This is the first time I've written for the PJO fandom. I couldn't help it; somehow, when I was reading Mark of Athena, this occurred to me. Even though it has absolutely nothing to do with Heroes of Olympus. No spoilers for the second series and pretty much just character spoilers for the first.
I don't own Percy Jackson or any of his friends. And I don't think anyone owns the gods.
Enjoy.
Nico meets her for the first time out of Camp Half-Blood at a fast food restaurant. Honestly, he's not exactly surprised to meet a half-blood there—they tend to love greasy foods, seemingly due to their unavailability at camp—but he is admittedly blindsided when the hypothetical half-blood is her.
Not that she stands out much. Sure, she gets that look from people who know to steer clear, but even if she seems to be some kind of gang member with her plain tank top and ratty army pants, plus combat boots and a bandana tied around her arm, she's just another New Yorker.
Nico orders a Happy Meal and a shake, then flops down across the table from her. Her gut reaction is anger, and he can see it in her eyes, but then her muddy brown eyes widen in slight shock. He's not exactly a common sight among the people who know him.
"Clarisse," he greets, shifting his scabbard around in order to keep his sword from poking his backside.
"Nico," she returns. Her shock fades in seconds and she goes back to wolfing down her food. He can barely see the tenseness in the line of her shoulder, which says something for her control, seeing as it's him who's looking for the posture cue.
He ignores her obvious wariness. "Fancy seeing you here. Did the food call?" Nico hasn't seen Clarisse for more than two years, but he doesn't see anyone very often; he hasn't even set eyes on Percy for the past three months. In the end, he falls into conversation with Clarisse the same way he does with everyone he should know: by pretending this is nothing unusual, like he never left.
Clarisse rolls her eyes at him, which is a slight upgrade from her usual glower. Nico almost congratulates himself for being upgraded when the glower returns full force at him, like it was just waiting for her eyes to finish their roll. "McDonalds calls to everyone. Even though for you it's just because of the stupid little Happy Meal prizes."
Nico has to concede the point there, especially since she's pinned the reason for his presence so well—his hands were already fiddling around with the toy wrapper when she pointed it out. He can't help but grin. "And here I was thinking you girls couldn't stand the thought of the colossal amount of calories the grease piles on." He knows he's smirking, because terrorizing some of the girls at camp was all too fun when he pointed out how much his metabolism allowed him to eat, but Clarisse isn't even fazed.
"That's just the Aphrodite morons," she growls, and Nico nods to concede her point.
They eat in silence for a time, and Clarisse slurps up her shake with about all the table manners she possesses—read: not much—while Nico licks the ketchup off of his fingers.
"It's been a while," Nico says at last. It's true, it has been a long while. Too long, he thinks, and Clarisse seems to know this. The tension in her shoulders increases just slightly.
"I guess. But when are you really ever around to see anyone?" Clarisse smirks, and finishes off her shake. Nico kind of wants to be hurt by the comment, because he knows what she's getting at. Except she's got her own weak spots, ones that Nico knows hurt a lot more than his own.
"You running away from camp didn't exactly help matters on the communications front."
Clarisse actually flinches. It takes a lot to do that to a child of Ares, but Stygian Iron isn't even the most powerful weapon Nico has at his disposal. Hades punishes people for their mistakes. His children hold massive grudges. And Nico in particular has proved himself most adept at holding grudges.
But he stays calm as Clarisse shoots to her feet with what would have been enough force to flip the table, had it not been bolted to the floor. "Shut up," she snarls, "just—don't you dare judge—"
She storms out of the McDonalds without looking back, and despite her obvious anger and offensive attitude, she seems more vulnerable than ever to him.
Years can change things, and at twenty-two Clarisse is not quite the same person she was at eighteen. There's more history there now.
But Nico isn't quite as thoughtless at sixteen as he used to be as twelve. He knew what he was doing, he knew he was going to make her run.
Before he leaves, however, he throws away her trash. His fault anyway.
The next time they meet, it's several months later and more than halfway across the country. Houston, Texas, to be exact.
Clarisse is simply carrying grocery bags through a nearly empty street. Grocery bags. Such a sight would raise so many eyebrows around Camp Half-Blood that you could lift the sky on forehead muscles alone. But then, most of them, while having lived on their own, have never lived as the head of a decently steady life situation. Most of them didn't have money to buy groceries, or a home to carry them back to.
Nico's not so blind.
So he trots up beside her, and smiles—not a smirk, okay, fine it's a smirk—when she turns to give him what is surely the glare of death that has kept anyone from trying to mug her on this mostly-empty street.
Except then she sees it's Nico and stops short in the middle of the sidewalk.
"What are you doing here?" she snaps, a reflex action, no doubt. She probably settled in Houston, Texas due to the distinct lack of familiar demigods. Nico is in no way an expected sight.
He only shrugs and shoves his hands into his pockets, beginning to amble forward in a silent prod to get Clarisse to walk again, which she does. "I'm just passing through. Supposed to go to L.A., actually, but I'm staying here for the night."
Clarisse snorts. "And who exactly are you planning to room with? The sewer rats?"
Nico isn't stupid, but all that stuff about risk-assessment is just a bunch of bull as far as he's concerned. He does something stupid, whatever, he'll probably get what he deserves. So, not bothering to process his thoughts, he says, "Actually, I was, but now I think I could just stay at your place."
