, too, under Will’s intensive, determined scrutiny, start to tingle.
“Extend your middle finger up, a little, like you’re trying to cross it over your pointer. No, don’t actually cross it, just — here. Let me.”
He grabs Will’s hands before he can think about it, and he regrets it; the contact makes it suddenly hard to breathe. He forces himself through it, breathing through gritted teeth, and places Will’s fingers the right way.
“Your heart rate’s way off,” Will comments. “You’re also producing an excessive amount of adrenaline and cortisol. You okay?”
Nico bites back a curse. Damn vitakinesis.
“I’m fine,” he grits out.
“If you say so.”
He rushes through the end of his explanation, practically flinging the bone in Will’s direction and throwing himself away, making sure there’s a healthy stretch of space between them when he sits back down.
“You try.”
Will shifts, eyes narrowed on the poised bone. His tongue peeks out of the corner of his mouth in focus, just barely, and Nico has to beat back his thoughts with a mental battering ram. The squirrel skeleton, still sitting on Will’s head, rattles as if laughing at him.
I’ll give myself a lobotomy. I will. Do not test me.
“I got it!”
He glances back down at Will’s cry, accidentally meeting his eyes — blue, blue, gods, they’re so blue, is that an Apollo thing? First the sunrise-coloured hair, then sky-eyes? Apollo’s eyes are brown, usually. Blue only when he feels like it. Why are Will’s so identical to the heavens, then? Why do they seem to take up half his face, they’re so constantly wide, constantly watching? Attention everywhere, all the time, like everything is worth looking at, committing to memory. They go near black, when the sun sets, they get so dark. Mirrors of the night sky. That can't be mortal.
Sure enough, the ulna weaves through Will's fingers — clumsy, stuttering, not as fluid as Nico, but the foundations are there — successfully.
"Good job."
The answering smile could light up the Earth in an eclipse. Nico feels sunburnt.
"I gotta go show off to Kayla and Austin!" Ulna tucked in his ear like a pencil, he reaches up a hand, waiting for the squirrel, despite not having an olfactory system, to sniff his palm, deem it safe, and crawl in. "Come on, Sammy. Thanks, Nico! You're the best!"
"Sure," Nico mumbles. He watches him run off, cradling the little squirrel skeleton carefully. "No problem."
A small smile pulls at his face.
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