I don't even know what I'm talking about here; I'm feverishly typing this on an insomnia-fuelled, angsty, Nico-di-Angelo-driven high at midnight so I apologise for the inevitable incoherency and swearing. And no I don't own Nico.
It's not someone who cries at night
It's not someone whose seen the light
It's a cold and a broken Hallelujah
Nico di Angelo wasn't fucking perfect.
And he wasn't fucking gorgeous either.
A hank of ragged, greasy hair that was always dirty, the same colour as the leached blackness as the polluted night sky.
Haggard skin, the pallor of an eggshell with none of the smoothness, ridged with scars and wrinkles and frown lines, exhausted bruises etched deep under his eyes.
A starved, sick, scrawny body, his skin tinted the same shade as a mirror, grime-lined fingernails and white scars that saturate his flesh, carved down his limbs like a bloody tapestry.
Dead eyes.
Blank and staring and lifeless.
Boring out of a faded face.
Cracked.
He doesn't even cry anymore.
Is there such a thing as tears?
Nico di Angelo wouldn't know.
It's not a cry that you hear at night.
His path wasn't destined to be a happy one.
The world took his mother, his sister, his comrades and himself. The world taught the little innocent boy not to smile and dragged him up to a dark world where ghosts screamed at night and skeletons grinned eerily, the light from the green fire casting shadows across their empty eye sockets.
They taught him he wasn't wanted and Nico di Angelo didn't prove them wrong.
He travelled into Tartarus.
Fucking Tartarus.
Living in Hell wasn't what Nico feared; no endless, unbeatable bands of monsters, no painful visions of his loved ones, no fighting, no conflict, no nothing.
It was the very definition of nothing.
Sometimes Tartarus was tiny. So tiny Nico had to scrunch up into a ball, winding his arms tight around his legs, his head pressed down against his stomach, unable to even twitch an eyelid.
At other times he would run and run and run and run and he would never reach the end. It didn't have limitations, boundaries, confines. It went on forever.
The only contast thing was the blindness. Nico couldn't see his fingers, even if he waved them in front of his eyes. He couldn't see the walls that trapped him like a fish in a bowl, even though his eyes were pressed against them. Eventually he gave up on sight.
And, of course, the silence. Only Nico wasn't quite sure about the silence.
He never heard anything. Not his footsteps or his words. Except for the voices.
He wasn't certain about the voices.
Sometimes it was so quiet, the nothingness seemed to ring louder and louder in his ears, deafening him. And at other times...they screamed.
They never said anything.
Only screamed.
Or sobbed.
Or shrieked.
Or sang in an insane, hysterical, high-pitched singsong that Nico couldn't decide if it as real or if it was all in his head.
It's not someone whose seen the light.
After that...well, things were never the same.
He fought, of course; how could he not?
But sometimes he would forget he was in battle and drop his sword, suddenly freeze in the middle of combat while his enemy paused, nonplussed and bewildered.
Sometimes he wouldn't move, spending hours huddled in a corner, his hands blocking out noises only he can hear, his eyes wincing at sights only he can hear, his body trembling at things only he can hear.
Most nights he screamed into his pillow for a solid twelve hours until his voice was a croaky, rasping whisper like stone grating against rock.
When the fighting was over, Nico moved full-time into the Underworld.
He would practise his skills when he could concentrate, go out into the mortal world when he could focus.
The days blurred like a fog and soon his friends stopped calling.
Eventually he got a job, more by chance than anything else, working five days a week in a mattress store.
He got an apartment, close to the city but not in the centre. Too much traffic.
He made a few acquaintances, his colleagues and his neighbours. He sat on his sofa reading every night (though usually he just stared unthinkingly at the page for hours on end). He bought a fish who died after eleven months.
He then turned sixty and everything hit.
He wasn't sure how; all he knew was that it crashed into him like a steaming train, splintering his carefully constructed, fragile veneer of blankness, the fire and the shadows and the pain leaking through his thoughts, engulfing everything in a burning posion that, after more then forty-five years of no emotion, made him scream into his pillow once again.
He was a lonely old man living alone in a cold flat.
And nobody cared.
And the next day he was dead with a bullet through his skull.
Nothing fancy or romantic or tragic. Just a gun in his hand, mud on his jacket and a ragged, gaping hole blew straight through his brains.
And that was how Nico di Angelo ended up; the only son of Hades, known and famed throughout the demi-god and death world alike for his powers and his prowness, the Nico di Angelo who survived Tartarus, fought fiercely in two wars, gave his sister a second chance at life, belonged to two Camps, was best friends with Percy Jackson, known as the Ghost King far and wide.
Alone and broken at the bottom of a ditch with no-one left who he loves.
It's a cold and a broken Hallelujah.
If this was okay, please review because it means the world to me and I'm currently sacrificing my possible sanity staying awake writing this for you guys.
Thanks for reading.
~Zoe~TheInternetGoblin~