It's been two hundred and forty-one days, and the first human Will sets eyes on looks like death in an oversized Hawaiian shirt.
Will is so pleased to see another human being that for a moment, he forgets about Jake and his vacant eyes and being left alone in a dark house, he forgets about crumbling architecture and helicopters buzzing overhead and corpses that wander the streets at night. He feels the sun on his back and the teenaged boy standing in the street with a bag of pretzels and a sword hanging loose at his side looks like death itself but he's alive and it's the first time Will has seen another human being in two hundred and twelve days.
"Are you alone," Will asks, his voice hoarse and cracking from so long without use, and he's powerless against a sword if the boy tries to use it but the boy is real and human and wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Will doesn't think he's really a threat.
"Yeah," the boy says, and his voice is hoarse, too. "You?"
"Yeah," Will says.
Later, eating the boy's pretzels and the jar of salsa Will found, the boy says his name is Nico and that he's been alone since the world ended.
It's been two hundred and forty-one days, and the boy in the Hawaiian shirt looks like death and smells like loneliness and Will thinks that if he tasted him, he'd taste the war on his olive skin and the loss in the crevices of his mouth.
Nico is quiet, which is okay, because Will talks enough for the both of them. They wander derelict parking lots and set up camp in the grocery store aisles beside the self-help books and Will talks and talks and talks, about music and sundials and poetry and art and the Black Plague and archery and famous prophets and how, before the world ended, he was going to college to become a doctor.
Nico says, soft and sallow, "You talk too much," but he doesn't say it like it's a bad thing, and he looks at Will like he's warmth and light and fine wine and delicate paintings and a forgotten language that Nico is rediscovering.
So Will doesn't think about Jake, he thinks about how the calluses on his fingers from playing guitar are worn soft by so long without playing and he thinks about how there's art even in death and he thinks about wide dark eyes and olive skin and chapped lips and he thinks he could write a million sonnets about the give and take of his relationship with Nico, where Will is giving giving giving words and thoughts and emotions and laughter and Nico is taking taking taking with a downturned mouth and an upturned nose and listening ears greedy for every word that pours from Will's lips because after so long of hearing nothing but the howling of the dead and the harsh pant of his own breath, now Nico is hearing Will's voice.
Will gives Nico one of Jake's old Henley's because Nico grumbles about the tacky Hawaiian shirt, and suddenly the scrawny sixteen year old boy isn't so scrawny when he's not being swallowed whole by swirls of colors and patterns. There's lean muscles writhing under the Henley and Nico looks like something precious left behind, and Will doesn't know if he's talking about the shirt or Nico or himself when he thinks that.
Nico gives Will music, finds an old mp3 player and pair of earphones, and they listen to the crooning of slow music, all i see are dark gray clouds in the distance moving closer with every hour, until the batteries run out and then they find more, they listen to every song on the mp3 player a hundred times over and Will sings along and Nico asks, once, if Will ever thought about becoming a musician.
"I've always wanted to be a doctor," Will replies, shaking his head and crowding in closer to Nico, the volume on the mp3 turned up loud in a futile attempt to drown out the screaming outside the grocery store. "I love music, I always have, but I wanted to help people in a way that music can't. Music heals the heart, I wanted to heal the body."
Nico says, "I destroy everything I touch," like a confession and looks at Will like a challenge, like Go ahead, try to tell me otherwise, I'll prove you wrong and swallow you whole.
"You can't destroy that which is already ashes," Will replies, and reaches out, twines his dirty fingers through Nico's dirty fingers, ten dirty fingers snug and tight and clinging close, and Will says, "I can't heal you and you can't destroy me. A match made in heaven."
"Or hell," Nico replies, and he pulls his hand away, draws his knees up to his chest, and Will lets him go, because he knows how this ends and he doesn't want to be cast away again, doesn't want to be left like trash on the abandoned shoreline, not again, not after Jake, so he pulls back, listens to the soulful cry of the woman singing why do you turn away, you are the one who asked me to stay, you are my home.
They find an RV close to sundown one night, door hanging open, the inside warm and tattered but livable, and when Will goes to check the bedroom, he finds a battered guitar case. Inside the case is a guitar, and while Nico locks the RV doors and checks the kitchen for food, stuffs their own cans in the cabinets, Will tunes the guitar by ear and says, softly, "You look like a Calliope. That's your name, right, baby girl?"