It sounds like he's hitting on her, for Hades' sake. But Clarisse only gives him a funny look. "That's not exactly the most dependable way to find a place in a city. Whatever, I don't have a roommate anyway. You can use the couch."
As stupidly optimistic as Nico can sometimes be for a son of Hades, he certainly didn't expect that answer. But he's used to the unexpected by now, so he rolls with the punches and grins like he never expected any other answer.
"Knew we were still pals."
Nico drops in four times in the next two and a half months. It's more often than Percy sees him, and Clarisse probably knows this. But she's not one for words, in the end, and she doesn't say anything of it.
He directly knocked on her door the first time, and the second time he hadn't bothered to even knock—the lock was hilariously easy to pick. The third time he didn't even ask verbally, although he did hesitate, give her a raised-eyebrow look and waited for her to snort and tell him it didn't matter in the slightest, before he settled back down onto the couch and ate her food. The fourth time Clarisse had tossed him a key just before he'd walked out the door.
The fifth time, there's someone else in the house who peeks around the doorway when Nico flops down on the couch and swings his combat boots up to rest on the upholstery. It's a guy, tan and blond, not exactly rugged but certainly looking strong enough to take down a decent percentage of the people out there. If you don't include half-bloods in the calculations, anyway; being trained to fight for your life since pretty much before you hit puberty tends to skew percentages like that.
Blondie stares at Nico like he's something the cat dragged in. Nico can consent to that description, depending on who the cat was, of course, seeing as he wouldn't ever call Clarisse "catty" to her face. No death wish, thanks.
"Who are you?" Blondie growls. His fists are clenched, his eyes slightly narrowed, no doubt absolutely baffled as to how Nico got in here. Well, Clarisse was never the type to go searching for the brainiest among men.
"Nico di Angelo," he drawls. Just to mess with the guy, Nico flicks out a knife—one of the three he kept in his aviator jacket, much to Percy's dismay, but hey, the streets weren't exactly nice—and starts checking the edge for sharpness, which he knows perfectly already.
Blondie apparently takes this as a challenge, and steps forward. Nico is hardly one to shy from a fight, but he refuses to look for one; every muscle in his body tenses, humming with energy and the beginnings of adrenaline, but he doesn't rise from the couch and won't unless Blondie is stupid enough to attack.
Surprise of all surprises: Clarisse, of all people, breaks up the fight.
"Jordan, you beat up Nico and I'm gonna be ticked. Nico, quit threatening my boyfriend."
Jordan's start to turn towards the doorway is a lot more dramatic than Nico's lazy raised eyebrow when they see Clarisse leaning against the doorway. She's glaring at both of them like they're just being stupid on purpose, which isn't true—on Nico's part, anyway, he's not vouching for this Jordan guy's brightness to be above that of a 10-watt bulb.
"Babe, who is this?"
Nico tries very hard not to inhale his saliva, as that would probably end in his choking to death, and tries even harder not to snicker at Jordan's endearment for Clarisse, as that would definitely end in his infinitely more gruesome death.
"Nico, Jordan, my boyfriend. Jordan, Nico, my… uh, distant relative."
Not exactly creative, but not exactly a lie. The blond looks between the two demigods. There isn't a familial similarity to be found, and Nico flashes Jordan an admittedly slightly psychotic grin just for the heck of it
"I'm her dad's aunt's cousin's niece's uncle twice removed," Nico explains, totally messing around; he's not sure such a relationship even exists, really, but Jordan's baffled look is totallyworth the verbal diarrhea. Clarisse gives him a disgusted look and Nico only grins and crosses his eyes at her.
"He's homeless," Clarisse says flatly, and Nico's obnoxious grin vaporizes, to be replaced by a scowl in her general direction.
"I. Um, okay," Jordan says slowly, looking more than a little worried. "He's… not going to knife us in our sleep?"
Nico doesn't like how easily the guy says 'us'; Clarisse is way too independent to ever only be part of someone else's 'us'. So he retrieves his slightly psychotic grin from where it was banished by Clarisse's glare and says, "Great idea!"
Of course, Clarisse ruins his fun by chucking something at him—that was a paperweight, he thinks as he rubs his head, where on earth did she get a paperweight that fast?—and turns to Jordan.
"We're going to sleep. Nico will behave, or so help me I will gut him in the morning."
The threat is so obviously meant for Nico's ears that Captain Oblivious would be offended. He smirks.
"Whatever. You kids go cozy up, I'm ready to crash here."
Jordan doesn't seem to want to listen to him, and Nico is so used to his type—thanks to some of the more stupid kids at Camp Half-Blood who always seem to "know best"—that he kind of does want to knife the guy, but Clarisse bodily drags her blond boyfriend out of the room. Nico probably wouldn't have anyway; Clarisse would get mad if he killed her boyfriend, and this is an important step in her life, and all that.
He snorts at himself and wonders when he got so sentimental about his old comrade in arms—he decides receiving a key to her apartment requires a kind of responsibility in return.
Nico used to like sleeping in. Now he's lucky if he sleeps at all.
He's awake pretty much before the crack of dawn and goes prowling around the house to make sure Jordan's presence hasn't made Clarisse dumber by association. It hasn't, apparently; all three monster alarms are still fully functional and the second bedroom is still chock-full of handy Celestial bronze weapons.
Clarisse ambushes him when he's trying to figure out what to filch from her fridge.
"Nico, what are you doing up at this ungodly hour of the morning?" she growls. Nico doesn't flinch; her ambush failed in that he's known she was there since she came through the kitchen doorway.
