ezyl
in
pillowcased
[pjo/lukenico] HUMMING BIRD, PART 2
go back.
Yeah, once upon a time? Once upon a time had been the boy standing by the window, his fingers held up to the glass and the reflection of the stars in the sky, singing lullabies to the child in the armchair, singing in a slightly unhinged voice, unbounded and light like the pieces of silk in the sky. Once upon a time had been Percy and Nico, Nico and Percy, Percy making distasteful jokes and Nico laughing awkward laughs, political incorrectness, flamboyant debauchery under the afternoon sun. Indecent exposure that had landed the two of them three days and three nights taking turns flipping the newspaper at the police office. Insanity at midnight that had landed them restraining orders from the patent office. Karaoke bars, Two Less Lonely People in the World, old Carpenter tapes, sounding out foreign words on a bridge under the stars. Once upon a time, there had been a boy and a heart and a pretty bit of Desperation floating along the banks of the river, touching their souls once in a while, but never breaching the border. Hummingbirds sing; swallow raindrops to clear their throats, drain nectar from a hibiscus flower to sweeten the tune.
Annabeth Chase is a very beautiful flower.
*
They have dinner in the morning, and Percy can’t hold it in any longer, starts complaining about needing to find a job.
Nico rolls his eyes. “The only problem I see here, Mister Jackson, is your unnecessary attention to economic issues, towards which you pay no allegiance, nor any real concern. That; and your talent for assuming the qualities of a big fat schmuck.”
“Hey, that is not true!”
“You follow the goddamn stock exchange.”
“So? Doesn’t everyone?”
“Um. No.”
“I thought it was something intellectuals did.”
Nico plucks another pear out of the bowl and takes a large bite. “Tsk, tsk. Confusing the philosophic with the corporate again? What are you, individual versus the state?”
“Shut up. That doesn’t even make any sense.”
“You need to get laid, man.”
*
Luke is seated at his grandmother’s piano; his fingers are pressing notes against the yellow ivory keys-he’s making music.
“Wow, piano? Learning something new about Master Luke, every day.”
(It’s cheesy, but it works.)
The blonde man shrugs, lifts his feet onto Nico’s lap. “Pastiche. Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Bach. Drunken key-smashing in between.”
“Dude. You can’t fit a classical composer in with the romantics.”
“Yes I can.”
“It doesn’t sound right.”
“Fuck you. I’ll show you exactly what sounds right.”
(before)
“Can’t you take care of yourself?” Luke mutters, shaking Nico back and forth, “What’s wrong with you, seriously? If I hadn’t climbed through the window, I swear to God you would have died.”
“Lemme go,” Nico mumbles, slings his arms around Luke’s neck and snuggles his head between Luke’s shoulders, “I don’t need you.”
I don’t need you at all.
(after)
Luke slides him against the sofa cushions, easing Nico out of his shirt with one hand, the other still focused on palming Nico’s cock through the heavy fabric of his jeans. He keeps one leg hooked over Nico’s, even when they near the bed, and then falls over and positions himself above Nico. It’s what he wants.
It’s what Nico wants.
“Let me ride you,” Nico pants, grinds his ass against Luke’s erection.
It’s a moan of ecstasy. It’s a moan of ecstasy, because he doesn’t want to hear the sound of his heart breaking.
*
“Hummingbirds can’t sing.”
“Yes they can.”
“…”
“Dammit, I’m hard. Hey, wanna go again?”
*
Grover passes the joint back to Percy with a grimace. “It’s fucking messed up, that’s what it is.”
“Fucking messed up,” Percy repeats.
“Yeah. Fucking shitting messed up like fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Girls? What g-girls? They’re all stupid. Dumb sluts. Don’t want to fuck, my ass. W-Who wouldn’t want a nice fuck?”
(Annabeth, Percy thinks, Annabeth wouldn’t.)
*
Thalia leaves the modeling agency walking on clouds. They’d praised her, brushed cheeks with her, shook her hand and patted her on the head, they’d called her a real Standout Woman, and on top of that, the receptionist had offered her candy mints. Candy mints!
It simply doesn’t get better than this.
And with a smile, she thinks that she might be able to deal with this life, after all.
*
The bathroom walls in the clinic are shiny and pastel-colored. Each stall is tucked away into a private corner, hiding from the glare of the light and softened down so that each patient could do his or her business and not worry about some teenage mother’s kid crawling between the stalls and looking up people’s legs. Nico chooses the stall in the far right corner, next to a stand of cheerful fake chrysanthemums. Chrysanthemums, nobility for the Chinese, honor and homoerotic symbolism in Japan, the flower of November. Roots planted firm within the aristocratic culture. It would be Nico’s good luck charm. He reminds himself of this a couple of times before opening the stall door and sitting down on the toilet.
Takes a deep breath.
It’s just a urine sample, after all.
*
So she doesn’t think twice about it, plunges into the idealism and fallacy of the project without taking a second look back. She’s always been good about this, taking initiative and blasting apart the bushes in the maze and calling the hotlines when she’d heard the neighbors sexually harassing their milkmen. She plunges into it and takes to it like a bird to the sky, imagines that perhaps she’ll understand now, perhaps she’ll have fulfilled what she’d called herself here for, perhaps Luke will understand and Percy will understand and Annabeth will understand, and maybe they’ll forgive her.
And looking back, she thinks that she’s finally beginning to realize the scope of the world, of telling someone you love them and not wishing for anything in return, of knowing that you’ll be the one laughing in the end, tune to the end of all tunes.
It isn’t a bad idea.
It really isn’t a bad idea.
*
Nico descends the mountain in late October, when the birds finally begin to cease their chatter in the morning and he can feel the fallen leaves on the ground turn into mush, autumn washes away into snowflakes. It had eaten away the summer by the inch, and it was finally becoming condemned. When the rebirth would be, he’d never know.
The lake had been a lovely sojourn. Bit of a lonely place, not enough firewood to last in the earlier days of spring, but he’d talked to the birds and fed tree nuts to chipmunks, experienced his transience for all it was worth. It had been a surprisingly good feeling. At the very end of the last week, he had finally put away his entire stash, the last of the gold coins and land leases and plastic bags with his soul zipped inside.
And it had been a nice, lovely load to zip inside. He thinks he can enter the world, now, and maybe the world will decide that it won’t pass anymore judgment. Wishful thinking, but it’s what he has left.
*
The streets of Fresno aren’t anything special. Three houses down the block is the lady who had made him lasagna and grated parmesan cheese on top; she’d given him a little neurotic warning about the previous tenants, but Percy had paid her no attention; it’s all about the same to him, now.
*
“I’m sorry,” is the first thing Nico hears, “I’m sorry, Mr. di Angelo.”
And she looks really apologetic, he thinks, enough to forgive. Apologetic. Funny way to think about it, since she hadn’t really done anything wrong. He would have liked to blame everything on the messenger, but that wouldn’t have been fair, not at all. Yes, like that. He’ll keep digressing and pulling himself around on a leash until he can start blaming himself.
“Why are you sorry?” He says instead, “I didn’t accidentally sleep with you while I was on the aphrodisiac, did I?”
She doesn’t say anything back (he doesn’t really expect her to); hands over the paper with less conviction than he’d liked to have seen.
“I’m sorry,” she’s saying it again, “I’m sorry.”
Nico smiles back.
He isn’t sorry at all.
*
“You’re stupid,” Annabeth says, “You’re really, really stupid.”
“I know,” Percy says.
“But,” she says then, “I’ve never actively taken a stick to measure your stupidity, so I can only gauge it with mine.”
Was she admitting to something, now?
(before)
She visits the supermarket the next day, takes a day off to keep her feet clean and her mind fresh. Her partner at the firm had just made a good show of telling their boss that her design was pure egotist and semi-ineligible, to which she had told him to go fuck his mother at home.
Manager told her to take a day off. You need it, Annabeth. Go treat yourself to something nice.
But that’s not what she needs. What she needs is someone to tell the dickhead to shove his own blueprints as far up his ass as it could physically go. And for a lightning bolt with no angle of incidence to drop directly over his head. What she needs is someone to keep her company in this mundane business, someone with a mind like her own. What she needs, right now, is a deli sandwich from a supermarket. She hasn’t seen Percy in a while, and she maybe kind of misses him.
So she makes a left at the next intersection and spots a corner supermarket by the public park; it’s open and there’s this weird door jingle that catches her ears. She’ll buy something to eat here, that’s what she’ll do.
(after)
The modeling company turns out to be nothing but a bad joke.
Thalia takes another puff, hears but doesn’t listen, nods along to the photographer with pork for brains while he takes her through the positions. He scratches his chin and speaks to her like she’s too dumb to understand, which is fine by her. He’s drunk on his own narration, vies for her attention while simultaneously pillaging his own perspective, says that I Stand Amazed at the beauty of pornography (awfully strange where you find God, these days). His company has been Proudly Going Innovative for quite a while now, since the good old-fashioned years of missionary position and doggy-style. He’ll have none of that, nope; this is the generation of blooming lotuses, firecracker position and dolphin-style, a brand of what his pork brains refer to as Oriental Mysticism, “where the sex addicts of the 80’s are your spiritual gurus”. (Seriously, you find God everywhere in this day and time.)
And she’ll be damned, but spiritual gurus, her ass.
“Of course, we won’t be forgetting the bondage portion of the film,” he goes on.
She takes another puff on the cigarette and spills the smoke in his face. “Yeah?”
“Can you take patent leather? Belts? Twenty?”
Only twenty? She scoffs. The standards of this company were low enough to make her want to jam a burning cigarette over all of their work papers and her contracts, smite some gasoline and watch the flames boil up into the air. No small wonder. The pornographic industry had been taking a dive for a while. No fucking way. No fucking way is Thalia Grace, poster girl for the porn industry, no fucking way is Thalia Grace working for the shitheads here.
(“Sure I can,” she says instead, dips the menthol butt in the ashtray, lights another cigarette with two fingers and one thumb. “I’ll take forty if you want.”)
He beams.
(This must be her cue to clock the shotgun at his forehead.)