Nico comes into the room, crawls onto the bed beside Will and pushes his shoes off with his toes, stares up at the ceiling and orders, "Serenade me."
So Will sings, "Well I thought that we could sit around and talk for hours," and strums Calliope's strings and she plays beautifully, a soft melody that lulls Nico to sleep and outside the dead are screaming and crying out and Will can't hear them at all because he's here, in this moment, singing this song while this boy sleeps on the bed beside him, and Will remembers that music was created for this purpose, healing the heart and the soul and all the soft bits in between, but Will's hands can't do that even with a scalpel and that's why he wanted to fix the fleshy bits, and now he can't do that, either.
He sings and plays long after Nico falls asleep, long after his fingers are sore and bleeding and his voice is hoarse, because he'd forgotten, somewhere between the world ending and being alone and meeting this strange boy with the olive complexion and midnight eyes, what it's like to do something simply because you enjoy it.
The first time Will killed one of the corpses, it was twenty-nine days into the end of the world. When he woke up the next morning, Jake was gone, the bed empty and cold beside him.
After that, Will didn't care so much about surviving as he did about getting the hell away from the house he'd shared with Jake for nine months, all the way up until that night, the night Will killed someone in front of Jake and Jake ran away.
The first time Will kills one of the corpses in front of Nico, Will shakes and throws up and leans against the RV door until he can breathe again, because he almost didn't make it back to RV in time and he should have died but he didn't because he killed the thing first, just like all those times before, and he looks up at Nico and expects to see fear and disgust and horror simmering in dark eyes.
Instead, he sees concern and compassion and Nico's hands are cupping his jaw, his voice saying Will, Will, it's okay, you're okay, and Will doesn't think twice about collapsing into Nico's arms, about letting the sixteen year old drag him to the bed in the back of the RV, about shivering the whole night and clinging to Nico, burying his face in his neck and breathing in the faded scent of loneliness, and he presses a kiss to the joint between Nico's neck and shoulder because if Nico is going to leave him in the morning, he wants to know.
(He's right and he's wrong. Nico does taste like war and loss, but he doesn't leave.)
They're somewhere in New York, according to the road signs, and Will strums out chords and notes and melodies on Calliope while Nico drives, and Will talks aimlessly, talks round in circles, talks about the philosophy class he was taking at the university and a photography project he did once where he took a picture of the sunset every night for an entire year and strung them up like paper lanterns in his bedroom and he talks about an art museum he always wanted to go to in Manhattan but never got the chance, never had the money.
Nico interrupts to say, "My sister was one of the infected, in the very beginning. I had to shoot her. That's why I'm alone."
When Will doesn't say anything, just continues strumming a soft tune, Nico adds, "I was searching for my half-sister, when you found me. I don't even know if she's still alive, but I was hoping that I'd find her if she was."
"Why'd you stop searching?" Will asks, his voice flat and quiet because he's never had anyone to search for, because everyone he needed was holed up with him in warm sheets in a one bedroom house in Arizona, and then he lost that.
"I found you," Nico says, and when Will looks up at him, Nico's eyes are on the road, his jaw is set tight, and Will realizes with startling clarity that Nico isn't going to leave him like Jake did.
He says, "My dad skipped out before I was born and my mom died when I was sixteen. My boyfriend, Jake, was all I had left when the world ended, and he left, too, the first time I killed one of the corpses. It was trying to bite him. I killed it, and he left."
Nico glances over at him, eyebrows pinched together. He doesn't reply, but he doesn't have to. Will plucks a couple notes on Calliope and sings, "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray," and Nico's voice is sandpaper and harsh whiskey when he sings along, and Will has never heard the song sound any better.
Nico shakes Will awake early, a genuine smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as he says, "Will, Will, come on, wake up, I need to show you something."
Will lets Nico drag him out of bed, out of the RV, and he's just in his boxers and an old Henley (he doesn't remember if it was his or Jake's anymore) when he stands on the front steps of the art museum he'd talked about a couple days before and he says, "You remembered."
Nico says, "Duh," and twines his fingers through Will's, ten dirty fingers locked together tight like lifelines, and they break into an art museum in their boxers.
