And The Snakes Start to Sing …

N.B. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, I decided to make Nico two years younger than in canon. I had a small plot point that I for some reason really wanted to include (it gets mentioned like twice it's kind of ridiculous) that didn't work until I did that. Sorry.

AU – no gods, just weird superpowers.

So if you read the original version of this, when it was still The Sharpest Lives, it was just a bit of a train-wreck. The problem was, at the start I had the idea of the demigods being these corruption-fighting good guys that went to fix everything, and then I went back and looked at it in about November of 2014, decided it was too perfect, and thought I should make it into a weird parody story. Then I went back in about March of 2015 and decided to basically make the demigods evil and Nico have a really fucked up past. Now, as you can imagine, these three themes don't go well in a story together. So, now, having finally made a decision on how I want to story to go, I feel safe re-writing it.

This is going to be a bit depressing, seeing as I had gone through I bit of trauma at the time of finally making a decision, so ... shit gets dark in this story.

Trigger Warnings:
Drug abuse.
Alcohol abuse.
Mental illness.
Child abuse.
Rape, assault, CSE etc.
Eating disorders.
Suicide + suicidal tendencies.

A major plot point of this story is Dissociative Identity Disorder, so if you know anything about it, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could talk to me about it.

NB: I kinda changed some things ... Like, a lot. Sorry; it just fits my ideal.

Chapter One – 24/6/13

Nico didn't know where he was.

It wasn't an uncommon phenomenon; he was used to it by now. He was used to finding himself wandering around unfamiliar streets far from home; used to waking up only to realize he had been out of bed for several hours; used to coming-to holding handfuls of unwanted, unpaid-for clutter.

He'd come to anticipate it now. It was a part of life.

He knew where he wanted to go – where he needed to go – but his body didn't seem to want to respond. Instead he just lay on the ground, staring despondently up at the dark sky. Okay, so it was night. Somewhere in the back of his mind, it registered that he was late – far too late – but he couldn't bring himself to care.

He slowly regained control of his limbs and, after and undetermined period of time, finally sat up. The world spun rapidly, but when it finally slid to a stand-still, it seemed oddly colored – duller, somehow, as though a veil of thin grey mist had settled itself over his eyes. It was bitingly cold, but he couldn't feel it. Perhaps he had been lying down for so long he had gone numb from it.

He stumbled blindly along the side of the winding road between the two steep hills, unable to feel his legs – or anything else – and hoping no car would come. Would they see him, the poor dead boy on the road corner? Would their blinding light illuminate his dark clothes, reflect off his pale skin, shine in his dull eyes? Would it hurt if they did? He didn't imagine it would. He imagined it being quick. Bam. Over. Done with. A single rush of adrenaline, collision and then flying … flying … flying high above the world.

Would he go to Heaven, like Bianca and Mama had? No, he wasn't good enough for that. That was what Father said – but what does Father know about Heaven? – would happen to him.

Father doesn't believe we can do anything.

Nico shook his head. Odd thoughts like that passed through his head, unbidden, on the strangest occasions.

He had reached the graveyard by now – wait, when did we go off the road? Goddamnit Nick – and he could see the towering steeple of the twelfth-century church over the gravestones.

Next to by far the most extravagant headstone in the churchyard, a rather interesting event was taking place. There was a large, glowing cup lying on the ground, about ten meters from where a scrawny, black-haired boy was talking to an older, more handsome one with copper-colored hair.

There it was again; that losing time. Nico had only blinked – at least he thought he had – but suddenly the copper-haired boy wasn't moving and the scrawny one was tied to the headstone.

Hold on, who was that? The man in the dark cloak – it's Pettigrew, of course – and what was he holding?

Oh, this doesn't look very good. Perhaps he should go up and talk to the black-haired boy over there? Maybe he'd know what was going on.

He sidled up very close to the headstone, just behind the boy.

The boy noticed him.

He had jet black hair, like him, but his eyes were green. They were a really bright green, Nico thought; like Lacy's. They looked to be full of pain right about now, for some reason.

He wheezed out something, but Nico couldn't hear him. He felt himself answer, though it sounded far away, as though through a tunnel, or bad phone signal.

