Solangelo Oneshots

Bingo Cards and Good Mornings

An apocalypse wasn't in Nico's bingo card for the new year.

The virus had spread seemingly overnight. It wiped out towns in hours, cities in days and countries in its first weeks.

Nico survived with a can do attitude, a pocket knife and a lot of luck. He escaped with his sister, travelling by night on anything that moved and didn't have people.

The disease was highly contagious and symptoms only showed after it was too late. Bianca led them across the country on the backs of trucks and lorries. They never hitchhiked. They never stayed in the same area as another human.

They survived for ten years. Nico spent his adolescence learning how to fight and steal and survive. Bianca spent her adolescence raising him.

She died six months after Nico's twentieth birthday. It was a raid of a warehouse gone wrong. Convenience stores had all been stripped and peeled back at the walls years ago. Warehouses were kept for small, quarantined communities.

Resources were lacking. Warehouses were heavily guarded.

Nico and Bianca had robbed more than a fair few in their time. This one wasn't one of the worst. She was just unlucky.

A guard heard them as they tried to sneak in. Bianca shoved and Nico and whispered to him to run before she jumped out of the bushes and presented herself.

Without hesitation, the guard shot her twice in the chest.

Nico spent the next three years angry and bitter. Bianca didn't die from a situation they couldn't handle. She didn't die from the goddamn epidemic. She died because humanity was fucked and they made a dumb mistake.

Unsure of what to do without his sister, Nico approached a community.

The level of vulnerability was a level of terrifying that drowned Nico.

He had to give up all his weapons and spend a month isolated in a quarantine room. Some people developed symptoms quickly and died shortly after. For others, it took longer. Better safe than sorry.

Anything pushed into his room wasn't pushed out again for fear of infection. His room was a stinking, mouldy cave by the time he was deemed healthy.

The people who ran the community were nice enough.

He drank his first beer with Mr. D and played card games with Chiron. Percy taught him how to shoot a gun properly and Annabeth caught him up on a decade's worth of missed education.

Will taught him how to bandage wounds and how to be a person again.

Will's mother was (as Will put it) the big cheese in the community. She called the shots. She'd served in the military when Will was young and had only quit a couple of years before the virus. Naomi was hardheaded and fierce.

Will was fierce too but in a way that caught people off guard. He was like a sleeping lion lazily stretched out in the sun. Harmless until poked.

He was also Nico's best friend.

"Di Angelo!" Will shouted, knocking on Nico's door. "Up and at 'em."

Nico groaned and rolled over in his bed. Reluctantly, he slid out of his sheets and opened the door.

"What?" he grumbled.

"Scouting mission," Will said. "You, me and a few others. We leave as soon as possible."

Looking for survivors, in Nico's opinion, was a waste of time. By now, people were either dead or looking for them anyway and it wasn't as if they were inconspicuous.