— III. NICO & ORPHEUS: DEATH —

Hell sucked.

Nico had decided this the first time he'd had to come to the Underworld, and sure enough! It held true every damn time. Worse than anything, the one "good" thing about hell —seeing your loved ones again after death— didn't even hold true. Bianca hadn't wanted to see him, and then had left. Mamma was gone and Hades wouldn't tell him what happened to her, and it was so terribly lonely all of the time.

None of his "siblings" were around —and even if they were, he'd avoid them— and Hades had restricted him from going to Elysium, the one place where maybe, just maybe, there would be someone there to talk to. He was stuck with two options (three, if you counted the Fields of Punishment): the cornfields of Asphodel, and Hades' Palace. The former was full of miserable lost souls who were left to wither away as time ticked by, and the latter ran the risk of running into Hades, or worse, Persephone.

Nico almost went with Asphodel. Miserable as it was, it was safe. Ish.

But it was also boring, and Nico could feel himself fading away as he spent time there. Endless misery and stagnation wears on anyone, and despite his heritage Nico was far from an exception. That left his father's palace. The one consolation was that he'd yet to explore the whole thing, and getting lost in the Palace was ridiculously easy.

So he did.

He went to his room, and then four corridors past, wandering through the labyrinthine palace with single-minded purpose. The fourth right left him somewhere he'd never been before, and the dark walls lightened to earthen brown. Wow, back to more black. He tried most doors, and most were locked. The ones that weren't were closets and cupboards and things Nico didn't understand why his father kept around.

The fifth right took him somewhere different: black walls were covered in tapestries of scenes from up above. Trees, flowers, streams, the sun, all there in blinding color in the dark. He walked slowly down the corridor, eyeing each tapestry with interest. All were still, and there were no humans or animals on them except for one woman with an indistinguishable face. She? She was in all of them.

Nico isn't sure how it happened, but in one step it went from the creeping silence of Hades' Palace, and in the next eerie chords bounced against the walls as a mournful song echoed through the corridor.

"If I get killed," Nico said to himself, fiddling with the skull ring on his hand, "I'm haunting Percy."

So he looked for the source of the song. Who wouldn't? He crept through the corridor as quiet as he could, glancing into empty hallways as he pinpointed the singer. Ten doors down, and the sound was clearer than ever before. He looked through the next doorway cautiously, and sure enough, there was the source.

A lone man, hunched over a lyre, strumming away as his voice rose and fell with the tune. The lyrics weren't in a language Nico recognized —an older Greek, maybe, or something else— but the tone was unmistakably mournful. What to do, what to do?

Nico stepped into the room, one hand raising to half-wave at the singer. "Hello."

The next note was discordant, and the singer stopped abruptly to look up at the son of Hades.

"I'm… Nico" Nico said, stepping into the room, "son of Hades. Who are you?"

The man stayed silent for a long moment, watching the young boy with narrowed eyes before he replied, "Orpheus."

Nico blinked once in surprise, "The Orpheus?"

"Is there another?" the lyricist snapped irritably, standing and pushing the lyre into a corner.

"I don't know, that's why I asked." Nico replied snidely, before backtracking "... sorry, I just wanted to know what you were singing. It sounded… sad."

Orpheus looked skeptical as he studied the young hero, but he answered eventually, "It's a song of mourning for Eurydice."

"You mourn her still?" Nico sounded surprised, "After all this time?"

Orpheus scoffed, "Was I supposed to forget her? My wife? My love? Was I supposed to let her memory fade?"

"No!" Nico exclaimed, "That's not what I meant. I just… I lost my mother and sister recently. At least, I realized I'd lost them recently. People keep telling me to move on. That they're gone, and since I'm a son of Hades I should be… fine. Fine with death. Fine with their deaths."

The singer stood contemplatively for a moment before he retrieved his lyre once more. "You don't need to be fine, child of mourning," Orpheus said. "You need not ever be fine, I've realized. But, you cannot pretend that they will someday come back to you." His smile was bittersweet, "That you can retrieve them."

"I— but, you got so close! I'm the son of Hades, surely—"

"Surely you know that is not how it works, child of loss," Orpheus mumurred, "you can mourn. You can always mourn, and you can always remember the love of your family, but you cannot bring them back."

"But—" Nico faltered, panic rising, and slipped to the floor, hands pressing to the sides of his head, "I just— I just want mia mamma, voglio solo mia sorella!"

Orpheus said nothing as the little hero finally took the time to mourn, sobbing on the cold floors, but he did begin to play. He strummed the lyre with gentle precision, and he chose a song to sing:

"Hear, o gods, my desperate plea

To see my love beside me

Sunk below the mortal sea

Her anchor weighs upon me

Fasten her tether unto me

That she may rise to sail free

Don't

Don't look back…

a/n: this one felt a little cliché & rather stilted but… oh well. The song is Lament of Orpheus by Darren Korb, from HADES.

— next: IV. TRAVIS, CONNER, & SCIRON: GAMBLE —