Solace Bound

"You can lie to the world, Nico, but dreams don't lie to you."

Nico di Angelo has everything he thought he wanted. A stable home, a prestigious fiancé, and a future that looks good on paper. But paper burns, and lately, so does his chest every time he wakes from the same dream. Always the same voice. Always the same boy.

Will Solace.

Nico hasn't seen Will in years. Not since summer camp. Not since they went their separate ways and promised not to look back, nearly five years ago. And yet, each night, Nico is pulled into a dreamscape that feels more like a memory, and less like a lie.

Waking beside Percy Jackson, charismatic, admired, a little too perfect, only makes the dreams sting deeper. Percy loves him, in his own way. The kind of love that needs an audience. The kind that looks better in pictures. But the boy in Nico's dreams loved him in silence, in shadow, and in small, unspoken ways.

The dreams should be meaningless. But they're not. Nico feels it in his bones. He feels it when he looks at Percy and wishes the eyes staring back at him were blue, not green. He feels it when he clutches an old shirt stained with memory, the name WILL still written in faded ink on the tag.

Nico's guilt grows heavier each morning. The ring on his finger feels tighter. The apartment feels colder. And Percy? Percy never notices. Or maybe he does, and just chooses not to.

Because the truth is this: Nico is beginning to forget how it felt to love Percy. But he remembers how it felt to love Will.

And sometimes, in the quiet between dreams and dawn, he wonders if that feeling ever really left.

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** If you see this story outside of WattPad or AO3, it has been copied. All of these ideas are 100% mine and these are the only platforms I use to publish my work.

** I do NOT own or claim any of the characters or pictures that are used. I find most of the chapter pictures on Pinterest so all credit goes to the original artists.