No one bothers to read the job description anymore.
(before again)
Annabeth takes her time picking out the type of watercress that she wants on her sandwich. The girl on the serving shift (Hello! My name is Rachel) was really eager about it, too, popping purple bubble gum between her teeth, jabbing a finger here or there and giving recommendations worthy of a five-star restaurant. There’s our special cheese for the day, the pepper jack. You could try the dry salami with it, we brought it in this morning and it’s still fresh, ‘cause you know we stock up on that stuff once every three days. Boss says it keeps just as well, and we can’t be too picky ‘cause we’re so small, you know?
When she smiles, Annabeth smiles back.
(Wonders when she had last been happy like her. She’s only a little envious.)
When she walks to the back of the store to look for the tapioca machine, she hears a shriek from the serving girl, and a cold chill run down her spine.
“Percy! About time. Were you jerking off back there or something? You were supposed to relieve me ten minutes ago!”
“Sorry, meant to come earlier,” Annabeth hears her boyfriend say, and when she spins around she decides that she had definitely chosen the wrong store to walk into.
(and after)
The empty boxes pile up on the shelf, and Nico counts fifteen of them. Trojan, Lifestyles, Crowns, MAXX, Kimono. All there, storybook font and clean-cut instructions on the labels, evidence for sex addicts and the over-precautionary. He’s unsure which category he falls in, now, and truth be told he really doesn’t want to know.
Fact remains, there’re too many, and definitely not enough. Maybe he should go buy a few more boxes, just to be safe. Maybe he should just raid a factory in Thailand and be done with it.
Fact remains, he’s still worried about Luke.
*
Thalia takes one look at the brands on the shelf and suddenly starts imagining herself walking out of this place and into the nearest McDonald’s, ordering hamburgers with a credit card and puking into the sinks, shoving French fries into her mouth and gagging rainbows. She’s never puked a rainbow before. What would she have to eat before she could produce a rainbow, anyway?
L’Oreal dominates over smaller boxes of Clairol and Revlon. The smiles and white teeth of the models sit triumphant on display in the corner aisle, grins so wretched and full of simper that Thalia starts fucking all of them in her mind, fucking them with the silicon dildo she had worn in the film last night. The blonde one would have been a flimsy fuck, especially with that angular face. Mask of a skeleton-a Voldemort body as well, probably. No physique equates to poor stamina. She’d bet good money on small curves, shadow and/or plastic boobs, and a whiny complex. The brunette looked okay; she’d probably last more than two rounds and maybe even a good blow, even though her hair would be ruined by the end of it. (Irony for the company, seriously.) But no, Thalia had saved the best for last. The black girl on the corner, shadowed by hordes of puny white models, she was the one that would have been worth the most of Thalia’s time. Her eyes gave it all away, it was the well-fucked look, glimmer of a confidence that had not been abandoned under the glare of a flashbulb’s light.
Yeah, that would be worth some of her time.
She stares back at the display and bites her lip.
And being the hypocrite she’d written herself out to be a million years ago, Thalia plucks the blonde girl off the shelf.
*
He prepares the place at five ‘o clock, half an hour before Luke’s arrival. Bianca had pretended to notice nothing, booking a camping trip with Tony the night before (in a fit of fatherly love or whatever else it could pass as, Nico had sent her off with a 15-pack of Kimonos); she told him she would call and then there was the honking of a Jeep horn and his daughter of four years was off to fuck the three days and three nights away.
Twenty minutes before, he sprays the place with a can of Febreeze. Too much salt and sweat and semen in the air for his liking. Too much of everything.
Fifteen minutes before, he showers, scrubs himself clean of whatever shame he had divested of himself before and pretended he didn’t have, scrubs with a small towel until his skin is scraped raw and red. Shaves what nonexistent hair he’s grown on his chin, climbs out of the bathroom looking like a plucked chicken. Keeps himself occupied with Jane Austen on the sofa. The shampoo smells too old; it had been caked in two-year old soap and he’s not sure if he should be worried about it or not.
Five minutes before, he puts down the novel and starts pacing.
(what am i going to do what am i going to do what the fuck am i going to do)
*
Thalia skims the instructions on the label and takes advantage of the bonus tube of hair cream that it had come with. Considers streaking her hair instead of full-on dye (there should still be tin foil in one of the kitchen cupboards, unused from her last picnic five years ago), but that would just be cowardly. She has no desire to follow out her plans with cowardice.
So she cuts her hair first, lines the scissors up to her hair and admires the view, flash of silver against chestnut brown. She’d always loved her hair. Her mother had told her not to brag about it, had even told her that it wasn’t anything special, but she’d continue to like her hair, twine her own fingers into it and wash it like it was her own child. There’s something absolutely dark and mellifluous about it, reminded her of the earth in the garden and how easily it crumbled beneath her feet. Sometimes, her hair would shine on the inside and other times, it would reflect the sun. More than once, she has caught herself wondering if her mother could see its reflection, all the way up in the heavens, see its reflection and appreciate it for what it’s worth.
She loves her hair.
She loves it so much that she’ll cut it off and pile it in the trash.
It’s thick on the blades at first; there are so many chunks of it and everywhere at once, so she has to hack at it and chop at it and squish locks of it together and split them up in awkward places. She tells herself that it’ll look better later, starts trimming it ferociously when it begins to look like a train wreck. Turns on Luke’s old electric razor and slices it up the nape of her neck, checks through two opposite-facing mirrors to make sure that she doesn’t nick her skin, shapes the roots and ends of her hair until it looks halfway-there. Her hair is like a warrior, like a river with rapids. Provoke it, and she’ll fight back. She’ll try to make your life hell while looking presentable, no matter how you mutilate her, no matter how well you try to control her. Her hair is like a Baltic country.
(She wonders if she had been intrinsically masochistic.)
After the dye job, she looks at herself in the mirror. Examines her eyelashes, the bridge of her nose, the bend of her lips. So her cheekbones hadn’t suffered any damage.
It would be a new look for the new year.
And she’s so happy she could cry.
*
(See, Thalia is a real hummingbird. She’d flitted around flowers too much, spilled her heart into empty shot glasses, taken too much of the nectar from the plants to keep her hands clean. She’s broken, she’s been broken for two years, but somehow she doesn’t really mind being broken, because she has the most fun this way. It’s so much fun.
So much ridiculous fun.
And true to her thoughts, to the expectations of the world, true to everything and nothing at all, the girl in the mirror starts to cry.)
*
When Percy finally spots her standing in the snack foods aisle, Annabeth can only stare. The pieces of dust had long settled by then, the horses and their prospective riders had already taken shelter in the mountainside cave and she had already left them to their own devices, drawn the curtains on the show and stashed away the last of her dignity. So she stares. She stares and stares and stares, tries to imagine the words that he’ll try to use to cover up that kiss, imagines walking out of this place and going back to their apartment, imagines packing her bags and leaving once and for all, psychotic bills passed in Congress, notes passed in the hallways, YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT JUST HAPPENED IT LOOKS LIKE ANNABETH CHASE AND PERCY JACKSON FINALLY BROKE UP.
There really isn’t much to say any more, is there, she thinks, and realizes that she’s said it out loud before she could stop herself.
Percy continues to look at her like he’s looking at a ghost, and what joy, she must have really died and gone to hell, then.
*
Luke arrives five minutes late with a bouquet of something in his arms, but he never gets past the rest of his sentence, because he’s already being dragged in by the arm by Nico and feeling particularly undignified.
“What’s going to happen now?” He asks, when Nico recounts his adventures at the free clinic.
Nico is taken aback, and the way his shoulders scrunch up shows through, “I-I. I don’t really know.”
“Is there something I can do?”
Now both of them are quiet, Luke is staring weirdly at Nico and Nico is staring weirdly at his hands, both of their fixations blinding and unmistakably borderline insanity. Nico half-shrugs and half-coughs, feeling vexed and uncertain and he’ll be damned if they’re the same thing. This type of scene is always supposed to work out in the books.
*
They end up having sex anyway.
Luke kisses Nico long and hard, presses every inch of his body against Nico’s and brushes his long fingers through Nico’s hair, doesn’t break the kiss at all in between strokes, kisses Nico like it’s his last breath on earth. Sweet and slow, they’ve got all the time in the world, and all of his time is in Nico’s hands. He unbuttons Nico’s shirt slowly, searching for a spot on Nico’s chest to tap the tips of his fingers. He knows this body so well now, well enough to know where Nico shivers, which part of his abdomen will make him moan soft and buck hard. He folds into Nico’s body, lifts him up until Nico is sitting on the kitchen counter. Nico’s legs curl around his waist.
And Nico, he doesn’t know what he’s doing any more. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, but he’s faced with a nice kiss and a gentle bit of skin, and he embraces it; maybe it’s all he has left.
Luke kisses him again, more slowly and softly, presses his lips against Nico’s chin and his throat and his neck. Presses lips against his jugular, his collar bones, the rest of his body, searching and feeling and smiling and humming. Nico fists his shirt and kisses him back, rolls his hips against Luke’s and feels himself growing hard. It’s kissing, only kissing, but he’s kissing Luke.
And this is exactly what Nico had been afraid of getting into. Unrepentant, no reluctance, looking into Luke’s eyes and seeing nothing there but himself, looking into Luke’s eyes and feeling something strange and unsightly bubble up from his stomach and into his chest, feels himself breathing the air and smelling nothing but Luke, feeling the rise and fall of Luke’s chest. The scent is fresh and beautiful and bright. It’s a scent that smells like love.
It can’t be love.
*
Grover has a second job at a place the local party-goers call Club Half-Blood, where he mixes drinks behind a wooden counter for a ruddy group of diehards with obsessive disorders involving Greek mythology, dyslexia and ADHD. Half of them were the recovering addicts from first-person shooting games, and the other half were completely focused on table-dancing and swaying their limbs to any beat they could get their hips on. You’d fit right in, he tells Percy, they’d just love you and hate you enough for you to be their hero. Hell, I bet you could even save the world some day and that’ll really prove it to them.