He grins at her, because he knows that bugs her. "What do you mean ungodly? Apollo's up and about already."
Clarisse gives him a level four glare, which he takes to mean back off until I've had my coffee or I'll have your head on a stick.
Because he prefers his head on his shoulders and not on a stick (survival instinct—what's a guy to do, right?) he backs off until she has her coffee. It's blacker than Tartarus, but from the way Clarisse sighs and closes her eyes in bliss, you'd think it pure sugar. Huh, pure sugar—good idea. Maybe if he weren't so ADHD already.
"I'll never understand why you insist getting up this early," Clarisse snarls without opening her eyes, but since her coffee is waking her up, it's a friendly kind of snarl. Yes, Nico figures his head is a possibly more than just a little messed up, what with having to differentiate between snarls and all.
Nico shrugs on reflex, even though Clarisse can't see him. "What, your boyfriend isn't up yet?" Clarisse shakes her head no, and Nico congratulates himself on not sounding bitter—he's bitter at a lot of things, really, (especially when someone else goes and tries to jack what's left of his family) but most people find him infuriatingly calm. Emotion never did get a child of Hades very far at all, and he's pretty good at hiding things by now.
There's a pause, and Clarisse does open her eyes this time. Her brown eyes aren't anything special by aesthetic standards, really, but Nico sees something in them that identifies every soldier who's lost someone. "You know, last night was actually really awkward."
Of course, Nico smirks at her. "Yeah, that's what I'm here for."
Clarisse shakes her head at him. "You did not have to make that meeting so awkward for Jordan."
"'Course I did," Nico scoffs, and watches Clarisse as she gives up and huffs at her choppy bangs. He's thinking, and Clarisse won't like it, of course, but when has he ever cared about that—"It's good to find you moving on," he says quietly.
The reaction is instantaneous: Clarisse nearly flips the table and the edge of it slams into Nico's chest, creating what is surely going to be a very lovely bruise in the next couple of hours, and the daughter of Ares is on her feet looking very, very angry.
"Don't—don't even—" Clarisse snarls, and this time it isn't friendly. "I'm not forgetting Chris, I—how dare you—"
"I didn't say forgetting," Nico murmurs, rubbing at his chest and daring to meet Clarisse's eyes. The soldier's pain is all the more prominent now, and he doesn't really want that, but it's like acupuncture. You know, needling stuff to hopefully make it feel better eventually. Although if Clarisse ever asked, it was just needling for the heck of it.
"I'm not forgetting," Clarisse says again, this time quieter, and Nico gets the uncomfortable feeling that the one she's really trying to convince is herself. "I'm not moving on. I never will." Her voice is suddenly hollow, and Nico for once doesn't want to meet her eyes. Instead he stares at the shattered remains of a water glass that was knocked off the table—neither had noticed it.
He glances up to find Clarisse staring at it too. She must feel his gaze, but she doesn't look up as she points to the doorway.
"Get," she says, her eyes glued to the glass.
Nico gets.
Clarisse is only marginally surprised when, several weeks later, her door opens and someone comes shuffling in. A cursory glance confirms it's Nico, which is really the only person who could get in without knocking on her door or breaking it down. She broke up with Jordan more than ten days ago.
More than a cursory glance, however, proves that something is wrong.
"Nico?"
His response is sluggish, and when he turns to her his eyes look glassy. Somehow, he looks younger than usual. His oversized aviator jacket drowns him a little more than is typical for him.
Nico blinks, and his eyes clear. But the sharp wariness seems alien to Clarisse.
"I just need a place to sleep tonight," he says quietly. Clarisse hasn't ever heard him be that quiet. And he knows he doesn't have to ask anymore.
She nods anyway, just in case he needs to see the affirmation, and she watches as through from a distance as this different kind of Nico breezes past her to go to the weapons room. Clarisse put a mattress in there a little bit before she broke up with Jordan, just in case Nico ever decided he didn't want the couch.
Today is the day, apparently. Clarisse can only stare as she runs through a million possibilities of what she could do: Annabeth would try to comfort him. Percy would try to cajole him out of his mood. Anyone at camp who wasn't scared spitless by the son of Hades would try making him feel comfortable .
Clarisse isn't Annabeth. Clarisse isn't Percy. Clarisse isn't at camp.
She leaves him be.
There's a reflex that every half-blood must have to stay alive. That is to say, quick ones. And, when someone starts screaming, grab a weapon.
Her weapons room may be across her hall, but Maimer is always propped up against the wall right next to Clarisse's bed. When the screaming starts, she has rolled out of bed and grabbed her spear before she's even half-conscious. The doorknob is an obstacle, and she scrabbles at it for a second before getting it open, but when she wakes up enough to register that the screaming is coming from Nico's room—and it's already stopped—she doesn't bother with the other stupid doorknob.
She breaks the door down, barreling into it with her shoulder. A millisecond later she's standing at the ready, assessing the threat.
There are no monsters, though. Nothing that's tearing Nico's bowels out with teeth or claw or sword, like Clarisse assumed from the scream. The only living thing in there is Nico.
He's huddled up in a corner, arms wrapped around his knees and face buried in his lap. He seems to be trying not to cry.
Contrary to popular belief, Clarisse can feel. She may be terrible at expressing emotion, and it might be easier for her to mock others' feelings rather than help with them, but she knows what hurts, what would be too cruel, and where to draw the line, for the most part.
