intoxicated i love you || xReader [SEQUEL] [COMPLETED]

one // wake me up when september ends - green day

Y/N

read between the lines
of what's fucked up and everything's alright.
check my vital signs
to know i'm still alive and i walk alone.

~~~~~~

I stuffed my hands into my pockets alongside Nico in the bitter, December air. We decided to get out of the Hades cabin and into the Forbidden Forest for a nice late-night walk. But the thing is, it was cold.

And somehow, I felt numb. It wasn't from the weather.

I didn't really talk to anyone since -- well, you know. I tried my hardest to distance myself from everyone. They all poked in with their giant noses and larger ears asking me how I felt. How I was holding up. If I was holding up.

To be quite frank, I felt nothing.

It was awful. I begged for empathy, for emotion. But everything was blank. I viewed everything with this white stare, a plain slate with nothing on it. And endlessly spinning globe.

I was empty.

Nico and I, though, had this routine of walking outside together after boundary hours. It was calming, and I had an excuse to feel numb. My mind didn't have to wander around these parts of camp, and Nico didn't have to worry about despite the fact that I'm the older sibling.

Tonight, however, he talked.

"It's pretty cold out tonight," Nico said, trying to strike up a conversation. He rubber his nose on the fuzzy collar of his over-sized hoodie. "I wonder how Demeter's doing."

"She should be used to this," I replied quietly. My voice droned around the woods, the trees eavesdropping into our conversation like satyrs and nymphs. "Her daughter's left her like this for eons. It's not like it's something new."

Nico shrugged. It was cute how his shoulders and small frame moved inside those giant clothes he wore. "Her unconditional love for Persephone doesn't die as easily as the years do," he acknowledged. "She is her favorite daughter, after all."

I knew what he was doing. I thought back to him and his deep, piercing sea-green eyes. The way his smile shone like Apollo's chariot across the sky made me feel warm inside -- the most I could ever feel since the Incident.

And his laugh -- oh, his laugh. It was so pure and gently. And beautiful. He was so, so, beautiful.

And it's so awful that he's gone. And it's more than just sticking with, "life sucks". Because it's more than that. It's torturous, and unfair, and so damn awful.

And it's never going to get better, and it seems like leaving will be the end of it all. And all this bullshit is just bullshit.

"I don't understand," I mumbled. I cast my eyes down at the crunching leaves underneath my feet. Time and space began to drift away. And endlessly spinning thread like the ones the Fates use to cut off a life became my mind. Everything was numb. "I don't -- I don't understand...."

Nico grabbed my hand, and I was shaken back to the scenery. "You don't have to understand," he said slowly. He drawled out his sentenced, his voice droning through the forest's trees. "It's how things are --"

"And you think Percy's death was just how things are?" I exclaimed, sharply pulling my hand away from him. The edges of my vision darkened to maroon, seeping closer to the middle. "Because I was just supposed to lose the only guy I've ever let into my heart? Because I gave him my everything, and it's okay that that disappeared?"

Nico flinched as I stabbed him with sharp words. And when he tried to hold me, sobbing, I let him.

The repeat of me leaning against Nico's fragile, bony body was repetitive nowadays. He didn't have to talk. He could sometimes pat my back softly, whispering Italian phrases into my ear.

"Vuole ballare con me?" he murmured, sneaking a hand to brush a strand of hair behind my ear.

Familiar to the common phrase, I gave my consent. I held his small hand softly and put my other arm on his bony shoulder. Nico was so accustomed to having his arms where they were that, before we knew it, we were swaying to an unheard song.

The way the frigid, brisk wind gnawed at our vulnerable ankles gave me distraction from all the shit in the world. It was the moment where all our troubles washed away like suspended watercolors that I could finally breathe.

Nico needed it too. A way he could stop thinking, like time could pause, was bliss.

So we danced until the moon came down and the sun came up. The frost-bitten ankles were heavy and tired, yet we danced. We twirled around slowly like Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler would. We swayed the way the wind tumbled, like a mess of dirty laundry waiting to be washed.

I didn't just lose my lover. Nico lost a friend.

We were broken. But half a heart will fill the empty void left by another.

And I don't know what I could ever do without my filler heart.