I don't own Percy Jackson, The Prince of Egypt, Frozen, or the Brotherband Chronicles. I do own Tianshi Psychiatric Hospital, Erin, Richard, Rose, or Martha.

Chapter 1

The walls are white. Very white. Too white. They are what most people would call smooth, but he doesn't know why. When he runs his fingers over them he feels the little bumps that come from plaster, so he thinks they should be called rough. Or bumpy. But not smooth. Smooth means no bumps.

The orderlies say that the walls are white because they deflect heat, and if the walls were darker the way he wants them to be then the rooms would be too hot.

He thinks maybe red would be okay. Or blue. He likes blue. He thinks blue would be better than white. And blue makes people more intelligent, or stimulates their brains, or something. He read that in a book. He likes to read.

Putting someone in a white room is a kind of torture. He read that in a book, too. The soldiers were captured and put in a white room. They were alone, and there wasn't anything in the room with them. It drove them crazy. When they got home, they had nightmares.

It seems sort of backwards to him. Why would white give them nightmares? He gets nightmares from black. Not black clothes, or black hair, or black eyes (all of which he has, and likes), but black black. Complete black. Complete darkness. It scares him.

But the orderlies don't understand him. They won't let him change the walls.

Sometimes he wonders if they like him. They seem so nice. But everyone seems nice at first. And not everyone can be nice, not really.

The white door in the white wall opens to reveal a white hallway. An orderly pokes her head through the opening. Her face is smiling.

Where is the rest of her body? It's outside the door, of course. It's standing outside the door while her head is inside. What if her body didn't want to stay there? What if it walked away, and left her head stranded? He watches her body walk away on the other side of the door. Her head stays there, floating in mid-air, her blond hair hanging limply without shoulders to fall on. Her body disappears around the corner.

"Nico." He blinks and he's back on his bed, staring at the orderly. He wonders if she knows that her body is walking away. "Your father's here to see you."

From behind the orderly a man appears. He wonders why he didn't see the man in the hallway when he was watching the orderly's body walking away.

The man smiles and begins walking towards the bed.

His fingers turn white as he clenches them around the sheets. This is my father, he says to himself, he won't hurt me. He repeats it in his head, running through the things he remembers about the man, until the man has reached the bed and has sat down. His fingers slowly come away from the sheets.

"I brought you something," his father says, and pulls a candy bar out of his jacket pocket.

He smiles. It's a Three Musketeers, his favorite. "Thank you," he says.

His father doesn't reply.

He tears open the wrapper, extracts the chocolate bar, and stares at it. It feels like a long time since he's eaten, even though he knows he did this morning at breakfast. It was eggs. He doesn't really like eggs. But he ate them anyway. He's trying hard to cooperate.

"Nico?"

They give him breakfast in his room, because he wasn't able to leave. There were too many people in the halls. Sometimes he can do that. It doesn't always scare him.

"Nico?"

But this morning he saw the people in the hallway, and he couldn't breath. The orderlies came by and tried to calm him down, but nothing worked. Finally they let him eat his eggs in his room. When it was time for Group, he had no problem.

"Bambino?"

A hand lands on his knee, and he flinches. He looks up from the chocolate bar to see his father's hand hovering just above his leg. "Sorry," his father says, and retracts his hand.

"It's okay," Nico says, and takes a small bite of his chocolate. It tastes as good as it always has before, and he smiles again and takes another bite.

His father smiles, too. "How was it yesterday?" He doesn't give Nico time to answer – he never does, and Nico doesn't know why. "I'm sorry I wasn't there. The meeting ran later than I thought it would. But Erin said you did well. That's why I brought the chocolate."

People don't like to be interrupted. The don't like to stop talking. And they don't like to be given opinions, only to give their own. His father never stops to let Nico answer. No one else does, either. They just keep talking and talking and talking, until finally they get tired and walk away. Sometimes they stay and look at him with big round eyes, as though they're waiting for him to answer. But when he does, they still stare at him with those big round eyes, as though he hasn't said anything at all. Sometimes he wonders why he bothers to answer.

