Written for Anna's prompt over at the Rachel/Nico Holiday Challenge on LJ. She gave the prompt: "It's a wonderful life," and I wanted to make an AU based on the movie where Nico is George and Rachel is Clarence (because it isn't nearly as fun if she'd been Mary). It isn't as long as I would've liked, mostly because I ran out of time. I might continue at a later date, though.

Anna, love, I'm sorry it didn't turn out as shippy as you probably wanted it to be.

Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson and the Olympians, or It's a Wonderful Life.

She Fell from the Sky, Alright
Did you fall from Heaven? Because you are truly an angel.

"Thanks for lending me your things, by the way."

Nico di Angelo grunted, taking a sip from his coffee.

Normally, he'd have more of a reaction if an admittedly beautiful woman was standing in his dingy little kitchen, wearing his shirt and an old pair of sweats he'd found in the back of his drawer. She couldn't have been any older than early thirties, with fair skin, apple green eyes, and a shock of fiery red hair that was slowly starting to frizz as it dried. He might like men, but that didn't mean he wasn't attracted to his fair share of women, either.

Granted, today wasn't exactly what he'd call normal. He'd just crawled out of a river on the coldest-recorded day of the coldest-recorded winter in the history of New York and then walked to his apartment against the biting wind, and that was after he learnt that the company he'd been looking after for years was being stolen right under his nose, so excuse him if he wasn't being a better host.

"S'fine." He muttered when she just smiled expectantly at him, clearly waiting for a response. For a woman who almost drowned, she seemed perfectly chipper. "Why the hell did you jump into the Hudson in the middle of the winter, anyway?"

Okay, that was hypocritical coming from him, since he himself had been planning to jump and, you know, not resurface, just before he heard a scream and saw a flash of red plunge into the river out of nowhere. Without really thinking, he'd jumped off the bridge and, instead of going with his original plan, decided to risk a slow death via hypothermia and save her instead. He'd then brought her back to his apartment which was, thank God, just a few blocks away to dry off.

A voice that sounded suspiciously like his friend Jason rang inside his head, telling him that, for a guy who claimed to hate human beings, he cared way too much about other people, even complete strangers like the woman in front of him.

The redheaded woman shrugged as she toweled more water out of her hair. "I did it to save you, of course."

Whoa, hold on.

"Save me." Nico said dubiously. She nodded. "Look, lady, I don't know about saving me, but from where I was standing it looked like—"

"Like you were going to jump and kill yourself." She finished, "That's kind of the entire point. I had to act quickly, so I did the first thing I thought of and jumped. I knew you were going to save me."

He gaped at her. "How did you know the I was going to...?"

He couldn't have been that obvious, could he? Admittedly, there weren't many people stupid enough to loiter on a bridge when it was freezing outside. Hell, in the fifteen minutes that he stood on the edge, he'd seen nobody pass by as he gripped the rail, probably with a constipated look on his face as he battled with himself.

She laughed. "I know all about you, Nico di Angelo."

Nico stared at her. He had a small circle of acquaintances and an even smaller circle of people he could comfortably call friends, but he couldn't recognize the redhead from anywhere, and he was sure he would have remembered someone as weird and annoyingly cryptic as her. "Who are you?"

"Rachel Elizabeth Dare, AS2." She declared, as if that would mean something to him.

When it became clear she wasn't going to explain the acronym, Nico asked: "And the AS2 stands for?"

"Angel: Second-class. Long story short, I'm your guardian angel."

Scratch that. This woman wasn't weird; she was certifiably insane.

"Your my guardian angel?"

"Yep." She replied, popping the 'p' sound at the end.

"A guardian angel. You."

The redheaded woman scowled as she crossed her arms. "Better watch that tone, buddy. Remember who's friends with the Big Guy here."

"You can't be a guardian angel!"

She sputtered. "And why not?"

Nico blubbered in response. "Aside from the fact that they don't exist? How about the fact that you couldn't even stop yourself from drowning."

She narrowed her eyes, and Nico could pick out a certain defiant gleam in them that made him nervous.