So, in light of the half-compliment and his own desire to get piss-faced for a discount price, Percy agrees to head down there and check it out some time. Club Half-Blood needs some new blood, once in a while.
It was the beginning of a descent to find Annabeth Chase.
*
Two hours ago, Luke had told him to pack enough clothes and toothbrushes for four days and four nights, that he’d be there to pick Nico up and they would go somewhere. It’s been two minutes after two hours, and Nico starts to feel like a bitchy girlfriend for waiting for Luke without anything in his hands. He can’t go. He’s going to die. He can just feel it. Most of the psychologists will write it off as delusional and symptoms of the Factitious Disorder, but he knows his own body better than anyone else; he’s dying and he knows it.
Luke’s beat-up American car pulls up to the curb in another ten minutes. He doesn’t even bother to open the door and get out, honks the horn impatiently, rolls down the passenger window and whistles through his teeth.
Like Nico was his dog or something.
“I’m not going,” Nico yells, and he hopes that Luke catches the words when he turns around to go back into the apartment, but the next thing he knows, the car door slams, a pair of arms forcibly fold around his waist, a hot breath runs down his spine.
“Idling the car increases a substantial amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you know,” Luke whispers, and Nico glares like he’s never glared before, as if Luke had ever cared about global warming; as if he didn’t only want an excuse to sound intelligent, as if he shouldn’t just fuck off, right now before there was violence. He was not insane enough to fall for this one, yet. Luke only makes it worse by turning Nico around with one arm and burying his other hand in Nico’s hair, pulling him down the building steps.
“’m not going,” he says, voice muffled in Luke’s shirt, “Geroff me, you psycho.” He grinds his heels into the pavement, holds back and tugs the other way when Luke pulls at his hair. (And you thought Nico di Angelo got Stockholm Syndrome that easily, you ass.)
“You leave me no choice,” Luke sighs, and he hoists Nico into the air (like he’s a real lightweight, like Luke was a body-builder. Like he needed to be treated as an incompetent before he’d really died). Nico aims a kick at Luke’s head and misses, starts hollering bloody murder and zounds and YOU’RE NOT MY DAD until he feels something warm slide up between his legs.
Oh, hell no, Nico thinks, before his thighs start trembling and he’s cursing all of the deities in the world, there is no God in this world, and Luke’s grinning; his hand has found a nice piece of ass to stroke, there is no fucking God.
He resorts to screaming. “Fuck you! Fuck you and your whole family. Fuck your friends and your nasty complex. Fuck you fuck you FUCK YOU.”
“Rather you didn’t,” Luke whispers conspiratorially, wiggles an eyebrow, “I’d rather you save all the fucking for me.”
“You’re the not the one who’s HIV positive, asshole,” Nico snaps.
“Ouch. So my love doesn’t count anymore?”
Nico spits in his face.
Luke spits back.
At least they’re even.
*
“Thalia.”
“Thalia.”
“Thalia?”
*
The room is kind of cold now, Thalia thinks to herself, really kind of cold. A bit like that time she’d turn on the fan in the middle of December. She’d felt the cold sink into her body like a second layer of skin, sticky and somehow sweet-smelling, like a rotting pile of murder victims. Yeah, cold like that. Cold like popsicles in January, licking icicles with the top of your tongue, french-kissing Luke on a Ferris wheel. Cold like that. Cold enough to burn a hole through her heart.
She wonders if she should do something about this cold. But something tells her that, even if she had bothered to turn on the gas stove, she’d still be freezing inside.
And she can admit to it now-she might be jealous, really jealous of Annabeth, in the way that she can never be jealous of Nico and Percy, jealous not because it’s all she can do; in Annabeth’s hands, her fear of the love complex had been vaporized, taken away and demolished with the rest of her fears. No, she was jealous of Annabeth, simply because Annabeth knew how to be happy, she knew how to carry on a conversation without second-guessing the other person, she knew how to relax and find beauty in the world and not the man.
She loved Annabeth for it as much as she was jealous of her.
(and before)
A pile of game controllers and wires fall on her lap and Thalia doesn’t even look up to know that it’s Luke and Nico here to crash her party. And oh goddamn it. It’s Percy fucking Jackson.
“Looks like the whole gang showed up,” she says as Nico sits down next to her, sucks on her Menthol as fast as she can before Luke tugs the stick out of her mouth, running the smoldering tip under the kitchen tap with a look like she’d stepped in someone’s shit.
“No smoking when I’m around.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Thalia says back, and starts rubbing Nico on the back with her empty hand. The boy curls into her hand like a little puppy. Nico’s always so cute.
“It’s Halo 3,” Percy explains, “and I still have the highest score.”
“You had the highest score,” Nico retorts, “Shooting you down today, motherfucker.”
“Hey, who’s the real motherfucker here?”
“I’m not anyone’s fucker,” Luke says, slips a small smile and an arm around Nico’s waist (the gesture warms Thalia, and it’s only strange because her heart is beating at a strange tempo), “I’m just here to save the world.”
“Pfft. Been here, done that,” Nico rolls his eyes. “We don’t need another Jesus,” Percy says at the same time.
“Who knows?” Luke laughs, “I’m certainly built better for martyrdom than you, Percy Jackson.”
And Thalia has to smile to herself. They’re here, they’re in her house and they’re arguing and being immature, but they’re here and they’re saving the world. They’re saving the world, one video game at a time.
And she’s relieved. She’s really, really relieved.
(now after)
They arrive at the Grand Canyon sometime in the early morning with stars trailing after the exhaust pipe of Luke’s car; they arrive under the impression that it’s night time, because there are no lights on the roads and the birds are only half-awake. Nico still has a frown caked in his face and Luke is driving, chafed somewhere between the boundaries of being half-asleep and half-inebriated. The radio dial broke halfway through the trip, and Luke had long since discarded his disc player for a place to keep booze in the car.
Safe driving, safe fighting; that’s his motto.
They enter through the northern exit, and probably because of the electrical company’s rigging in the dead of the night, all the road lights had been turned off and they’re left staring at each other, staring at into the night, looking at the sky and watching the clouds run and tumble across the lip of the canyon. It’s an enormous geographical wonder, stamped and tamped down by horse hooves and waterfalls, dry and cracked like the skin on a grandmother’s forehead. Arizona had never appealed to him like this. He feels an urge to step down, 6000 feet down into the canyon and let the river take him away, lift a finger through the slipstream and feel the stars crash down around his shoulders. The utter silence of the place makes him want to shout, to scream until his lungs are sore, fall into the sky and remember life when it was still there for him to live it. Because here, he can really see the sky.
Because here, he can fly.
Luke pulls his arms around him, and they look at the stars together, he counts the constellations, watches the sky turn bright and the lights fade and the first hikers begin their descent.
He can really fly.
*
(Five years ago: Monaco, 3:37 pm, side of the highway that’s facing the sun. It’s quiet and lonely, and the man tells Nico that he has money sealed away in a corner of the world. He has wandered among unknown men, seen stories and legends and relived battles and fierce days. Nico faces the north, the man faces the south. So it’s a casual encounter, a missed connection. Somewhere off to the side, a cell phone rings. He slips out of his clothes like he’s in a dream and playing with a crime. He fucks and they fuck, his breath is stolen away from his lungs and his limbs are flat, pale against the sun. And the man tells him that he has a nice fortune made, that he’ll pay it all for this last day on earth; his time is up, and so is the rest of Nico’s life. I want to die, he hears in between fucks, I want to die I want to die I want to die. Humans possess weak immune systems, even without virus and hunger and disease. All it takes is a heart and three words to shatter your pride.)
*
“Thalia?”
“Thalia?”
“I’m right here, Annabeth. I’m right here.”
*
The party at the grocery store is already in its twilight-zone mode when Luke and Nico arrive. Grover’s the one who spots them first, bellowing something obscene before he promptly sloshes beer down Nico’s shirt with an exaggerated bow of welcome. There’s music, there’re opened boxes of graham crackers and Pepperidge Farm from the snack shelf, people Nico doesn’t know are dancing and Thalia’s there, chatting up men and women and batting her eyelashes with the air of an aristocrat. Annabeth is sitting on the counter with a licorice straw sticking out between her lips. Somewhere next to her, Percy is sitting on a stray chair, looking at Annabeth and then back at the door, weighing his chance of survival and circumstance with each glance.
Nico picks up a beer from the stack riding on Grover’s back and pops it open with a click.
“So wait. What the hell are you doing?”
“WE’RE PARTYING. IT’S A PARTY. PARRRY. TEE. WITH BOOZE AND TITS. SEE THE TITS?” Grover shouts, sloshes more beer down his own shirt this time, and now he starts to drag Nico and Luke around to the back of the store.
It’s a mess of overturned chairs and shelves of food that have been ransacked by hungry dancers. A shelf of feminine products and shaving cream had been pulled to the side to reveal a dance floor, speakers ramming out dance beats on the side. There’s even a disco ball floating above their heads, and Nico really has to give them some more credit; they’ve really managed to ruin Percy’s work reputation forever.
Thalia shows up, then, smoky-eyed and swaying under alcohol. And even though both of them know that she’s no lightweight, she really looks more drunk than displeased, and definitely more daring than cautious, because the minute she sees them, she gives both of them a big smile, and then she plants a kiss on Luke’s mouth, right in front of Nico and right in front of everyone else. She’s planned it well, she has. Hell has broken loose.
“Holy fuck, it’s Luke Castellan!”
“Really? God, what the hell would he be doing here? Stupid dick.”
“Oh my God oh my God!”
“Ask him if he’ll sign my boobs.”
“Do you have any more lipstick?”
“LUKE CASTELLAN, GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE,” Percy roars.
*
And while he’s staring at the stars, he can see the constellation in the sky. Unclear and wobbly at first, as if the stars were adjusting themselves into the correct path, but another minutes, it’s clear like water droplets falling on the grass.