"Prince of Egypt, wasn't it?" his father continues. It was actually Frozen, and Nico really enjoyed it, but he doesn't interrupt, never interrupts. "You used to love that movie." His father chuckles. "I couldn't get you to stop watching it sometimes. You knew every word to all the songs. You used to sing them to me."

There can be miracles, when you believe. Though hope is frail it's hard to kill. Who knows what miracles you can achieve when you believe? Somehow you will. You will when you believe.

He still knows them. They play in his head sometimes when it's too quiet. Sometimes he likes the quiet better.

By the might of Horus you will kneel before us, kneel to out splendorous power!

That's his favorite. He loves the priests, loves watching them spin and dance and laugh. Their laughs are cruel. They're laughing at Moses, even though he's supposed to be good. He doesn't like Moses. He likes the priests.

Deliver us; hear our prayer, deliver us from despair, these years of slavery grow too cruel to stand.

No, no, he doesn't like that one. That one hurts. It should stop. He wants it to stop.

I send the swarm, I send the horde, thus saith the Lord!

No, stop, stop, please stop.

I sent the thunder from the sky, I send the fire raining down.

He clamps his hands over his ears. Stop, please, please.

This was my home. All this pain and devastation, how it tortures me inside.

Please, Papa, make it stop, make it all stop.

I send my scourge, I send me sword, thus saith the Lord!

The room is full of orderlies now, and his father is standing beside the bed with a poorly disguised terrified look on his face, and Nico is watching himself sitting on the bed with the orderlies gathering around him. He can hear their voices, like soft birds in his ears, and he wonders idly who's screaming.

The lights are too bright. They're shining right in his eyes, blinding him. He looks down to avoid them, but they reflect off of the shining surface of the table and blind him all over again. He squeezes his eyes shut. Spots dance behind his eyelids, and he squeezes them harder. Then cruel laughter starts to fill his ears.

He opens his eyes, finding that the lights are not as bright as they were and wondering where the brightness has gone. He looks up at the ceiling. Perhaps it floated away. He watches as the brightness rolls up into little balls and sails through the air to an open window.

The cruel laughter fades back into his ears, and he looks across the table at the boy sitting there. The boy's hair is cut close to his head, almost shaved off, but it is blonde enough that the only way Nico knows it's there is because of the way it shines in the light. His blue eyes are hard, and sunken in a pudgy face. His cheeks are too red, as though he's been drinking (Nico only knows that alcohol turns people red because he read it in a book, and it confuses him – he thinks that if carrots turn people orange, then wine should turn people purple (because even red wine isn't really red) and beer should turn people amber).

"Somethin' on the ceiling?" the boy demands, his lips twisted into a smirk.

"Tiles," Nico responds in a dry tone, but the boy laughs before he's finished the word.

"What's wrong, angel boy, devil got your tongue?"

Nico almost frowns, but doesn't, because he doesn't want to give the boy – Richard, he thinks – that satisfaction.

Richard laughs again, and Nico's senses begin to flare. His heart is pounding louder in his chest, and his breath grows heavier. He takes a few deep breaths to calm himself down. Around the room are security guards. They won't let Richard hurt him. Chiron says he needs to start trusting people more. These are good people to trust.

Nico looks down at his tray, piled high with green mush and orange mush (peas and carrots, each in their own separate section of the try) and a bowl of creamy clam chowder. He can see a few potato chunks floating in the milky white soup, and picks up his plastic spoon to push them around a bit.

"Hey!" Richard says, loudly enough to attract the attention of the other people at their table. "Angel boy!"

Nico doesn't look up, but his heart begins beating faster. He isn't fond of raised voices.

"Angel boy, I'm talking to you!"

Nico still doesn't look up.

One of the boys sitting next to him shoves the side of his head, not hard enough to knock him off the seat but hard enough for it to frighten him. They mean it, he can tell.

He stands up, turns around, and begins walking out of the cafeteria, leaving his tray there for someone else to deal with. Chiron says that when things get too hard he can just walk away, and no one will criticize him for it.

Chiron is wrong, Nico knows. People will torment him for it later. They latch on to anything they can to make fun of, and suck it dry. Like leeches. Like high school students.

Nico knows this from a book. He's never been to high school.