Nico is probably the strongest kid she knows. No, not probably, he is. He's survived this long when he's hardly ever at camp, he's survived this long through hate and fear and a father like Hades. He doesn't cry easy.
She can relate.
Clarisse lowers her arm and leans Maimer up against the wall. Her footfalls are light as she nears, and she hesitates as she's standing in front of him. Maybe he doesn't know she's here. Maybe she can just leave and save this potentially crippling embarrassment from ever taking place.
Somehow, Clarisse thinks that if their positions were switched, Nico wouldn't be walking away.
Clarisse crouches down in front of him and haltingly reaches out a hand to rest it on his upper arm. At the contact, Nico flinches and looks up. His dark eyes are sad and he looks ten years old all over again.
"Hey," she says, and instantly feels inadequate. Hey? Really? "Uh, you… you okay?"
Nico's eyes close again and he looks away, his shoulders hunching a little. He doesn't respond.
Something about the situation convinces Clarisse this is going to take a while, and so she settles down next to Nico. She moves her hand from his arm to his shoulder and squeezes a little. That's comforting, right?
While sleeping, Nico apparently doesn't wear his ridiculously oversized aviator jacket that isn't quite so oversized anymore. He's shivering from the cold, and Clarisse remembers that it's kind of the middle of December. She almost stands to get him a blanket, but decides that possibly it wouldn't be a good idea to just leave him here.
"You cold?" she asks instead. Nico turns his head and stares at her with that familiar what the heck look. But her question is reasonable and she stands by it. "It's the middle of the winter. Do you want a blanket?"
Slowly, Nico shakes his head. He closes his eyes and sighs. "I hate December," he murmurs.
Clarisse blinks. At least he's responding now, even if he's not making much sense. "O…kay. Why?"
His eyes are full of pain when he looks at her. "Bianca died," he whispers. Suddenly, it makes a lot more sense, and Clarisse swallows as she looks away. He hates December the way she hates February.
Ten years old really isn't old enough to try being on your own. Clarisse knows this—she was there once too. Running hopelessly away from monsters, wherever she had to go, and then finally taken in by a satyr and lead to Camp Half-Blood. Nico didn't even have camp after Bianca died; he'd just ran.
Contrary to popular belief, Clarisse can feel. She's just really bad at showing it.
"Let's get some hot chocolate," she decides, and hauls Nico to his feet as she stands up. He stares at her, a little bemused, but she's made her decision and she's not changing her mind. She snatches up his aviator jacket and tosses it to him before dragging him out of the room.
Growing up in Phoenix, Arizona didn't prepare Clarisse for winter at camp. The closest thing she'd ever seen to snow before age eleven was the shaved ice in the snow cone machines and the fake stuff they put on ski tracks when it doesn't actually fall from the sky. However, she was very prepared with hot chocolate. Her mom loved the stuff, and Halloween night was always looked forward to, not just because of the candy, but because her mother would break out the cinnamon hot chocolate mix for the rest of the winter.
Clarisse had memorized the recipe. She hoped Nico liked cinnamon.
It's maybe two in the morning. Clarisse and Nico sit across from each other, their hands wrapped around their mugs of hot chocolate. Clarisse found some slightly stale marshmallows in the back corner of a cupboard under some chocolate chips (she didn't know where they'd come from) and therefore discovered that Nico liked them. The top of his mug is a two inch barrier of pure sugar.
Nico is still pretty much dead to the world. While his eyes are open, they're darker than usual, and Clarisse can see the demons he can usually shoulders hunch unconsciously over his mug.
The silence weighs heavy, deafening, and Clarisse's teeth are grinding with the feel of it. Nico is certainly not inclined to speak, and while Clarisse is generally more than okay with that, this is not one of those times.
So she starts talking. For a moment she can't settle on a subject, and then she remembers that all Nico knows about her life in the past few years is what he sees when he drops in. So she talks, explains that after she left camp, she tried making her way in New York. Key word: tried. Too many monsters, thanks to the proximity to camp, and she still couldn't escape it all. A part of her is appalled she's laying herself bare to Nico of all people, but another part points out that it is Nico of all people. Who's he going to tell?
She continues, explaining how she moved to Houston in a random move just to get away from New York. The job she got at Home Depot, since she can actually lift some of the heavy things unlike most of the other girls working there. She explains how she met Jordan there, how he seemed nice enough, and they were together for almost three months before deciding it just wasn't working.
Then she jumps into explaining some of the monster fights she'd gotten into. Less than in New York, but still there; at least she has plenty of weapons. And she's explaining with relish exactly how she gutted a hellhound before the syllables choke in her throat. She flushes red.
Sometimes she forgets that not everyone is a child of Ares. Sometimes she forgets that most people are severely creeped out by such descriptions.
But Nico, looking somewhat more normal—for a child of Hades, anyway, which means still ridiculously pale—just looks up from his hot chocolate like he doesn't understand why she stopped.
"Go on?" he suggests.
Clarisse stares and takes a second to respond. "Um, you don't—people are usually a little… grossed out…"
Nico's mouth slowly stretches into a bitter smirk. His eyes sparkle darkly. "Nothing you can describe could possibly be worse than the kind of things I see in the Fields of Punishment."
Something clicks. The demons in his eyes, the way they come out every time she looks in a mirror, too—they both resist living at camp with everything they've got—
Clarisse just starts laughing, probably sounding more than a little crazy.
