The Rebirth

Combat practice was not great, if you’d even call it “combat”. Second year of Camp Jupiter and he was still doing drills. Up parry. Down strike. Side step. Dodge. Up parry. Down strike. Side step. Dodge. Up parry. Down strike. Side step. Dodge.
Because, as his centurion Perry explained, he knew how to fight … but not how to fight.
He had to fight the “real” way, they were saying subconsciously. The Roman way.
And when Nico finally got up to fight, and he tried to fight the “real way”, he got his butt handed to him. His partner gave him a sort of pity-apology look as she helped him back up.
“Again, Nico.”
This time, he was ready. Because, as Perry said, he did know how to fight. In a battle, it’d be much better to not get killed and do it “the wrong way” than to get pummeled doing it “the right way”, right?
So he slashed and smacked with the hilt of his sword, the way he’s always done. His partner widened her eyes, grinning as she fought back. Their centurion groaned and called the match to stop, but they continued, Nico hacking and his partner stabbing, until Perry finally pulled the two apart.
“That’s enough,” he said firmly, before dismissing the lesson. He continued on to a lecture, starting off with, “You know, Nico, you’re looking at this the wrong way. We’re widening your horizon, not destroying your…”
The talk faded to background noise while Nico leaned his armor and weapon against one hip. There’d been a lean guy, with sandy hair wind mussed to the side and light brown eyes, watching the match. Now, he was surrounded by his friends, throwing a weightless laugh to the sky before making split-second eye contact with Nico.
Nico’s eyes narrowed. It was him. The one that interrupted the ceremony last night.
What was his name again?
The guy gave a smile and a small wave, but Nico wasn’t there to see it. He’d already turned around and began to stride back to his room. He was done here.