"Look, look," Will gushes, "look, it's Minerva Hunt's work. The Architecture of Loss. She wasn't even an artist, you know, not really. She was only a couple of years older than me, I think, and she had all these big dreams about being an architect, and I guess that's its own form of art, but she was just this girl from this small town in Virginia who sketched buildings and look, Nico. I have such an art boner for her work."
Nico's gaze flickers to Will's crotch and he says, voice amused, "I can see that."
Will ignores him, drags him through the exhibit, talks about the artists he knows and gushes over the art he doesn't recognize, gushes over the art he does, feels like he can't get the words out fast enough when he tries to talk about the watercolor painting called Sunkissed where the dark swirls bleed into vibrant yellows and golds and Will could talk for hours about the artist, who goes by Apollo, and he realizes when they're walking back out of the museum hours later to get dinner that he's still in his boxers, and he's still holding Nico's hand.
They set up the mattress from the RV in the museum underneath Sunkissed, even though it's more work than necessary, and that's where Nico kisses Will, chapped lips against chapped lips, dirty fingers on a stubbled jaw line, the boy who looks like death with his mouth slotted against the mouth of the boy who can't stop talking.
Sunkissed.
They make out all the time, after that. In the RV before going to bed, in the RV when they wake up in the morning, quick kisses on food supply runs, sloppy kisses against counters and in libraries where they're stealing books and sweet, soft kisses every time they have to split up for any reason.
They're kissing, mouth against mouth, body flush against body, hands in hair and on hips and tucked in belt loops and back pockets, Will's back against the wall of the grocery store and Nico plastered along his front, when they hear an amused chuckle and everything goes still.
This is it, Will thinks grimly as Nico steps away, we had a good run and we made out a lot and Nico never left and I'm not going to die alone, and then the voice twists into a silhouette, which twists into a boy with shaggy dark hair and shining sea green eyes, and there's a fierce girl with wild blond hair hanging onto his hand like an anchor, and the boy smiles, a stark contrast against the world they live in, and says, "Sorry to interrupt, but you're blocking the aisle and I really want to get to the Twinkies behind you."
Nico knows them, knows the girl and the boy with their linked hands and her stormy eyes and his kind smiles, and the boy chokes up a little bit and wraps himself around Nico and Nico stares, wide-eyed, at Will over his shoulder.
"Percy," he chokes out, and ends up wrapping his arms around the older boy, pressing his face into a mop of dark hair, and Will looks up at the girl and says, "I think your boyfriend knows my boyfriend."
It's the end of the world and they haven't talked labels, haven't needed to, but Will feels a surge of happiness when he says it, my boyfriend, and he realizes he's in love with Nico who doesn't have a last name, who looks like death warmed up a little bit and doesn't smell so much like loneliness anymore and tastes like war and loss but something warmer, too, something that settles easily in the pit of Will's stomach, something like home and mine and forever.
"I'm Annabeth," the girl says, and her lips curl into a razor-sharp smile. "My husband is your boyfriend's cousin."
It's been three hundred and twenty-three days, and the first humans Nico and Will meet are on a mission to save the world.
Annabeth sketches while Percy drives, and Nico lies with his head in Will's lap and Will's fingers in his hair, and Will and Percy banter back and forth, and for once, the RV is filled with two voices bouncing back and forth and the silence doesn't stretch out as an endless reply, like it did when it was just Nico and Will.
Percy talks about his wife and the fish documentaries he used to make and the degree he was getting in marine biology and how he'd written a book about teenagers saving the world but the world ended a couple months before it was supposed to be published, and how he and Annabeth are going to save the world, too, eventually, they're just researching and studying the corpses and the science behind what happened and they're going to fix everything because that's what they do. He talks about the camp they have set up down on Long Island Sound, about the family and friends and the dog they have there, Nico's dog, Nico's dog from before the end of the world because Nico has always been real, even before the world ended, and it feels like the Nico Will knows isn't this Nico, because this Nico that Percy talks about was just a little kid, and the Nico Will knows is two years younger than Will but years ahead of him maturity-wise.
And then Nico looks up at Will, smiles shyly and tangles five dirty fingers into Will's, and ten dirty fingers still fit together the same way even when layers being peeled away reveals Nico to be so much more than the sixteen year old boy in the Hawaiian shirt who smelled like loneliness and looked like death.