Nico doesn't say anything. As Clarisse winds down, he raises an eyebrow at her in a silent question. She shakes her head, her laughter subsiding.
"I forgot," she says in explanation. "I forgot I'm not alone anymore."
They continue to live. Clarisse works at her job, keeps her apartment in good shape and her weapons in better shape. Nico leaves again and again and always circles back around at least once a month.
A year passes.
Jordan is replaced. The new guy is named Darren and has reddish brown hair. He smiles whenever he looks at Clarisse and she has a funny little half-grin whenever he's around. Nico crosses his arms over his chest and gives the guy a critical eye, but he approves.
"You hurt Clarisse, they're not going to find the body," Nico warns him. Darren doesn't even blink, and Nico stows away the knife he's been fiddling with and strides out the door. Clarisse protests that she can take care of herself, thanks.
Behind him, he hears Darren ask, "Who was that, exactly?"
"Nico di Angelo," Clarisse supplies. "He's… Well, he's basically my little brother."
Nico kind of wonders when that happened, and has to swallow a sudden, aching lump in his throat. That shouldn't hurt, should it?
Moved on, he reminds himself, not forgot.
It's a few weeks later, downtown Houston, when Nico sees Darren again. He's in the doorway of some bar, and he's getting frisky with some bleached-blond who probably does this kind of thing every night.
The natural assumption is the one that occurs to Nico, and he decides to go to Clarisse. She must be single again and probably would like a friend. Breakups are never exactly easy, even when you have the emotional capacity of a mug of hot chocolate on a good day.
So, as usual, he walks on into Clarisse's place without knocking. Clarisse peeks around the doorway leading into the kitchen and raises her eyebrows.
"This is a little earlier than usual for you. It's not midnight."
Nico smirks at her, then sidles past her into the kitchen and peers into the oven. A lasagna is sizzling, just a store-bought, thirty-second prep-time meal, but still a vast improvement from the kind of stuff Clarisse was eating when Nico first started invading her house. Cooking wasn't one of the necessary life skills you learned at camp.
"Planning to eat that whole thing?" he teases.
Clarisse raises her eyebrow. "I'm sure Darren will eat about half of it, but you could probably snitch some if you're hungry."
That… isn't the answer Nico was expecting. Isn't Darren…
Oh.
Oh.
"So, are you and Darren… going well?" Nico asks with assumed nonchalance. Clarisse gives him a strange look; Zeus knew that Nico wasn't exactly the touchy-feely type.
She shrugs. "Yeah. He's… well…" Her voice goes a little soft, but then she glances at Nico out of the corner of her eye and cuts herself off from further embarrassment. She clears her throat. "Yeah, we're good."
Which, of course, makes Nico simmer quietly in anger. He glares at the lasagna as Clarisse takes it out of the oven, watches as she picks up a knife lying on the counter and starts sharpening it. It's not a kitchen knife.
"Geez, Nico, if looks could kill. What's up?" Clarisse is staring at him with that look that tells him she knows when he's about to go homicidal.
The thing is, Nico doesn't exactly like to hedge. He is sarcastic as all get out and if he doesn't want to tell you something, then have fun prying it out of him, but in the end he's blunt to a fault.
"I saw your boyfriend getting it on with some tramp in a bar downtown," he says flatly. "I assumed you'd broken up."
Clarisse freezes and stares at him with that look that's half stone, half say what now, and a tiny, minute fraction hurt betrayal. Not many people can see that tiny, minute fraction—Clarisse is better than most seem to think at hiding what she doesn't want seen—but Nico can read her like a book. It takes maybe ten seconds for Clarisse to process it, and then her smile is teeth and Spartan. She slams her newly sharpened knife into the table she's leaning against.
"So, I'm going to go kill him now," she says, like she's discussing the weather, which she could be if it weren't for the slightly axe-crazy glint in her eye.
Nico matches her with a wolf's grin. "Leave some for me."
In the end, there isn't much left for Nico, but he extracts his revenge anyhow. Darren will probably get out of the hospital in a few weeks.
If Nico were twenty-one instead of seventeen, he probably would have taken Clarisse out for a drink so she could get it out of her system. But as underhanded as he is, underage drinking isn't something he wants to add to his record, and Percy would probably kill him for it if he did.
So Clarisse goes alone, and Nico waits up for her when she comes home, scowling up a storm and muttering about stupid boyfriends, and doesn't flinch when she throws a bottle at the wall and it shatters two feet away from his head.
He makes sure she goes to sleep and he stays the next day, executing a version of the "friend through a breakup" scene that actually works with whatever they have—their warped kind of friendship.
The next morning, however, he's gone before she wakes up, and she's not surprised.
Clarisse is perfectly accustomed to Nico randomly barging through her door. Barging through her wall, however, is a little much.
Nico deftly dodges the spear she throws his way and it thunks into the wall behind him. "Gee, thanks for the hello. Happy to see me?"
She isn't hyperventilating or anything, no, really. Not even a little bit. Her teeth are gritted together in reflex and she wrenches them apart to hiss, "Are you trying to make me go into cardiac arrest? Because I'm pretty sure you're not exactly qualified to cope with the kind of problems you seem to like to cause."
This is when Nico chooses this very inappropriate time to take a mental moment and wonder if he's a bad influence on Clarisse. He's sure she wasn't this sarcastic before he started hanging around the apartment so much.