***
It was at dinner that he saw him again.
“I heard you got something new,” Hazel commented a little too casually. "A new lead…?" Nico gave her a steely sideways glance that clearly stated “Not here”.
She quickly turned to Frank, who’d been talking about the recent disturbances along the transportation routes to and from Camp Half-Blood. His head was in his hands, and he was slipping off towards sleep.
Looking over Piper, Frank, and Hazel, Nico saw the same person.
The one who interrupted the ceremony.
The one who made eye contact after combat.
He watched him for a while, unashamedly. Not to analyze him as a potential date, surprisingly, but instead analyzing him as a person. Within a couple of minutes, Nico’d seen him laugh lightly about every ten seconds, tell stories animatedly with his eyes lit up, and rotate through dozens of friends.
Nico kind of hated him.
He watched this person until the guy finally caught sight of Nico. Nico held his stare.
The guy excused himself from his large group of good ol’ pals and began to walk over. Nico groaned and got up.
“Excuse me,” he commented to his table before walking quickly out.
He was halfway to his cabin, edging along the side of the lake, before he heard a call. “Hey!”
Nico did stop, but he didn’t turn around. His hands stayed stuffed in his pockets. He waited for the footsteps to catch up to him.
“Hey,” the guy said again, touching a hand to his shoulder. Nico flinched, and then forced his shoulder to relax.
He still didn’t like being touched.
The guy awkwardly came around into Nico’s view. The lake slugged bright white ripples to Nico’s left.
The sun was setting.
“I don’t know what you were doing last night,” Nico said calmly, as though this was just another regular conversation with Piper or Jason or Annabeth. His face remained impassive. “But I don’t appreciate you coming in and refusing to leave my sight.”
“That rhymed,” the other one commented, grinning down in a playful, goofy smile. His cheeks had a splatter freckles. His nose and bones in his face were soft and angled. He was a little pale, too.
Nico raised an eyebrow and decided not to say anything. He promised Hazel that he would talk more- to her. And his friends. Not this guy.
The other boy’s grin slipped, softening. His eyes were- suddenly, somehow- really very brown.
“You’re just… interesting. Man.” He added the last word a little awkwardly, chunkily, like it was an afterthought. “You do things other people don’t.”
“Nice of you to notice.” It actually was. Nico, somewhere inside, was slightly touched- people don’t generally seem to care. But he was still also really peeved.
“It is, isn’t it?” the boy gave another full smile. Nico immediately recoiled a little bit. He decided he didn’t like that smile. The boy noticed and smiled even wider. “I just wanted to see some more, I guess.”
If Nico hadn’t known better, he’d think that this was flirting. But he knew every gay guy in this area, simply by chance- they’d all come up to him and introduced themselves, either through Hazel battering them to ask Nico out, or simply because they’d dated every other gay guy in the area and needed to check Nico out somehow. This person wasn’t on that gay list.
“I’m not a free show,” Nico said at last. “I don’t do things for your entertainment. And some things are for my eyes only.”
Stupidly, ridiculously, insanely, after these pieces of information, the guy goes, “So may I ask what you were doing last night?”
Nico was actually stunned into silence before hardening his eyes and saying, “You may not.”
“Please.”
“No.”
“Just a hint.”
“No.”
“Do you want to sit down?”
“No. I actually need to get back to my house.” Nico remembered. He began to walk, taking long strides.
“Why, exactly?” the other one jogged to catch up. After Nico refused to answer, he grabbed Nico’s arm. “Hey-“
Nico whipped around, the tolerance he had for this guy spilling over his limit. His hair was wild and black and messy in the front, swept up. His eyes blazed darkly.
“Look,” he started. “I can’t believe I’m actually going to have to spell this out for you. Don’t follow me in the night, because that’s creepy. Don’t watch through my dead rituals- which are for business, if you really need to know: business that’s not yours to get into- and then ask to see more, because that’s almost as weird as me doing dead rituals. And you don’t touch me unless we’re buds. Clearly, we aren’t.”
The guy let go and nodded in seriousness. He gave Nico another one of his smiles, but this one was so blindingly different that Nico did a double take. It was gentle and easy. It melted the beaming mask off his face. He looked a little more vulnerable and real. He looked less like the guy that went from friend to friend telling jokes and more like the guy that kicked it back on the wall and observed everything else that went on around him. It looked like someone who was more.
“Just sit down,” the guy motioned as he took a tentative sit on the ground, leaning back on his hands as he faced the water. He looked up at Nico in waiting.
Somehow, this boy did something right. Nico didn’t know what it was, but he wanted to reward him for it. He took a seat, completely surprising his newly made acquaintance next to him.
Daniel. Nico remembered now.
His name was Daniel. They didn’t really say anything for a while. They just watched the water.
“The Ghost King,” Daniel finally broke the silence. The sun was just a sliver by the time this conversation had started, barely brushing the golden dots on his cheeks. “How does that feel?”
“Terrible,” Nico said in all honesty, after a deep pause. “It used to feel terrible.”
He furrowed his brow. “How’d you know I was the Ghost King?”
“I asked around.”
“What’d you find out?”
“That you were the Ghost King. Your name was Nico DiAngelo. Your father was Hades. It explained why you were summoning the dead.”
“Huh.”
He studied Daniel’s face some more. His face seemed even more pale in the gold highlights on his face. Daniel noticed Nico studying him and gave him a sideways quirk of a smile.
Nico couldn’t help but laugh.
Which got Daniel laughing. Two happy, clear ringing noises across the water.
They didn’t even question it. When it finally died out, they just sat in silence some more, simply understanding.
It was when night fell that Nico realized that this was actually a pretty awkward situation, being there in the quiet dark alone with another boy.
He stumbled up and managed to trip over Daniel, landing halfway on top of him.
Daniel laughed another laugh, getting up himself, pulling Nico with him by the hands. Nico’s face burned red in the dark.
It was Nico who let Daniel’s hands go. Quickly.
And he took fast paces back to his room, waiting outside the door to let his cheeks cool down.

Notes

:))) triple update today, because I missed yesterday