Nico catches a glimpse of a silver band on Annabeth's finger one night and says, "When did…" and trails off, looks up at them uncertainly.
"The world went to shit, and this loser still hadn't proposed," Annabeth says, and she's driving so her gaze is fixed firmly on the road, but there's a softness about her eyes when she says it.
"So we got married," Percy shrugs. "I mean, did you know that Mr. Brunner can legally marry people? Because I didn't, but apparently he can. But even if he couldn't, I would have married Annabeth, anyways. At the end of the world, I don't think the rules on how to get married are so strict."
Annabeth makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, glances up at Nico and Will in the rearview mirror. "When did you two start dating?"
Will plucks at Calliopes' strings and hums you never know dear how much i love you please don't take my sunshine away, and then, when Nico doesn't answer, he stops, looks up at Annabeth, and says, "He took me to an art museum and we made out underneath my favorite painting. It was all very romantic."
"You make me sound like a sap," Nico accuses, and Will reaches over, places a sloppy kiss on Nico's cheek, hums you are my sunshine, my only sunshine, and Nico gives him the most fond look he's ever seen grace Nico's features, and Will wonders if Nico is maybe a little bit in love with him, too.
It's a sunny day, and Percy is passed out in the back of the RV, waiting for night fall so he can go out and do his studying-to-save-the-world thing, and Annabeth is wearing Nico's boxers, Percy's shirt, drinking from Will's coffee mug, curled up on the couch with her sketchpad.
Nico's driving, and Will is half-heartedly strumming a melody he wrote for Nico, and he watches Annabeth, her brow furrowed in concentration, lips tucked downward in an absent-minded frown, the side of her right hand black with pencil smudges.
"What are you drawing?" Will asks, and she looks up at him, gray eyes searching and stormy, and wordlessly hands over her notepad.
Will sees skylines and buildings and smoky back alleys and words curled in a spiral around the Empire State Building, our world isn't alive anymore, and he says, "Oh, my god, you're Minerva Hunt."
Annabeth arches a brow. "You know my work?" she asks, nonplussed, and Will nods frantically, says, "That art museum Nico and I went to, we talked about The Architecture of Loss, I talked about you, oh my God, Nico, why didn't you tell me you knew Minerva Hunt? Why didn't you tell me that I know Minerva Hunt?"
Nico ignores him, points at the earphones in his ear to mime that he's listening to something else, and Will remembers the early days, before Percy and Annabeth and the art museum, before Calliope and the RV, when it was just the two of them on a dirty floor in a grocery store, sharing the earphones and falling asleep pressed close together for warmth, thinks about saying I can't heal you and you can't destroy me, we're a match made in heaven, thinks about Nico saying or a match made in hell, thinks about Jake leaving him alone in that empty house with pictures of the sunset strung up like souvenirs, like postcards from an exotic place that you could escape to, like you could escape into the past from this God-awful world where dead people come back to life and devour one another.
Will thinks, for the first time in the year since Jake left, that he's a little bit thankful Jake didn't stay. Because now he has this boy who's starting to look a little bit alive, who doesn't smell like loneliness anymore, who still tastes like war and loss but also tastes like something sweeter, something like peace and all the simple pleasures in life.
The camp that Percy talks about, the one on Long Island Sound, is so much bigger than Will thought it would be.
Percy and Annabeth are welcomed back cheerfully, and a tall boy with electric blue eyes and spiky blond hair throws himself bodily at Nico as soon as he and Will step off the RV, scolding Nico for disappearing and muttering thank God you're alright, we were so worried, we thought you were dead.
Nico pulls away, introduces Will to his other cousin, Jason, and then Jason's sister, Thalia, and then a dark-skinned girl with frizzy blond hair is barreling towards Nico, sobbing and flinging herself at him, and Will feels out of place, like an observer on the outside, the third party who has to remain present just to give an unbiased opinion.
Will fiddles with the sleeve of his Henley, scuffs his combat boots against the ground, watches all these people swarm around Nico and Percy and Annabeth and realizes that he's the only person here who doesn't have anyone from before.
And then he sees Jake Mason, eyes wide, mouth hanging open, features still lit with the kind of fear that never goes away, not entirely, and Will feels his whole body seize up.
