Umm. So, yeah. Hi? Been a while, I know, but I'm beavering away behind the scenes on an epic (in size) fic that I want to get written before I post it, so that's taking time.

This has been in my head for a while, although the ending surprised me yesterday. So it's almost as new to me as to you. Heh. It's a oneshot that got out of hand, as is my wont. So prep for a long and bumpy ride

I love Will and Nico so much. I'm a terrible person for putting them through this, but then most of you knew that anyway.

Prepare for strong language and some graphic medical scenes.

Marzipan.

Drips of blood plinked into the water cascading around the sink, which whisked them to pale shreds as they swirled down the drain. The colour of the water deepened as the drops grew in size and frequency on their way to becoming a full blown torrent.

Will hissed in annoyance and turned off the tap, accidentally blowing a bubble of blood as he did so. He glanced up into the mirror; there was a stream of blood trickling out of each nostril, livid red against his otherwise pale face and gleaming under the bathroom's harsh fluorescent light. Already it had started to coat the back of his throat. The tang of copper burned beyond the base of his tongue.

Tilting his head forward, he pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand and reached for the toilet paper with the other. He missed. The skull toothbrush holder — it had been a joke, dammit, but Nico not only insisted they use it but also it be referred to it as Yorick — flew off the side of the sink. It bounced off the mercifully-closed toilet lid, spraying toothbrushes, toothpaste and a neglected reel of floss in all directions, before crashing into the bath and exploding to fragments. The sound rang in the tub and bowled around the bathroom with all the associated subtlety of a herd of sprinting elephants stampeding through the sound barrier.

He wasn't proud of himself and he'd never admit it, but he actually let out a small whimper as he took in the mess. Exhaustion weighed on his limbs like molasses. The very act of continuing to inhale and exhale felt like a giant black hole gobbling up any iota of energy he could summon. With his head thrumming with tiredness like he was a mile underwater, even the thought of picking up the shards of Yorick seemed a Sisyphean impossibility.

Blood chose that moment to overspill his top lip and slip into his mouth. He was breathing through his mouth — he had nothing to spare to keep his jaw closed or make pretty much any other facial expression and his body was more than happy to exploit that to bypass his nose to breathe — so he inhaled blood. It choked him as it congealed. He hacked a red mist onto the back of his hand.

He closed his eyes, which sent him wobbling dangerously and scrabbling for the edge of the sink for support. When you needed more than the sum of your fingers and toes to count the hours since you'd slept more than four hours uninterrupted, closing your eyes was an automatic signal to your body to sleep, sitting or lying down banished to a mere formality.

He shook his head and opened his eyes, blinking at the sudden starburst assault his retinas. As he yanked off a wad of toilet paper and twisted it to form plugs for each nostril, the bathroom door burst open.

Nico had his sword drawn. His eyes were wide but still clouded with sleep; his clothes were rumpled. There was a shiny trail from the corner of his mouth surrounded by a patch of red skin, where he hadn't quite managed to scrub the drool from his face in haste. He had taken to keeping his hair so it could form a stubby ponytail at the nape of his neck, but it had come loose about his face, matted and mussed on one side where he'd slept on it. There was a tie tangled in one clump of hair, swinging wildly.

"Will?" Nico sheathed his sword, his forehead creasing into a frown. "What the hell was that crash? It sounded like the minotaur was remodelling in here."

Will kept his back to Nico and quickly used the toilet paper to wipe the blood off his top lip. He snorted the remainder back up and down into his throat. His stomach roiled in protest but he swallowed anyway, suppressing a shudder as he hid the bloody toilet paper by balling it into his fist.

"Will?"

Will took a quick last glance in the mirror above the sink and then turned around. Somehow, he managed to quirk his mouth into the pale spectre of a smile. He nodded to answer Nico's question, not sure he had what it took to make his vocal chords work, but Nico kept frowning at him, seeking further explanation. Grimacing, he sat down hard on the closed toilet, reasoning that perhaps he could speak if he didn't have to put energy into standing as well. "I'm fine," he managed at last, finding words albeit ones thick and slightly slurred with exhaustion. He reached sideways into the bath and plucked out a shard of the toothbrush holder, offering it up to Nico. "But alas, poor Yorick."

Nico scoffed and folded his arms. "Ugh. Seriously? How long have you been sitting on that one?"

Only one shoulder responded to Will's desire to shrug. It hunched up to his chin and crashed back down almost immediately. "About two seconds. I came up with it just now. On the fly. What can I say? I'm a comedy genius."

Nico made a buzzing noise, like Will had given a wrong answer on a gameshow. "I'm sorry, 'comedy genius' is not the answer I have on the card. What I have here is 'tragically newly single'. I feel like I'm well within my rights to dump your ass for even thinking that was funny."

"Hey, no judging. I get so much extra credit for even remembering Hamlet right now. I'm barely awake enough to remember my name."

