Shattered

Nico

Leo had once told him that one of his latent abilities was that he could kill the mood of any room he walked into. Granted, this was when he was still wrestling with his sexuality and his then one-sided attraction to a certain son of Poseidon, but the son of Hephaestus had clearly never met his stepmother, Persephone.

"So," the goddess hummed, a predatory gleam in her eye, "how long has that been going on?"

"A while," Nico answered, as he removed his blade from his pocket and willed it to full size. The Stygian sword almost felt off in his hands from lack of use. While his father had been drilling him and Percy on improving control of their powers, their sword fighting skills had been kind of pushed to the side. I'll have to convince Jason to spar with me until Percy can stand on his own. I'll bribe him with food if need be...

"You don't seem that excited about it," she smirked, slowly circling around him. "What's wrong? Perseus not meeting your expectations?"

"No, Percy exceeds them in every way," he answered casually, though his grip on the hilt of his sword tightened considerably.

This was just how things were between him and goddess. She would either actively ignore his very existence or rarely poke and prod at him until she got some kind of response out of him, which she would use an excuse to punish him. Generally he could ignore her and pretend to be a compliant little demigod that the gods seemed to enjoy, but if she mentioned Percy, or worse, his mother, it was hard to restrain himself. Thankfully now that he was with Percy, her words had lost some of their sting, but anything related to his mother still hurt.

Deciding that it wasn't worth going down that particular rabbit hole, he busied himself with surveying their surroundings. Persephone had taken them to a small clearing in some ancient woods. Strangely there was a bronze SUV parked off to one side, he had no idea how it got there as there didn't seem to be a path large enough to drive the mechanical monstrosity through. The air was thick with acrid smoke from what had to be a forest fire to the north. "Are you sure Lady Artemis passed through here?" he asked, turning around to face the goddess.

"My little friends wouldn't lie to me," Persephone said, as she crouched over a small red flower that appeared to have been stepped on. "Flowers," she touched one of the small plant's few remaining petals with one glowing finger, "unlike gods and mortals, do not lie." Instantly the flower stood upright and new pedals grew to replace the damaged and lost ones. "They simply have no reason to." Persephone stood back up and brushed off her jeans.

Nico knew that was some kind of thinly veiled insult directed at him, but he wasn't sure what exactly it was about. Knowing her it could be about the time I snuck Bob into the kitchen so he could get a decent meal... Deciding it wasn't worth the risk of getting turned into some form of vegetation, he clenched his teeth and asked, "Do you know where they went?"

Persephone looked at him as if he had just asked her the most obvious thing in the entirety of history, recorded and otherwise. "Isn't it obvious?" she asked, the goddess grinning ear-to-ear. She pointed to the heart of the forest where the thick billows of smoke originated from. "They went that way."

"Of course they did..."

---------

Nico was having a hard time focusing on the task at hand, which for a demigod could be a very fatal thing. It wasn't because Percy had formally asked him to prom in front of everyone, nor was he worried about what his father and Jason were subjugating his boyfriend to while he was away. No, when he was on a mission Nico could push aside personally feelings and issues (with the exception being New Rome after Percy had kissed him the night before).