A/N: Well, this is my newest PJO one-shot. It focuses on Nico again, what a surprise. I'm sort of hiding out from everyone in this fandom though, because...well...I mean...Sick seemed like such a fun idea when I started it and then I realized I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA HOW PERCY AND NICO WOULD INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER AFTER TLO. NO. FREAKING. IDEA. My first guess is that they would be friendly, but there's just so much bad blood between them, I don't know. They seemed to have buried the hatchet by the end of BotL, but then there was all that angst about Nico betraying Percy in TLO and then he made it up to him and so I was like what is this. Basically, I have no grasp of Percy or Nico's characters, and I would completely mangle them if I tried to write them. This is about all I feel comfortable doing. So, enjoy.
Blood. Warm, scarlet liquid, shockingly red against the olive skin, oozing between his fingers and dripping lightly onto the floor.
"I was hoping you'd give up."
Too much. All too much. He needed more. He dragged the celestial bronze knife slowly across his skin again, almost glorying in the pain of it. It felt good. It cleared his head.
"It's not Percy you're mad at, Nico. It's me."
Hell yeah! Hell yeah, Nico was mad at Bianca, furious with her! Why was she helping Percy, and not him? Why did she appear for Percy and not him, Nico, her little brother, who loved her and missed her and needed her? Percy had killed her!
Too much. Another.
A neat slice was carved into his skin, and blood flecked the blade, a steady drip of constant red now. Minos had told him that one day Hades would collect his soul. Was there anything wrong with speeding up that process? Was there even a point to life anymore?
Bianca was helping Percy, her killer. Bianca was dead and she didn't care about Nico. Maybe she never had. It wouldn't be the first person who Nico had honestly trusted to care for him, and then stabbed him in the back.
But…she'd said she loved him…
Tears gathered in his eyes. He wanted to die. He wanted to die. The Underworld would be better than this pain, he was sure. He dragged the knife across his skin again, hoping it would help, but it only made everything better for a moment. And then he was crying again, the knife slipping from his grip, his forehead resting on his knees. He wanted to die. Nico slowly lifted his head from his knees, picking up the knife again and examining it with a calculating eye. He'd already given himself three cuts, all deep enough to scar, but far enough from the vein to be safe. If he threw caution to the wind, and crept closer to the vein, and cut a little deeper than he ever had, would he die? The thought triggered more tears, and something in him went cold as he considered it.
He leaned against the wooden cabinet, resting his head against the cool ceramic tile of the sink. He wanted to die. Things would be better if he was dead. He lifted the knife again, inching it closer and closer to his wrist, letting the bloodstained blade fall upon his skin. If he did it now, there'd be no more monsters. Not just the ones that followed his scent and tried to kill him, but the ones that lived in his head, as well. The ones that tormented him every day of his life. The ones that wasted no time hiding under his bed or in his closet. They used every moment of every day to try and tear him apart.
A whimper escaped his lips as pain began to gnaw at his bleeding wrists. Nico didn't know if there were any bandages in this bathroom, seeing as the two men who ran this stupid ranch were immortal. Did immortals even need bandages? He didn't know.
Nico glanced down at his hands again, one clenched into a fist around the blade of the celestial bronze knife. He could faintly feel the cold material biting into his skin, drawing more blood, but he just couldn't bring himself to care. This was what he'd wanted, right? To die?
A sudden fear sparked within him, icy cold and sharp. Everything about him was cold these days, but this cut through his sudden spell of numbness faster than the blade in his hands ever could. Nico realized suddenly that he was afraid. He was the son of the god of death. He conversed with ghosts on a regular basis. Yet he was afraid of dying. A frightening, crystal clear realization crept up on him: he didn't want to die. He wanted Bianca back, but he didn't want to join her. And he didn't want to face Percy in the morning, but he didn't want to die. It was just that he didn't want to keep living this way.