At that, Nico's face lapse back into a frown. He ran a hand through his hair; it snagged in the tie. It snatched a cluster of hairs free from his scalp as he wrenched it out and stretched it over his wrist for later amidst a tangle of other ties and a couple of leather and bead bracelets. "Right. What time is it, anyway?"

Will blew air out through his lips and shook his head, his aura of helplessness permeating the room. "I don't know. I only got home about ten minutes ago. But I nearly got squished by a garbage truck on the way in, so I guess about five?"

Nico was yawning, but Will's words snapped his mouth closed. "In the morning?"

"I hope so. Otherwise I'm like five hours late for my next shift."

"I'm awake at five in the morning? This is disgusting. No one is supposed to see five a.m. from this side. It's fine to still be awake at five, but actually getting up at this time? No. Nope. Not happening. This has to be a nightmare. It's against the laws of nature."

"Yeah, which is why I tried to deploy stealth mode. Sorry I blew it."

Nico softened, shrugged and pulled his body into a wide stretch. "Eh. I figure I can forgive you. Eventually. Maybe. I mean, you will owe me for waking me up at this vile time, but we'll get to that later. But I thought you were supposed to be getting off at midnight? I was waiting for you. I must have fallen asleep."

"Yeah, you were flat out on the couch when I got in. I didn't want to wake you. Sorry. I was going to brush my teeth and pass out. You weren't even supposed to know I'd got in, but, well…" He grimaced at the shard of Yorick in his hand and tossed it back in the bath with the rest of the mess.

"What happened?"

"Yorick had a great fall and all the king's horses…" Will had to break off and yawn so hard his ears roared, so he ended the thought with a vague forward rolling motion with his hand. "Well, you know the deal."

"Hamlet and Humpty Dumpty. I wonder why no one's written that crossover yet?"

"Uh, you have been on the Internet, right? Of course there's someone, somewhere who's written that."

As he considered this, Nico's lip curled. "Gods, people are weird. I don't get people."

"Have you ever considered that's because you're not an actual person? I always wondered if you were secretly an android. It would explain the alarming lack of social skills."

Nico narrowed his eyes. "Hey, I have people skills. I have people skills coming out of my ass. I just don't use them. It's too much freaking effort. People need to get a lot better at handling the truth. Simple."

"Nico, there's this thing called tact…" Will trailed off and closed his eyes. "You know what? I'm too tired for this and if it hasn't sunk in by now, it's really not going to, is it?"

"Nope. And yet, you're still with me anyway."

"Yeah, but by this point I'm starting to suspect Stockholm syndrome. If you really loved me, you'd get me psychiatric help."

Nico snorted. "So you could sit in group therapy in a big circle and be forced to listen to everyone else's dumb ass problems? That's what I'd do if I loved you? Because to me, that sounds more like torture."

"See? Robot. Error 404: Compassion not found."

"If that means I never have to pretend to care about the problems of people I don't even know then yeah. But anyway, quit avoiding the issue. Screw Yorick. Screw my missing empathy chip or whatever. That's not what I meant and you know it. What happened to getting off at midnight?"

Nico thought he saw pain flash across Will's face, but it was barrelled aside by irritation so fast he couldn't be sure it had ever been there.

"Come on, Nico. You know what happened. Same thing that always happens. I'm a first-year resident in the ER. People don't stop getting sick or falling down or having car wrecks because office hours are over."

Nico sighed and rubbed a hand down his face, trying to sluice the sleep from his eyes like he would water. "I know," he said, leaning against the doorjamb. "I get it. You do what you have to do. But there are other residents and doctors. You know you're not the only one in the city, right? They replace you when the shift changes. You don't have to be there all the time."

"Well, maybe I want to be. Did you think about that? Maybe I really like my job and want to be good at it. Maybe I want to help people. Is that so terrible? I didn't ask you to wait up for me, you know." A spark of annoyance leapt in Will, enough to let him break the yoke of exhaustion and launch him to his feet and across the room towards Nico, who blocked most of the doorway. Will stopped abruptly in front of him, throwing his arms wide. "So? Am I allowed to go to bed? Or do you want to fight about that as well?"

Nico tilted his head back and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath and chewing on the inside of his cheek. There was no point rising to Will's tone; although it pissed him off, it wouldn't be fair. He could tell from the glazing over Will's eyes and the purpling under them deepening by the day that Will was beyond exhausted. No one was at their best when sleep-deprived.

"I'm not fighting with you," he said, managing to keep his tone level, even if his words were more clipped than usual. "This is not a fight and it's not some whiny boyfriend thing where I complain you don't spend any time with me. If I become that person, I'll be the first to volunteer for a swan dive off top of the Empire State Building. I'm worried about you. Nothing else. So sue me. You're ready to drop. Maybe try taking care of yourself before you try taking care of everyone else, huh? You look half dead. And if there's one thing I'm qualified to talk about, it's the walking dead. On so many levels."