It's been three hundred and thirty-four days, and Will realizes he'd convinced himself that if Jake Mason wasn't with him, Jake Mason must have died.
Jake doesn't talk to him, doesn't look at him, whispers something to the curly-haired Latino who is best friends with Jason, Leo or something, that makes Leo look up at Will with raised eyebrows, and Will feels like he can't breathe. And he finds himself saying to Nico, before he can stop himself, "I can't stay here."
Nico's features are a battlefield of emotions, and then he says, "You can't stay here, or you can't stay with me?"
Will purses his lips, can't bring himself to look Nico in the eye and see the disappointment and hurt in his gaze. "Isn't that the same thing?"
Nico takes in a sharp breath, like he's going to say something more, but then he releases it, turns and walks away. Will climbs back aboard the RV by himself, waves off Percy's confused looks and wait, aren't you staying with Nico, you just got here, you can't leave, and Annabeth's sharp gaze and the tight line of her mouth, like she knows what Will is doing and hates him for it.
Everyone has left Will, but this time, Will leaves before he can be left. The boy who used to look like death, who used to smell like loneliness, who Will could only assume tasted like war and loss, slips through the empty spaces between five dirty fingers, and Will is alone again.
Will thinks about it, all the time, writes sonnets about how much it hurts and how all he'd wanted was for Nico to offer to come with him, not to ask him if he was leaving Nico or the camp like it wasn't the same thing, like Nico didn't belong at the camp with his friends and his family and his dog and his life from before, before the world ended and everything was ruined and he met Will and gave Will a reason to hope again.
It's been four hundred and two days, and the radio in the RV crackles to life when Will is getting gas from a derelict gas station.
"This is Percy Jackson from Long Island Sound," the voice on the radio says, still a little bit staticky, and Will wonders how far their signal reaches, for it to broadcast to him, up in Maryland. "We've finally gotten the radio towers up and working, and we'd like to take the time to make the announcement that a cure has been found for the infected. If you're still out there, still alive, you should know that you're going to be safe, now. We're shipping out the cure soon. Stay alive. Signing off, this is Percy Jackson from Camp Half-Blood."
Will climbs into the RV to turn down the static of the radio, even when Percy starts blasting Coldplay, and climbs back out to poor the gas canister into the RV, rests his head against the side of the makeshift home, listens to the wind move and feels the sun on his back and wonders if Nico and Jake talk about him, sometimes, talk about the boy who loved them both but couldn't be good enough for either of them.
It's been four hundred and thirty-nine days, and people are filling the streets again, men and women and children, families and friends and living people who aren't trying to devour each other, who look real and alive in a way that Nico never did, and Will wonders how many of these people lived in hiding while he was wandering across the country aimlessly, how many of them listened to the corpses crawling the streets, how many have seen the dead bodies piling up on street corners and underneath stop signs, in the roads and inside the buildings they hid in during the day, wonders how many of them helped get the cure into the air so that the dead finally stopped walking, were finally put to rest.
Will drives back to Arizona, back to that one-bedroom house that he shared with Jake, finds it ravaged and torn apart, finds photos of the sunset scattered on the floor, finds the couch and the TV and the curtains gone, curls up in the bed he used to share with Jake and wonders what it'd be like to have this with Nico, now that he could have this, if he hadn't seen Jake at that camp and realized he was never going to be able to be what Nico needed, not when healing hands couldn't heal a damn thing and hands that brought death couldn't burn someone who was already dead inside.
Will is at the house for three days before Jake shows up, watches from the window as Jake picks his way into the house, watches from the bedroom as Jake looks over the ruined house with a sigh. Will has put it back together, some, but he can't fix what isn't there anymore.
He thinks, he obviously could never fix anything at all, thinks no one should trust him to fix the flesh of a human being when he couldn't even fix his own heart and soul up enough to give someone everything they deserved.
He's not talking about Jake, either. Not this time.
Jake makes coffee for them, sits at the edge of the bed and looks around the bedroom, looks at the pictures of the sunsets that Will hung back up.
"He misses you, you know," Jake says, not meeting Will's gaze.
Will says, "I missed you, too, for a long time. He'll get over it."
Jake snorts, but the lines around his face tense up again. "What you did, Will, that was…I wasn't ready for that."
"I wasn't ready to lose you," Will retorts. He doesn't know if he means I wasn't ready to watch you die or if he means I wasn't ready to watch you leave.
