"Okay, so if you don't care about Olympus, why are you still here?" Lou Ellen didn't meet his gaze, but her voice was steady and sure as she busied herself by wringing out the blood-stained rags.
They'd tried to scrub out the rust-colored stains that coated the strips of cloth so as not to alarm new patients, but to no avail. The deaths they'd seen seemed insistent on leaving a mark.
It took a few seconds for Nico to accumulate an answer. He stared at the rags as it soaked in the water and turned it a pale shade of pink as it flowed down the drain. Lou Ellen went to squeeze the water from the fabric for a final try.
"Entertainment I suppose." The lie slid smoothly from his lips.
Lou Ellen snorted. "Yeah, you haven't lived until you've seen a landscape burned to ashes and mutilated dead bodies littering the streets."
Cecil cast his eyes downwards to stare at the tiled floor. Nico wondered if his mind was going back to his siblings, if he had found one of their bodies on those streets. Too many deaths.
"Not funny."
"Never said it was."
There was a silence. A long, suffocating silence. It was deafening, and Nico scrambled for things to say, fishing in a sea of sentences and emerging from the cold waters dripping wet and empty-handed in the end.
He cleared his throat, and as if by luck, the words came to him easily this time around.
"You know why I'm here as well as anybody."
Well that gave away absolutely nothing useful.
Good job.
"Will isn't dropping out of our ranks, you know. It's useless to try."
"And I know that. But I'm not about to let him get his ass killed."
"Damn straight you won't," Cecil said affirmatively.
A voice yelled angrily from across the hall and he vaguely recognized it as Will's. "WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME???"
Lou Ellen fell in the floor laughing, tears at the corners of her eyes. Nico only shook his head mutely, his exasperated expression crumbling and giving way to a fond one.
It's strange to see this place as normal. It's strange to think of them as a family. Of all the families he'd seen, it had been so long since he was a part of one. But they were his family now. And it's too terrifying to dwell on the fact that he'd do anything for them.
Only for them.