A hummingbird, flying through the stars, picking up a splash of light from the sun and a prickle of ice from the moons around Jupiter. It’s diving through the sky, warming up in its flight, flying against the celestial traffic on the star-swept stage and it’s dreaming, it’s dreaming of his memories and he remembers. It’s the same rainy day. It’s the same lake in the middle of the mountains. It’s the same log cabin, the same girl wearing the same white clothing, pieces of wildflower slipped under her red hair, the same girl telling him that she would see him again in Barcelona, telling him not to worry about feeling lonely, because she would find him soon and she would be a part of his family, that she was oracular, a real fortune teller, that’d maybe she’ll find a little more mysticism in his life than he had thought. Rachel Elizabeth Dare, here to enlighten and turn your life on its back.
The hummingbird sings.
*
Percy tries his best to explain it to his manager the next day. He’d planned all sorts of excuses, and he’d actually bothered to write them down on a piece of notebook paper today. He couldn’t lose this job, not after losing his life to a girl and losing the remainder of his sanity to a freaky bit of drug.
But his manager doesn’t come to work that day. Nor the next.
Rachel helps him clean up the mess in the morning. She grumbles something about starting to keep tabs on his habits, and Percy smiles apologetically; he doesn’t have anything more to say than the next person.
*
Luke isn’t nearly as lucky. He’s yelled at, pummeled at, frowned and leered at, and is almost carted off to the hospital ward by what was very likely an assassination attempt from one of the porn industry’s hired hit-men. He visits the Salvation Army down the road the next day and purchases a bullet-proof vest. Never could be too unwary of attack.
*
Bianca comes back from her camping trip three days after the party, her clothes ripped and bleeding from scratches. Upon closer examination, Nico discovers that’s she’s breeding spores of poison ivy in her hair, and she’s laughing something funny, mumbling incoherency about a giant mechanical contraption that had swallowed Tony alive, that she’d run home and she never, never wants to leave Nico, ever again.
She’s about to break, he sees it, she’s going to break.
He’s an awful father.
He can do nothing but pick her up, sling her over his shoulder and drag her into the bath. He’s her dad, whatever Bianca may think, he’ll be her dad until the end of her days, and he’ll subscribe to taking care of her forever, simply because he loved her as much as he would love anyone else. In the bathroom, he tugs the dirty pieces of cloth off around her arms and cuts open her bra with a kitchen knife. It’s trapped in her back and tangled through a bunch of thick pieces of grass; he’s surprised it hasn’t cut off her circulation completely. Fills the tub with water and bubble bath, purple bubbles, she’d always liked purple bubbles, takes off the rest of her clothes for her and lifts her into the bath.
She’s silent at first, silent and soothing and every way the doll she’d never been. She speaks to him about the tiger lilies Tony had picked for her by the road, the In ‘N Out they had stopped by on the way to the site, the boys who had flirted with her and the punches Tony had thrown. She speaks to him about perverts hiding on the freeway and the free breakfast she’d never tasted at the homeless shelter. She says all of this with a straight face, smiles at Nico like she’s still a young girl, like she’s still reading high school love stories and she hasn’t grown out of her training bra yet, prepubescent Lolita staring into the gaping cavern of Humbert, she says all of this with her own brand of grace, little smiles and whispers and splashes of bath water on his clothes, and then she’s laughing and laughing and now she’s bursting into tears.
*
“I’m waiting out for my happy ending,” Percy tells Annabeth, one year three months five days seven hours later, “I’m waiting for it.”
And Annabeth can bring herself to say it. “You’re still waiting?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
Another three hours later, Thalia spots a hand-delivered wedding invitation sitting in her mailbox.
*
Near the country of Jordan, Luke encounters a camel tied to a fence. The camel’s owner has already neglected the beast for over two days, choosing to spend his time with the women in the brothels down the street, but Luke had been watching over the camel in that time, using it as an opportunity to remember and meditate and look for the last link to the puzzle in his pocket.
The camel chews on stubbly straw, leans against the wooden picket while Luke places a hand on the other side of the fence.
“Hot today, isn’t it?” he suddenly hears a voice saying, looks around and wonders when he sees no one there, and realizes that the words had come out of his own mouth.
“I’ve wondered for a while about this,” Luke goes on, surprising himself, “but why do camels down here only have one hump on their backs?”
The camel blinks back.
And there’s something extremely irrational, off-scope and insane about this, but he presses on anyway, “Oh c’mon, don’t ignore me. At least tell me why.”
A beat. Luke stares at the beast, and it stares back. They look at each other for the longest time, until the camel suddenly opens its mouth, revealing decayed, yellow teeth and long strings of coffee-colored saliva.
“I’m a camel, and you’re a man,” the camel tells Luke, “and for me, that is certainly enough reason to ignore you.”
(It’s because he’s dehydrated, that must be why. He’s dehydrated. He’s in a state of delirium. This isn’t real.)
“So what about your hump?”
The camel lifts a split hoof in the air and shakes it. A small pile of sand falls on the ground with a puff of hot air and Luke feels his skin itch. The creature throws him a bewildered look, “Whatsa hump? If you’re talking about the layer of fat on my back, we don’t call those humps. Don’t think I don’t know how derogatory you humans can get with the different parts on your own bodies. Those are not humps, no sir, I’m a male camel and I am very well-endowed, thank you very much.”
“You, I…what?” Luke mumbles, and the camel snorts.
“From the back, you dumb bastard. I mean my loins. Y’know. Genitalia, wee-wee, penis-phallus-dick, whatever it is you men call your pride? Yeah, here, lemme turn around and let you look. Yeeeah, here. See the balls? Yeah, you see ‘em, dontcha? You can touch ‘em if you’d like. I don’t kick unless you spit in my face. And there. Proof of my masculinity. I’m actually pretty big for an Arabian camel, you know. See? You only wish yours were as big as mine…”
The animal stops talking at this point, because his owner is back and Luke is slumped against the fence, telling himself to stop daydreaming, that this is starting to become ever creepier than science fiction; he tells himself this while pawing his hands against the sand in the ground. The owner pays for his camel-sitting in paper bills, asks Luke what’s wrong, but Luke shakes his head, tries to spit out as many broken Arabian phrases he knows that can somehow relay the meaning, “There’s no point anymore because I’m totally fucked, man.”
The Arabian owner and his Arabian camel leave, and Luke is still digging against the sand with his fingers, continues to dig even though he’s not exactly sure what he’s looking for, he’s crazy, he’s ruined it all, he doesn’t have anywhere left to go, he digs and digs until he sees a glint of metallic faith flash around his head, around the sun and back through the atmosphere, sees it and feels his head spin and shit
it’s the gold, it’s his Angel’s gold, all four-hundred-forty solid kilograms of it.
*
“Oh, Christ.”
Thalia Grace, dropping paper grocery bags on the ground with a loud thump of her heart.
“Jesus, Luke, if you’re going to cheat, can’t you do it in someone else’s bed?”
“I’m…sorry.” Nico mumbles.
The girl only laughs. “Sorry? Why the hell are you sorry?”
“You’re the porn star,” Luke points out.
“Nope,” Thalia says, “With this kind of thing-finding your boyfriend fucking another man? I’m actually a little turned-on. You boys down for a threesome?”
Nico gapes. Luke sighs. (Thalia smirks at her own cleverness. She could probably win an award for this someday.)
*
Nico bites his lips, and promptly decides to throw away his dignity. “Look, I kinda fell in love with you.”
Luke smiles, bemused. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
“You are an ass.”
“I’m serious. What are you going to do?”
“I…” He licks his lips. “I’m going to continue loving you until you love me back.”
Luke takes him in his arms, smirks into Nico’s hair. “Well, that’s certainly a plan.”
(don’t you know I do? I do, I do, I do)
(and now?)
“Please don’t die.” Luke whispers in Nico’s ear, “Please, please don’t die.”
“Too late, I’m already dead,” he cracks a smile.
“Be quiet. You’re gonna make me cry.”
And he has to laugh. “Luke Castellan doesn’t cry. He doesn’t give a shit about…about anything, remember?”
“Be quiet. Be quiet, be quiet.”
“You be quiet.”
“I love you. I really do. If you die, I’ll never forgive you.”
“It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”
The world is a big, scary place. He’s been scared; dying is scary and even though he’s played around with Death before, it’s merely gnawed at the back of his mind, clawed at his throat with pale talons, glared at him through the lens of a kaleidoscope; this time there’s no turning back to look because he knows he’d only turn into a pillar of salt. Now it’s enough. It’s all he needed to hear. It’s been enough, since the once upon of time and the bridge under the stars, since the grocery store house party and saving the world one computer game at a time, since the rain of invisible fingers and Rube-Goldberg machines, since he met Luke Castellan, since he saw stars. A tangent line to the circle in his life. I’ll live in your heart if you stay in mine. It’s been enough since the beginning of the world and the end of his life.
It’s enough, and he’s had enough.
He swears he can hear the hummingbird singing in the sky.
(before that,)
“If you want money, I have about three trillion dollars in gold, stashed in every nook and cranny around the world. More than enough for a career start-up. Find you a few producers and second-rate directors, buy you a few drinking buddies down in Hollywood,” the boy says, shuffles hands in his pockets and produces a slightly crumpled card. There is a carefully drawn map on one side, and small print on the other.
(And he can stare all he wants, but Luke isn’t going to look away, and once he realizes it, he sighs and puts his palms up in the air. Heavy raindrops crash around them on the sidewalk and over the dome of Luke’s clear umbrella, and when he gives the instructions, he knows that Luke can barely hear the words as they slip out of his mouth.)
“W-Wait.”
“Yeah?”
“W-What’s your name?”
He grins, watches it flashes across Luke’s eyes. “You can call me your savior, if you’d like.”
“You…but how will I find you again? To thank you. I mean, this is huge, I can’t just-”
“I don’t need anything from you,” Nico says, brushes him off with a wave and a turned back. “I’m transient, after all.”
And he’s wanted to get rid of it all for a long time. He’s wanted to live life from the beginning, clean his slate and shoot amnesiacs into all of his secretaries. He’s wanted this forever, and now that he has this outlet, he’s keeping it forever.
But what’s funny, is that he has never wanted to be transient.
It’s just jumped on him one day,
and never let him go.
