Chapter Text
To say that Nico di Angelo was done with the gods’ bullshit, would be an understatement.
He was more than done, he was resigned from this, dropping off the resignation papers with his name signed and a huge middle finger drawn in the middle of it. Maybe he’ll even give personal fuck-yous to a couple of gods if he had the time, but who’d want to waste anymore time for immortal beings who make their children do the dirty work?
Not Nico, that’s for sure.
He was done and he was ready to walk away the moment that someone came up to him and said that his dad needed him for something. No way is he getting involved in that kind of bullshit anymore and no way is he going to pay the price for blindly following the gods’ plan when it wasn’t even a plan! (Seriously, he expected more from Athena, who was the brains and literally came from Zeus’ brain, for fuck’s sake!)
Yet, even if Nico was done with the gods, it would seem that fate had other plans for him. If Nico was done with the gods, the gods weren’t done with him.
How else could he explain the fact that he was waking up in what could only be described as a shithole of chaos?
Nico hasn’t been able to remember things. It’s been doing that recently.
His mind’s become a bit hazy with memories as of recently, blurring details until they were no longer decipherable and it’s been a bit harder recalling things as of late. One too many things get muddled up and sooner than one could expect, memories are nothing more than a string of blurry events that don’t even make any vague sense to anyone.
That’s been Nico’s mind for the past few days. Hazy memories that just seem like fiction more than reality and at this point, he isn’t sure what to believe or not.
Which is why when he blinks his eyes open, only partially aware of the blaring sounds of car alarms and the pungent smell of burning trash, Nico’s half sure that he was dead.
And that was a ridiculous thought itself, because him? Nico di Angelo? Only son to Hades, the god of the dead? Ruler of the underworld? Tilted as the ‘Ghost King’ by those who fear him? Yeah right.
Still, it was hard to think straight when all of his senses come to attack him at once, and fuck, was it an experience. His head was pounding, his nose was violated, his ears were throbbing, his body in pain, his back was itching for some reason and goddamn, if that wasn’t the worst headache he’s ever experienced.
Nico can smell the vague scent of alcohol, which could imply the fact that he’d gone drinking prior to… whatever was happening around him. It must’ve been something strong that the Stoll twins had smuggled in, because good fucking lord, Nico feels so hungover.
With a groan, Nico forces himself to rise, ignoring the way his head pounds harder and bile threatens to rise up in his throat. When he tries to put his hand down somewhere solid, he misses entirely and instead goes tumbling down with a yelp.
Nico falls flat against what could be cement ground, hard and completely unwelcoming for a hungover guy like Nico. He groans again, low and entirely out of it as he sluggishly gets up to his feet with as much composure as he could.
Gods above, he feels like shit. And that’s saying a lot coming from the guy who constantly looked half-dead and had starved himself with only pomegranate seeds for… how many days again? Fuck, if Nico even remembers.
He shakes his head feverishly, raven black curls bouncing around from the motion as he does so before he blinks, trying to get the post-drunk, hungover haze from his eyes. Nico blinks once, then twice, then three times before-
“OUTTA THE WAY, MOTHERFUCKER!”
He goes scrambling back, hitting the back of his head against some wall as a car goes speeding past him, taking only a couple precious strands of his hair and just a shred of his sanity. Nico blinks profusely.
What. The. Fuck?
Nico, this time, presses his palms against his eyelids, his eyes squeezing shut as a wave of nausea washes over him. He pulls his hands away, blinking blurrily until the haze from his vision goes away. And what he sees is not the camp itself.
Nico’s somewhere else entirely.
“What… the fuck?” The son of Hades mumbles, eyes squinting as they dart from left to right in frantic movements.
Tall and imposing buildings loom over Nico, all of them painted very vaguely in the same dark colour schemes that center around red, which honestly, a horrible colour scheme to run with in his opinion. The sky was a dark almost auburn red as well, a bright red circle in the middle of it. Was it supposed to be a sun or a moon? Nico can’t tell.
Frantically, he looks around, eyes squinting and mind scrambling as he tries to gauge just where in the everloving fuck he was.
There were several figures strolling past and they definitely did not look human, whatsoever. All of them were on varying levels of a scale that Nico personally calls ‘What the fuck am I looking at?’.
Some landed on a solid 5/10. Others, below. And very few, on an all-time high.
Nico gets up to his feet shakily, breathing slightly ragged as he takes in surroundings. This was not camp. And these figures were definitely not human as far as he could see. They weren’t human, but what could only be described as creatures, monsters even.
A thought passes through his head and Nico drops his head into his hands as he groans again. Another wave of nausea passes through him.
“Fuck, am I in Tartarus?” He mumbles into his palms, prying his hands away before putting them back onto his face.
This was NOT fucking good.