He leans back against a wall and takes deep breaths until he feels like his lungs are working again. He imagines tiny people in his lungs pumping huge bellows to make him breath. He wills them to work harder. Richard's words and raised voice are oxygen on the iron of the bellows, and they've rusted. They aren't working well anymore. The tiny people are rushing to oil them, but his head is spinning from lack of oxygen and he feels everything more acutely than ever. He hates these times, when he can feel the water in the air and the sweat beading on his brow and the slight wind that comes from the barely open window down the hall.

Something warm lands on his shoulder, and he wonders why he didn't know it was there before. He blinks a few times and looks up from the floor. An orderly is standing there, smiling. Her hair is somewhere between red and brown, and it's been curled and put into a ponytail. Her skin is a perfect color, not too pale and not too tan. Her makeup is flawless. But her eyes are a muddy brown, and it ruins the effect.

"You alright, sweetheart?" she asks, and Nico immediately dislikes her. He doesn't like it when people call him sweetheart. A sweetheart is a type of candy. He's not a candy.

The little people in his lungs have begun to work their bellows again, so he takes a deep breath (makes them work harder – they deserve it for quitting on him like that) and straightens up.

"What's your name?" the orderly asks.

"Nico," he answers, but she keeps looking at him as if he hasn't said anything. Her muddy brown eyes are wide, and her teeth are showing.

"Can you tell me your name?" she asks again.

"Nico." Why isn't she listening? She should be listening. He's already told her this once, she should have heard, why can't she hear? Should he say it louder? He tries it.

She takes his hand and begins pulling him away from the cafeteria. Her hand is warm and soft. He doesn't like it. In a moment his hand is going to start sweating, and her soft hand will get sticky. Then she'll drop his hand and her pretty face will get twisted and the skin around her muddy eyes will crinkle up, and she'll run away like he's a disease. It's happened before.

He follows her down the hall to the Desk. The Desk is where people go when they're lost, or when they need something. He isn't lost, and he doesn't need anything, except for this lady to let go of him. And he thinks he can handle that alone.

But he likes Rose, the lady who works most nights, so he doesn't fight the orderly with the muddy eyes.

When Rose sees them, she smiles, but her eyes don't. She looks like his father does sometimes, or how he did, before Nico had to come here. He father never looks like that anymore, and Nico is glad. "Hi," she say, cheery as ever.

The muddy eyed orderly answers, "Hi, Rose. I was wondering if you could tell me where this young man's room is." She looks up at him, still smiling. "He was outside the cafeteria, looked like he could use some space."

Looked like he was having a freak out, he thinks, but he doesn't say anything. He wishes people wouldn't do that. It's so much easier to understand when people say what they mean.

Rose flicked her eyes from the orderly to Nico. "Nico, this is Martha. She's working your floor."

"What happened – ?"

"Seth had to take a vacation."

Nico frowns. He likes Seth. He doesn't like this new woman, this Martha, with her too wide smile and her muddy eyes. Seth has nice greenish-brown eyes, and his smile is a little crooked, but in a good way. Not like the Stoll brothers. Their smiles are crooked, too, but their smiles hint at mischief and trickery. Nico doesn't like mischief, not after he found a snake in his bed after dinner the night he tipped one of the brothers' bowl of soup into the other brothers' lap. They didn't find it as funny as he did.

Rose looks back at Martha and says, "Can you take Nico back to his room? He's 242. He might just need to lie down for a while."

Martha smiles at Nico, and he doesn't smile back. He feels like crossing his arms, but he isn't five and he won't act like he is, no matter how annoyed this new orderly is making him. "How does that sound? Nico, right?" She looks back and Rose.

"Like I told you twice already," Nico says in a sullen tone.

Rose nods. "Nico."

Martha looks back at Nico, and takes his hand again. Her hand is still soft, but now it feels too fleshy in Nico's. He wiggles it in discomfort, but she doesn't let go. "Come on," she says in a soft voice, as if she's talking to a child.

Nico allows himself to be led away.

The walls are still white, but now they're dark. Where the moonlight slips through the curtains, they're glowing. The marks in the plaster are accented by shadows. Nico can see every dip, every imperfection. He thinks it's ironically symbolic, that the glow that makes the white beautiful also highlights the imperfections.