>>>
HUMMING BIRD % THE END
<<<
feedback?
Yeah, once upon a time? Once upon a time had been the boy standing by the window, his fingers held up to the glass and the reflection of the stars in the sky, singing lullabies to the child in the armchair, singing in a slightly unhinged voice, unbounded and light like the pieces of silk in the sky. Once upon a time had been Percy and Nico, Nico and Percy, Percy making distasteful jokes and Nico laughing awkward laughs, political incorrectness, flamboyant debauchery under the afternoon sun. Indecent exposure that had landed the two of them three days and three nights taking turns flipping the newspaper at the police office. Insanity at midnight that had landed them restraining orders from the patent office. Karaoke bars, Two Less Lonely People in the World, old Carpenter tapes, sounding out foreign words on a bridge under the stars. Once upon a time, there had been a boy and a heart and a pretty bit of Desperation floating along the banks of the river, touching their souls once in a while, but never breaching the border. Hummingbirds sing; swallow raindrops to clear their throats, drain nectar from a hibiscus flower to sweeten the tune.
Annabeth Chase is a very beautiful flower.
*
They have dinner in the morning, and Percy can’t hold it in any longer, starts complaining about needing to find a job.
Nico rolls his eyes. “The only problem I see here, Mister Jackson, is your unnecessary attention to economic issues, towards which you pay no allegiance, nor any real concern. That; and your talent for assuming the qualities of a big fat schmuck.”
“Hey, that is not true!”
“You follow the goddamn stock exchange.”
“So? Doesn’t everyone?”
“Um. No.”
“I thought it was something intellectuals did.”
Nico plucks another pear out of the bowl and takes a large bite. “Tsk, tsk. Confusing the philosophic with the corporate again? What are you, individual versus the state?”
“Shut up. That doesn’t even make any sense.”
“You need to get laid, man.”
*
Luke is seated at his grandmother’s piano; his fingers are pressing notes against the yellow ivory keys-he’s making music.
“Wow, piano? Learning something new about Master Luke, every day.”
(It’s cheesy, but it works.)
The blonde man shrugs, lifts his feet onto Nico’s lap. “Pastiche. Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Bach. Drunken key-smashing in between.”
“Dude. You can’t fit a classical composer in with the romantics.”
“Yes I can.”
“It doesn’t sound right.”
“Fuck you. I’ll show you exactly what sounds right.”
(before)
“Can’t you take care of yourself?” Luke mutters, shaking Nico back and forth, “What’s wrong with you, seriously? If I hadn’t climbed through the window, I swear to God you would have died.”
“Lemme go,” Nico mumbles, slings his arms around Luke’s neck and snuggles his head between Luke’s shoulders, “I don’t need you.”
I don’t need you at all.
(after)
Luke slides him against the sofa cushions, easing Nico out of his shirt with one hand, the other still focused on palming Nico’s cock through the heavy fabric of his jeans. He keeps one leg hooked over Nico’s, even when they near the bed, and then falls over and positions himself above Nico. It’s what he wants.
It’s what Nico wants.
“Let me ride you,” Nico pants, grinds his ass against Luke’s erection.
It’s a moan of ecstasy. It’s a moan of ecstasy, because he doesn’t want to hear the sound of his heart breaking.
*
“Hummingbirds can’t sing.”
“Yes they can.”
“…”
“Dammit, I’m hard. Hey, wanna go again?”
*
Grover passes the joint back to Percy with a grimace. “It’s fucking messed up, that’s what it is.”
“Fucking messed up,” Percy repeats.
“Yeah. Fucking shitting messed up like fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Girls? What g-girls? They’re all stupid. Dumb sluts. Don’t want to fuck, my ass. W-Who wouldn’t want a nice fuck?”
(Annabeth, Percy thinks, Annabeth wouldn’t.)
*
Thalia leaves the modeling agency walking on clouds. They’d praised her, brushed cheeks with her, shook her hand and patted her on the head, they’d called her a real Standout Woman, and on top of that, the receptionist had offered her candy mints. Candy mints!
It simply doesn’t get better than this.
And with a smile, she thinks that she might be able to deal with this life, after all.
*
The bathroom walls in the clinic are shiny and pastel-colored. Each stall is tucked away into a private corner, hiding from the glare of the light and softened down so that each patient could do his or her business and not worry about some teenage mother’s kid crawling between the stalls and looking up people’s legs. Nico chooses the stall in the far right corner, next to a stand of cheerful fake chrysanthemums. Chrysanthemums, nobility for the Chinese, honor and homoerotic symbolism in Japan, the flower of November. Roots planted firm within the aristocratic culture. It would be Nico’s good luck charm. He reminds himself of this a couple of times before opening the stall door and sitting down on the toilet.
Takes a deep breath.
It’s just a urine sample, after all.
*
So she doesn’t think twice about it, plunges into the idealism and fallacy of the project without taking a second look back. She’s always been good about this, taking initiative and blasting apart the bushes in the maze and calling the hotlines when she’d heard the neighbors sexually harassing their milkmen. She plunges into it and takes to it like a bird to the sky, imagines that perhaps she’ll understand now, perhaps she’ll have fulfilled what she’d called herself here for, perhaps Luke will understand and Percy will understand and Annabeth will understand, and maybe they’ll forgive her.
And looking back, she thinks that she’s finally beginning to realize the scope of the world, of telling someone you love them and not wishing for anything in return, of knowing that you’ll be the one laughing in the end, tune to the end of all tunes.
It isn’t a bad idea.
It really isn’t a bad idea.
*
Nico descends the mountain in late October, when the birds finally begin to cease their chatter in the morning and he can feel the fallen leaves on the ground turn into mush, autumn washes away into snowflakes. It had eaten away the summer by the inch, and it was finally becoming condemned. When the rebirth would be, he’d never know.
The lake had been a lovely sojourn. Bit of a lonely place, not enough firewood to last in the earlier days of spring, but he’d talked to the birds and fed tree nuts to chipmunks, experienced his transience for all it was worth. It had been a surprisingly good feeling. At the very end of the last week, he had finally put away his entire stash, the last of the gold coins and land leases and plastic bags with his soul zipped inside.
And it had been a nice, lovely load to zip inside. He thinks he can enter the world, now, and maybe the world will decide that it won’t pass anymore judgment. Wishful thinking, but it’s what he has left.
*
The streets of Fresno aren’t anything special. Three houses down the block is the lady who had made him lasagna and grated parmesan cheese on top; she’d given him a little neurotic warning about the previous tenants, but Percy had paid her no attention; it’s all about the same to him, now.
*
“I’m sorry,” is the first thing Nico hears, “I’m sorry, Mr. di Angelo.”
And she looks really apologetic, he thinks, enough to forgive. Apologetic. Funny way to think about it, since she hadn’t really done anything wrong. He would have liked to blame everything on the messenger, but that wouldn’t have been fair, not at all. Yes, like that. He’ll keep digressing and pulling himself around on a leash until he can start blaming himself.
“Why are you sorry?” He says instead, “I didn’t accidentally sleep with you while I was on the aphrodisiac, did I?”
She doesn’t say anything back (he doesn’t really expect her to); hands over the paper with less conviction than he’d liked to have seen.
“I’m sorry,” she’s saying it again, “I’m sorry.”
Nico smiles back.
He isn’t sorry at all.
*
“You’re stupid,” Annabeth says, “You’re really, really stupid.”
“I know,” Percy says.
“But,” she says then, “I’ve never actively taken a stick to measure your stupidity, so I can only gauge it with mine.”
Was she admitting to something, now?
(before)
She visits the supermarket the next day, takes a day off to keep her feet clean and her mind fresh. Her partner at the firm had just made a good show of telling their boss that her design was pure egotist and semi-ineligible, to which she had told him to go fuck his mother at home.
Manager told her to take a day off. You need it, Annabeth. Go treat yourself to something nice.
But that’s not what she needs. What she needs is someone to tell the dickhead to shove his own blueprints as far up his ass as it could physically go. And for a lightning bolt with no angle of incidence to drop directly over his head. What she needs is someone to keep her company in this mundane business, someone with a mind like her own. What she needs, right now, is a deli sandwich from a supermarket. She hasn’t seen Percy in a while, and she maybe kind of misses him.
So she makes a left at the next intersection and spots a corner supermarket by the public park; it’s open and there’s this weird door jingle that catches her ears. She’ll buy something to eat here, that’s what she’ll do.
(after)
The modeling company turns out to be nothing but a bad joke.
Thalia takes another puff, hears but doesn’t listen, nods along to the photographer with pork for brains while he takes her through the positions. He scratches his chin and speaks to her like she’s too dumb to understand, which is fine by her. He’s drunk on his own narration, vies for her attention while simultaneously pillaging his own perspective, says that I Stand Amazed at the beauty of pornography (awfully strange where you find God, these days). His company has been Proudly Going Innovative for quite a while now, since the good old-fashioned years of missionary position and doggy-style. He’ll have none of that, nope; this is the generation of blooming lotuses, firecracker position and dolphin-style, a brand of what his pork brains refer to as Oriental Mysticism, “where the sex addicts of the 80’s are your spiritual gurus”. (Seriously, you find God everywhere in this day and time.)
And she’ll be damned, but spiritual gurus, her ass.
“Of course, we won’t be forgetting the bondage portion of the film,” he goes on.
She takes another puff on the cigarette and spills the smoke in his face. “Yeah?”
“Can you take patent leather? Belts? Twenty?”
Only twenty? She scoffs. The standards of this company were low enough to make her want to jam a burning cigarette over all of their work papers and her contracts, smite some gasoline and watch the flames boil up into the air. No small wonder. The pornographic industry had been taking a dive for a while. No fucking way. No fucking way is Thalia Grace, poster girl for the porn industry, no fucking way is Thalia Grace working for the shitheads here.
(“Sure I can,” she says instead, dips the menthol butt in the ashtray, lights another cigarette with two fingers and one thumb. “I’ll take forty if you want.”)
He beams.
(This must be her cue to clock the shotgun at his forehead.)
No one bothers to read the job description anymore.
