WAIT FOR ME [ nico di angelo ]

Greatful

TIME PASSED, BUT Louis and Nico stayed in their embrace. It was safe, it was comforting, it was the only thing they had.

"Are you ok?" Louis asked. Nico nodded,  and Louis pulled away to give him a look that said you're  not fooling anyone.   Nico's arm was badly bleeding, but Louis wasn't any better. For his neck and arm were also bleeding badly.

Nico tore off a peices of his clothing, wrapping it around both his wound and Louis'. "That should stop the bleeding for now."

"I look like I'm wearing a scalf."

"What's so bad about that?"

"Black isn't really my colour."

Nico loomed like he wanted to pull his hair out. "It dosent matter!"

"It matters too me." Muttered Louis.

Nico ignored him. "Let's just keep moving, we don't have time to waste."

They continued onwards through the wasteland, tracing the route of the Phlegethon as they approached the storm front of darkness. Every so often they stopped to drink firewater, which kept them alive, but neither were happy about it. It felt like they was constantly gargling with battery acid.

Louis' only comfort was Nico. And Louis was his. Every so often Louis would glance over and smile, or squeeze his hand. He had to be just as scared and miserable as Louis was.

Nico broke thr silence. “Thankyou."

Louis was confused. "For what."

"Everything."

"Could you be more specific?" Louis tried again.

"For saving me from the empousai. For making Taturus not feel so lonely. For coming here in the first place. For being my friend, for everhthing. Thankyou."

Louis looked at Nico, and noticed how terrible he looked. His eyes had sunk, almost all the light drained out of them with dark circled underneath. His skin had turned pale and pastry rather then his natural olive complexion. His dark curles were messy and slightly frizzy. The sadness Nico carried with him was evident from his appreacence, oozing out of him every direction he looked. Nico looked like a corpse, and yet he was still thankong Louis for doing the bare minimum.

Louis took Nico's hand in his. "I'd do anything for you."

For the first time in a long while, a small smile crept over Nico's face. "Thankyou." He repeated.

"Anytime." Louis returned his smile.

They picked their way across the ashen wasteland as red lightning flashed overhead in the poisonous clouds. Just another lovely day in the dungeon of creation. Louis couldn’t see far in the hazy air, but the longer they walked, the more certain she became that the entire landscape was a downward curve.

He’d heard conflicting descriptions of Tartarus. It was a bottomless pit. It was a fortress surrounded by brass walls. It was nothing but an endless void.

One story described it as the inverse of the sky—a huge, hollow, upside-down dome of rock. That seemed the most accurate, though if Tartarus was a dome, Louis guessed it was like the sky—with no real bottom but made of multiple layers, each one darker and less hospitable than the last.

They passed a blister in the ground—a writhing, translucent bubble the size of a minivan. Curled inside was the half-formed body of a drakon. Louis speared the blister without a second thought. It burst in a geyser of steaming yellow slime, and the drakon dissolved into nothing.

They kept walking.

Monsters are zits on the skin of Tartarus, Louis thought. He shuddered. Sometimes he wished he didn’t have such a good imagination, because now he was certain they were walking across a living thing. This whole twisted landscape—the dome, pit, or whatever you called it—was the body of the god Tartarus—the most ancient incarnation of evil. Just as Gaea inhabited the surface of the earth, Tartarus inhabited the pit.

If that god noticed them walking across his skin, like fleas on a dog . . . that would surely be the very end of them.

They stopped at the top of a ridge. Below them, in a sheltered depression like a moon crater, stood a ring of broken black marble columns surrounding a dark stone altar.

“Mercury's shrine,” Nico explained.

Louis frowned. “A Mercury shrine in Tartarus?”

Nico sheugged in response. “I dont know why its here eaither. Anyway, monsters steer clear. Mostly.”

“How did you know it was here?” Louis asked.

"I did lots of research before coming here."

"You came prepared."

"Yeah well, I didn't exactly feel like dying down here."

"Right, I knew that." Louis felt like kicking himself.

They climbed into the crater and entered the circle of columns. Nico collapsed on a broken slab of marble, too exhausted to take another step. Louis tood over him protectively, scanning their surroundings. The inky storm front was less than a hundred feet away now, obscuring everything ahead of them. The crater’s rim blocked their view of the wasteland behind. They’d be well hidden here, but if monsters did stumble across them, they would have no warning.

Nico spoke up. “They are following, yes. They know we are here. Giants and Titans. The defeated ones. They know.”

"Well that's such a comforting thought."

Louis tried to control his fear. If all of them were down here in Tartarus, and if they were actively hunting Louis and Nico, they'd never make it.

“Why are we stopping, then?” Louis said. “We should keep moving.”

“Soon,” Nico said, clearly exhausted.

“You sleep,” Louis told him. “I’ll keep the first watch."

Nico didnt look so sure.

He didn’t want to sleep, but his body betrayed him. His eyelids turned to lead. “Louis, wake me for second watch. Don’t be a hero.”

He gave her that smirk he's come to love. “Who, me?”

He squeezed Nico's hand one last time, his lips parched and feverishly warm. “Sleep.”

Reluctantly, Nico became overcome with drowsiness. He curled up on the hard ground and closed his eyes.

Louis looked down upon him, admiring how calm Nico looked when he slept. There was something he wanted to say, something he wanted to tell Nico. It was at the tip of his tounge, but Louis didn't exactly know what it was. It was a funny feeling, yet he didn't mind it.

Unsure of what this new feeling was, Louis instead lowered his voice to a whisper, "Good night Nico."

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