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"wow i never would have guessed you're autistic" thanks! i traumatized myself throughout my developmental years learning maladaptive masking skills that have harmed me body and soul
I've felt normal about spn for the past year and now I find myself suddenly caught with the burning need to resume writing 2 huge fanfiction projects, start a new destiel fanvid and post fandom stuff what is GOING ON
catch me in ur bathroom drinkin out the faucet cuz I’m too embarassed to ask ur mom where the cups are
I have a deep fear of being known BUT I have a slightly larger fear of being forgotten. the best solution I can come up with is making art every once in a while
im the king of "ok what do you want to see me draw. ok cool. i will continue to not draw anything"
I'm at least a little surprised that I haven't seen anyone shopping Zane and Frohikey yet
*sorry, I don't know how to spell his name
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It's Astarion time.
After a lot of testing and a healthy dose of stress, the party are readying for one last adventure to mark the end of an era. But something feels different…
Nico doesn’t seek to uncover a new scientific field, originally. It is just that he does not understand it.
"Make better choices! Dumbass!"
"Whatever you say, Apollo Junior."
"Oh, shut up!"
This -- Apollo Junior business.
There are similarities, sure. Here and there. Blond, blue-eyed, tall and strong. Many are. And of course the proclivity for drama and histrionics.
But the similarities end there, as far as Nico is concerned.
"You good?" Will calls, and Nico startles. "You're staring into space." He focuses his eyes and realizes Will is watching him out his peripherals, smiling when Nico meets his eyes.
“Do you have a photo of your mother?”
Will looks up again, eyebrows raised, glow finally fading from his hands and eyes. He holds a strip of bandage over a camper’s bicep, wrapping the roll around. “I have several," he says slowly. "Why?”
Nico squints at him.
“C’mere.”
Will hands the roll off to his patient, walking over. He stands hesitantly in front of Nico’s chair, shoulders pushed up, teeth worrying his lower lip.
Nico reaches out and tugs it free.
“You don’t look that much like your dad,” he murmurs, tilting Will’s head to the side. “You’ve got the — general blueprint, sure, but he’s all…angles.” He runs a finger over Will’s soft jaw. “You’re rounded.”
It's true. Will has more to his cheeks than his father does, baby fat he hasn't quite yet dropped. His skin is spattered with freckles on freckles, peeking through the burn scars, and his eyebrows and eyelashes are fully blond. His curls, even are nothing like so many campers claim -- yes they are sunshiney, yes they are golden. The color matches the very shimmer of the sun.
But Will's curls are a mess. Constantly.
He can no more tame the mass on his head more than Chiron can control this camp. He can run a brush through, sure -- not that he does -- but every cowlick is at odds, and every curl chooses a different pattern. Like all the frazzle that lives in his head shoots out of his skull at random, like the exclamation points in a comic.
It's cute.
It's very un-Apollo.
"Um," manages Will, voice crackling like firewood. "Um, Nico?"
When Nico looks at him again he is glowing. Not with healing, this time, but -- red. Sun-cow red, dwarf-star red.
Flustered.
Nico blinks in surprise.
"You're, um. Um! I gotta -- work."
Will twitches a little in his hold, pulling back but stopping, and Nico gets the hint and releases him. He pulls back rapidly, then, haggard breath brushing across the fine hairs on Nico's fingers.
"I'm gonna," he says, or mumbles, picking at his cut up fingertips. "Uh, see you."
He runs, practically, to the back of the infirmary, disappearing behind a supply shelf. The girl he was treated throws her one working arm up in exasperation, scowling at the horrible bandage-wrapping she has attempted on herself.
"You," she says, glaring at Nico, "are always distracting him. I might as well bleed out if you're around!"
She stalks off, tossing the ruined bandages at his head. Nico slides off the nurse's station counter, nudging them with his foot. A sound escapes his throat, unbidden: a low, contemplating hum, wrapping around his tapping fingers.
He looks back towards the supply shelves and wonders.
———
He stretches it further three days later, when the weather spells are lifted to feed the strawberries.
Will delivers on the photographs.