But then the moment passes, because he shadow traveled into her kitchen for a reason. "Pack of hellhounds coming up the stairs," he says shortly, and doesn't wait for permission before lunging forward, hooking his elbow around her spear arm, and diving into the shadows behind the fridge.
He must be the only person who's actually heard Clarisse scream who hasn't been killed immediately afterward, except maybe the Stoll brothers. And yeah, he'll allow that shadow travel is kind of a creepy experience, what with hurtling through complete darkness at about a million miles an hour. And yeah, he kind of did spring this on her. And yeah, he is so filing this away for some unknown later date in his mental blackmail storage, which is actually surprisingly hefty, especially when it comes to Percy and Annabeth and the combination thereof.
Clarisse stumbles, spins slightly, and sits down hard on a crate of Zeus knows what where Nico has come out, in a boarded off alleyway. It's kind of a rough landing, and Nico barrels into the opposite wall.
"Ow," he says, rubbing his shoulder where it hit the brickwork. He glances over to where Clarisse is sitting, calming down, and wonders slightly at the peculiar look on her face.
It looks as if she wants to bite someone's head off, but the idea sickens her.
Nico edges over to her, now somewhat cautious, and sits down on a crate he's pretty sure doesn't contain any explosives. Or he hopes not, anyway. Clarisse is still taking deep breaths, but now Nico's pretty sure it's to stop herself from charging like an angry bull at whatever she's thinking about.
"So. I thought you couldn't take passengers with shadow travel?" she says lightly, her voice only shaking a little bit.
Nico flinches away from the accusation and abruptly stands. He can't make himself look at her and he mutters out some kind of excuse. "I—I couldn't. Before. I mean… I made it my business to learn. After, you know. That." After another few moments of intense silence, he risks a glance up. Clarisse is staring at him with a desolate kind of hurt and sadness that cuts straight to Nico's heart—proof he has one, despite his constant, only half-joking insistence to the contrary. There's no forgiveness in her gaze, but there's no clear-cut 'I'm going to kill you' vibe either, so he relaxes, slowly and carefully.
"I'm sorry," he says, and he's not sure she hears him. There's still two unspoken words hanging between them.
If only.
Sometimes, Nico feels like he's in some kind of reality TV show. Except usually, reality TV shows don't deal with gods and monsters—the majority of America's population is still blissfully oblivious to that particular side of their country. But seriously, the amount of crap he's gone through? Or Clarisse for that matter? You're on candid camera, you know?
This is the kind of thing he thinks when he strides into the most permanent home he's had in the past two years (which still isn't saying much) and stops at the sight of Clarisse.
She's slumped at the kitchen table. Her elbows are resting on the top of it, and what looks to be a damp rag is against her cheek. She doesn't look up when he comes in, and it's probably that little tidbit that puts Nico on edge. She always glares at him when he barges into her apartment—what does she think she's doing, defying tradition?
He sits himself across the table from her. She finally looks up at him, and her brown eyes are tired and vulnerable.
"So, you look like it's been raining for a month straight," he says frankly. Her eyes try to glare at him, but it's a watered down imitation that can't hold the heat it should.
"It's Houston," she croaks out. It's good to know she's not beyond speech, but her dull tone doesn't exactly inspire huge amounts of hope in Nico's gut.
"Point," he says, because she has one. "Dare I ask what the rain is?"
Her pseudo-glare fades and brown eyes find the table. "Dad came by," she says shortly.
That shouldn't make everything clearer. It shouldn't make Nico's stomach twist in sympathy, because their fathers are disgustingly similar when it comes to what they should do for their children versus what they actually do for their perceived disappointments.
He gestures vaguely to her face. "And the rag?"
She moves it aside for a moment, to let him see, and he bites his lower lip to keep from swearing at Ares, as that's generally not a good idea. Clarisse's cheek is darkening into what will, by tomorrow, be a livid purple bruise from just below her eye down to her jaw. There's a gash in her skin, bleeding sluggishly but smeared by the rag, right down the middle of it.
"He was wearing a ring," she explains.
"That must have hurt," he says obviously and lightly, too lightly. Clarisse gives him a look that says, Seriously, Sherlock?, but it's more tired than anything else.
Nico's eyes are steely as he stands and walks around the kitchen; Clarisse doesn't bother following him with her eyes. A cupboard opens and closes, and she can't be too surprised that Nico is now sitting next to her with a first aid kit in hand.
First step: Get a little ambrosia or nectar in her. Of course, that's easier said than done. "It's just a bruise." "You're bleeding." "I've had worse." "You've also almost died before." "Shove off." "Di Imortales, just eat the ambrosia already!"
That accomplished, he moves on to step two: Get that nasty-looking cut a little more help than a damp rag. This time, Clarisse doesn't protest as he moves in armed with antiseptic and gauze. The sting makes her wince, barely perceptibly, and Nico pretends not to notice. He tapes the gauze onto her cheek and sits back on his chair. Mission accomplished.
Clarisse doesn't look quite so much like a poster girl for abusive relationships anymore, but her eyes are still dull. Seeing as Nico doesn't have a cure for dullness tucked away in the handy little first aid kit, he ventures forth with an alternate solution: talking.
Talking through stuff isn't exactly foreign to the two of them, but it's a concept usually still arguing with the border patrol. So when Nico talks, he doesn't really expect an answer.
"Geez, I'd highly suggest to the general population not to get godly dads. They're kind of jerks." It isn't the nicest thing to say, and probably not the smartest given that these were gods they were talking about, but it's pretty well deserved. "What did he want, anyway?"
