neighbors | solangelo au

2.1

tw;; ment. death, underage drinking (OH MY GOD WHAT A SIN), the fucking amount of sexual tension

It had been the best school year ever, hands down. Well, teachers were still shitty sometimes, and Nico drowned in homework during finals season, but he was actually happy for, like, 85% of the year.

He had Will to thank for that. Apparently Will was unable to keep himself from talking to people, and by the end of the year, he'd formed a little group of friends, who became, through that weird best friend correlation thing, Nico's friends as well.

Nico and Will had been blessed by the public school system with the same lunch period, and their little booth was soon joined by Percy, Annabeth, and Frank, who were upperclassmen in Will's PE class, and Hazel, a girl in their grade. Hazel's friend Leo, a tiny freshman as short as Nico, showed up a few weeks into the year, and brought his friends Jason and Piper to sit with them as well. Zoe would cut class at her preppy private school and show up to have lunch with them until the security guards caught her in November and started doing annoying as fuck ID checks at all the doors.

Initially, Nico would've rather jumped off a fucking bridge than been in a situation like this one, but he eventually warmed to the idea of having friends (plural!), and even became close enough to Hazel to think of her as a sister.

He still had the same awful, relentless crush on Will, that had annoyingly grown into love, but he was able to deal with it now. Nico could have a normal conversation with Will, he could make eye contact, they could have physical contact, and, yes, that horrible, wonderful burst of butterflies in his stomach happened whenever he saw Will, but he was handling it, for the most part.

And he had to keep handling it, since they were pretty central parts of each other's lives now. They'd spent Christmas and New Year's together, and both of their birthdays. On the anniversary of Will's mom's death, Will insisted that Nico come with to visit her grave, and back at Will's house, they sat in the backyard in a foot and a half of cold-ass snow while Will leaned against Nico and cried silently. They were like family now; Nico definitely loved Will as much as he loved Bianca and his mother, if in a slightly different way.

Nico was actually sort of surprised nobody had found out yet, the extent of his crush. Well, nobody except Hazel. She apparently had noticed the abnormally large amount of time Nico spent staring at Will, and confronted Nico mid-year. Nico grudgingly confirmed her suspicions, effectively making himself Hazel's bitch, as she threatened to tell Will how Nico felt any time he pissed her off (which was quite fucking often). However, she tried about once a week to get Nico himself to confess to Will, and spent the morning of the first day of summer break lecturing Nico on why he should tell Will how he felt.

Nico's dad had gone out of the country on a business trip (maybe to Dubai? Nico never paid much attention), Nico's mom was in the hospital while the doctors tried to get her new meds for the umpteenth time, and Bianca went to Marseille with Brian's family for a week and a half, so the house was wonderfully devoid of adult supervision. Nico and Will and all of them had decided to take advantage of the empty house to have an extremely small nine-person party (it probably should've been called a sleepover, except they weren't in fucking middle school). Hazel, being the solid maternal figure in their group (despite being the youngest?), came over to Nico's house early to set up, since Nico sure as hell wasn't gonna make an effort, and spent a good half hour before anyone showed up perched on Nico's dresser, giving him "advice."

"Tell him," she said. "C'mon, you have to."

Nico was laying on his carpet, looking at the ceiling. "Fuck off. No, I don't. Besides, why bother? He doesn't-"

"You'll never know unless you ask." Hazel bounced her heels against the side of the dresser.

"That's a cliché. And since I know he doesn't like me back, he'll just think I'm creepy and stop being my friend if I tell him. And that's a hell of a lot worse than unrequited love."