Percico/Nico di Angelo One-Shots

Don't Worry [Nico]

Hello everyone! Did you miss me? Ahaha... I think this is the first new one-shot I'm starting in a while. I have a million drafts that I haven't worked on. 😅 I'm taking today's one-shot idea from UnknownToAll153! This was supposed to be angsty, and it is, but there is some happiness there too.

This one-shot is incredibly wordy and has an over abundance of commas and descriptions that I probably shouldn't have added but couldn't help myself. I hope y'all can get through it.

As always, my Italian translations are from Google so! Please correct me nicely, and I will of course change it!

What if, while visiting Bianca's resting place, Nico meets her reincarnation?

(Let's pretend that Nico had a ceremonial grave made in Italy for Bianca. 😅)

Nico honestly wasn't sure why he did it. Why he made a physical place for him to remember the fact that his sister was gone. As if he needed more reminders than the hole that ached every time it came to this day. But there was also a desire in him to have a tangible memory that Bianca had actually been real. It'd been so long since he'd had her; he was 20 years old now. Living so long without her was never the plan, and now it felt like he'd always been alone. But the grave reminded him that she had been real. She and her love that he could always feel, invisible as the wind but felt all the same.

So on this day, he walks without fail to see the grave that he had made for her. A simple thing made of granite that had her name, birth and death dates (altered, of course, so mortals who may stumble upon it would not become curious), a carving of a skull flanked by two angel wings, and a simple Italian inscription: "Alla mia luna, mia sorella maggiore". Nico delicately holds a bouquet of white chrysanthemums and roses in his hands as he strolls through the graveyard. The sense of death and mourning is ever present, but he'd been wrapped in that feeling for as long as he could remember. The son of Hades sidesteps many graves that had fallen into dilapidated states, grimacing at the way some people did not care for their dead. He hears people sobbing and wailing a little ways away from his left as he meanders his way to Bianca's grave, but he pays them no heed. Probably a funeral going on.

Finally, he reaches the grave of the girl who was supposed to protect him until the end. His big sister. It has been a long time since he has grown older than her, but it still amazes him that he is now the older sibling. He puts his hand on the earth in front of her grave, knowing he would feel no coffin underneath, but it grounds him to sense the others who were buried here, calming him in a strange sort of way that only children of the Underworld or those associated intimately with death could understand.

Nico doesn't know how long he kneels there with his hand pressed to the ground, but it was long enough that the ache in his chest that always intensified during this time had lessened. He feels more at peace with the events of so long ago, feels more at peace with the boy who he claimed he hated for so long, feels more at peace with himself.

Nico pulls his hand back and sits criss-cross in front of Bianca's grave. He sets the bouquet down gently in front of him and begins whispering quietly everything that had happened since last year when he visited her. He tells her of the happenings at camp whenever he popped in for a visit, of the missions their father sent him on, of the places he's seen. He quietly says that she would've loved the lights of Paris at night, the meadows of Denmark, the night sky over Amsterdam. He thinks she would've enjoyed a picnic along the Han river, the cherry blossoms scattering in Japan, a gondola ride in Italy. He remembers her love for adventuring, remembers when she would indulge his stories of the heroes in Mythomagic, remembers how her eyes would light up when he would describe all of the places they went, the people they met. He thinks she would've made a better ambassador than him, because she's always had a natural way of diplomacy, of getting people to connect.