Clarisse is quiet for a long moment, and Nico settles in to wait until she starts getting talkative again. There isn't really another question Nico has for her as of yet, so he lets her stew and stares at his own hands.
"Says I'm a coward," she mutters, and the intrinsic shame of it colors her voice despite her effort to the contrary. "For running."
Nico looks up at her, thinks, and then snorts. "Well, I'm certainly not one to support that thought. I've run away plenty. Healthy idea for survival." Clarisse glares at him, but misses the thought still floating, unsaid, in Nico's eyes. Even if you're only running from yourself.
"He wants me to go back," Clarisse grits out. "Even though… And then he hit me when I said I cou—wouldn't."
Nico is quite aware of that little slip and knows why the word almost slipped out. Of course she felt she couldn't, and of course she would deny there was anything she couldn't do. Except, of course, there was.
He sits back in his chair and folds his arms. "I'm not sure I understand that, actually. Why you can't go back. It's been years, Clarisse."
She shoots him a quick, vivid glare and her shoulders tense defensively as she looks away again. "First Silena, then Chris," she mumbles to the table. The corner of Nico's mouth turns down and he slumps in his chair. This isn't exactly the topic he'd like to pursue, but…
Some part of him that Nico has been suppressing for years, now, has to know.
"Clarisse…" Perhaps she hears something in his tone, or sees it in his face, because her eyes are that of a deer ready to run. "What happened? With… Chris." The forbidden name, finally out in the open.
Clarisse's face closes. "You know."
Nico can't stop the flinch that steals his muscles for a moment. "Not all of it," he whispers. "I… I ran too soon."
The table must be extremely interesting, judging by how hard Clarisse is staring at it. "Yeah. I guess you did." The tone is blank, not pointed, but the guilt curls viciously in the pit of Nico's stomach. His fists clench on his knees.
"Please," he murmurs. "I… I know you don't want to talk about it. But—I tried asking Connor. And Katie. Neither of them would say anything about it."
"I don't blame them," Clarisse proclaims, shifting her gaze up to stare at the ceiling. "Why do you want to know?"
Nico freezes. He… he can't explain. I need to know the weight on my soul.
"Is that really what you think?" Clarisse says softly, and he realizes with a start that he said that aloud. "Fine," Clarisse says, her voice void of emotion, "I'll tell you." And in the same dead tone she begins to tell her story.
Nico remembers well the events leading up to that day in early February. Running and running and running like there was nowhere to stop, which, well, there wasn't.
He'd kind of stumbled in on a quest-type adventure, except not quite because Rachel said the prophecy shouldn't come to pass, and because there were more than three. It was supposed to be Clarisse and Katie and Connor. And then Travis had snuck along because there was no way in Hades he was letting his only brother go alone, and Chris just drove after them with a grim determination until they'd relented because he wasn't about to let Clarisse go alone. Needless to say, she hadn't appreciated this kind of sentiment.
Of all of them, Nico was the only one who'd gotten there actually on accident, missing his target during shadow travel and winding up in, of all places, the particular Wendy's that the five of them were momentarily resting on their run from the monsters.
You might think this would give Nico a pass on the guilt of it all, being an accident, but it really didn't. Because he had, like an idiot, made the explicit choice to go with them.
And he had, like a coward, abandoned them when they needed him most.
Yes, he'd sprained the wrist of his sword arm and he'd been nearly too tired to stand. But that had to be his own fault, or something. In the end, he edged away from the fight, Clarisse taking advantage of a thirty second relent in her own duel with more monsters than anyone should have to deal with figuring out why Nico thought he could walk away.
"Take someone else with you!" Clarisse screamed at him when he said he couldn't fight anymore. He could only shake his head helplessly and held his hands up in a sign that there was nothing else he could do.
At barely thirteen, Nico resigned five people to the grave and disappeared before Clarisse had been able to respond. Two weeks later, he returned to camp to find that Connor couldn't look at him with the one eye he had left, Katie would still occasionally break down in tears, and Travis and Chris were dead. Clarisse was long gone.
The only one who can force herself to tell him what had happened is currently trying to stutter around the fact he'd left.
Clarisse doesn't lay the blame on him. That's something Nico notices and cringes from. He was thirteen—it seemed so young, but he should have known better. Should have been able to help. Should have been able to do something after learning of the result besides shadow travel until he pushed himself far past his limits and collapsed on the wrong side of the Styx, to be watched by curious hovering shades.
The story that stumbles from Clarisse's lips is a gory one, one of how Travis is torn apart in front of his brother who holds his own bleeding face in one hand with more horror than imaginable in his remaining eye. Katie screaming for the boy she'd fallen in love with and finally killing the last beast they were up against.
Not before it got Chris.
Nico likes to think he's heard everything Clarisse would say to anyone, but she's never lain herself bare quite like this. In halting words she tells the air—Nico doesn't know if it's him she's talking to anymore—how she held Chris as he died, begged him not to leave her. It had been the day before Valentine's Day, and Chris swore almost jokingly at the gods for making him miss that with Clarisse. He said he'd planned to propose to her on their next anniversary, had the ring picked out and everything.
He died with a bitter laugh on his lips and left her with a heart so shattered she'd hardly been able to breathe.
Nico is not one for utter silence, but it's the only response he has. It lays heavy on them, nearly choking Nico, and it spreads into hours as the sun sets outside the little window in Clarisse's apartment.