(before again)
Annabeth takes her time picking out the type of watercress that she wants on her sandwich. The girl on the serving shift (Hello! My name is Rachel) was really eager about it, too, popping purple bubble gum between her teeth, jabbing a finger here or there and giving recommendations worthy of a five-star restaurant. There’s our special cheese for the day, the pepper jack. You could try the dry salami with it, we brought it in this morning and it’s still fresh, ‘cause you know we stock up on that stuff once every three days. Boss says it keeps just as well, and we can’t be too picky ‘cause we’re so small, you know?
When she smiles, Annabeth smiles back.
(Wonders when she had last been happy like her. She’s only a little envious.)
When she walks to the back of the store to look for the tapioca machine, she hears a shriek from the serving girl, and a cold chill run down her spine.
“Percy! About time. Were you jerking off back there or something? You were supposed to relieve me ten minutes ago!”
“Sorry, meant to come earlier,” Annabeth hears her boyfriend say, and when she spins around she decides that she had definitely chosen the wrong store to walk into.
(and after)
The empty boxes pile up on the shelf, and Nico counts fifteen of them. Trojan, Lifestyles, Crowns, MAXX, Kimono. All there, storybook font and clean-cut instructions on the labels, evidence for sex addicts and the over-precautionary. He’s unsure which category he falls in, now, and truth be told he really doesn’t want to know.
Fact remains, there’re too many, and definitely not enough. Maybe he should go buy a few more boxes, just to be safe. Maybe he should just raid a factory in Thailand and be done with it.
Fact remains, he’s still worried about Luke.
*
Thalia takes one look at the brands on the shelf and suddenly starts imagining herself walking out of this place and into the nearest McDonald’s, ordering hamburgers with a credit card and puking into the sinks, shoving French fries into her mouth and gagging rainbows. She’s never puked a rainbow before. What would she have to eat before she could produce a rainbow, anyway?
L’Oreal dominates over smaller boxes of Clairol and Revlon. The smiles and white teeth of the models sit triumphant on display in the corner aisle, grins so wretched and full of simper that Thalia starts fucking all of them in her mind, fucking them with the silicon dildo she had worn in the film last night. The blonde one would have been a flimsy fuck, especially with that angular face. Mask of a skeleton-a Voldemort body as well, probably. No physique equates to poor stamina. She’d bet good money on small curves, shadow and/or plastic boobs, and a whiny complex. The brunette looked okay; she’d probably last more than two rounds and maybe even a good blow, even though her hair would be ruined by the end of it. (Irony for the company, seriously.) But no, Thalia had saved the best for last. The black girl on the corner, shadowed by hordes of puny white models, she was the one that would have been worth the most of Thalia’s time. Her eyes gave it all away, it was the well-fucked look, glimmer of a confidence that had not been abandoned under the glare of a flashbulb’s light.
Yeah, that would be worth some of her time.
She stares back at the display and bites her lip.
And being the hypocrite she’d written herself out to be a million years ago, Thalia plucks the blonde girl off the shelf.
*
He prepares the place at five ‘o clock, half an hour before Luke’s arrival. Bianca had pretended to notice nothing, booking a camping trip with Tony the night before (in a fit of fatherly love or whatever else it could pass as, Nico had sent her off with a 15-pack of Kimonos); she told him she would call and then there was the honking of a Jeep horn and his daughter of four years was off to fuck the three days and three nights away.
Twenty minutes before, he sprays the place with a can of Febreeze. Too much salt and sweat and semen in the air for his liking. Too much of everything.
Fifteen minutes before, he showers, scrubs himself clean of whatever shame he had divested of himself before and pretended he didn’t have, scrubs with a small towel until his skin is scraped raw and red. Shaves what nonexistent hair he’s grown on his chin, climbs out of the bathroom looking like a plucked chicken. Keeps himself occupied with Jane Austen on the sofa. The shampoo smells too old; it had been caked in two-year old soap and he’s not sure if he should be worried about it or not.
Five minutes before, he puts down the novel and starts pacing.
(what am i going to do what am i going to do what the fuck am i going to do)
*
Thalia skims the instructions on the label and takes advantage of the bonus tube of hair cream that it had come with. Considers streaking her hair instead of full-on dye (there should still be tin foil in one of the kitchen cupboards, unused from her last picnic five years ago), but that would just be cowardly. She has no desire to follow out her plans with cowardice.
So she cuts her hair first, lines the scissors up to her hair and admires the view, flash of silver against chestnut brown. She’d always loved her hair. Her mother had told her not to brag about it, had even told her that it wasn’t anything special, but she’d continue to like her hair, twine her own fingers into it and wash it like it was her own child. There’s something absolutely dark and mellifluous about it, reminded her of the earth in the garden and how easily it crumbled beneath her feet. Sometimes, her hair would shine on the inside and other times, it would reflect the sun. More than once, she has caught herself wondering if her mother could see its reflection, all the way up in the heavens, see its reflection and appreciate it for what it’s worth.
She loves her hair.
She loves it so much that she’ll cut it off and pile it in the trash.
It’s thick on the blades at first; there are so many chunks of it and everywhere at once, so she has to hack at it and chop at it and squish locks of it together and split them up in awkward places. She tells herself that it’ll look better later, starts trimming it ferociously when it begins to look like a train wreck. Turns on Luke’s old electric razor and slices it up the nape of her neck, checks through two opposite-facing mirrors to make sure that she doesn’t nick her skin, shapes the roots and ends of her hair until it looks halfway-there. Her hair is like a warrior, like a river with rapids. Provoke it, and she’ll fight back. She’ll try to make your life hell while looking presentable, no matter how you mutilate her, no matter how well you try to control her. Her hair is like a Baltic country.
(She wonders if she had been intrinsically masochistic.)
After the dye job, she looks at herself in the mirror. Examines her eyelashes, the bridge of her nose, the bend of her lips. So her cheekbones hadn’t suffered any damage.
It would be a new look for the new year.
And she’s so happy she could cry.
*
(See, Thalia is a real hummingbird. She’d flitted around flowers too much, spilled her heart into empty shot glasses, taken too much of the nectar from the plants to keep her hands clean. She’s broken, she’s been broken for two years, but somehow she doesn’t really mind being broken, because she has the most fun this way. It’s so much fun.
So much ridiculous fun.
And true to her thoughts, to the expectations of the world, true to everything and nothing at all, the girl in the mirror starts to cry.)
*
When Percy finally spots her standing in the snack foods aisle, Annabeth can only stare. The pieces of dust had long settled by then, the horses and their prospective riders had already taken shelter in the mountainside cave and she had already left them to their own devices, drawn the curtains on the show and stashed away the last of her dignity. So she stares. She stares and stares and stares, tries to imagine the words that he’ll try to use to cover up that kiss, imagines walking out of this place and going back to their apartment, imagines packing her bags and leaving once and for all, psychotic bills passed in Congress, notes passed in the hallways, YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT JUST HAPPENED IT LOOKS LIKE ANNABETH CHASE AND PERCY JACKSON FINALLY BROKE UP.
There really isn’t much to say any more, is there, she thinks, and realizes that she’s said it out loud before she could stop herself.
Percy continues to look at her like he’s looking at a ghost, and what joy, she must have really died and gone to hell, then.
*
Luke arrives five minutes late with a bouquet of something in his arms, but he never gets past the rest of his sentence, because he’s already being dragged in by the arm by Nico and feeling particularly undignified.
“What’s going to happen now?” He asks, when Nico recounts his adventures at the free clinic.
Nico is taken aback, and the way his shoulders scrunch up shows through, “I-I. I don’t really know.”
“Is there something I can do?”
Now both of them are quiet, Luke is staring weirdly at Nico and Nico is staring weirdly at his hands, both of their fixations blinding and unmistakably borderline insanity. Nico half-shrugs and half-coughs, feeling vexed and uncertain and he’ll be damned if they’re the same thing. This type of scene is always supposed to work out in the books.
*
They end up having sex anyway.
Luke kisses Nico long and hard, presses every inch of his body against Nico’s and brushes his long fingers through Nico’s hair, doesn’t break the kiss at all in between strokes, kisses Nico like it’s his last breath on earth. Sweet and slow, they’ve got all the time in the world, and all of his time is in Nico’s hands. He unbuttons Nico’s shirt slowly, searching for a spot on Nico’s chest to tap the tips of his fingers. He knows this body so well now, well enough to know where Nico shivers, which part of his abdomen will make him moan soft and buck hard. He folds into Nico’s body, lifts him up until Nico is sitting on the kitchen counter. Nico’s legs curl around his waist.
And Nico, he doesn’t know what he’s doing any more. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, but he’s faced with a nice kiss and a gentle bit of skin, and he embraces it; maybe it’s all he has left.
Luke kisses him again, more slowly and softly, presses his lips against Nico’s chin and his throat and his neck. Presses lips against his jugular, his collar bones, the rest of his body, searching and feeling and smiling and humming. Nico fists his shirt and kisses him back, rolls his hips against Luke’s and feels himself growing hard. It’s kissing, only kissing, but he’s kissing Luke.
And this is exactly what Nico had been afraid of getting into. Unrepentant, no reluctance, looking into Luke’s eyes and seeing nothing there but himself, looking into Luke’s eyes and feeling something strange and unsightly bubble up from his stomach and into his chest, feels himself breathing the air and smelling nothing but Luke, feeling the rise and fall of Luke’s chest. The scent is fresh and beautiful and bright. It’s a scent that smells like love.
It can’t be love.
*
Grover has a second job at a place the local party-goers call Club Half-Blood, where he mixes drinks behind a wooden counter for a ruddy group of diehards with obsessive disorders involving Greek mythology, dyslexia and ADHD. Half of them were the recovering addicts from first-person shooting games, and the other half were completely focused on table-dancing and swaying their limbs to any beat they could get their hips on. You’d fit right in, he tells Percy, they’d just love you and hate you enough for you to be their hero. Hell, I bet you could even save the world some day and that’ll really prove it to them.