As his anger evaporated, Will's body sagged like someone had pulled the plug on a bouncy castle, leaving him with even less energy than before. He closed his eyes, kneading them with his fingers, then managed a small smile as he poked Nico in the shoulder with gentle accusation. "Yeah, this is why I never watched more than three episodes of The Walking Dead with you. All I got was lectures on the mechanics of reanimated corpses and how badly they were portrayed in the show, as if I didn't have Gray's Anatomy open on my lap full of diagrams about how skeletomuscular system works and a medical cadaver on ice at med school. And as for looking after myself, seriously? You're telling me to look after myself? You? I've been trying to get you to take better care of yourself for years. And failing every time. You are the king of self-neglect."

"Yeah, but I don't give a crap about me," Nico said, sliding a hand up to cup Will's face so Will's ear nestled in the webbing between his fingers and thumb. Nico's fingers curled into the hair at the nape of Will's neck. He pulled Will's face towards him and brushed a kiss across his lips, pausing on the lower one for an extra split second, long enough to feel it curve up into a smile. "I can go to hell. Well, do go to hell. Frequently. You're a different story."

"If anyone else said that, this would be the point where you'd be making a comment about tossing your cookies and adding graphic sound effects." Will muttered, smiling as he bumped his forehead into Nico's. "If I were wearing a wire right now, your reputation would be dead in the water."

Nico slipped his free hand up Will's oversized, washed-out Columbia t-shirt, ghosting his fingers over Will's hipbones and up over his ribs. They barely snagged on patches of raised, rubbery and shiny keloid scar tissue — Nico could draw a map of Will's old battle wounds blindfolded and was able to skirt over them accordingly. "Nope. Looks like you're clean."

Will shivered. Then his eyes snapped open. "Wait, are you trying to seduce me into forgetting we were fighting?" he asked. "Kind of below the belt, don't you think?"

"Well yeah, that's generally the area you're going for if you're trying to seduce someone," Nico said, a smirk playing across his lips. "But no, I'm not trying to make you forget. We weren't even fighting, were we, so how could I make you forget something not even happening in the first place?"

Will had to close one eye to try and process what Nico had said; he didn't have the brainpower left to interpret stereoscopic vision and Nico's words concurrently. "Um. Yes?"

Nico rolled his eyes and withdrew his hand from Will's shirt, gathering the hem into a bunch and using it to drag Will out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, where he stabbed a finger at the bed. "Sleep. And yeah, I mean as it is, if you need me I'll be on the moral high ground not taking advantage of a zombie boyfriend. And FYI, it sucks up here."

"You're on the moral high ground?" Will murmured, sinking onto the bed. His lower back, aching from being on his feet for only the gods knew how many hours, grumbled as the vertebrae found new ways to squish down on each other. "Make sure you take plenty of pictures. This will probably be your last time up there for a long time."

"So you're so tired you can barely speak but you still manage to be fluent in sarcasm, huh?" Nico threw a skeptical, narrowed-eye look at Will as he slipped out of his t-shirt and tossed it on the floor. "Interesting."

"What can I say? I live with a guy and sarcasm is his first language. His English is broken at best except for curse words, especially when you try and teach him the words for laundry hamper, but he's all over sarcasm. It must have rubbed off."

Will gave a huge yawn; he wasn't sure it would ever stop. It thundered on despite his jaw clicking in protest, only stopping stopped when Nico flicked his t-shirt into Will's face with his foot, startling him out of it with an undignified yelp.

"Oh, you live with a guy?" Nico asked, sitting down on the bed next to Will as Will slapped the t-shirt from his head and back onto the floor. "What's he like? And you know, don't worry about holding back. If you want to use 'sexy', 'gorgeous', 'hot' on top of 'so good looking it hurts' then feel free."

"Yeah, I do live with a guy, but you'd probably hate him. He's a huge egomaniac."

"I knew I should have dumped your ass the second you made the Yorick comment." Nico shoved Will and got off the bed so he could shimmy out of his jeans, which he rebelliously dumped on the carpet also.

Will groaned. Then, in the last concrete thing he remembered doing, made to push himself up after Nico. He couldn't be sure, but maybe Nico had said something else — the words were distorted as if from the bottom of a well — before black splodges spattered over his vision multiplied to become one constant gaping darkness.

"—wake up right this second…"

Will woke with a gasp. He was on his side on the bedroom floor, Nico's discarded jeans sliding in and out of focus on the carpet. The side of his head stung; he bet he'd given himself serious facial rug burns. His legs were tangled where they'd failed on him. Immediately he tried to sit up, but Nico's hands on his shoulders stopped him from rising.

"Yeah, you're not going anywhere. You blacked out. How about lying still for a second?"

"I'm fine," Will said, groaning and rubbing his eyes. His fists rasped on the stubble on his cheekbones. "I got a little dizzy. Big deal."

"You're bleeding."

Thankfully, the wad of toilet paper hadn't left his fist. Will brought it up to wipe his nose, but Nico snatched it out of his hand. With a flick, he unravelled it like it was a blood-spangled banner or part of a gory ticker tape parade. He glared from it to Will with a laser intensity threatening to set both toilet paper and Will aflame. "I meant from your damn ear this time, but thanks for confirming you're still getting the nosebleeds as well."