She doesn't bother to hide her tears that course down her cheeks as she stares up at the ceiling, but Nico pretends not to notice her crying. Stupid, utterly juvenile and completely implausible, but he pretends all the same. His heart eats away at him, crushing and biting, and at last he breaks the silence with a broken whisper.
"I'm sorry."
Clarisse's fist on the table shouldn't be so entirely unexpected, but Nico jumps a good foot and gives her a scandalized stare. She's giving him one of those murderous looks she's so good at, and it's even worse with her scant bit of eyeliner smearing from the tears.
"Say something that stupid again and I'll gut you, punk," she growls, and he would be offended at his sudden demotion to 'punk' if his brain weren't scrambling for an explanation as to why, exactly, she'd threaten him for apologizing.
"I never blamed you," she says softly, and he stills. "I'm trying to… not forget. Just… move on, I guess." Her lap must be fascinating, to have her gaze glued to it like that. "You blaming yourself every chance you get doesn't exactly help."
Nico so shouldn't be snorting, but he can't help an inappropriate sound here and there. "Yeah, I'd guess it makes it a lot harder to blame yourself."
Clarisse winces, and avoids Nico's pointed stare. Guilty he may be, soft he is not. "Clarisse, you can't—blaming yourself doesn't help. You couldn't save him, true"—he holds up a hand to stall her stung protest—"but you couldn't stop him either. He didn't know what would happen and neither did you." He considers saying the age-old manipulation, he wouldn't have wanted this, but he can't. He really hadn't known Chris in life and he isn't about to cheat and get the story from him in death.
"If you say 'he wouldn't have wanted this,' I'm going to kill you," Clarisse says flatly, and Nico quietly congratulates himself for avoiding death by disembowelment for the umpteenth time.
"Wasn't going to," he says truthfully. He hesitates, risk assessment—oh, Hades, forget the risk assessments. "But I don't, either."
Clarisse stares at him, an odd expression on her face. "What?"
And then Nico realizes exactly what it is he wants for Clarisse. He stands, looks to her, and holds out his hand. "Come on," he says. "I think it's time for you to really heal. Let's go home."
She stares at him, her eyes widening slightly on the word home. For a terrible moment, Nico thinks she's going to storm out and he's never going to see her again.
Clarisse takes his hand and holds it like a lifeline, wordless trust behind the fear in her eyes saying more than any speech of change.
It's… surreal, Nico decides. Surreal is a good word for it. He didn't think he'd ever see Thalia's pine tree from this side, actually, but he was worried that if he tried to shadow travel Clarisse straight into the camp, she'd flip out and stab someone.
It was a justified precaution, actually, considering how tense she seems at the moment. She's wound as tight as a spring.
"You are okay with this, right?" Nico asks bluntly. He's not trying to give her a way out—Clarisse is too stubborn to let him, most likely—but he doesn't want to be responsible for a second and possibly worse falling out.
At his words, Clarisse's shoulders slump, more in a release of tension than dejection. She lets out a breathy little laugh. "Yeah. Gods, this is so…" She doesn't finish, but she doesn't really have to.
They stand at the base of the hill for another minute, and then Nico starts forward. "Come on."
Clarisse strains to look up over the hill as they ascend, eyes taking in everything to see what's changed. Not much—camp practically hangs in a stasis, only changing noticeably over twenty years or so, from what he's heard. It's still familiar for Clarisse, and Nico for that matter. It still holds pain—but it also is still their home.
At the crest of the hill, beside Thalia's pine, Clarisse just stops and stares.
"If you start tearing up, you're never hearing the end of it," Nico warns. Clarisse shoots him a scowl that is more fond than anything and, fast enough that Nico doesn't have time to move, grabs him in a headlock and grinds her fist into his hair. It makes him feel about five years old, and he struggles away.
She releases him abruptly, and Nico tries to smooth out his hair again when he glances up to see Chiron galloping towards them. Clarisse is stock still, her expression a doubtful mess of indecision, but Chiron is beaming at them.
Nico gives him a careless salute. "Long time no see," he says. If anything, Chiron's grin grows wider, and Nico hasn't seen him this happy in, well, ever, really.
"Hello, Nico. I'm glad to see you've returned." The centaur turns to Clarisse then, sizing her up, and Clarisse seems to sag a little. "Child," he says softly, and clip-clops closer to wrap her in a gentle embrace. She doesn't return the motion, but she doesn't pull away either. Her eyes are closed and her lips are pressed together tight.
Nico is, as usual, the unrepentant interloper in such a moment. But this time he doesn't say anything.
Chiron releases her and steps back. Clarisse stares at him, then glances at Nico before letting her gaze rise to the sky. "I guess running away didn't really help," she says quietly.
This time, Chiron's smile is tinges with sadness. "It usually doesn't." He prances back a little, hooves shuffling at the ground, and beckons. "Come. Both of you," he adds, glancing to Nico. The son of Hades isn't exactly a permanent fixture here either, after all.
Sometimes, Nico wonders what would have happened if he'd never chanced upon Houston, Texas. Sometimes, Clarisse wonders what would have happened if she'd never let him in. They both wonder what will happen if they go down the other side of the hill to find the ones they left behind, and others beside. In the end, they find out together.
Hopefully, they'll stay a little longer this time.
"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." ~Robert Frost
There is now a sequel by the title of Come What May, also a one-shot, if you want to check that out.
Drop a line if you feel so inclined.
~UnAdulterated