A/N: Because I'm kind of on a Nico roll right now. This takes place Post-Giant War. Nico is 15 or 16. Unrelated to Tender Curiosity and These Mortals Be.
Warnings: mild swearing, m/m PG-13 behavior
Charcoal
Coming down the world turned over
And angels fall without you there
And I go on as you get colder
Always someone there
~Black Balloon, The Goo Goo Dolls
1
Nico di Angelo sits alone at the Hades table. It's an old convention, and one that no one really follows anymore, especially after the Giant War, but he doesn't want to deal with people right now.
He especially doesn't want to deal with Percy, who is sitting at the Poseidon table with Annabeth on his lap. They've been doing the constant-physical-contact thing ever since Tartarus and even though he's over it (or at least that's what he tells himself), he doesn't want to be constantly reminded of it.
Sometimes he has nightmares about Percy ignoring his outstretched hand and falling to Tartarus. With Annabeth.
The dreams don't bother him as much as it used to, though, which he takes as a good sign.
A better sign would be if the other dreams stopped, the ones that sometimes woke him in the middle of the night, heart racing for an entirely different reason. He doesn't want to feel this way.
He used to think it was just a phase, that he would grow out of it. Percy was his first crush, and for a long time he'd thought that maybe it was just some convoluted form of hero worship. It was months before he'd even admitted to himself that he liked Percy.
Even now, years later, he still can't bring himself to say the words, "I'm gay."
Jason is the only other person who knows – except for Eros, if that even counts, and Nico guesses that by extension Aphrodite probably knows – and if anything, Jason seems even more comfortable with it than Nico is himself.
Sometimes, all he wants is to be able to watch the Stolls drop water balloons on girls in white T-shirts and feel… anything.
"You're sulking again," Jason says.
Nico hadn't noticed him coming over, and he curses himself a little for letting his guard down.
"Your point?"
He's being unfair to Jason and he knows it, but he's in a bad mood and doesn't need Mr. Golden Boy to waste time trying to cheer him up.
"Do you want to come sit with us?" Jason asks, gesturing back at the Zeus table. Piper is there, but so are Leo and a few of the other Aphrodite and Hephaestus kids.
"I'm good," Nico says. "Actually, I'm done eating."
And then he gets up and heads back to his cabin.
By himself.
2
He stares at the blank canvas. White. Pure. Whole.
Then he lifts up the charcoal and draws a thick black streak straight through the center. And another. And another.
He doesn't really know when he learned to draw, which means it's probably left over from his childhood – a childhood full of faded half memories that he's alternately curious about and repulsed by – but he finds comfort in the fact that the dark lines form a face, a body, a person.
Bianca.
He wonders if she would know whether he ever took art classes.
He can't ask her anymore.
Nico shades in her face, making it look like the sun is shining on her.
"That's pretty good." Nico jumps at the sound, accidentally smudging the charcoal above Bianca's head. It's an ugly blemish on the canvas. He'll have to start over.
"Gods, I'm sorry." The speaker is one of Piper's half-brothers.
Nico has every reason to mad, but for some reason he finds himself saying, "Don't worry about it." He hesitates, then, "It's Mitchell, right?"
The boy nods. "Yeah. Nico?"
It's a stupid question, because everyone knows who he is. But Nico nods anyway.
"Who is she? Your girlfriend?"
Nico holds back a bitter laugh. "No. I'm—" he stops himself, not wanting to finish the sentence. "She's my sister. Bianca."
Saying her name still gets him all choked up.
Mitchell is suddenly quiet. Of course he is, since everyone knows what happened to Bianca, and no one wants to talk about it.
Then, "She's pretty." Pause. "She looks kind of like you."
Mitchell is gone before Nico can process that. He refuses to turn Mitchell's statements into a categorical syllogism because he's already hoping that Mitchell meant the words as such.
What the hell is wrong with him? No, he can answer that one.
He turns back to the canvas. The dark outline of Bianca's figure, shrouded in sunlight, with a dark splotch above her head. He wastes time drawing her shadow on the ground beneath her.
Then, on a whim, he turns the splotch into a halo.
Bianca di Angelo. Of the Angels.
Heaven is such a Judeo-Christian concept, but in another lifetime he was raised Catholic and he finds it easier to think of Bianca as an angel, even though he knows exactly where people go when they die.
3
A few days later he finds himself paired up with Mitchell at swordfighting practice.
Nico pulls his Stygian Iron blade out. It stands out against all the Celestial Bronze around him.
Mitchell surprises him by being better with a sword than Nico would have expected – he's definitely the best out of the Aphrodite kids, Piper included – and Nico finds himself breaking into a sweat as he ducks and parries all of Mitchell's attacks.
Nico needs a new tactic and he's about to attempt to fake out his opponent, to lunge right and then aim for Mitchell's undefended left side, but Mitchell anticipates it and moves to block. Celestial Bronze meets Stygian Iron and with a twist of Mitchell's wrist, Nico loses his balance and falls forward.
Onto Mitchell.
The Aphrodite boy stumbles back a few feet from Nico's weight, but manages to remain standing.
In the process of righting himself, Nico somehow ends up with his hands on Mitchell's upper arms. They're muscular without being overly bulky. They feel nice. No, they don't.
Yes. They do.