Will sighed. The side of his face he hadn't taken for a burning skid across the rug did indeed feel sticky. He touched his jaw gingerly; his fingers came back dark with clotted blood. "Oh. Well, that's new."

Nico savagely re-balled the toilet paper and tossed it at Will. He didn't catch it. It bounced off the side of his head.

"That's the best you have to offer me? It's new? For fuck's sake, Will, you promised. No more healing spells and prayers. You can't keep doing this every time you go to work. Look at you. One day, you're not going to come home. This is killing you."

There was a hard glint to Will's eyes when his head snapped up. "What, and you always keep your promises? What about when you shadow travelled a big ass statue across the Atlantic and almost faded into nothing? I told you afterwards to rest but you still went after Gaea."

"That was different and you know it. Apocalypses have different rules. I had to get the statue here to stop a freaking civil war and then it was pretty important to stop Gaea rising up and, you know, taking over the entire planet and destroying everyone who lives on it. You know, that tiny issue."

"So it's fine for you to nearly kill yourself to save people but the second I try to use my powers to help others I have to stop? Are you even listening to yourself, to how hypocritical you're being?" Will sat up, jerking off Nico's restraining hands and sending him reeling back to sit on his heels. Will's back thudded against the side of the bed and he drew his knees into his chest, hugging them close as he glared thunderously over the top of them at Nico.

"The world was ending!" Nico burst out with, throwing his arms wide. "What did you want me to do? Let it? This is different. Maybe I was ready to throw my life away back then but it was for the world and I didn't think I had anyone who gave a crap. It's different now but it wasn't then. You do have people who care. Right this second, you have people who care so much about you and you're throwing it away. Killing yourself for one person at a time."

Will clenched his jaw until it throbbed, splintering the clot of blood next to his ear and sending a fresh rivulet of blood down the side of his face. He looked down at the floor, his fingers finding the bloodied tissue and twisting it to shreds. "Every time I have to tell a person that someone they love is dead, I end a world," he said eventually, his voice stunted by a jaw that barely moved. His words were measured and even, but he felt each one like a stab in the gut. "They're sat there in the relatives' room waiting and thinking you're busy saving the person they love more than anything because you're a doctor and they're in a hospital and that's what doctors do, they save people. But then I have to go in there and sit them down and tell them sorry, I wasn't good enough. Do you know how hopeful people look when I walk in? They think I've come to give them good news, tell them everything's fine, and then…" He gave a frustrated growl, slamming his head back against the mattress behind him.

"Will—"

"No, let me talk. Let me tell you what it's like for me every day. I don't need Gaea or the Titans to win to see the world ending. I have seen the world end in people's eyes over and over again, right across from me over a cheap ass coffee table. They're sitting there on this couch with some disgusting cup of vending machine coffee in their hand, which is stone cold because they're too distracted to drink it, and I have to end their world and watch as everything implodes for them. Do you have any idea what that's like? To see a patient die in front of you and then watch a piece of the people they've left behind die as well when you tell them you weren't good enough to save the person they're waiting for? And if you could do something about that — and I can, Nico, I can — wouldn't you fix it? Wouldn't you keep someone alive and keep someone else's world whole for as long as you could? You dragged that stupid statue across a continent and an ocean even though it nearly killed you. Don't tell me you wouldn't help these people if you had a way."

One after the other, tears slipped over the bottom edges of Will's eyelids. His vision wobbled and his eyes prickled. He dashed them from his face with the heels of his hands but they kept coming. He snarled in anger at his inability to stop them.

Nico closed his eyes, his stomach plummeting. "It was another kid, wasn't it?"

A big chunk of toilet paper was wrenched free as Will's hands spasmed. His throat worked for a few moments before he spoke. "She had pyjamas on." His voice was jarringly calm, as if he were making a passing comment on the weather. "Fleecy. She was thirteen years old. You know she'd begged her mom for some cooler pyjamas for sleepovers, but she still wore these flannel ones at home, even though she'd grown out of them. They were too short at the ankle. I think they were blue but by the time she got to us, they were black. With the blood." His eyes slid out of focus, staring at the wall over Nico's shoulder, where an image of the kid careening through a hospital corridor on a gurney, surrounded by medics crisscrossing bloody footprints over the scarlet tracks left by the wheels, played over and over.

Nico swallowed hard.

"I don't know how she had so much blood to lose," Will continued. "I mean, I know what the average blood volume of a thirteen-year-old should be but this… There shouldn't have been that much blood." Two vertical creases appeared between his eyebrows as he tried to fathom how it was possible that one girl could bleed so much.

"What happened?" Nico asked, his mouth dry. If Will had started talking about it then maybe he wanted to finish talking about it, get if off his chest to help him cope, but he still felt like a dick for prompting him to continue. Maybe Will was right and he did suck at empathising with people. He hated himself for watching the guy he loved coming apart at the seams in front of him and having no idea what to do.

