Nico was running.
Not walking, not marching, running. Running as if he was being chased by hungry monsters, running as if he was outracing a white-hot forest fire, running as if his very life depended on his escape.
His life didn't depend on it, but his emotions did. He wasn't quite sure how it had happened, but it had left him reeling from the force of the emotional blow.
When he finally stopped, he threw himself down onto the hard, unforgiving ground of the riverbank, the built up pressure of his emotions bleeding out of his drained form as he turned half-lidded eyes to the milky water rushing by. He'd never so much as touched the water before...
I wonder what that water feels like...?
It had started out like any other morning in the underworld, a rather uneasy time for eating, and in the case of most of his company, arguing. He'd taken his mug with him, choosing to drink silently instead of trying to "fit in". Demeter had given him a glance when he'd gotten to the table; he'd taken the look for as good a "good morning greeting" as he could expect, and said a soft reply when he took a seat next to her at the table.
Things had spiraled out of control from there. Arguments between Hades and Persephone were as common as sand in a desert, but in this case, it appeared that the conflict had become worse than usual. Nico hadn't even been sure what they were arguing about; everything had been shouted in Ancient Greek, and he'd been too occupied with trying to blend in with the background to bother trying to translate the screams. The room had shook like an earthquake was in session, the walls vibrated with the sheer volume of noise, the torches flickered like candles in the wind, casting the room in light and then darkness repeatedly. There had been some sort of accusation from Persephone, hissed with words as sharp, as bright, as cutting as blades of ice. Her pointer finger had suddenly pointed at him, her eyes blazing with some sort of angry triumph, and then she'd said something, something he couldn't quite make out, apart from one word: spare.
Hades had muttered something in reply, his face closed off and expressionless, as if carved from marble. Nico knew it had been some sort of denial, but the words seemed flat, half-hearted, dull, as if recited out of obligation.
The nagging, snide little voice he'd recalled from his sojourns before the mirror in his room returned, taunting, in a repeated echo: See? You are the bad one...
The feeling of numbness he'd felt through most of the conversation vanished, replaced by a rapidly spreading coldness, as if his blood had been replaced by ice water, his veins freezing over, his body becoming heavy, leaden, as if he was becoming a statue to put in Persephone's garden.
He hadn't bothered listening to anymore, the damage had already been done. He was on his feet and out of the room within seconds, mug just barely dangling from one hand. The silent footfalls might as well have been made by a ghost, as he tore off down the hallway and out of sight. Demeter gazed after the departing demigod, until he'd gotten far enough that she couldn't see him anymore, before turning back to her breakfast. The food vanished. Then she turned to her daughter, then to Hades, pinning them both with an unreadable expression, before walking out of the room in a cold, haughty silence.
The snap of her fingers as she left echoed in the suddenly quiet room, and all the food on the table vanished, along with the place settings. An inch of dust settled over the table, as well as on the seats, which drew themselves up to their places and refused to budge afterwards. Persephone and Hades stared after the harvest goddess, for once silent.
When Demeter left the palace, she stretched out the scope of her powers, intent on locating Nico. Even if the underworld was a place of death, it still had more than enough dirt to put down some roots in. She reached out and began searching, the sentient roots twisting and growing at a rapid pace, until a single pulse back alerted her to her wayward target. She cursed inwardly as she realized the location.
A swirl of magic later, and the harvest goddess rematerialized at the bank of the river Lethe. The mug was sitting on a large root, one of many which had grown up out of the ground from the twisted, gnarled tree overlooking the river. Nico was lying on his side on the riverbank, trailing his fingers carelessly through the milky water, eyes alight with a strange, detached interest. He didn't look up as she approached, but he answered her anyway. "Hello, Demeter."
She stared, not quite sure what to believe, or what to do. What do you tell a child who's just been told, essentially, that he's inadequate, in all meanings of the word?
Instead, she found her voice and asked, "What do you think you're doing?".
Nico gave her a strange look: a leering grin, so very unlike that soft, hesitant smile she'd been given the night before. The grin was cold, detached, lifeless, robotic even. The grin looked so perfect it seemed almost mechanical, except that it was crooked, just the slightest bit. The light in his eyes was broken too: a bizarre, detached light that seemed to burn with a spark of fragile, shaking feeling that Demeter knew, but was unwilling to name.
She knew that feeling, she'd seen it in demigods before, the ones who'd been left on their own for so long that they couldn't comprehend their own reality anymore. Nico was like that now, she could see it. Or rather, he was about to be. The events following up to this point had put him on a precipice, leaving him teetering dangerously to either side, ready to plunge off the abyss without so much as a single warning.
It was insanity. Insanity was gazing back at her, a tiny little spark now, but she knew that if she wasn't careful, that spark would become a raging bonfire.
Nico di Angelo would be razed to the ground by his own broken image of self-worth, and it was all she could do to prevent it. The cracks were already formed, they'd merely been widened by the words from this morning, and from the mornings, the days, the nights, the time in the underworld before today. It was if Nico was a porcelain mask with hairline cracks caused by his rough experiences. The cracks were almost impossible to see unless one knew where to look, but once they started, they spread, they widened, and eventually, unless they were smoothed over and fixed, the mask itself would shatter.
A mask like that would be impossible to put back together again, not if it was to be the same as it was before.
Slowly, tentatively, she walked to him, kneeling down beside him, and said quietly, "You know, if you're not careful, your face will freeze like that."
Nico was silent, unmoving, for a moment, and then suddenly he shoved his arm into the river water, the thin appendage stark white, the fingers fanning out and wiggling, like the ghostly branch of a long dead tree. Demeter forced herself not to jump up in shock; she'd never seen anyone, mortal or otherwise, willingly touch the water, much less immerse parts of their bodies in it.
He spoke up then, voice hoarse, as if he'd been shouting. "You know, this isn't the first time I've come down here, but it's the first time I've come this close to actually dunking myself. I used to wonder what would happen if I jumped in, hehe...". Demeter stared at him, speechless.
He pulled his arm back out of the water, waving it around. The fingers were so thin they looked almost bone at first glance, the skin whiter than snow. Water dripped down, slowly, drop by drop, milky droplets falling from his fingers like translucent pearls. He held his hand out to Demeter, still grinning that awful grin.
"Go on, touch it. It won't hurt you, it didn't hurt me."
Demeter wasn't quite so sure about that, but didn't question it, instead gazing, with a sort of morbid curiosity, at the glistening, wet fingers. He is one of Hades' children, perhaps the water doesn't affect him like it does others...
Nico stared at her for a moment, gazing with a sort of dark amusement, before he threw back his head and laughed. Laughed like a man does when he knows he wants the unattainable. The noise was dark, morbid, an echo of what-if, the laugh of someone broken. Then the laugh turned shaky, broken, stilted, as the laugh turned less frequent, then to hiccups, and then finally to sobs. Aching, heaving sobs that left him trembling, eyes still staring at Demeter, the madness still there, but pain too. Pain of childhood, and of an adulthood that came too soon. Pain of loss, of hopelessness, and of no knowledge of how to recover.
The harvest goddess gathered the demigod into her arms and rocked him back and forth, her embrace tight but reassuring in its strength. They stayed like that by the river, his body shaking as he slowly became silent. She remained wordless, humming a soft, long-forgotten tune as she trailed ancient fingers through his dark hair. Nico shivered, but the madness was silent now.
She would fix him. That was a promise.