There are, as he promised, several of them. Several dozen, really, tucked carefully in a weathered leather album, between dozens more of his siblings with them and not. He sits next to Nico on his bed, knees tucked against his chest, flipping between tracing the curve of his family's smile against the edge of his thumbnail and watching Nico from the corner of his eye.
"She's young," Nico observes, tapping at an older photo of Naomi. She is twenty-something, in the photo, early; she holds a squirming, chunky toddler Will in her lap and laughs so hard she's blurry with it.
The shape of their faces is identical down to the atoms.
"Yes," Will agrees. "She was young when she had me. Nineteen."
Nico raises his eyebrows. His own mother was young, he knows, but not for the time; Sally Jackson was young but at least old enough to drink. Will notices the look on his face and smiles a little wry, a little bitter.
"I know. I've had lots to say about it myself."
Nico nods, turning the page. This one is mostly Will's older, gone siblings -- he knows by the heaviness of Will's breathing before he can even puzzle out what the older polaroids tell him.
It is interesting, the way Will imitates. The way Lee Fletcher stands, the way Michael Yew rolls his eyes. The gentle hold of an older girl Nico doesn't recognize, poking a giggling, eight-year-old Will in the stomach. The exaggerated cheek kiss of a woman with hair down to her knees.
Will stares, now, at the photographs, images he captured, images he has memorized again and again over the years -- the blue of his eyes is almost gray in the shadows of the rainclouds, in the darkened fairy lights of the quiet cabin seven. There is a distance to them, a sadness Nico so rarely gets to see. It is pretty, on him. Makes him look heavy, makes him look full. So often he is cheery and empty, or whatever his campers, his patients need; it is relieving to see him soft and wanting for a moment, to see the love rising and bubbling in his face, to see it crashing like waves in the gentle shake of his large hands. In the rainy softness he looks like moonlight, reflective.
"They'd be proud of you, you know."
Will smiles slightly. There is no light in his eyes, for once, and Nico cannot resist running his thumb under them. Will shivers.
"You think so?"
"How could they not be?" He tilts Will's head, slightly, until those grayed blue eyes lock squarely on his, wide and hopeful. "I am."
He says it slowly, carefully, spending time on the separation between the vowels. Like he hoped there comes the heat, seeping right through to his roughened palms. He removes them quickly, unwilling to miss it, and to his sudden wave of satisfaction there it is: the redness in his cheeks, glowing like June strawberries. His looks away quickly, biting the corner of his cheek.
"I'm -- uh."
He reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. It pops back into his eyes immediately, so Nico tugs it gently back, tucking it behind the bobby pin by his temple. He watches his lips part as he inhales more than he hears the sharpness of it.
"...Thank you, Nico."
Nico watches the quiet set to his face, the small, pleased smile. Tiny. He watches the color that clings to his cheeks even as he flips through the rest of the photos, even as he is absorbed in distant memories. He watches. He watches Will watch him, out of the corners of his eyes, through the curls of his hair. Nico exhales, low and contemplating.
"Of course."
———
Will is a deeply affectionate person.
It is in the mornings when he grabs Austin's grouchy, scowling face, pressing deafening and exaggerating smooches all over until he cracks and laughs. It is in the gentle hand on Kayla's shoulder on the range, waving wildly at the missed target until she nods, eyes bright again, face narrowed in determination along her next shot. It is in the gentle hip-check of a frantic, barking Clarisse out of the way, murmuring assurances as he patches a slash through Chris's bicep. It is in the sunshine-bright smiles pointed at everyone he sees, at the thanks, darlin'! at busy passing nymphs and tricking Chiron into giving up his paperwork. It is in both hands occupied by giggling, awestruck children and his shoulders the new hot seat, it is in the shrieking laugh bubbling out of Lou Ellen's mouth as he twirls her to music playing only in his head, it is in his holler of gravity's increasing on me!! as he crushes Cecil to the ground. It is in the arm he slings over Nico's shoulders, constantly, the parting mwah pressed to his temple, the brush of his guitar-callused fingertips across cheekbones, knuckles, shoulders and crooked elbows.
It is everywhere. It is constant. It is, almost, forgettable.
It is confounding.