"Severe cranial trauma to the left parietal bone. Penetrating gunshot wound with massive damage to the underlying parietal lobe." Will took a deep breath and looked up, meeting Nico's eyes. "Her father took his gun, killed his wife in their bed, shot his daughter in the head then blew his own brains out." The tic pulsing in his jaw as he spoke belied his prim matter-of-fact air. "The neighbours heard the shots, called 911."

"Fuck."

"Yeah, pretty much. Luckily he was a terrible shot and didn't manage to kill his daughter." Will cracked a sudden, bitter laugh, tasting bile at the back of his throat. "'Luckily'. Did you see what I did there? The kid is on a gurney coming into the ER minus half her skull. There's cerebrospinal fluid leaking off the edge of the bed and she's got all these shards of skull looking like teeth you need to floss chunks of grey matter out of and she's lucky because her dad didn't manage to put a bullet in her medulla oblongata and destroy the part of her brain keeping her breathing and her heart pumping, or anywhere else immediately vital." He shook his head, clearly disgusted with his choice of phrasing.

"You didn't shoot her, Will. It's not your fault."

"Of course I didn't shoot her. Don't you think I know that? I'm not stupid, Nico. I'm not blaming myself for her being in the ER. I'm just telling you what happened. I'm telling you I've got this kid lying there somehow still alive when everything is telling me she should be dead. I've got the mother's sister refusing to use the relatives' room; she's frozen in the corridor so far past the point of crying, like this red-eyed statue. She stopped by the house. The crime scene techs got her some things from her niece's bedroom, clothes and stuff, because she thinks this kid is going to need them because we're going to patch her up. Like she's skinned her knee or something. Don't worry, the doctors are here and now everything will be fine! Here are some new clothes for when you're discharged tomorrow!" He slammed his head back into the mattress once more. The bed shuddered. He did it again and again, trying to bash the image out of his brain.

"We don't have to talk about this now if you don't want to," Nico said. "I know I brought it up but if this is too hard for you then we don't have to. I'd get it."

Will stopped hitting his head. "Hard for me? Why would this be hard? My skull is totally intact and there's no bullet hanging out in my brain so I'm fine. Compared to that kid I'm all kittens and sunshine. Who am I to complain? So anyway, back to the story. The aunt's got this bag of clothes and she's clutching a teddy bear because it's the girl's favourite toy. She's standing there with this bear as the janitors mop around her to clean up the trail of blood and bits of brain her niece left as we wheeled her in. Even the fucking teddy has a bullet in it, Nico. Or a flying piece of skull got it. I don't know. But the aunt's there holding it upside down by the leg so hard her hands are shaking and it's disintegrating in her grip, dropping blobs of stuffing through a hole in its back all over the floor." Will took a deep shuddering breath, choking back a sob.

Nico lurched towards him instinctively, but Will blocked him by slashing his arms through the air. He fell backwards onto his butt with hair in his face. He was slow to push it back behind his ear, taking a beat to collect himself.

"Don't," Will said. "Don't try and make it better. You can't. Thank you for trying and I love you for it, but you can't make that kid… you can't make her…" He swallowed. When he started speaking again his voice was even, but it had a hollow ring to it. "I'm a doctor in the ER, Nico. That's what I want to do. I need to get used to the fact that this is what happens. The world sucks. Sometimes kids get shot in the head by their fathers. I need to learn to deal with that. I can't fall to pieces every time something like this happens. I need to learn to be okay with this myself."

"Bullshit," Nico snapped, wrenching the hair back from his face now and glaring at Will. "I'm going to be here for you. I don't care if you're kicking and screaming."

Will's smile was sad and slow and slumped off his face the second it appeared. "I know. But that doesn't mean I don't need to learn to cope when shit like this happens. Right after what's in the Hippocratic Oath, it's rule number one of being a doctor: Don't go to pieces at every trauma you see."

"You don't. You kick trauma's ass every day. How else could you still be there doing what you're doing? Every doctor must have moments like this. Seriously, every doctor must have patients who get to them. Ask anyone in that hospital. Especially kids. You wouldn't be human if this didn't happen every once in a while."

Will gave something that was a little more than a snort, but not quite a laugh. "Ah, but there we are, that's the point. I'm not just human though, am I? My dad is the god of healing. I don't have to sit there and be human and watch people die and tell their aunt and their teddy bear that this thing that used to be a little kid has now become a body and is heading down to the morgue. Straight to the morgue. You don't let relatives see a body that looks like that. That's not the last image they need to see of someone they loved. You might get an open casket if your mortician is outstanding, like child of Aphrodite fantastic with makeup and reconstructive putty, but weirdly it's not an area Aphrodite kids have much interest in. Besides, even if your mortician is the best in the business, it's still not generally recommended to have an open casket for a GSW to the head. Kind of ruins the moment if half of someone's head or face slides off during the ceremony, don't you think?" He broke off and gasped for air, like he was bursting through the surface after a deep dive; his breath hitched repeatedly on the intake.

"So you healed her."

