All The Ways I Hate You [Solangelo]

Chapter 2

Nico always had a pen on him. If Will could trust nothing else about the world, this one singular fact would never betray him. They had never really talked but one didn't exactly need to talk to Nico di Angelo to know what he was about. There were three core traits of Nico:

• Nico di Angelo does not like you. This means he will not be talking to you and any attempts to engage him in conversation will be met with blatant and unfiltered hatred.
• Nico di Angelo will never like you. No matter how many jokes you make or how nice you are to him, regardless of the nights spent awake studying his social media accounts to find similar interests (or to fake them) for a pleasant conversation. He will even deny your brownies. There is nothing you can do about this.
• Nico di Angelo will always have a pen on his person.

There was always the slight technicality of getting him to let you use said pen, but Will was desperate and there was literally no way in hell that he was asking Leo. He loved Leo but there was just no way to ignore the obvious teeth indents and the possible slobber that would fall onto your hand if you used any of his writing utensils. Really, any of his things at all. Will had once used a hammer with gnaw marks on the plastic handle. Will had done that before and he was not sinking to that level again. Ever.

They were in studyhall and Nico was doing his best to avoid him, per usual. Will had wished a thousand or more times that Nico would open up to him, to talk to him, to at least acknowledge that he was more than a pesky piece of gum that was stuck to the bottom of his shoe, too hard to peel off and so old and squished that he barely noticed it anymore. He wanted to be close to Nico more than he'd ever wanted anything all his years of wanting, but that wasn't happening anytime soon. He would settle for the borrowing of a pen.

Will always got struck by inspiration at the worst times possible. On the toilet, walking to school in -3 degrees, trying to take a calculus exam. But sometimes he was lucky. Sometimes he was blessed with that gentle muse who waited for him to have a spare second in which to jot something down, the muse that wanted him to be happy and for lyrics and rhymes to spill out of the pen tip with little to no turbulence. The gentle muse was also a vindictive bitch who chose the only day where none of his friends or even mild acquaintances except for Leo The Licker and Mr. Angst were around to lend him a pen. Oh, and Will never brought his own supplies. It wasn't an arrogant thing, it was just a Will thing. It always had been and he had made it to junior year without correcting it, so this really was his fault. Maybe this was the gods punishing him for being a lazy slacker with no motivation and no real skills except writing bad haikus and couplets. Either way, if he didn't get the poem out of his head this minute it was going to fester and rot and die in the field of stanzas he couldn't save. And he really liked this one. Somehow he had figured out another unique but still completely accurate way to describe Nico's eyes.

The teacher watching them today didn't really care about how much they moved around the classroom so long as no one made noise. Hopefully Nico wouldn't choose to cuss him out today.

His shoes squeaked against the linoleum and the teacher's head snapped up. He smiled awkwardly and hoped she wouldn't yell at him. There were possible verbal assaults coming from every angle today and it had him very much on edge.

"Hey," he whispered, crouched by Nico's desk, his fingers curled over the surface and his head barely peaking up over it. Nico rolled his eyes dramatically and Will suppressed a smile.

"What do you want?"

"Can I borrow a pen?"

"Go away, Freckles."

Will whined and bit the inside of his cheek. Nico's face was still stone cold, but he shifted. With Nico it was all about the tells he didn't want you to see, not the ones he showed you—so maybe he'd be able to wear him down. "C'mon," he said, dragging out the syllables. "I'll give it right back, I promise."

Nico tapped his foot, but only once. Will let the silence get to him (of course, silence never got to him, not that he could tell, but he knew Nico wouldn't want to be so close to him for long. If he could just hold his ground for long enough...)

Nico dropped a ballpoint pen on his face. "Scram," he ordered, shooing him away with a flick of his wrist. Will grinned.

"Thanks," he whispered, rushing back to his seat, scribbling onto the paper before he even sat all the way down.'

He pushed all the thoughts of the traits and mannerisms that he loved about Nico to the side of his mind, focusing instead on the stanzas he'd composed in his head. He'd almost lost them, they were on the tip of his tongue. He squeezed his eyes shut and summoned them back.

Will spent the next ten, fifteen, twenty minutes composing a poem about Nico. He couldn't name the rhyming pattern, but it reverberated in the walls of his brain with a sweet tone and filled his mind with a pleasant chill. The one he got when he thought of Nico. Being around Nico di Angelo was to open a window on a March night, where the darkness of the sky froze dew drops until the morning sun hit it. To let that chill into your life was to cool down everything else around it, and that's what Will craved more than almost anything. Most people didn't open their windows at midnight in March. Will made a habit of it.

When he was finished with the poem it was nearly eight stanzas long, filled with imagery about his brown irises and his cold hands. They had only touched hands once or twice, in the beginning, and Will was almost sure Nico took special care not to touch him anymore—but he remembered how it felt to have their fingers brush. When Nico walked into the building at 6 am his face was flushed, his nose bright red and the tips of his ears just as crimson. He wrote about that, too. Even with how long the poem was and all of the information he had packed into it, it still wasn't enough to say how he felt all at once. He didn't think he'd ever be able to achieve that, actually. But that didn't mean he wasn't going to try.

He folded the paper and almost stuck it in his pocket. Almost. And then he opened the back of the pen and rolled the poem around the cartridge of ink, closing it and stealing a look around the room. Hopefully Nico hadn't seen. In a few days the pen would run out of ink and Nico would throw the pen away. The poem would be lost forever, but that was okay. There were a lot of things that Will did that Nico would never notice. Will just had to learn how to accept that, no matter how much it hurt.