He brought a hand up to his face and rubbed his temples. His head was pounding and the odd static that filled his ears wasn't helping. He barely registered the odd ritual going on, although his legs took him to the cauldron side obediently.

The sight of the tall, slender man with dark hair and red eyes only seemed to make him feel worse. The world started to spin again, and suddenly he wasn't there.

Harry wasn't sure what to make of the boy.

He was a taller than Harry by nearly half a foot. Dark haired, pale and thin – far too thin – but at the same time almost impossibly handsome in a wow-we-need-to-get-you-help kind of way. His eyes were the most striking thing about him though. They were almond shaped, deep set and narrow and, even though they were glazed and unfocused, seemed to shine with the light of a thousand suns.

"Why are you just standing there?" Harry whispered at him.

"There's not much more we can do," the boy replied, although looking at his face, you wouldn't have thought he'd heard anything.

Harry was too scared of the situation to notice the unnecessary use of the first person plural. "Can you at least loosen these ropes?"

The boy didn't seem to hear; he was wincing and rubbing his temples with his hand. At a word from the bundle of rags, he walked forward woodenly. Harry wondered if he was high or, perhaps, mentally handicapped, but he hadn't sounded particularly uneducated – quite the opposite, in fact.

He stood by Voldemort's side during his unnecessarily longwinded and narcissistic speech, his posture changing almost entirely. He went from a hunched over, timid looking child – fifteen at most – to a strong, haughty-looking leader rivalling Voldemort in terms of how powerful he looked, despite his fragile frame.

Something about this posture reminded Harry of someone. He wasn't sure who – definitely not someone in the Wizarding World – but certainly of someone.

To be honest, now wasn't exactly the time to be worrying about that.

He seemed oddly spaced out during their duel, fixed on a spot far in the distance that Harry couldn't and didn't want to see. He didn't react when Voldemort's avada kedavra missed him by mere centimetres, or when a shattered piece of Tom Riddle Sr.'s gravestone shot over his head, or when the ghosts of the most recent people Voldemort had killed floated out of his wand, or even when Harry dashed right past him, trying to get to Cedric's body – 'Yeah, definitely high,' Harry thought – but what did catch his attention was Harry's wordless cry of despair as he realised he wouldn't reach the Cup in time.

It seemed almost in slow motion: Harry grabbed Cedric's body and turned to where he thought the Cup had been, only to see it being banished over to the other side of the graveyard by the Death Eater he was 67% sure was Malfoy. He caught the boy's apathetic eye and thought 'I'm right-royally buggered.'

However, the boy's mask seemed to crack slightly, and something vaguely human shone from his night-black eyes. He raised a hand, stopping the Cup mid-flight, and sent it right back to Harry. Shocked, Harry barely managed to raise his hand in time to catch it, and the last thing he saw was the boy cowering at Voldemort whirled round to face him, looking more livid than Harry had ever seen him.

Nico was back home now.

It was new town, built after the end of the Giant War. It was called New London, situated about three miles south of the Oklahoma-Kansas border on the Ozark planes at high altitude, smack-bang in between the two pre-existing camps.

It was an odd town, in all fairness. The symmetry was almost impossible: there were four roads, going off north, south, east and west, and all of the houses went slowly and slowly up in size and grounds the further they got away from the town center, which was where the four roads met. The south road extended several hundred meters past the others and led to the training grounds.

"Nick!" someone called.

Nico turned slightly and, sure enough, Percy was grinning and waving at him from across the square, near Bombilo & Bombilo's Coffee Store.

Nico waved back and ran over.

"How are ya?" Percy said, his eyes lighting up. Nico had always marveled at how both of his eyes would light up, or both turn to the speaker, even though his left one had been out-of-action for several months now.

"Not bad, thanks," he replied, not mentioning the earlier amnesia. "You?"

"Not too shoddy, all things considered," he said. "Can I talk to you at my place later?"

"Sure," said Nico. "Not a problem. When's best for you?"

"Whenever you're free," he said.

"What's the issue?"