Will bit his lip, more tears escaping. When he opened his mouth to speak again, his voice was diminished to a squeak and his bottom lip was dented with prints of his incisors. "I tried." He shoved his hands through his hair, gripping it in his fists and hiding his eyes with the heels of his hands.

Nico crawled over to Will and sat next to him, dragging him into his lap as his body shook with sobs. Nico coaxed Will's fingers from his hair and stroked it back flat again with one hand, the other gripping a fistful of Will's sleeve to remind him that he was there.

"Goddammit, Nico, I tried so fucking hard." Will stared through the wall rather than at it, his eyes glassy. Though Nico had liberated his hands from his hair they kept twitching, the fingers twisting around each other, clawing for something to grab hold of. "I think maybe it was working at first. Her vitals started to stabilise. Enough that they were talking about getting her to the CT scanner to see the damage and prep for surgery. I thought if I can get her to hold on for long enough for that…" His whole face creased; he wiped his traitorous nose on the back of his hand. "Then my fucking nose started bleeding. I was pouring blood all over her and exchanging bodily fluids with patients is a big no-no. They're pretty strict on that. They made me leave so I could fix it. I tried to get them to let me stay. I tried. If I were a better healer or if I were stronger then it never would have happened. I'd have been able to help her easily. I wasn't strong enough. I barely got out the door and she coded."

"No, don't go there. This isn't on you. Don't think that. For fuck's sake, Will, you are the best damn healer around. Second to none. I know you did everything you could. Anyone who knows you even a tiny bit would know that."

"Everything I could wasn't good enough."

"Yeah, sometimes it isn't," Nico said, more as an exhale than a sentence, the bitterness in his words palpable. "Sometimes we give it all we can and it still isn't enough." There was a half-empty glass of water left over from the night before on the nightstand. He reached up for it then grabbed his t-shirt off the floor, dipping a corner into the glass and using it to caress the blood from the side of Will's face. "But all that matters is we try. And you tried to hard you've probably burst blood vessels in your enormous, stubborn, idiotic brain."

"Everyone works so much harder when it's a kid," Will said, his legs curling into his abdomen. His voice was tiny. "I watched them work on her through the door. They wanted to save her as badly as I did. The doors are thin swing doors to get gurneys through fast, so I heard them break her sternum and ribs with CPR. Even then, it didn't matter what they did. She was crashing because she'd lost so much blood and her veins were shrivelled to nothing, so they tried intracardiac adrenaline. They do that sometimes on paediatric trauma cases. I watched them stick this giant needle through her chest into her heart. There was nothing, Nico. Everything I did, everything they did…" He broke off, clamping his lips closed to restrain a new wave of sobbing. "She still died. And I don't know why, but while they were turning off the machines and calling time of death, all I could think was what the fuck is her aunt going to do now with a half-stuffed teddy and a bag of clothes for a dead girl?"

Nico dipped the t-shirt in the glass again. The water blossomed with shreds of pink. "You didn't have to be the one to tell her," he said quietly, continuing to clean the side of Will's face. "The aunt, I mean. Someone else could have done it."

"Yeah, because everyone's clamouring to end an anxious relative's world." Will turned his head to look up at Nico; he nearly got a damp t-shirt hem in his eye for the trouble. His forehead was wrinkled. "How did you know I told her?

Nico sighed, but still managed to smile at Will. "Because I know you and your freaking martyr complex. You would have told her because you think it's your fault and you deserve to punish yourself by putting yourself through that. As if losing the kid wasn't enough. And I know that just like I know that you can't stop healing people. It's who you are. It's what you do. What you were born to do. It was dumb to ask you to stop. It was like asking you to stop breathing. But…"

Will turned his head back to face the wall and settled into Nico's lap again. "Can there not be a but right now? Please? This is what I want now. Nothing else."

"Sorry, Will, but look at you. You are a wreck. You can't keep healing people because it's killing you. Blood from your nose and ears killing you. Something has to give."

"Maybe this is what's meant to be," Will suggested with a shrug, like he was floating the idea of splitting a pizza. "Maybe it's how I'm meant to go. I mean, my dad is Apollo. Is there a better way for me to bow out?"

Nico stood up abruptly, dumping a startled Will on the floor with a thud. He paced away to the other end of the room, his face vanishing behind his hair as he pressed his forehead to the wall. He swallowed hard; tears burned in his eyes and nose as he fought to keep them back.

Will blinked a few times and sat up, peering up over the edge of the bed like it was a parapet. "Nico?"

"Don't make me say it," Nico mumbled to the wall. "Don't make me be that guy."

"What guy?"

Nico gritted his teeth. "Fine. While you're out there haemorrhaging to death from every hole in your face for your patients, what am I supposed to do? What about me?"

Rubbing a hand down his face, Will sighed and used the bed to haul himself to his feet. He wobbled, entwining a fist in the sheets for support. "Nico—"

"Don't, Will, okay? Don't. I can't…" Nico broke off again, shaking his head and slamming his palm into the wall. His eyes were screwed closed.

