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Nico doesn't notice it, at first.
Most of the day his eyes are just blue.
Pretty blue, of course. Most of Will is; pretty that is. He sounds it, especially, rolling r's and loud lovely laughs and a lower voice that's right on the edge of raspy. He matches it, too, his voice, he has the wild golden curls and veritable spattering of freckles that match the paint-spatter splash of his very being. He is pretty the way dandelions are pretty, bright and explosive and covering hills as far as the eyes can see.
Nico doesn't talk as much as he does. Most people don't, honestly, if there's one thing about Will it's that he's got something to say. Nico likes it when he talks, he likes to walk along and listen or track the waving of his arms as he rants during breakfast. When he watches he can see his big big eyes widen and narrow with every raised and falling pitch of his voice, he can see them sparkle with something secret every time a tripwire gets pulled and someone blames the Hermes cabin. When he watches he can see the shimmery, sky-blue catch in the sunlight, glowing with the pride of his father.
It takes a morning on the silent Apollo cabin veranda for Nico to catch the difference.
It is a Sunday, and he's awake by force of habit. He's been out of his time-distant past longer than he's ever been in it, but ten years of waking up at the crack of dawn, or before in the winter months, to slide on a starchy shirt and squeeze into pinchy shoes he hated, dutifully if grumpily holding onto Mama's left hand and making faces at Bianca around the curve of the pews, has made its mark. He's yet to spend a single Sunday morning anything but groggy but conscious, glaring out the lone Cabin Thirteen window.
One morning, he catches movement across the common.
The way the cabins are set up puts Nico on a small hill. It's interesting, really, and Nico doubts it was on purpose -- what with the disastrous design of the cabin before Nico renovated it -- but nothing venerating Hades is ever looking down on anyone else. His father is quite pleased with it, he knows, and for it the cabin is always pleasantly warm, and smells slightly like turned dirt. Garden dirt, thankfully, not grave; Nico cannot be sure and will never ask but sometimes he suspects his stepmother might have something to do with it. Either way Nico has a clear view of the entire camp from end to end, including the line of cabins gently curving from his down to Zeus's. Three doors down, and smack at the crux of the curve, is Apollo's: in the warming, rising sun, the gilded walls glow, making the red cedar beams holding up the roof look warm and lively, like there's life still growing inside. On the rickety, camper-built porch sits Will, up earlier even than any of his siblings, curled up in the corner of a porch swing. He rocks it ever slightly with one bare foot.
Unthinkingly, Nico walks over to join him.
It's harpy time still, technically. They have reign until the sun is high and clear in the sky, even in the lazier winter months. They glare at him, now, some more restlessly than others, but they know better than to come at him. Nico's sword is dark and obvious from its spot at his side, hands twitching towards it. Besides that his death aura clears him for a solid radial mile.
Will smiles, when he sees him coming.
"Mornin', sunshine," he says, voice soft in the barely-daylight. He taps the cushion next to him. "Come sit?"
It's pleading, almost, Nico notices. Not will you come sit, or wanna come sit. But come sit, as in here is your spot. Come sit as in I want you to.
Nico flushes and joins him.
"Yer up early."
His accent is thicker this early in the morning. Nico almost wants to shiver when he hears it, words short and vowels long. He looks like it, too, eyes closed and face mirroring the sun, tipped up to meet it. Long limbs curled up but bent, like the awkward ends of a sweet-tea straw. He bleeds warmth, from the foot of space between them.
"Sunday," Nico admits, just as quiet. He watches as Will drags a hand through his messy hair, smile tugging at the dimpled corners of his mouth. "Habit, I suppose."
"Yeah? Were ya up with them church-goers, once 'pon a time?"
Nico nods, suddenly restless. He sits on his hands to keep them from reaching out, to keep them from brushing along the bob of Will's Adam's apple.
"My abuela -- my mama's gramma, that is -- was Catholic, too. Crack'a dawn every week."
"Oh."
Nico forgets Will has a mortal life, sometimes. He seems so cornerstone to camp, mentioned in passing in every other story, a part of the schedule from breakfast's daily mental health check-ins to sing-along at ten. Even the infirmary bears his name -- never you should probably head over to the infirmary, but go on and get Will. Nico tries to imagine him without the backdrop of the strawberries, or in the empty desert, and comes up blank.
"Y'seem surprised."
"I am, I guess."
"How come?" He cracks an eye open, grinning. "'M too much of a sinner for it?"