Percy held his head completely still for a moment. It was an odd trick Nico had yet to master, but that had done Percy very well since he lost sight in his left eye. It was difficult and complex, and involved intense attention Nico's ADHD and general lack of focus in the world had never allowed him to obtain, but it basically used people's magic to sense where they were. "You know that issue we sent you to Britain for?" Percy said as though nothing had happened – which Nico supposed was true.

Nico nodded.

"I need you to give me a mission statement on that."

Nico nodded again, but inside he started panicking. His odd memory lapses had only gotten worse since he started going to Britain, and indeed so had his mood swings. It drove Lacy up the wall to no end.

"I'll see you at some point this evening," Nico said, getting up.

Percy raised an eyebrow. "Not grabbing a coffee?"

Nico shook his head. "I need to see Lacy. Know where she is?"

Percy paused a moment. "Brooklyn."

"Brooklyn's a big place."

"Give me a moment," Percy said lightly. "She's in the park near her school campus – Brooklyn Academy for the Gifted, if I'm not mistaken."

"That sounds about right," Nico confirmed. "She free?"

"Mmhmm," Percy said non-committedly, sipping his coffee. "May not be for long, though, so hurry up."

He ran to the Apparition Point just outside of town (it was the one place exempt from Camp's wards to keep out intruders, and the only place you could Shadow Travel to/from in the vicinity) and Shadow Travelled just behind the trees in the park on Lacy's school campus.

He caught sight of the blonde pretty quickly, and sat down abruptly next to her. "All right there, Dove?" he said, smirking lopsidedly.

Lacy closed her book on theatre studies and smirked right back at him. "What're you doing here?" she asked.

"Not happy to see me?"

"Never said that."

Nico slid further up the bench and wrapped an arm around her waist.

Hiding his inner desperation behind Lacy's dyed flaxen curls, he said, "I really need to talk to you."

"You been losing time again?"

Nico nodded and rested his head on hers.

"What brought this issue to the front suddenly?"

"This isn't exactly the best place to talk about it, is it?"

Lacy nodded. "That's fair enough." She was silent for a few moments, then said, "Is this an emergency situation?"

Nico shook his head.

"I'll see you tonight then," she said.

"I need to talk to Percy then."

"After that, then."

Nico nodded held her closer.

Nico knocked on Percy's door at exactly 18:00 that evening before opening the door. Most people didn't bother locking their doors in this town; Percy knew everything that went on everywhere and, while Cabin Eleven were all kleptomaniacs, they were told to go steal from some of the nearby towns instead of here on pain of death.

Well, the official statement was that stealing was strongly discouraged in the local vicinity, but tomato-tomato (please tell me I'm not the only one who gets a migraine looking at that expression written down?).

"Hello?" he called.

"In the study," Percy responded.

Nico padded lightly along the hall – for all he knew, Theo had already gone to sleep – towards Percy's study. The Jackson household was situated right on the outskirts of New London, and was probably the largest one of them all.

The study was almost as large as the next-door living room, and both lengthwise walls were covered in filing cabinets. It had the biography of every person in the Western World, Nico knew. Social security numbers, zip codes, bank details, every dirty little secret encrypted within those files, and Percy was the only person who knew how to crack the code.

As much as he tried to repress it, a part of Nico wanted to break almost every law in the Empire just to find out what was in there. Sure, most of it would be of little consequence – ordinary people usually were – but the good stuff in there … the very thought made his mouth water.

Percy was sitting behind his desk in the center of the room.

"Sit," he said.

Nico sat.

"So, what's happened? Anything of notice?"

Nico thought back to last night – or at least, he thought it was last night. He'd lost days at a time before. He knew something had happened. Something to do with a cauldron, and a boy with Lacy's eyes. Something that wasn't fun.

It came to him in a flash, but he couldn't bring himself to tell Percy.

Don't tell. We'd get hurt if we told.

"No," he said. "Nothing's happened."

Percy looked him in the eye, sea green on midnight blue, and Nico knew that Percy had detected his fib. Nico didn't know why he lied … he just couldn't make himself tell the truth. His gut twisted – how could he lie about something so important to someone he owed so much? – but he still sat, tight-lipped.

Nico didn't break eye contact. He wanted Percy to know, wanted him to somehow read his mind and know what was going on, but all Percy did was nod. "Okay."