Will began edging his way around the bed, leaning heavily on it for support. When Nico whirled around, the hair flying from his face, it made Will jump; his knees gave out and he collapsed down to sit on the bed.

"Yeah, I just heard myself. I know how I sound, but I don't care. You're ready to die for other people. You're this amazing person and I know I don't deserve you because all I can think about is myself, but if you kill yourself, Will… What about me?" Nico's voice cracked. "Don't leave me."

"I don't want to leave you: I love you. But I'm not doing this on purpose," Will said to the mattress, smoothing the sheets flat. "It's not that simple."

"Isn't it? Don't die. Sounds pretty simple to me, and I'm the resident expert on the subject. Don't die and don't leave me. There."

Will looked up from the sheets, which were now pulled taut. His nostrils flared. "You say that like it's easy. Are you kidding me? You think it will be easy for me to give up everything? This is who I am. What I want to be. And you want me to ditch everything I've worked for."

"No. I'm asking you to keep everything. Gain everything. By staying alive and staying with me."

"What you're asking is for me to let people die."

Nico shrugged. "Maybe, yeah. But people die. All the time. Every day. Again, you're talking to an expert here. It's hard and it sucks but that's life. I know what happened to that girl was awful and I am really sorry about that. I wish I could change it, but I can't. No one can. Maybe no one should."

Will growled in the back of his throat, the unending keening of the girl's flatlining heart monitor clamouring through his brain. "Well, maybe some of us whose dads don't rule over a realm stuffed with dead people have trouble with that viewpoint." The silence that crashed over the room at his words rang, like it would after an explosion. His hand flew to his mouth, trying to cram the words back in. But they were out there, swirling around and dripping with venom. He'd seen Nico flinch and realised the damage had already been done. "Nico, I'm sorry. That was not fair. I didn't mean—"

"You of all people should get that I'm not saying this because of who my dad is," Nico cut in with, his voice low. "My mom is dead. My sister is dead. By the time I was ten years old, I'd lost everyone I'd ever cared about. So when I tell you people die, I'm not saying it because my dad is the god of the Underworld. I'm saying it because I had to learn it the hard way. But hey, welcome to the human race." He spread his arms. "I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but look around. It's messy and wonderful and ugly and chaotic and beautiful and at the end, we die. It's what we do. It's the only thing that happens to everyone. The only thing everyone has in common with every single other person on this planet. Is it always fair? No. Not everyone gets to go peacefully in their sleep at 105 having had an amazing life. But death doesn't have to explain itself to anyone. It just is."

"If that's what you think, then why are you trying to change it for me? If everyone dies then so what if I heal people until my brain leaks out of my ears?"

Nico slumped back against the wall, looking down at the floor. "You caught that hole in my logic, huh?"

"Yeah, kind of. I'm driving a bus through it as we speak."

"You're different. You're different because I need you. I'm a selfish bastard and I need you, okay? I love you so much. Before you came along, I hadnothing. I was nothing. And I'm sorry, but I can't sit here and watch you die and go back to being alone. Please don't make me go back to living that empty life because I don't think I can take it. Not after knowing I could have this. And I don't care how selfish that makes me sound. Fuck it. Yes, I need you. I am always going to need you. So please stay with me."

"You're not selfish," Will said, shaking his head. "The things you've done for the world, what you've given up, the way you kept going even despite everything… You are not selfish. Don't think that."

"You have to say that," Nico said. "You're my boyfriend."

Despite the headrush it caused, Will lurched to his feet and managed to remain standing. "Yes, Nico, I am your boyfriend. And that means I have been right next to you in bed when you wake up screaming because you're having nightmares where you're back trapped in that jar. Something that only happened because you were trying to stop Gaea. I am not going to let you call yourself selfish when you deal with that every day, not to mention all the other things you've done for the whole of humanity."

Nico slid down the wall to the floor, resting his forearms on his bent knees. Will knew that what he'd said hadn't fully gone it. It was one of those things that Nico would always need to hear one more time to believe, one of those things Will wouldn't mind repeating until his voicebox shattered.

Will sat down himself and started crawling over to Nico. "Can I say how happy I am that we're back on floor level?" He stopped in front of Nico so their knees touched, grabbing Nico's hands.

When Nico looked up at him, there were tears glistening in his eyes. "I'm not a saint," he said. "I'm sorry, but I'm not. So yeah, I am selfish. I'm not strong enough to do this without you and let you go. Even if that means saving lives."

"Okay," Will said. "I get it. So I'll stop. For us, I'll stop."

"Haven't we had this conversation already?"

Will winced as if Nico had prodded a particularly nasty bruise.

Nico sighed. "Sorry, that came out wrong. All I meant is that you're right. This is who you are. It's why I love you. But it's also the reason I know that you're never going to be able to stop."

"So, what? We're back to me quitting as a doctor? I can't do that. I won't do that."

"No. I would never ask you to do that for me. Kill a part of yourself like that. I love you for trying to help that girl. But you don't have to be a doctor in the ER. What if you switched your residency?"

