a/n-I am posting the first chapter on Nico's birthday. I am posting the first chapter on Nico's birthday. If you do not appreciate the total awesomeness of this, seriously get out.
Anyway, here, have a seaside romance that was unasked for. I hope you guys like it!
Widows who lost their husbands to the sea used to waste away on the beach, staring out, half with longing, half with despair, at the waves that had stolen their love away. Nico had lived on the New York coast for long enough to hear the tales of Wailing Sarah and Mad Charlotte; of the Lighthouse Keeper's Second Wife and the Nameless Lover who drowned mere months after losing her betrothed to the same ocean. They were the kind of sad, mournful stories that his sister Bianca would have loved-she had always been more enchanted with the idea of romance than the actual thing.
Nico was different. Nico hated the legends, hated every word and name and place they contained. He didn't see the kind of beauty he was sure that Bianca would have-all he saw was the immense suckiness of life after you lost everything that was precious to you. He liked stories with happy endings, where the heroes won and everyone went for coffee at the end, even the bad guys.
He slept at the cape, mostly, wrapped up in a thousand blankets and waiting for summer to come back to the coast. The sky was always gray, the sea choppy and uninviting. The drafty cape house was never warm enough, and the salt-soaked wood wheezed in protest every time the wind blew, and all of the pipes froze sometime in October and he was forced to get water from the ancient pump well in the backyard and heat it up on the gas stove. There was no electricity. He had to hike down the cliff to the beach to use the toilet at the surf shack, which he only kept heated out of sheer stubbornness to not leave the sea.
He wasn't some sea-robbed widow, anyway. He wasn't lovelorn or desperate or wasting away, or anything that romantic. He just stayed at the cape because someone had to. Even if everybody else had long since left, he knew that someone had to stay behind. Someone had to wait for Percy.