Nico tests it, again. He waits for the dusk of campfire, on an evening cold enough even Will is in tight blue jeans, and he says, in front of everybody:
“You look good.”
The tips of his own ears are red, hidden by his hair, and his voice is low enough to have several onlookers wolf whistle.
But the flames don’t burst into being across Will’s nose.
Instead he grins, wide and grandiose, cocks his hip high, and says, in the worst exaggeration of his soft, subtle accent Nico has ever heard:
“Aw, don’t I?”
And Nico thinks:
Hm.
He watches, and every day is groundhog day; every day Will is grinning teeth and kiss-pursed lips and hearty palms and gentle, careful fingers. Every morning he greets Nico with his lips pressed to his fingers and blown into the air, and he is shameless, and when there is teasing he responds with knuckles dug into ribs and wide-mouthed grins and come here, brat, you're next. Every other sentence ends in darlin' or dearest or if he's talking to Nico than a million others he pulls from a hat, Zombie Boy and Death Breath and sweetcheeks and princess. He doesn't even think about them. Nico will blink at every new one and say, no, and he will laugh, low and snorting, and double down. And Drew will roll her eyes and mutter about Southern charm or rather his lack of it and can you maybe be a kicked puppy somewhere away from me, please and he will roll his eyes. And he will walk Nico to his door every night and say, bright as daylight, night, Neeks, love you! and bound away across the common, shrieking as the harpies descend on his chronically late ass.
And Nico thinks:
Hm.
But there will be moments. In corners, or in twilight: when it is someone else's turn to sing, when someone else strokes the little ones' hair as they blink themselves awake to drowsy flames, when the campfire smoke is sweet and soft and wraps around the two of them, on the blanket Will has laid out. And Will will yawn, head drooping, halfway asleep, too out of it to notice Nico's creeping hand. And Nico will touch, barely, the edge of his pinky to the bent knuckle of Will's, tucked away between them, shrouded in shadow.
And under the dancing light of flickering embers, Will's face will burn.
And Nico thinks:
Ah.
———
Nico decides to consult an expert.
"Morning," mumbles Annabeth, bumping into him as she stumbles her way to breakfast.
Nico follows quickly, sitting down next to her and staring until she sets down her book. When she does not, he puts a very careful finger on the spine, tugging down until she blinks.
"Oh, Nico! Hey. Good morning."
Nico hides a small smile. "Morning," he greets back. "I have a Question."
"Capital Q question," Annabeth observes, taking a bite of her cereal. She glances over at her half-closed book. Nico cautiously slides it away, and she glances back. "Shoot."
"How do I test a theory?"
"Uh, hypothesis, usually," she answers. "Unless your theory is: Percy is deathly afraid of centipedes, in which case I will go ahead and confirm that theory for you."
"No, that's not the theory." Nico blinks. "Thank you, though."
"Mhm. Reparations, etc etc."
"Right. Uh, my theory is secret."
Annabeth stares at him. Nico stares back. Annabeth does not blink. Nico squirms.
"A gay theory," she surmises.
"Shut up," Nico confirms, red-faced.
Annabeth grins. "Make a list of true/false statements you can prove or disprove. Test them. After testing, form a conclusion." She waves her spoon emphatically. A drop of milk lands on Nico's eyelid, and she smiles sheepishly. "Boom. Questions gained. Will Solace's Affections: conquered."
"Shut up," he says, again. But then adds, belatedly: "Thank you."
He flees to the exit horn of her cackling, before anyone can overhear them.
———
next
Sometimes remembering that Abe Sapien exists is enough to keep me going. Like swooning over here.
I'm so tired and lazy and cbf to draw but know this is me permanently btw
robots were made to be kissed. You agree
for me internet friendships are “we don’t talk all the time but I see you’re online and it makes me happy” and I really hope it’s like that for everyone
If I’m ever to actually make a comic I should learn how to draw more then just characters facing forward
If Barbie (2023) is so anti-men then how come that despite my deep, intimate conection with Barbie's journey and my absolute emotional understanding of every single element of the female experience portrayed in the movie, all I can think about after watching it
is
HIM
