TWO

LITTLE THINGS IN THE NIGHT

At night,

everything is more intense, more true.

-Elie Wiesel

It was way past midnight, and Connor and Travis Stoll were the only ones awake anymore.

But unlike most other nights when they had been awake, this time they had a mission. Or, at least, a mission whose effects would last longer than the next morning. And this mission was to reinstate their old partner in crime: Nico di Angelo, who, according to them, could really use a break from being dull and gloomy.

Before the quest to save Artemis had ended and NIco had (at least in their opinion) gone ahead and wasted all that beautiful potential, he had actively joined the two sons of Hermes on their various conquests to sow trouble and breed mischief.

Tonight, they planned to get their di Angelo back.

On the way to Cabin 13, they passed by the Poseidon Cabin, and Travis couldn't stop himself from jerking his thumb at the open window and making kissing noises, earning a chuckle from his brother, who moved to look into said window. Inside the Cabin, the two lovebirds we're wrapped up in each other, even in their sleep.

Annabeth stirred a little, and Connor ducked his head down, taking Travis with him. If Annabeth caught them spying on her at this time of the night...He didn't even want to think about the consequences.

The two crept slowly down to the back of the black cabin. It was not the biggest cabin around, but it still loomed over, well, everything. It had been a week since Nico had officially moved in, and (apparently) he was too busy redecorating the interior to bother himself with the outside yet. He had not been a huge fan of the vampire dynamic (or the Greek Fire torches, for the matter).

Connor carefully jimmied the lock and opened the door as quietly as he could. What he saw inside made him whistle a little. Beside him, Travis was gawking with his mouth open.

They were ina full-scale living room, with oak-paneled walls and a thickly carpeted floor. There were three black couches around an ornate center table, all of them facing a flat-screen television set. Paintings hung on the walls, there were pictures of Nico and Hazel on the mantelpiece, and dang, was that a chandelier?

"Whoa," said Travis."Whoa ho ho," he added, looking around in disbelief.

"We've come here on a mission", said Connor, as much for his own benefit as his brother's, struggling to keep his hands off all the stuff that was just lying there, positively begging to be stolen. The chandelier had these tiny gold fixtures, and Nico probably wouldn't even notice...

Mission. Right.

"Come on," he said, and Travis followed him into a hallway of sorts, with a door on the right that was clearly the bathroom, a door straight ahead that was obviously the bedroom (it said 'Nico and Hazel are in here' on it with a big DANGER sign).Which left the door on the left.

Without even looking at each other, Connor and Travis came to the conclusion that went: Snoop?Snoop.

Travis cracked the door open, and it seemed like that night was custom-made to accommodate as many spit-take moments as possible, because both of them had another one right there.

The inside of this room was not posh like the living room, but it was about ten times more shocking, because this was Nico we were talking about, and most of the campers had decided that he spent his free time either in a hospital or in a drug den.

The room was split roughly in two, one side littered with stray art supplies, the other with loose pieces of sheet music. The first side had easels upon easels lining the wall, each fitted with its very own unfinished piece of art. Paint splashes decorated practically everything, and there were honest-to-Gods framing supplies in the corner. The bottom of each painting was signed either Nico di Angelo or H. Levesque, each one of them stunning.

The other half of the room was taken up by musical instruments - some that they could name, but most that they had never even heard of before. A priceless ebony grand piano took up almost half of the wall (Nico will definitely notice if that one's gone, Travis reminded himself.)

By the thickly curtained window sat two armchairs on either side of a coffee table, surrounded by bookshelves. There was a cup on the table, sitting next to a book with a paintbrush shoved through it as a bookmark - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Neither son of Hermes dared enter the room because one, it felt like hallowed ground, like a church at night (at least the night part was true), and two, as it was Nico's, it was most probably booby-trapped in three thousand different ways.

Connor nudged Travis with his elbow. "Did you know about this?" he asked in a whisper. He didn't know why, but it seemed appropriate to whisper. Travis just shook his head.

Now silent, both processing what they had just learnt about their former (and hopefully soon-to-be) co-prankster, the two demigods made their way to the bedroom.

Travis had thought he would be used to surprises by now, but the sight that greeted him left him utterly, completely, horrifiedly silent.