He started crying then, in earnest this time, memories piling up on him, rising higher than him before engulfing him completely. The fear still resided in his stomach the deeper the knife cut into his palm. He was afraid. He wasn't just afraid of dying, but he was afraid of living, too. Afraid that, if he lived, things would only get worse. And he was afraid because he was alone in a bathroom at the Triple G Ranch, contemplating the pros and cons of suicide, with bleeding wrists and a knife in his hand. Nico was suddenly very frightened that he would start cutting one day and he wouldn't be able to stop. Slicing open his skin felt as natural as breathing. The blood that rewarded him, trickling out in slow, scarlet drops was always beautiful to him. And suddenly he was afraid that if he did it again, used that knife one more time, that it might be the final time he used it.
He wasn't strong enough to keep going, the way everyone expected him to. He wasn't strong enough to forgive Percy, the way Bianca wanted him to. And he definitely wasn't strong enough to stop crying, the way he tried to tell himself to. The tears just kept falling. Everything hurt. Everything felt blurred, like he was trying to look at the world through a funhouse mirror.
He'd thought he'd had it all figured out. He'd thought if he got Daedalus and brought Bianca back, everything would be better. But nothing was that simple anymore, nothing was black or white. There were so many shades of gray, how was he expected to choose the right one?
He squeezed his eyes closed, sensing rather than feeling the knife sliding out of his grasp. He heard it hit the floor with a dull thud, but at the moment, he didn't care. He knew that there were some people in the house bound to still be awake, but he didn't care. He just didn't care.
How had he gotten to this point? He was completely alone. Nobody cared for him. He wasn't even being dramatic when he thought this – just honest. He knew that Bianca couldn't possibly have cared for him. She'd wanted him to give up, like it was that easy to let go of the only piece of family you had left, the only piece of family you'd ever known. And Percy…while Bianca may have deemed him trustworthy, her judgment calls were clearly way off now that she was no longer among the living. And even if Percy was to be trusted, he'd never cared either, Nico reminded himself. He'd always sounded annoyed whenever the younger demigod asked him questions, or tried to find out things about Camp Half-Blood.
Annabeth was nice enough. She was tough and beautiful and nice to him, but she was on Percy's side. And Percy couldn't be trusted. Percy didn't even like him. Annabeth was nice out of pity. She kept throwing him sympathetic glances all day, and it infuriated him. He didn't want her pity! He didn't want anyone to pity him! He was doing fine on his own!
The angry thoughts stopped there. "Fine". Yeah. Right. If he was fine, he wouldn't be sitting in the bathroom, leaning against the sink, crying his eyes out. Nico swallowed thickly, struggling to choke back the tears. He didn't want to leave the relative safety of the bathroom, because that would mean stopping all of this. And honestly, he knew he wasn't strong enough to live without his knives. He picked the knife up from the floor and slipped it in the pocket of his aviator jacket. Slowly, the young demigod dragged himself up from the floor, wiping at his eyes. He wasn't allowed to cry anymore. The crying portion was over. He would go to one of the bedrooms, but he wasn't allowed to cut. Bloodstains were harder to scrub out of carpet or blankets – he needed to confine this activity to the bathroom. He opened the cabinets over the sink, scanning them. There were a few bottles of nectar, and some squares of ambrosia in a baggie, and…he pushed the ambrosia aside, and there were the bandages, looking extraordinarily out of place, being so normal.
Nico grabbed the box up and set it down on the bathroom counter beside him, turning the sink on. The water rushed into the ceramic bowl and Nico grabbed off a few squares of tissue paper, soaking them thoroughly and squeezing a little bit of soap onto them. He could have gone the less cautious route of eating a small bite of ambrosia to patch him up more thoroughly, but he wanted to keep the cuts. He needed this pain, to remind himself that he was still alive, until a monster or his own damaged, frayed mind decided to change that.
Until he made a decision about the rest of his life, knives would have to be his answer.