Nico shoves away from Mitchell.
"Best two out of three?"
4
Nico dreams he's eight years old again, dragged to confession for getting in a schoolyard fight and shoving a classmate against the ground. Afterwards, while his mother prays, Nico wanders off and stands in the shadows.
He's good at hiding in shadows.
He watches the others confess their sins to the priest hidden behind the wall.
Then there's a man, strong and tough-looking, but shaking. He begins the same way as all the others. "Bless me father, for I have sinned…"
Nico wonders what this man has done. Stealing, he decides.
The man speaks so softly, it's practically a whisper, but the room is empty so his voice carries over to Nico.
"I have had relations" —There is a long pause here— "with another man."
Nico's mother finds him and drags him away from the confession booth before he can find out how many Hail Mary's the man has to say for that one or even work out what the sin was.
5
He's drawing again, a landscape this time but still in charcoal. He isn't in the mood for colors.
Mitchell sits down and watches, quietly. Nico is aware of his presence, but doesn't know what to say to acknowledge it, so he just keeps working on the picture.
"Do you think you could teach me?" Mitchell asks.
"What?" Nico says absentmindedly.
"To draw," Mitchell clarifies. "It's just," he says, running a hand through his sandy hair, "I've always wanted to learn, but I've never been able to actually take a class."
"Oh," Nico says. "Yeah. Sure."
Now is not the time to decide he likes sandy-colored hair.
"Cool," Mitchell says.
Nico guides the charcoal to form the outline of the trees in the distance.
"You can come over to my cabin," he offers, and he doesn't know why it makes his heart speed up – well, he does, but he doesn't want to know – "tonight. If you want. I can show you some basic drawing exercises."
"Yeah, okay."
"Bring some scrap paper with you."
A little while later, when Mitchell leaves, Nico notices the rainbow striped sticker on the bottom corner of his backpack.
Then he finds himself smiling for the first time in a while.
6
"Try to get it in proportion," Nico finds himself saying. "Eyes are in the middle of the face, not at the top."
He's been meeting with Mitchell for art lessons every night for a few weeks now. Right now, Mitchell is sitting in front of a mirror, trying to draw a self-portrait. It was the easiest way Nico could think of to teach him to draw faces, but Mitchell is struggling.
"Can you show me?"
Nico doesn't mention that he's wanted to draw Mitchell for a while now. He just takes the pencil from Mitchell's hand and looks up at his face.
"Like this," he says, tracing a rough oval for Mitchell's head. Sharp lines for his chiseled jaw, a few loose curves for his hair. Then he sketches lines running down and across Mitchell's face, using them to guide his placement of Mitchell's features. "Eyes can be kind of hard, since—"
"Hey," Mitchell says suddenly. Nico glances up. It looks like he's steeling his courage. "This is probably totally uncalled for, since I know you're probably into girls and all that, but, uh—"
"I'm not into girls," Nico finds himself saying. It's the first time he's actually said the words out loud.
"Oh," Mitchell says.
"Yeah." Gods, his heart feels like it's about to explode from his chest because why the Hades did he just say that?
"Um, so do you, uh, maybe want to go out with me? Sometime?"
Nico finds himself nodding.
And then when Mitchell gets up to leave, he kisses him. It's quick and chaste and nothing earth-shattering, but later on in bed Nico relives it over. And over. And over.
7
Jason is ecstatic, of course. He spends all day Saturday poking through Nico's drawers.
"Do you own anything that isn't black?"
"No," Nico says. "Get out."
"Come on, you've got to have a button-down here somewhere…"
"Jason Grace, leave my clothes alone or I swear on the Styx I will—"
8
They aren't technically allowed to leave camp, but Mitchell sets up a picnic on the beach and it's basically perfect.
There are many perks to dating a son of Aphrodite, and this is one of them.
"So you aren't out yet?"
"No," Nico says. "Not really. Jason knows. And I guess other people will find out now. I think I'm ready for it."
"Jason Grace? How'd he take it?"
"Actually really well," Nico says. "Better than I did at the time."
"What changed?" Mitchell asks.
Nico smiles. "I met you."
9
In another dream, Nico remembers his mother talking to his aunts in rapid Italian when they think he's asleep. The women's voices filter into his room from the hallway.
He doesn't understand all of it, because he's young and tired and can't hear everything they're saying. But he manages to catch a few words.
Guerra. Italia. Mussolini. Hitler. Sterminio.
They are scary words for a child who is meant to be sleeping.
10
After their third date, Nico brings Mitchell back to the Hades cabin. As long as Hazel isn't visiting, he has the place to himself, and that fact alone is enough to make his heart pound.
And so when he closes the distance between himself and Mitchell he doesn't hold anything back.
He's never made out with a girl before so it's not like he has anything to compare it to, but something tells him that kissing a girl wouldn't even come close to this.
He's taller than Mitchell, but not by much, and so Mitchell has to rise on his toes a little to reach him. Nico can barely think straight, but somehow Mitchell ends up pushing him against the wall and kissing him like there's no tomorrow.
He's happy in this relationship, really happy, for the first time in a long time.
A/N: Yay. After everything he's been through, Nico deserves a happy ending.
Also, I am apparently incapable of ending a fic without having someone make out with someone else.
Review?