Solangelo One Shots

Four Eyes

Seventeen | Will

Will dropped his bags at the side of the arena, hearing soft grunts and muffled sounds of steel against wood echoing from the walls that now surrounded him. It was too spacious when nobody else was there, and it made practicing almost eerie. Especially with the echoes. That's why Will had invited his boyfriend to come in the first place. The sounds that Will could hear were probably Nico; at least ten minutes early as usual.

For such a tired guy he was way on top of his time management.

Walking in to the main area, the sounds of practice were now matched with Nico's slender frame hacking at a dummy across the arena, just as Will expected. Well, hacking wasn't really the right word. Nico was nothing short of elegant with a sword, even if a bit intimidating.

"Hey, there, Swingy," Will called, naturally going with the first terrible joke he thought of.

Nico promptly stopped his 'swinging,' letting his arms drop. He wasn't too tired yet, but still his chest rose and fell in succession. The more unfortunate thing was that Will's bad joke was only met with a glare.

"Woah, jeez, what was that for?" Will put his hands up in surrender, still approaching steadily.

"What?" Nico demanded, still glaring.

"Why are you glaring at me?"

"I'm not glaring at you, dumbass." Nico said, and then scoffed.

"Oh yeah?" Will scoffed, taking on a sarcastic tone. "Then what are you doing, sunshine?"

"Shut up, Solace."

For some reason the memory kept replaying in Will's head. It wasn't a particularly unusual memory, and there was nothing overly upsetting about it, but the whole event of it just seemed... off. Just like yesterday morning! Will had pointed across the chariot track to a banner that read 'Keep Racing Safe.' He'd made a fairly dumb joke about it, and at first Will assumed Nico was giving him the cold shoulder because it had been so awful. But when he asked about it, Nico seemed to not get the joke at all.

Considering the joke was literally just "You think Chiron would be mad if we didn't?", that was relatively hard to believe.

There was also a thing two months ago where Will was pointing out different types of butterflies to Nico in the strawberry fields, and Nico was missing the mark on like, every description. Will had thought it was a joke at the time, but now since the arena he'd been noticing Nico 'glaring' at everyone who tried to capture his attention from any distance more than twenty feet.

Will was starting to put together a theory. Fortunately, there was a pretty foolproof way to test it, but it required for Nico to actually be in the infirmary.

Luring that special someone somewhere in the pretense of a date just to examine their eyes wasn't a bad thing to do, was it? It came from a place of love. Or, you know, maybe love. Will was still sorting that out. They'd only been together six months.

That wasn't the point though. The point was, right now Will was cleaning up after his last patient of the day (in theory) and Nico was supposed to be there in ten minutes.

Which meant he arrived exactly then. He didn't even bother knocking.

"Hey, Will. Almost done?" Nico asked, setting his bag down so that he could sit in one of the patient chairs.

"Yeah, I'm just -- is that my jacket?" Will had glanced up for only a second, but he had to do a double take. Nico had never stolen his clothes before, as far as he knew. This was sort of a development. In what, he wasn't sure. Their relationship? Nico's permanent record?