secret hearts {Larceny & Nico}

The rain feels like karma.

Nico wonders if the rain will ever just seem like rain to him again, and not some horrible reminder of the life that he had been forced into, of the violence that he had nearly asked the world to thrust him into. It still haunts him, that memory. I volunteer as tribute. The words had echoed around in his head for months. He had prepared himself to say them day after day, scared himself out of it and then convinced himself it was what he had to do.

He had told Reggie that he was going to.

And then, when he hadn't said them, what he had his agency taken away from him once again by a government that would rather see him in the ground, when he had been put in the arena and forced to know exactly what it was to have life stolen by his own than—Reggie had spit it back in his face.

Nico had recognized the hollow ache then.

He sees it again in the boy standing in front of him.

It brings so much pain to Nico's chest that he thinks he will stumble under the weight of it. He is standing in the middle of the city in a home that isn't his in a district that's unfamiliar but that—Nico knows that pain, and it's too much. Much too much, and Nico wants to run away from it, wants to turn around on this marble floor and find a bottle of liquor that he can drown himself in, wants to numb every feeling that this boy is displaying clear as glass.

Nico has no interest in shattering.

Larceny Theft though, he looks like a boy of the verge, water draining down onto the floor, dampness running off his hair in rivulets. The sight of it reminds Nico of those last days in the arena, in the storm and the wind, air whipping at his cheeks and never, never being completely dry. "It's not really life is it?" Larcent says, and Nico's teeth grind together. He still wants to run, to hide, to do anything but talk to someone who will make him remember. "Coming back."

Nico looks down at him for a moment, breathing steadily, jaw tight.

"No," he says finally. "It's not."

The tension between his shoulders is thick, and Nico rocks back and forth between his feet, shifting his weight nervously. His hands curl into loose fists at either of his sides, and too late to avoid it he remembers being in the arena and learning how to get used to the feeling of his weight being in one place. Still, even now, most days he is eerily still.

Sometimes though, on the worst days, he crumbles.

"Then again, you'd know better than I would," he says finally, trying to make a joke, trying to get away, to think about something else, but all it does is remind him that Larceny died and came back, where Francis did not.

Jessica did not.

Severus did not.

Myrcella did not.

Nico lives. Nico came back, but the people that he had cared about, the people he had worried about? They were gone.