"Nico di Angelo, twenty-seven years old." She said. "Your mother died in a building explosion caused by a gas leak when you were ten. Your older sister was killed in a hit and run shortly after that. Your younger step sister, Hazel, is the only family you have left, and she goes to college all the way in San Francisco with her boyfriend. You haven't seen your closest friend in the two years since he joined the Air Force. Your first love loved someone else, his childhood sweetheart, and you were one of the groomsmen when he eventually married her."

Nico inhaled sharply, causing him to choke on his coffee, but she wasn't done yet. "Your father left part of his company to you and Hazel before he died and his brothers took over the rest of his empire. Now you run Erebus Industries while your sister gets her degree. But one of your uncles wants the entire empire, so he tricked you. Now, Erebus is going to go bankrupt if you don't sign the ownership over to him." She raised a challenging eyebrow at him. "Do you want me to go on?"

For a long moment, he can only open and close his mouth in an attempt to find the right words to say, because this woman he'd never met before had been spot on about everything. At first, he'd been willing to dismiss her as a stalker, but she knew about his first love. He'd never told anyone about that; the only reason Jason even knew was the bastard had figured it out, but somehow she knew and—

"I got over Percy a long time ago." He blurted out before cursing. "How do you know all that, anyway?"

She pointed to herself. "Guardian angel," was all she had to say.

No way. There had to be another explanation. It wasn't that he didn't believe in a higher being (though, admittedly, that had never been a big part of his life), but it was kind of hard to believe that he had a guardian angel when everything seemed to continually go wrong in his life.

But, God, he couldn't think properly when half his brain felt like a Popsicle and the other half felt like someone had gone through it with an ice pick.

She frowned. "Are you still cold?"

Nico didn't answer, but the way his shaking fingers gripped onto his coffee mug probably gave him away. He'd already taken a shower with enough boiling water to peel his skin off and set the heater in his apartment to match the ninth circle of hell, but the chill in his bones refused to go away.

She leaned forward and placed her palms on his shoulders. Nico was met with the subtle scent of lavender as she moved closer, relaxing his mind. Lightly, she blew a warm breath against his forehead, and he felt something almost otherworldly wash over him, like pure light was being injected into his system. Immediately, the chill was melting away from him bones.

"Is that better?" She asked.

Nico stared incredulously at her, something that he'd been doing a lot that night. "You couldn't have done that instead of bringing up my life story? I would've believed you from the get-go."

A slightly mischievous grin lit up her face. "Now, where's the fun in that?"

He ruffled up his hair, slumping into the uncomfortable dining chair. "So I'm guessing that the whole drowning in the Hudson thing was an act, too. Or do you really not know how to swim?"

The woman – Rachel, he corrected himself; might as well use her name – huffed. "For the last time, I was pretending to drown so you wouldn't kill yourself, moron."

Wow, his guardian angel just insulted him. After everything that had already happened in his life, it figured he'd get the mouthy redhead as his guardian angel. No wonder his life was messed up.

Deciding to change the topic, he asked. "If you're a guardian angel, why don't you have wings?"

For the first time that night, the light in her eyes faltered. Her gaze dropped and she rubbed her arm uncomfortably. "I actually don't have my wings yet." She muttered. "But Michael – he's basically my boss – said that I can earn them if I manage to help you."

"Help me, huh?" Nico's mind went to the huge debt Erebus Industries was running. "You got a couple million on you?"

She furrowed her brows. "A couple million of what? Oh, those pieces of paper you use to buy stuff? Nah, we don't have much use for that in Heaven. Everything up there runs on goodwill."

He sighed. He knew it was too good to be true. "How are you going to help me, then?"

"We're going on a little trip." She declared before she tipped her head to the side, as if hearing something. She began to walk out of his kitchen. "That's the dryer. Let me just change really quick and we can go, Nico di Angelo."

"Go where?" He asked, halting Rachel in her tracks.

She looked up at him, and the genuine sorrow in her eyes made Nico feel almost ashamed at what he'd nearly done on that bridge. "To a world where you don't exist."

I feel like this was everywhere ugh. But yeah, a couple of things from the movie had to be altered to fit the dynamic.

Still, you know the drill: leave a review so I know what to improve on.