The lights in the hallways have been turned off, save for the nightlights they line the hall with, but he can still hear orderlies pacing back and forth. One of the women who take the night shift on his floor (he never sees her during the day and so has never learned her name) has very loud shoes. They clack every time they hit the floor. Nico doesn't know how anyone sleeps with her heels walking past their room. Then again, it's nearly half past midnight, and most of the patients are asleep already.

Nico doesn't like the dark. It scares him. Sometimes, when it's quiet enough, he can't remember where he is – only where he was, all those years ago. It terrifies him. He's alone and small and begging for his father, but no one can hear him and he doesn't know why.

But it isn't that quiet now, and he's grateful for it. He's grateful for the orderly's clacking heels, no matter how loud they are, because they remind him where he is.

He turns over and stares at the ceiling. The moonlight doesn't reach the ceiling. It streams from the window to the wall, but the ceiling stays dark. It could go up for miles, and no one would ever know. It could grow every night, reach up to the stars, but it would stay dark all the same.

The orderly's heels approach, and pass.

Nico rolls over to face away from the door. Across the room is a small desk. It's covered in books right now, although his father insists that he'll be getting a real bookshelf for his next birthday. They haven't been able to afford it yet.

Nico glances over his shoulder, but although the door is open there is no one in the hallway, only the dim glow of the nightlights. He throws back the covers and makes his way to the desk on silent feet, picks up the book on the top of the pile in the middle, and goes back to the bed. He curls up under the covers next to the nightlight they've put in his room and opens the book to a random page. He doesn't care what he's reading, just so long as it's something. He needs to fight away the memories that the dark brings.

The following morning, the Herons were roused from their blankets by Gort, who was banging a hardwood stick on an old barrel hoop, just inside the entrance of the tent.

He smiles. He loves this story. The Outcasts, the first book in the Brotherband Chronicles. Not quite as good as the Ranger's Apprentice series, but still up there. Maybe if he read the third book, he'd like it more.

The orderly with the clacking heels comes back. He hides the book under his covers until she's passed. Then he pulls it out again.

But he can't concentrate on the book. As much as he loves the story, he can't focus on it. It doesn't feel real to him this time. The terrors are still creeping up on him. He can feel them on his skin, feel the shadows crawling up his neck. His nightlight does little to fight them off. It's a guard wall made of straw, and it's burning up, letting the terrors in.

He draws the covers up over his head and whimpers softly. His breathing grows faster and shorter. He squeezes his eyes shut and sobs, but the orderlies can't hear him. No one can hear him. Only two people have ever been able to hear him – one is at home, and one is not, not anymore.

Bianca, please.

Hey, guys. For those of you who haven't read my stuff before, welcome. For those of you who have, welcome back. The Thalico story won the poll, so I started this one first. I'm still working on the outline for the Percy/Nico one. It might be a while, because it's a long outline.

If you haven't read anything I've written before, hi, I'm Jez. I write Percy Jackson fanfiction, although I've written Avengers before. I write mostly Thalico, but I have written Jasper and Jeyna before. I'm also working on a Percico story. I take requests and I'm a beta. I have quite a few people who I'm betaing for, so I can't guarantee that I'll get back to you quickly if you ask me to beta.

This story won't have regular updates like Along the Way and White Rose did. I haven't got an outline for this one, so the updates will be a little sporadic. But I've already got the second chapter planned and I've started writing it. So it shouldn't be too long.

Also, for anyone who reads my holiday series, the next one will be Fourth of July. And they'll be taking a pretty big step in their relationship. So stay tuned. And I'm hoping, fingers crossed, that I'll be able to get one up for my birthday, which is two days before Fourth of July. It won't be a holiday story, but it will be Thalico. It will be a twist on a cliche story. I've got it planned out and everything.

So yeah! That's about it. I'll talk (write?) to you all next chapter.

Oh, almost forgot. Quote of the Chapter (the chapters won't be weekly, so we're going with Quote of the Chapter instead of Quote of the Week): "Never a dull moment around here - go to the bathroom and someone steals your pants." We just got a new puppy, and she likes to take things to chew on. She's stolen my mom's pants more than once.

Review!