There were two ordinary four-poster beds in the room, separated by a common bedside table. On the bed to the left lay the sleeping form of Nico di Angelo, clad only in purple pajama bottoms (probably bought by Hazel).

Being demigods, Connor and Travis were used to scars. All demigods had them, a few of them having up to ten or fifteen of them - some wounds never healed completely, even with nectar and ambrosia. But what they saw on Nico was a world away from average demigod scars.

The Ghost King's arms were lacerated - that was the only appropriate word for something like this - with what looked like multiple claw marks. The front of his torso was littered with suspiciously deliberate-looking cut and burn scars - as if someone had purposefully cut into him and pressed white-hot iron rods into his front.

On his back, standing out almost angrily, were long, crisscrossing lines that looked like - were those-

"Whip marks?" gasped Travis, unable to quite process what that probably meant. After all, torture was not commonly practiced these days. He turned to look at Connor, who looked back at him, both their eyes wider than they had been in a long, long time, the two brothers finally understanding why Nico had spent two months in the infirmary.

They turned back to Nico, who was shaking slightly in his sleep - trembling, even, a gag tied tightly around his mouth. The gag was another thing they were familiar with. Many demigods used them, preferring discomfiting themselves to waking others up with their screams.

And then suddenly, he wasn't on the bed anymore, and Connor and Travis had twin daggers pressed to their throats, drawing tiny droplets of blood.

"Why. Are. You. Here?" said Nico's voice, and waves of terror in its purest form literally radiated off him. For a second, Connor's mind blanked out with fear, his pulse thudding in his ears, his breath coming in bursts that were surely way too short to be normal.

And then, it stopped, and Connor gasped a little. Nico pocketed the daggers (since when did pajamas come with pockets that were dagger-safe?) and took a few steps back. "Oh," he said. "It's just you. I thought - " He stopped himself mid-sentence. "Why are you here?" he asked.

Travis looked at Connor, and Connor looked at Travis, and the two came to a silent decision to ignore both Nico's scars and the shadows which were slowly curling into and away from him, somehow doing both at the same time.

"We are here," he said, his tone as formal as it got."on a mission."

"A mission?" asked Nico, and for a second, Connor thought he saw a shadow of ten-year-old Nico on the face of the boy that stood in front of him now.

"A mission," said Travis,"to offer you your old position as co-troublemaker."

Nico's voice shook slightly as he asked, suspicion the greater part of his expression,"You-you really want me b-back?" For a moment, he looked to Connor both incredibly young and unbelievably old at the same time - afraid that he was being tricked, aware that he had been tricked too many times to count, wanting to take a risk, but knowing that the last leap of faith he had taken had ended with him spiraling into the abbys.

Connor waved away his concern. "Of course," he said airily, knowing that if he softened his tone to anything lesser than obvious, the Ghost King would turn his offer down in less than a second.

Nico blinked, and suddenly, Nico's eyes, which had been pitch black a second ago, turned a striking, almost glowing, amber, just a shade darker than Hazel's luminous gold ones. That was when Connor remembered something about Nico he had almost forgotten, mostly because it was something very few people actually got to see - his eyes.

Nico's eyes, like Hades' eyes, reflected his mood. Most of the time, they were black, but when he was furious - absolutely, insanely furious - they turned blood-red, looking for all the world like a pool of, well, blood that had flooded out of a fresh cut. And when he was happy - no, not happy. When he was freaking jumping up and down with happiness on the inside, his eyes turned an unnerving amber. Needless to say, not many people had seen his eyes turn fully amber. Maybe a few flecks from time to time, but not completely amber.

Like they were now.

A slow grin spread across Nico's features, and then it appeared full-force. The only living son of Hades was one of those people who grinned with their entire face, their eyes lighting up (in this case, literally so) and their cheeks developing impossibly deep dimples. And it was the kind of 440-Watt, turn-the-world-upside-down, grin, the sort of grin that could stop wars.

The next morning, there were three names being screamed by angry campers instead of two.

And just for that one moment of pure, unadulterated happiness, Nico decided not to ask Travis and Connor about the missing gold fixtures Hazel had so lovingly put on his chandelier.