This Dark Night ― Percy Jackson & Annabeth Chase¹

―xxii. the hurting and the healing

CAMP WENT LATE THAT SUMMER. It lasted two more weeks, right up to the start of the new school year, and Naomi had to say, they were the best two weeks of her life.

Grover had taken over the satyr seekers and was sending them out across the world to find unclaimed half-bloods. So far, the gods had kept their promise. New demigods were popping up all over the place—not just in America, but in a lot of other countries as well.

Naomi and Nico came to an agreement—rather than build a Hades cabin and a Persephone cabin (Naomi loved her half-aunts and half-uncles in Cabin Four, but Demeter had warned them they would probably getting quite a few new additions to their cabin, so they could use the room), they'd build a Hades-and-Persephone cabin.

Persephone had made it clear she didn't plan on having anymore demigod children, and even without the Big Three Oath, Hades didn't have a lot of his own, so it made sense to just make a cabin for the two of them. They did decide to build separate rooms rather than the typical open-concept cabin, because Naomi loved her stepbrother, but she also loved privacy.

Annabeth helped them with the blueprints—Naomi insisted on an attached greenhouse for flowers and pomegranate trees straight from the Underworld, since Nico's Hades-ness wouldn't kill those just by being around—and Nico recruited (or rather, summoned) a crew of undead builders to work on the cabin. It was going to look pretty cool—solid obsidian walls with a skull over the door and torches that burned with green fire twenty-four hours a day. Naomi decorated the front porch with flowers (Nico insisted on dark ones—Naomi feared his emo phase wasn't going anywhere anytime soon).

As she tacked decorations onto her bedroom walls—pictures of her friends at camp, a few posters Percy and Annabeth had brought her from the real world over the years—Nico walked in, knocking on the door-frame.

"Katie Gardner's looking for you," Nico said, inviting himself to sit down on her freshly-made bed. "She said you left a mint plant in the Demeter cabin."

"Pepper!" Naomi gasped. "I can't believe I left her!"

Nico blinked at her. "You named your mint plant Pepper? That's dumb."

Naomi did the mature thing and stuck her tongue out at him. "She's special. She deserves a good name."

"But Pepper?"

She rolled her eyes. "She appreciates it," she said. "Now make yourself useful and help me hang this up." She shook the bi flag Silena had gifted her last winter at him.

Nico sighed like she'd just given him a labor-intensive chore. "Fine," he muttered, standing back up. Naomi handed him one corner and took the other, stabbing a thumbtack into the wall to secure it over her headboard. She handed one to Nico for him to do the same, and stuck one in the middle just in case.

She stepped back and scrutinized it, making sure it was level.

Nico frowned at it. "What country is that, anyway?"

Naomi looked at him, confused. "It's not a country. It's a pride flag."

Nico blinked at her, lost.

It was then that Naomi remembered Nico had been out of commission between the 1940s and now. He probably didn't know anything about the LGBT+ community. He'd been a kid when he entered the Lotus Hotel—it made sense that he was confused.

Not for the first time in the last few weeks, Naomi wished Silena was here. She'd been so good at teaching Naomi.

But now, it was up to Naomi to teach Nico. Passing the torch, in a way.