DISCLAIMER: Rick Riordan owns PJatO, and all the characters listed in this one-shot. Never would I seek to rob him of it.
INTRO/INFO: Just in case this was not made clear enough, it is set in the ranch house in Texas, in Battle of the Labyrinth, the night after Nico talks to Bianca for the first time after she died. Much shorter than my last one-shot.
oOo
It is not complicated. There are simply things I am willing to do, and things I am not.
I am willing to do what it takes to survive, for example. No matter how many times Demeter jumps me and stuffs Cheerios down my throat because the 'sugar-filled cereal-impersonating load of Minotaur dung' I pull from dumpsters when I'm lucky and get dinner is 'not worthy of any living thing'. I am willing to visit dark places and I am willing to do what I must to get out of them with my heart still counting down its remaining beats. I am willing to sleep in one place and then move on directly to the next. A snowy ditch that smelled comfortingly of discarded bread one night and the dark, damp, deceiving recesses of the Labyrinth the next. I am willing to leave my settings behind. I am willing to train with the ghosts and listen to their laments even though they have nothing to do with my own. I am willing to confront demons. I am willing to let myself cry, sometimes, when nobody is there to watch.
But I'm not willing to murder. I am not willing to trust my life and my objectives to something as petty and destructive as time. I am not up to the task of confronting Camp again, and I never will be. I will not stoop as low as to forgive the lying faces of Conner and Travis and Percy. I will not lose the jacket that still smells of her sometimes.
And I am not willing to leave her behind, like she meant nothing, like she was naught but another empty space that'd only served as my home for those fleeting hours of fitful rest.
I will not abandon her as she had to me.
I will not be so heartless.
May the Fates plunge me into Tartarus twice and leave me alive to deal with it afterwards if I ever do that to her. If I ever forget the laughs we shared and the nights I fell asleep in her arms and the days we skipped class to see each other. If I forget the pressure of her hand in mine and her old green hat and the wandering little freckle high up on her forehead and the white, white plains that so proudly shone through rivers of crimson, blood-red crimson, as she smiled. If I forget the moment she finally put her foot down and felt that she was making a difference at last. Of how proud she was when she left, even if it was so painful to me. It wasn't painful at all, in retrospect. If I ever forget the nightmares, if it ever slips my mind the day Percy came back with that little black piece of her in his hands, may I be locked away to suffocate and shrivel and die with the pain she'd felt when she expired by the sevenfold.
Should I ever forget what it had done to me.
Should I forget the holes. Holes, holes everywhere. In my hands. They do not hold anything. In my chest. It makes no sense at all for my lungs to continue their pointless laboring. In the walls and the roof and the floor. In the world. In the fabric of sadistic time itself. How does the world still turn, with her gone? How do things insist on moving? How do words form? How do the thoughts that birth them exist? How does anything function, with so much negative space?
Why am I the only one who doesn't understand?
Why am I the only one that falls through these holes? That falls and falls to the point where I can't handle it anymore and, long past the point of standing, fall to the ground and scream? Not even cry – just scream until my voice was swallowed by the searing negative air and still let my lips run until… Until…
…Until nothing? Until my mind is gone, too?
How could she ask this of me? To forget her and forget the pain? Could I do that, even if I wanted to? How could I leave her behind like… Like the empty box once the waffles were gone? Like this pain didn't even exist at all?
What kind of sick game was that?
Did she not know? Was she misled? Had I not proven myself? No, no, Bianca. You don't understand. It's not like that. I can't do this. I can't just forget and move on. You mean so much more to me than that. I can't… I can't just… Leave you…
From somewhere in the distance, miles and miles away, I hear someone sobbing. I know it's me. I don't care. Not even if Percy can hear.
There's not a lot I do care for these days. Just one more reason I shouldn't let her go.
With a shaking breath, I open my eyes. I know what I must do. I must hold on. I must not forget. She is too much to me. The pain is too large, too crushing, to leave many options. I won't listen to her. I won't forget. I'll save her. That's all I have to do; she isn't unreachable, she isn't gone, not yet… And forgetting would change that…
For some reason, this does not satisfy me like it should. In a desperate attempt to find something that makes sense, my eyes scan the room. There is the blank television and the sharp, thrusting, violent shadows of the stuffed game on the walls. There is the warm leather couch beneath me. Too warm, even – hot. I would say it was burning if I didn't know bigger pains and deeper burns.
But the ranch house in not comforting. It just brings back the thoughts of what conspired the back yard not long ago. Of her words.
No, no, Bianca, I'm not mad at you. How could I be? I love you. I love you, too. I'd do anything to have you back. I'm not mad, and I never was, and I swear I never will be… If you just come back with me…
But my tongue did not find those words. It died and fallen limp across in its toothed coffin and stunk up the space as it rotted in her presence. They have gone unsaid.
No, not unsaid. I will say them to you one day. One day soon.
I close my eyes and let the grief have me again, I jump into the holes even as they swallow me, because if nothing else, it is a reminder of why I must rescue her.
Because I don't ever want to forget. I don't want to let my mind wander, for a single moment, from those ashes. From the sand. From the hot sun and the cold nights that watch over her deserted graveyard. From the blank stares of the others when I'd asked where she was and from the shadows in Percy's green eyes and the pain and her gentle touch and her voice as she spoke those last words, soft and comforting, ringing clear and perfect as bells, defended with a smile and warmth and love in her dark eyes. Be good for Percy and the others, Nico. I'll be back by Christmas. Love you.
No. No, you won't be back by Christmas. You won't ever come back.
But she will. I promise myself this. The fact that I won't forget solidifies it.
I will not forget. She is wrong, she is wrong, she is wrong! It is all I have left to live for. I must not forget, I must not let go!...
…No matter what she says, no matter that she's always been right, no matter that I wish I'd listened to her more when she was alive…
I still don't know what I'm going to do, come morning when I must make a decision, and come next night when Minos will talk to me again. But I do know one thing for certain and I cling to it, I cling to it and cry, because letting go is so hard. Too hard. Much too hard for me.
Should I forget, I will die with her.
oOo
Nyx: This is what happens when I imagine Nico dying in HoH. I start to cry. And, being a writer, I let my emotions into little splashes of text like this. It's mainly just him struggling with the concept of 'letting go' – he can't distinguish it from forgetting her and acting like it never happened. Had it in mind for a while and then I remembered HoH, and either him or Hazel has to go, we know it, and since she's already had a conflict introduced in chapter one, we know that she's gonna worry about it all book long and then overcome it and that most likely means she won't die. So, in the resulting flow of emotion, I finally wrote this down. Hope y'all like it. Please do review. Any questions, I will answer via PM.
Now. Back to writing Reject's next chapter. Heh. Funny, how these two connect…
HoH comes out on October Eight, btw. Di Angelo fangirls, pray with me!