So, in light of the half-compliment and his own desire to get piss-faced for a discount price, Percy agrees to head down there and check it out some time. Club Half-Blood needs some new blood, once in a while.
It was the beginning of a descent to find Annabeth Chase.
*
Two hours ago, Luke had told him to pack enough clothes and toothbrushes for four days and four nights, that he’d be there to pick Nico up and they would go somewhere. It’s been two minutes after two hours, and Nico starts to feel like a bitchy girlfriend for waiting for Luke without anything in his hands. He can’t go. He’s going to die. He can just feel it. Most of the psychologists will write it off as delusional and symptoms of the Factitious Disorder, but he knows his own body better than anyone else; he’s dying and he knows it.
Luke’s beat-up American car pulls up to the curb in another ten minutes. He doesn’t even bother to open the door and get out, honks the horn impatiently, rolls down the passenger window and whistles through his teeth.
Like Nico was his dog or something.
“I’m not going,” Nico yells, and he hopes that Luke catches the words when he turns around to go back into the apartment, but the next thing he knows, the car door slams, a pair of arms forcibly fold around his waist, a hot breath runs down his spine.
“Idling the car increases a substantial amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you know,” Luke whispers, and Nico glares like he’s never glared before, as if Luke had ever cared about global warming; as if he didn’t only want an excuse to sound intelligent, as if he shouldn’t just fuck off, right now before there was violence. He was not insane enough to fall for this one, yet. Luke only makes it worse by turning Nico around with one arm and burying his other hand in Nico’s hair, pulling him down the building steps.
“’m not going,” he says, voice muffled in Luke’s shirt, “Geroff me, you psycho.” He grinds his heels into the pavement, holds back and tugs the other way when Luke pulls at his hair. (And you thought Nico di Angelo got Stockholm Syndrome that easily, you ass.)
“You leave me no choice,” Luke sighs, and he hoists Nico into the air (like he’s a real lightweight, like Luke was a body-builder. Like he needed to be treated as an incompetent before he’d really died). Nico aims a kick at Luke’s head and misses, starts hollering bloody murder and zounds and YOU’RE NOT MY DAD until he feels something warm slide up between his legs.
Oh, hell no, Nico thinks, before his thighs start trembling and he’s cursing all of the deities in the world, there is no God in this world, and Luke’s grinning; his hand has found a nice piece of ass to stroke, there is no fucking God.
He resorts to screaming. “Fuck you! Fuck you and your whole family. Fuck your friends and your nasty complex. Fuck you fuck you FUCK YOU.”
“Rather you didn’t,” Luke whispers conspiratorially, wiggles an eyebrow, “I’d rather you save all the fucking for me.”
“You’re the not the one who’s HIV positive, asshole,” Nico snaps.
“Ouch. So my love doesn’t count anymore?”
Nico spits in his face.
Luke spits back.
At least they’re even.
*
“Thalia.”
“Thalia.”
“Thalia?”
*
The room is kind of cold now, Thalia thinks to herself, really kind of cold. A bit like that time she’d turn on the fan in the middle of December. She’d felt the cold sink into her body like a second layer of skin, sticky and somehow sweet-smelling, like a rotting pile of murder victims. Yeah, cold like that. Cold like popsicles in January, licking icicles with the top of your tongue, french-kissing Luke on a Ferris wheel. Cold like that. Cold enough to burn a hole through her heart.
She wonders if she should do something about this cold. But something tells her that, even if she had bothered to turn on the gas stove, she’d still be freezing inside.
And she can admit to it now-she might be jealous, really jealous of Annabeth, in the way that she can never be jealous of Nico and Percy, jealous not because it’s all she can do; in Annabeth’s hands, her fear of the love complex had been vaporized, taken away and demolished with the rest of her fears. No, she was jealous of Annabeth, simply because Annabeth knew how to be happy, she knew how to carry on a conversation without second-guessing the other person, she knew how to relax and find beauty in the world and not the man.
She loved Annabeth for it as much as she was jealous of her.
(and before)
A pile of game controllers and wires fall on her lap and Thalia doesn’t even look up to know that it’s Luke and Nico here to crash her party. And oh goddamn it. It’s Percy fucking Jackson.
“Looks like the whole gang showed up,” she says as Nico sits down next to her, sucks on her Menthol as fast as she can before Luke tugs the stick out of her mouth, running the smoldering tip under the kitchen tap with a look like she’d stepped in someone’s shit.
“No smoking when I’m around.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Thalia says back, and starts rubbing Nico on the back with her empty hand. The boy curls into her hand like a little puppy. Nico’s always so cute.
“It’s Halo 3,” Percy explains, “and I still have the highest score.”
“You had the highest score,” Nico retorts, “Shooting you down today, motherfucker.”
“Hey, who’s the real motherfucker here?”
“I’m not anyone’s fucker,” Luke says, slips a small smile and an arm around Nico’s waist (the gesture warms Thalia, and it’s only strange because her heart is beating at a strange tempo), “I’m just here to save the world.”
“Pfft. Been here, done that,” Nico rolls his eyes. “We don’t need another Jesus,” Percy says at the same time.
“Who knows?” Luke laughs, “I’m certainly built better for martyrdom than you, Percy Jackson.”
And Thalia has to smile to herself. They’re here, they’re in her house and they’re arguing and being immature, but they’re here and they’re saving the world. They’re saving the world, one video game at a time.
And she’s relieved. She’s really, really relieved.
(now after)
They arrive at the Grand Canyon sometime in the early morning with stars trailing after the exhaust pipe of Luke’s car; they arrive under the impression that it’s night time, because there are no lights on the roads and the birds are only half-awake. Nico still has a frown caked in his face and Luke is driving, chafed somewhere between the boundaries of being half-asleep and half-inebriated. The radio dial broke halfway through the trip, and Luke had long since discarded his disc player for a place to keep booze in the car.
Safe driving, safe fighting; that’s his motto.
They enter through the northern exit, and probably because of the electrical company’s rigging in the dead of the night, all the road lights had been turned off and they’re left staring at each other, staring at into the night, looking at the sky and watching the clouds run and tumble across the lip of the canyon. It’s an enormous geographical wonder, stamped and tamped down by horse hooves and waterfalls, dry and cracked like the skin on a grandmother’s forehead. Arizona had never appealed to him like this. He feels an urge to step down, 6000 feet down into the canyon and let the river take him away, lift a finger through the slipstream and feel the stars crash down around his shoulders. The utter silence of the place makes him want to shout, to scream until his lungs are sore, fall into the sky and remember life when it was still there for him to live it. Because here, he can really see the sky.
Because here, he can fly.
Luke pulls his arms around him, and they look at the stars together, he counts the constellations, watches the sky turn bright and the lights fade and the first hikers begin their descent.
He can really fly.
*
(Five years ago: Monaco, 3:37 pm, side of the highway that’s facing the sun. It’s quiet and lonely, and the man tells Nico that he has money sealed away in a corner of the world. He has wandered among unknown men, seen stories and legends and relived battles and fierce days. Nico faces the north, the man faces the south. So it’s a casual encounter, a missed connection. Somewhere off to the side, a cell phone rings. He slips out of his clothes like he’s in a dream and playing with a crime. He fucks and they fuck, his breath is stolen away from his lungs and his limbs are flat, pale against the sun. And the man tells him that he has a nice fortune made, that he’ll pay it all for this last day on earth; his time is up, and so is the rest of Nico’s life. I want to die, he hears in between fucks, I want to die I want to die I want to die. Humans possess weak immune systems, even without virus and hunger and disease. All it takes is a heart and three words to shatter your pride.)
*
“Thalia?”
“Thalia?”
“I’m right here, Annabeth. I’m right here.”
*
The party at the grocery store is already in its twilight-zone mode when Luke and Nico arrive. Grover’s the one who spots them first, bellowing something obscene before he promptly sloshes beer down Nico’s shirt with an exaggerated bow of welcome. There’s music, there’re opened boxes of graham crackers and Pepperidge Farm from the snack shelf, people Nico doesn’t know are dancing and Thalia’s there, chatting up men and women and batting her eyelashes with the air of an aristocrat. Annabeth is sitting on the counter with a licorice straw sticking out between her lips. Somewhere next to her, Percy is sitting on a stray chair, looking at Annabeth and then back at the door, weighing his chance of survival and circumstance with each glance.
Nico picks up a beer from the stack riding on Grover’s back and pops it open with a click.
“So wait. What the hell are you doing?”
“WE’RE PARTYING. IT’S A PARTY. PARRRY. TEE. WITH BOOZE AND TITS. SEE THE TITS?” Grover shouts, sloshes more beer down his own shirt this time, and now he starts to drag Nico and Luke around to the back of the store.
It’s a mess of overturned chairs and shelves of food that have been ransacked by hungry dancers. A shelf of feminine products and shaving cream had been pulled to the side to reveal a dance floor, speakers ramming out dance beats on the side. There’s even a disco ball floating above their heads, and Nico really has to give them some more credit; they’ve really managed to ruin Percy’s work reputation forever.
Thalia shows up, then, smoky-eyed and swaying under alcohol. And even though both of them know that she’s no lightweight, she really looks more drunk than displeased, and definitely more daring than cautious, because the minute she sees them, she gives both of them a big smile, and then she plants a kiss on Luke’s mouth, right in front of Nico and right in front of everyone else. She’s planned it well, she has. Hell has broken loose.
“Holy fuck, it’s Luke Castellan!”
“Really? God, what the hell would he be doing here? Stupid dick.”
“Oh my God oh my God!”
“Ask him if he’ll sign my boobs.”
“Do you have any more lipstick?”
“LUKE CASTELLAN, GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE,” Percy roars.
*
And while he’s staring at the stars, he can see the constellation in the sky. Unclear and wobbly at first, as if the stars were adjusting themselves into the correct path, but another minutes, it’s clear like water droplets falling on the grass.
