When I Don't Remember You (Percico)

Chapter Twenty Two: What You Do Next

Nico di Angelo

I went numb.

By the end of the breakdown, I had nothing else. I threw up based on how hollow my stomach felt, but I don't remember doing it. My face was stained and salt was starting to crystallize down my cheeks. Dad had given me a tissue for the disgusting matter of my nose.

"I have a job for you," Hades said as he realized that I was once again in a position to process things. "If you want to take it. To keep you from... Getting worse."

Or at least, I could hear him again. I wasn't processing much.

"A job?"

He nodded his head.

"It's a longer one, I was going to wait until after New Year's to ask you to do it," he insisted. "Especially since you can't tell your friends what it's about."

"Why not?"

"Because they'll find out in a short while, but it's too soon still," my dad told me, which sounded like bullshit, but whatever. "You'll be in California quite a bit, there's a demigod you to bring there. It'll be a day or so until you can do it since I have to dig out the file and everything, but go back to camp or to the Jackson's and deliver the news and get some sleep. Eat, too. I can't have you starving yourself."

He paused for a moment as I grabbed another tissue to blow my nose.

"Did you ever tell him?" Hades asked me. "Since he lived, did you tell him the other reason you did what you did?"

I think he was happy when I nodded my head, but it was hard to tell with Hades if he ever had a positive emotion around somebody that isn't Persephone.

Who's supposed to be down here, but got called to Olympus by Zeus.

"Yeah, like a week after the battle ended I did."

I took a second because he knows part of it, but I still wanted to tell him. More for me than for him.

"We're dating," I elaborated, which seemed to be news for him. "we started going out that day, at the end of August. We haven't really... We were going to tell everyone at New Years. Come out."

And then it hurt all over again.

It overwhelms me again and I don't expect him to, but my dad pulls me into a hug, telling me things that I'm not sure he really knows.

Telling me that it's going to be okay. That I'm going to see him again and that we'll be together again and we'll be alive together and that he's okay and that Hades is sorry that he doesn't know more right now because had he realized that we were dating, he would've pressed for more information for me.

But that's all he knows. And so it's all he can say.

And despite the fact that he's a god, or maybe it's because he's a god, but it was hard to believe him.

I didn't have a choice but to. I had to take him at his word, especially as messenger to the others, but still.

It must've been 11:30 by the time I was in a state where I could shadow travel back to New York, and thanks to curfew at camp, I just went to the apartment because I planned on sleeping there tonight anyways.

Despite the time, Sally was awake, and even more, Rachel and her parents were over and awake. Probably trying to keep Sally sane.

"Nico!" Rachel was the one that answered the door, and she's also been crying recently, but not as hard as I was in the Underworld. "Hey! Come in!"

Probably in anticipation of what I'd say and due to her own anxiety, Sally stood up when she saw me walk in, looking like she might suffocate holding her breath.