He felt a deep sense of relief – no, that wasn't right. He wasn't relieved. He did, however, feel a deep sense of dread leave him. Why would he be dreading telling Percy anything? Percy had never wronged him, never judged him …

"That's not true," he blurted.

Percy's eyebrows rose. "Go on."

Nico tried to move his mouth, but it refused. "I can't," was all he said.

Percy's eyes softened. "Is it urgent?"

One part of him was screaming for him to get up and run, and Nico wanted to, more than anything else, but he forced himself to stay sitting down and, slowly, nodded.

"Why can't you tell me?"

Nico felt cold, all of a sudden. Not cold enough. "Can we open a window?" he said.

"You're shivering."

"Can we please open a window?"

"There aren't any windows in here."

The world was spinning. Nico had a headache. He felt a hand on his shoulder. "You don't need to tell me if you don't want to, Kid."

Nico nodded and opened his eyes. When had he closed them?

"Need a drink?"

Nico shook his head. Percy pressed a glass of water into his hand anyway. Nico didn't bother to think when he had got it.

"Do you want to see a doctor, Nico?"

"Hmm?" Nico looked up. That moment of panic, the fleeting need to keep everything concealed, had passed, but he could feel it lingering at the back of his mind, just in case.

"I'm worried about you."

No no no no no no no no…

"You're not allowed to worry about me," he said. "That's my job, 'member?"

"I'm family," Percy reminded him. "If I want to express my concern, I damn well will."

"I don't need –"

"Yes, you bloody well do! This isn't normal Nico! Most people don't have near panic attacks when trying to tell someone something."

Nico nodded. Percy rarely got angry with him – in fact, it was rare for Percy to get angry at all. Irritated, yes, but never angry.

"So what actually happened?" he asked.

The panic was back in full force, but he pushed it back. He owed Percy this. It wouldn't be right to keep it.

But as the fear faded, so did the memory, like water through cupped hands. "Um … Riddle was there … and Pettigrew … they had another boy there … it … um …"

"What did the boy look like?"

"I don't … I'm not …" The boy wasn't clear anymore. His features had become fuzzy. Had his hair been black, or brown? Red, even? It was dark, but maybe he just thought that because it was nighttime … "He had green eyes!" he remembered. "They're the same color as Lacy's."

"What happened to Riddle?"

"He got a body again," Nico said. He was certain of that. "They called all the Death Eaters there …"

"Do you know which Death Eaters were there?"

Nico shook his head. "No. I don't remember. I don't remember anything after Riddle got his body again."

"That can't be true," Percy said. "You saw the Death Eaters there. Riddle would never let them see his rebirth; meet him after the fact, yes, but never as a bodiless vapor …"

"The boy … Riddle challenged him to a duel I think … he wasn't going to get out, but I helped him out."

Had he? It was fuzzy. All he remembered was a snapshot, a split second in which he thought that he had to help him …

"Can you remember where it was?"

"A graveyard."

"Where, though?"

"I don't know," said Nico. "Somewhere around Little Hangleton, I think …"

"Anything else?"

Nico shook his head. "No. I can't remember anything else."

"Hey, Kid," said Percy, and his tone was kind. Nico couldn't see his face, but Percy crouched next to him. "You all right?"

Nico shook his head again. His head felt crowded, like it was stuffed with cotton wool. "Headache."

Percy wrapped an arm around his shoulder. "No problem. Can you tell me if you remember anything? Maybe write it down, so you don't forget it?"

"Okay," said Nico. "I need to go see Lacy."

"Are you sure it's okay for you to Shadow Travel like this?"

"Yeah, it's fine. I do it all the time."

"Fine," said Percy. "Don't dissolve into a pool of shadows though, all right?"

Nico laughed. "Promise."

"Good."

This was a really dramatic chapter. I'll try not to make them all quite that blatantly DID. That was Nico going through a dissociative episode, so most of the time it's not quite that obvious … I think. I don't have DID so I'm not really able to comment. If you're a DID expert, or someone with it, please tell me about it!

~ Emmy.

Thanks to my friend Satan Gave Me a Taco for putting up with my weird ideas-bouncing.