A hummingbird, flying through the stars, picking up a splash of light from the sun and a prickle of ice from the moons around Jupiter. It’s diving through the sky, warming up in its flight, flying against the celestial traffic on the star-swept stage and it’s dreaming, it’s dreaming of his memories and he remembers. It’s the same rainy day. It’s the same lake in the middle of the mountains. It’s the same log cabin, the same girl wearing the same white clothing, pieces of wildflower slipped under her red hair, the same girl telling him that she would see him again in Barcelona, telling him not to worry about feeling lonely, because she would find him soon and she would be a part of his family, that she was oracular, a real fortune teller, that’d maybe she’ll find a little more mysticism in his life than he had thought. Rachel Elizabeth Dare, here to enlighten and turn your life on its back.
The hummingbird sings.
*
Percy tries his best to explain it to his manager the next day. He’d planned all sorts of excuses, and he’d actually bothered to write them down on a piece of notebook paper today. He couldn’t lose this job, not after losing his life to a girl and losing the remainder of his sanity to a freaky bit of drug.
But his manager doesn’t come to work that day. Nor the next.
Rachel helps him clean up the mess in the morning. She grumbles something about starting to keep tabs on his habits, and Percy smiles apologetically; he doesn’t have anything more to say than the next person.
*
Luke isn’t nearly as lucky. He’s yelled at, pummeled at, frowned and leered at, and is almost carted off to the hospital ward by what was very likely an assassination attempt from one of the porn industry’s hired hit-men. He visits the Salvation Army down the road the next day and purchases a bullet-proof vest. Never could be too unwary of attack.
*
Bianca comes back from her camping trip three days after the party, her clothes ripped and bleeding from scratches. Upon closer examination, Nico discovers that’s she’s breeding spores of poison ivy in her hair, and she’s laughing something funny, mumbling incoherency about a giant mechanical contraption that had swallowed Tony alive, that she’d run home and she never, never wants to leave Nico, ever again.
She’s about to break, he sees it, she’s going to break.
He’s an awful father.
He can do nothing but pick her up, sling her over his shoulder and drag her into the bath. He’s her dad, whatever Bianca may think, he’ll be her dad until the end of her days, and he’ll subscribe to taking care of her forever, simply because he loved her as much as he would love anyone else. In the bathroom, he tugs the dirty pieces of cloth off around her arms and cuts open her bra with a kitchen knife. It’s trapped in her back and tangled through a bunch of thick pieces of grass; he’s surprised it hasn’t cut off her circulation completely. Fills the tub with water and bubble bath, purple bubbles, she’d always liked purple bubbles, takes off the rest of her clothes for her and lifts her into the bath.
She’s silent at first, silent and soothing and every way the doll she’d never been. She speaks to him about the tiger lilies Tony had picked for her by the road, the In ‘N Out they had stopped by on the way to the site, the boys who had flirted with her and the punches Tony had thrown. She speaks to him about perverts hiding on the freeway and the free breakfast she’d never tasted at the homeless shelter. She says all of this with a straight face, smiles at Nico like she’s still a young girl, like she’s still reading high school love stories and she hasn’t grown out of her training bra yet, prepubescent Lolita staring into the gaping cavern of Humbert, she says all of this with her own brand of grace, little smiles and whispers and splashes of bath water on his clothes, and then she’s laughing and laughing and now she’s bursting into tears.
*
“I’m waiting out for my happy ending,” Percy tells Annabeth, one year three months five days seven hours later, “I’m waiting for it.”
And Annabeth can bring herself to say it. “You’re still waiting?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
Another three hours later, Thalia spots a hand-delivered wedding invitation sitting in her mailbox.
*
Near the country of Jordan, Luke encounters a camel tied to a fence. The camel’s owner has already neglected the beast for over two days, choosing to spend his time with the women in the brothels down the street, but Luke had been watching over the camel in that time, using it as an opportunity to remember and meditate and look for the last link to the puzzle in his pocket.
The camel chews on stubbly straw, leans against the wooden picket while Luke places a hand on the other side of the fence.
“Hot today, isn’t it?” he suddenly hears a voice saying, looks around and wonders when he sees no one there, and realizes that the words had come out of his own mouth.
“I’ve wondered for a while about this,” Luke goes on, surprising himself, “but why do camels down here only have one hump on their backs?”
The camel blinks back.
And there’s something extremely irrational, off-scope and insane about this, but he presses on anyway, “Oh c’mon, don’t ignore me. At least tell me why.”
A beat. Luke stares at the beast, and it stares back. They look at each other for the longest time, until the camel suddenly opens its mouth, revealing decayed, yellow teeth and long strings of coffee-colored saliva.
“I’m a camel, and you’re a man,” the camel tells Luke, “and for me, that is certainly enough reason to ignore you.”
(It’s because he’s dehydrated, that must be why. He’s dehydrated. He’s in a state of delirium. This isn’t real.)
“So what about your hump?”
The camel lifts a split hoof in the air and shakes it. A small pile of sand falls on the ground with a puff of hot air and Luke feels his skin itch. The creature throws him a bewildered look, “Whatsa hump? If you’re talking about the layer of fat on my back, we don’t call those humps. Don’t think I don’t know how derogatory you humans can get with the different parts on your own bodies. Those are not humps, no sir, I’m a male camel and I am very well-endowed, thank you very much.”
“You, I…what?” Luke mumbles, and the camel snorts.
“From the back, you dumb bastard. I mean my loins. Y’know. Genitalia, wee-wee, penis-phallus-dick, whatever it is you men call your pride? Yeah, here, lemme turn around and let you look. Yeeeah, here. See the balls? Yeah, you see ‘em, dontcha? You can touch ‘em if you’d like. I don’t kick unless you spit in my face. And there. Proof of my masculinity. I’m actually pretty big for an Arabian camel, you know. See? You only wish yours were as big as mine…”
The animal stops talking at this point, because his owner is back and Luke is slumped against the fence, telling himself to stop daydreaming, that this is starting to become ever creepier than science fiction; he tells himself this while pawing his hands against the sand in the ground. The owner pays for his camel-sitting in paper bills, asks Luke what’s wrong, but Luke shakes his head, tries to spit out as many broken Arabian phrases he knows that can somehow relay the meaning, “There’s no point anymore because I’m totally fucked, man.”
The Arabian owner and his Arabian camel leave, and Luke is still digging against the sand with his fingers, continues to dig even though he’s not exactly sure what he’s looking for, he’s crazy, he’s ruined it all, he doesn’t have anywhere left to go, he digs and digs until he sees a glint of metallic faith flash around his head, around the sun and back through the atmosphere, sees it and feels his head spin and shit
it’s the gold, it’s his Angel’s gold, all four-hundred-forty solid kilograms of it.
*
“Oh, Christ.”
Thalia Grace, dropping paper grocery bags on the ground with a loud thump of her heart.
“Jesus, Luke, if you’re going to cheat, can’t you do it in someone else’s bed?”
“I’m…sorry.” Nico mumbles.
The girl only laughs. “Sorry? Why the hell are you sorry?”
“You’re the porn star,” Luke points out.
“Nope,” Thalia says, “With this kind of thing-finding your boyfriend fucking another man? I’m actually a little turned-on. You boys down for a threesome?”
Nico gapes. Luke sighs. (Thalia smirks at her own cleverness. She could probably win an award for this someday.)
*
Nico bites his lips, and promptly decides to throw away his dignity. “Look, I kinda fell in love with you.”
Luke smiles, bemused. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
“You are an ass.”
“I’m serious. What are you going to do?”
“I…” He licks his lips. “I’m going to continue loving you until you love me back.”
Luke takes him in his arms, smirks into Nico’s hair. “Well, that’s certainly a plan.”
(don’t you know I do? I do, I do, I do)
(and now?)
“Please don’t die.” Luke whispers in Nico’s ear, “Please, please don’t die.”
“Too late, I’m already dead,” he cracks a smile.
“Be quiet. You’re gonna make me cry.”
And he has to laugh. “Luke Castellan doesn’t cry. He doesn’t give a shit about…about anything, remember?”
“Be quiet. Be quiet, be quiet.”
“You be quiet.”
“I love you. I really do. If you die, I’ll never forgive you.”
“It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”
The world is a big, scary place. He’s been scared; dying is scary and even though he’s played around with Death before, it’s merely gnawed at the back of his mind, clawed at his throat with pale talons, glared at him through the lens of a kaleidoscope; this time there’s no turning back to look because he knows he’d only turn into a pillar of salt. Now it’s enough. It’s all he needed to hear. It’s been enough, since the once upon of time and the bridge under the stars, since the grocery store house party and saving the world one computer game at a time, since the rain of invisible fingers and Rube-Goldberg machines, since he met Luke Castellan, since he saw stars. A tangent line to the circle in his life. I’ll live in your heart if you stay in mine. It’s been enough since the beginning of the world and the end of his life.
It’s enough, and he’s had enough.
He swears he can hear the hummingbird singing in the sky.
(before that,)
“If you want money, I have about three trillion dollars in gold, stashed in every nook and cranny around the world. More than enough for a career start-up. Find you a few producers and second-rate directors, buy you a few drinking buddies down in Hollywood,” the boy says, shuffles hands in his pockets and produces a slightly crumpled card. There is a carefully drawn map on one side, and small print on the other.
(And he can stare all he wants, but Luke isn’t going to look away, and once he realizes it, he sighs and puts his palms up in the air. Heavy raindrops crash around them on the sidewalk and over the dome of Luke’s clear umbrella, and when he gives the instructions, he knows that Luke can barely hear the words as they slip out of his mouth.)
“W-Wait.”
“Yeah?”
“W-What’s your name?”
He grins, watches it flashes across Luke’s eyes. “You can call me your savior, if you’d like.”
“You…but how will I find you again? To thank you. I mean, this is huge, I can’t just-”
“I don’t need anything from you,” Nico says, brushes him off with a wave and a turned back. “I’m transient, after all.”
And he’s wanted to get rid of it all for a long time. He’s wanted to live life from the beginning, clean his slate and shoot amnesiacs into all of his secretaries. He’s wanted this forever, and now that he has this outlet, he’s keeping it forever.
But what’s funny, is that he has never wanted to be transient.
It’s just jumped on him one day,
and never let him go.
>>>
HUMMING BIRD % THE END
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