Three days in the infirmary a Solangelo Fanfic

Through His Eyes

Nico

I walked out of the infirmary hand in hand with Will. I breathed in the fresh morning air and smiled, it was a beautiful morning.

"Where do you wanna go?" Will asked, excitedly.

"Let's go to my cabin, I want to show you something." He had asked me about my artwork and even though I think it's not the best, I feel like it's important to show him.

As we walk to my cabin I notice how quiet and still the camp is, maybe I should wake up early more often. The only others awake are from the Apollo cabin and most of them are either in the archery range or still in their cabin. We reach my cabin and I push open the door, I had almost forgotten how horrible the decor was.

I motion for Will to sit on the bed opposite of mine and I pull out my box labeled 'Art stuff.' I pull out sketchbook after sketchbook, making piles for each year. Then, I take out my stacks of camper portraits. There's a portrait of every CHB camper and about half of the Camp Jupiter Legion and ghosts.

"So this pile is from before I went to the Lotus casino," I point to the smallest pile on my left, there are four sketchbooks and a few loose artworks. "These are all after and then sorted by year." I gesture to the four groupings of sketchbooks, each larger than the next. "And these are Camp Jupiter and CHB." I indicate the two piles of portraits.

"Can I look through everything?"

"Yeah, but be careful with that pile," I say, referring to the before Lotus Casino pile, "They're over sixty years old."

"Ok," Will ignores that pile and goes to the smallest pile of sketchbooks, "How old were you this year?"

"That was the year that we were taken out of the casino and that Bianca died, I was twelve." He starts to page through the books, if I remember correctly there isn't anything truly notable about my sketches but there was one piece that I was really proud of. It was a painting of Bianca that I did before I found out she had died, it was of her as a huntress and I think it really showed how much she had grown in such a little time. But it wasn't in that pile of sketchbooks, it was in my pile of portraits so it would take Will a while to get to it.

Will

I looked at the sheer number of sketchbooks and had to wonder when he had the time to make all of this art. I started in the smallest pile and was immediately wowed by the quality of the work. It was really good for a twelve-year-old, even I can't draw this good now. I have been blessed with many of my dad's gifts but art wasn't one of them. Most of the artwork surrounded themes like mythomagic, camp, and his sister. Then in the last sketchbook from that year, I saw a lot of darker themes as it seemed Nico had hit a change. His art style was completely different and everything was shaded really heavily.

I moved onto the second smallest pile, this was from when Nico was thirteen. There were a lot of sketches of the Labyrinth and of the underworld, everything was really vivid and screamed with realism. It felt like I was really there, and it wasn't a very pleasant feeling it felt very ominous. I saw quite a few sketches of Percy here and there but they all looked cartoony, like a filtered version of him.

The next pile had twelve sketchbooks, one for each month of the year. I saw things from Nico's travels and there were a lot of sketches of Hades' palace. I saw quite a few of the river Styx and some extremely vivid imagery of Percy being dipped into it. I also saw some sketches of a house with a sidewalk lined with beanie babies with smoke curling from the edges of the page, kind of like what happened to Rachel when she spewed the prophecy of seven. It was so odd that I didn't even bother to ask about it.

In the next few sketchbooks, I noticed how almost everything was scenes of death and destruction. I recognized it, it was when over half the camp died defending the Empire State-Building and Mount Olympus. Except there was something different about the scenes, some of the campers had really dark shadows pulling at them from the ground and others had only normal shadows. I showed it to him and asked, "Can you tell me about this one?"

He moved so that he was sitting on the floor next to me and began to explain it, "You probably already guessed that this was from the battle of Manhattan. That much should be obvious, those campers there," He pointed at the figures that the shadows were tugging at, "are dying, that shadow is a visual representation of their life force dissipating and moving into the underworld for judgment. Then over here," he pointed at something I hadn't noticed before. A really well-known statue that had moved off of its pedestal, "Is where I incorporated plan Daedalus 23. Which was Annabeth's genius discovery that helped the war a lot."

"Can you see when a person is dying or do you just get a feeling?"

"It's more of just a feeling, I can also tell if a person is close to death even if they are perfectly healthy. It can be hard, knowing that the person you just passed is going to get run over by a truck in an hour, and not being able to do anything because I would be interfering in the Fate's business. And nobody, I mean NOBODY, should mess with fate. Unless you're immortal." He adds the last part as an afterthought.

"Wow, I never thought about it that way. I'm really sorry you got stuck having to live this way."

"It's alright, I've learned to deal with it," He flips to a page of a woman crossing the street, a dark shadow pulling at her feet, moments before a semi-truck will hit her, "This is just one of the stories that fit the description, and she didn't know this, but she was two weeks pregnant with twins."

My jaw dropped and my eyes began to tear up, "How- but- are you sure you're ok? There's no way you're actually ok when you live with stuff like that on the daily."

"I get by," but I can tell it's gotten to him. He leans against my chest and lets out a heavy sigh, I wrap my arms around him and forget about the mounds of artwork next to us.

"Hey, do you wanna go back?"

"No, I want to stay right here." I give in, the rest of camp has already begun to wake up and there's really no rush for anything. So we silently move onto his bed and cuddle for a little while.