the world is spinning and he can't breathe through the smoke in his fragile lungs , and he is waiting - for something he isn't quite sure what , but it is brewing in his bones like the beginning of a wildfire.
[word count: around 27,500]
/NICO DI A...
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please note, this chapter is written from the past, before nico left camp half-blood.
(OCTOBER 22, TWO YEARS AGO. CAMP HALF-BLOOD).
His reflection watches him with dark eyes, hopeless eyes, pale skin and bitten lips, a silvery scar on its nose and another on its cheek. It watches him and he watches it, curls his hands into the grass and swallows the dread in his throat, the sky above dark and endless in a way that rouses the moon to shine brighter still.
It is quiet, and it is dark, falling thick and heavy around him. His jaw aches and he can already see the ugly bruising in his reflection that stares at him with those condemning eyes and alabaster skin, stares at him as the wind dances over his skin with feather touches.
His reflection is watching him and it is almost the end of August, almost the end of summer, almost the end of this waiting and waiting and waiting for a day he's not even sure will arrive.
Warm air brushes past him as if it doesn't exist at all, and he closes his eyes and breathes through the humidity.
There is a bonfire tonight, can see the roaring flames dancing in the sky. He can imagine their voices and their laughter in his aching head, melodies strung together and broken by the crackling of flames and he thinks, maybe, in another lifetime he could be there also, but it is quiet here and he bathes in it, relishes in it, lets it sink into his skin into his blood.
(There is a bonfire help tonight and if he concentrates hard enough he can imagine he is there too, but it is quiet here and he lives in it, so he doesn't try very hard).
Somewhere amongst the stretching fields, a bird sings. It sings of sadness and blue melancholy, resonates through his fingertips to his bones. He loses himself in the quiet and finds himself in the bird songs and gets swept away into the solidarity of the darkness.
Tangled around his feet, the dry, dead grass curls around his legs like a hissing snake his mother warned him about, the snakes he would see on the back of leather jackets he stared at.
The stars overhead pinprick the expense of sheer blackness, and the full moon is so bright that it hurts to look at, so he keeps his eyes on the silver ring on his finger that glints like the stars above. His reflection watches him, and he watches the sky.
Then he hears it, a howling, shrill, of pain and anguish and loathing, anger in its rawest form. Tears apart the silence and a little of himself too, waiting, and wondering which it dreads more: the echo, or the answer.
He's on his feet in a second, sword drawn in a blur of dark shadows, eyes scanning the dark landscape of rolling fields and the glow of a spiteful fire. It howls again, scratches down his skin with its anger and pain clawing their way into his heart.