Nico snorts, thinking of the thundering of the Ares cabin last night, coming home after campfire -- where Will has been suspiciously and conspicuously absent for all but his little number at the end -- to each and every bunk and possession attached to the ceiling. As far as Nico is aware, they spent the night on the cement floor.
"Something like that, you menace."
Will smiles, a self-satisfied little thing, and settles back onto the cushions. He exhales as it rocks and all tension melts from his broad shoulders; his extended hand rests limp and tempting in the cushion between them and every cell in Nico's blood itches.
The run rises, slowly. It takes its time by the measured sound of Will's breathing, warming the cracking calluses of his bare heels to the wind-rustled hem of his shorts. With every inch of sunlight he gets brighter, and Nico gets warmer, and warmer, and warmer.
When more than half of it has pushed its way over the crest of the horizon, he shifts, stretching, turning to face Nico fully. He opens his mouth to say something or make a comment and Nico does not hear it, in fact his ears go long and ringing, because his --
His eyes.
For the first time that morning, he faces Nico head on, elbow off the curve of his forehead, blond eyelashes catching in the warm rays. For the first time that morning, eyes fully open, Nico can see -- not the languid spread of him, or the endless, summer-dark freckles, but the width of his irises, the shine of his pebble-sized pupil: in the bright, early-dawn morning, Will's eyes are endless.
Blue is no longer the right color for them. Desperately, Nico searches around the porch roof, above the chimney of the Big House, and there they are, reflected in infinity: Will's eye are every jealous painter's deepest desire, they are the exact makeup of the morning sky from the pale blue at the rounded top to the golden clouds reflecting the flares of the gentle yellow sun. There are even lines, cutting straight through, of pure, gentle gold; like the angular rays of Heaven looking kindly on the spinning Earth, so stretch the lines in Will's infinitely expanding irises. Layered in between the blue and the gold is the color Nico has never been able to name, the color like pillow softness, the color like soft hands on a fevered forehead, the color like coming in from the biting cold. The color like welcome on in and I got you, darlin'. The color like a long, easy inhale that sits soft and easy in your tired lungs.
"You're starin'," says Will, quietly.
Nico swallows. He doesn't even know what to think in response.
"Everythin' alright?"
Nico's hands twitch, again, and this time he doesn't have half to strength to stop them; unbidden they move slowly up the curve of Will's cheek, pinky lingering on the prominent tendons of his scarred neck. He rests his palms on the softness of his jaw and his thumbs on the dips under his eye, hands cupped like before the holy Eucharist. He waits, mouth dry, tongue poised in anticipation of the I believe.
"Your eyes," he breathes, finally. Its mirrored in the hitch of Will's chest. "My God above."
"Ain't nothin' special," Will argues, or tries to. Heat begins to bloom under the curl of Nico's palm, and Will's voice as gone reedy and thin. "I'm -- they're just blue, darlin', what have you --"
"They're not." Nico stops himself from becoming vehement, barely, but can't slow the firm shake of his head, the whip of his rapidly warming hair. "They're -- they're sky blue Will, gods." He tilts Will's head, slightly, and he goes, swallowing heavy. "This is the kind of thing artists dream about."
That makes Will blush, heavy and hard from the tips of his forehead to below the collar of his shirt. Nico smiles, fond, something heated along the bridge of his own nose, but he cannot help but notice that Will's eyes are still shifting, even as he narrows them, even as he cringes away from Nico's words; the golden along the bottoms spreads, now, past half his irises, like sunlight on shoreline.
"You're -- full'a somethin, di Angelo," he accuses, only his pretty voice cracks. "I dunno what's got you smoother than a polished river stone, but cut that right out, y'hear me?"
Or what, Nico wants to challenge. He is emboldened, now, by Will's embarrassment; as much as he squirms he does not move away. But as the sun crests higher and higher the gold begins to fade, irises smoothing bright and blue and reflective of the sky, still. Robin-egg pale at this exact moment. But familiar enough that Nico exhales, obedient, and drops his hands, scoots way.
"You got possessed," Will mumbles, still curled in on himself. But he smiles slightly to himself and Nico mirrors it, drinking in his shy, shocked pleasure. When he looks over and huffed there is a brazenness in his teeth, a sudden realization of what Nico has been seeing this whole time: he is pretty, and quite obviously so. Even in the neon of his Head Medic shirt. "Oddball."
Nico says nothing, knocking him gently across the shoulders. He settles back in the cushion right next to him, and together they rock, on the creaky old swing, watching lights flick on, shadows move across curtained windows.
Nico looks up into the brightening sky and finds it familiar.