"Nico wasn't ready to lose you, either," Jake bites back, and he glances up at Will sharply. "I'm not exactly friends with him, but I hate seeing the kid hurt like that. Did you ever think about how, when you left him, you were doing to him what I did to you?"
"I didn't leave him because he saved my life and I wasn't ready for it." There's an edge to Will's voice, an edge that he thinks was maybe always there when he talked to Jake, because they loved each other like warriors and maybe Will was never heartbroken because Jake left, maybe he was just heartbroken that he'd exerted so much energy on someone who was only ever going to leave him for trying to fix things.
"Why did you leave him, then?" Jake shoots back, and Will—Will doesn't want to have this conversation with Jake.
"I left because he needed me to," Will says, and sips his coffee, looks up at the sunsets hanging from the ceiling, three hundred and sixty-five of them, too few to count the days the world was broken. "I wasn't what he needed. He needed his sister, his family, his friends and his dog, he needed his life from before. I'm his after, Jake."
"Yeah," Jake agrees, and his voice is soft again. "But I'm your before, and you—we weren't good together. Maybe we never were, maybe just not in a world like this, but. Will, just because he found his before doesn't mean he wanted to let go of his after. We all changed after what happened. We're all different now, and so is he. He doesn't fit in with his before without his after to balance out who he was with who he is."
That's why Will loved Jake, he thinks. Jake was good with his words. Nico talks less, he thinks, but what Nico says is more important.
Di Angelo echoes in his head, rings in Jake's voice, di Angelo di Angelo Nico di Angelo, the angel of death who looked like a boy with a heavy past and a heavy heart, the boy who destroyed everything he touched but couldn't destroy Will, because Will, with hands that were always meant to heal, destroyed himself when he drove away in a battered old RV.
He leaves Jake in the house, spends four days driving up to Long Island Sound, finds the camp from memories of sticky kisses and Percy's laughter and the map Annabeth poured over sometimes, and Annabeth is waiting at the gates when he pulls up, arches her brow and purses her lips and says, "Well, look who came back."
Will fiddles with the hem of his Henley, says, "I just want to talk to Nico. I just want to see… I just want to know what Nico meant, if he would have—if we could still. You know."
Annabeth looks unimpressed, but she nods, jerks her chin as a gesture for Will to pull through, calls out a cabin number and Will drives down the gravel road, pulls up in front of the dark cabin, and before he can even open the door of the RV, Nico steps out of the cabin, eyes wide, gaze frantic, and he looks like death and Will can smell the loneliness on him without stepping out of the RV and he bets if he put his mouth on Nico's neck, that sweet taste would be gone again and he'd just taste like bitterness and loss and war.
He climbs out of the car, walks up to Nico, and Nico says, voice quivering, "You left, asshole."
Will looks down at the gravel, says, "I wanted you to tell me to stay. I wanted you to come with me," and ten dirty fingers twine together, laced snugly like a promise of forever, and Nico says, "I offered, remember? I asked if you were leaving me, or the camp, and you said you were leaving both."
Will shakes his head. "That's not," he tries, but the words lock in his throat, so much easier to get them down on paper when they mean something, he can talk forever about things that don't matter but give him something important, something worthwhile, something like olive skin and midnight eyes, and he can't make a single damn word he says mean what he needs them to.
He feels the sun on his back and the teenaged boy standing in front of him with a hurt expression and fingers wrapped tight through Will's looks like death itself, but he's alive and it's the first time Will has seen Nico in one hundred and twelve days.
"I missed you," Will says, soft like a promise. "I thought you'd be better off without me."
"You're an idiot," Nico replies, testily.
Will laughs. "Yeah," he agrees.
It's been four hundred and forty-six days, and the boy in the faded Henley looks like the dead coming back to life and smells like the spaces between loneliness are filled with contentment and Will thinks that the next time he tastes him, he'll taste war and loss on his olive skin and lick sweet comfort and peace and the words you are my sunshine, my only sunshine out of the crevices of his mouth, and they are bathed in golden light.
Sunkissed.
fin.
Dedicated to Taffeh A. Llama, who stayed up with me most of the night to encourage me while I wrote. Written between the hours of one am and six am, unbetaed by anyone but me, so all mistakes are mine.