"To what? Whatever I choose, I'll always be around sick people who need healing. It goes with the territory."

"Not necessarily. I was thinking…" Nico paused, a look of apprehension crossing his face, like he was about to suggest Will considered becoming a drowner of kittens. "What if... what if you become a medical examiner? Not even you can bring those patients back, so you won't be right there and feel like you have to try."

Will let go of Nico's hands and rocked backwards, propping himself up with his palms flat on the floor behind his hips. He gave a long exhale. "That's… yeah. Wow. I mean, it's technically true, I guess, but I don't know."

"I know what it sounds like, but I'm not saying it because of who I am and who my dad is. It's not some weird kink I have, to sleep with an ME. I wouldn't do that to you." Nico's words tumbled over each other on their rush to get out; he leaned forward, trying desperately to catch Will's eye.

"I know," Will said. "I know. Don't worry, I don't think that. I know you wouldn't do that. It does make sense. But part of the reason I became a doctor is to help people. It's pretty hard to help a corpse."

"You'd be surprised. You'd be giving a voice to the voiceless. And believe me, the dead have a lot to say. Getting them to shut up is actually the hard bit. You could bring them and their families justice and closure."

Will twisted his mouth in thought, his thumbs bobbing up and down against the carpet. "Maybe? It's just pretty far from what I'm doing now, you know? What I always imagined I'd be doing. I didn't grow up thinking I wanted to cut up dead people for a living."

"I get that. But Will, you are an amazing doctor. An amazing healer. If you keep working in the ER you're going to be gone so fast, and if you die right now it's not only death it's a waste. How long do you think you can keep this up for before it kills you? A year? Think about the small list of people you could help in the ER in a year before keeling over compared with the people you could help with an entire career as an ME and Camp Half-Blood's healer in chief. All you have to do is switch to something where you didn't feel like you had to use your powers all the time."

Will tilted his head in vague assent, rubbing a hand along his jaw. "I guess. But even if I decided to do this, and I'm not saying I will, are you sure you'd want to date an ME?"

Nico screwed up his face. "What the hell kind of question is that? It's you. I'd want to date you if you were a freaking golden lemur."

Will leaned forwards, narrowing his eyes. "You said golden lemur because I'm blond, didn't you?" He reached out and tugged on a strand of Nico's hair. "Because if you really want to talk hair..."

"Not getting a haircut," Nico said automatically. "Anyway, my point still stands. I don't care what you do, as long as you're still you."

Will batted at Nico's legs to get him to unfold them; when Nico stretched them out, he settled back down in his lap, listening to Nico's heartbeat throb through his femoral arteries. He let out a contented huff. "No getting up this time, or I will seriously unleash a can of whoopass. I've fallen down enough today. I'm tired. Don't push me. And I just meant… are you ready for what other people are going to say about you? A son of Hades dating an ME? A match made in hell blah blah? The jokes write themselves. It's going to come up a lot."

"Everyone else can go fuck themselves," Nico said. "I stopped giving a rat's ass what people thought about me a long time ago and I've never felt better."

Will smiled. "Charming."

"Well, my boyfriend seems to think so."

"You have a boyfriend? Aww shucks. But I got myself all perdy to ask you to the prom."

"Yeah, I have a boyfriend. But you'd probably hate him. He's a stubborn idiot."

"And dangerously close to a certain very important parts of your anatomy," Will reminded Nico pointedly, digging his skull into Nico's thighs to emphasise the fact.

"Don't remind me," Nico groaned. "I'm having enough trouble keeping myself in check thinking about a limo three-way with two of you on the way to the prom."

Will snorted. "Please. As if. You couldn't organise a one-way in the back of a limo if you raided the bar and got yourself wasted first."

"Is that the new way of saying I couldn't put together an orgy in a brothel?"

"Sure. Give it time. It will catch on."

"Hey, even I'm not that incompetent."

"Uh…?"

Nico flicked Will's ear. "Asshat. You're a mean asshat."

"I thought you didn't care what other people think? Which is good because now I think about it, there are about a million TV shows where an ME is helped out by someone who sees dead people. We're going to get so much shit for this if it happens, you know that, right?"

"Who cares? I'd watch that show."

"You'd watch anything that starred you," Will said, rolling his eyes.

"Hey, and you. As long as it was on HBO so they show all the sex scenes."

Will whacked Nico in the chest with the back of his hand. "Ew, gross. You're pretty much talking about a sex tape. Isn't that a little perverted?"

"Don't tell me you're not thinking about it."

Will paused. "Shut up."

Will hadn't lowered his hand from swatting Nico; Nico took it and interlaced his fingers with Will's. His forefinger traced a line forwards and backwards across the back of Will's hand. "But if you're talking about a TV show… does this mean you're actually considering it?"

Will sighed and squirmed in Nico's lap. "I don't know. It's a big decision. It will change my entire life. Our entire lives. I can't make it in one night on a whim."

"I know. And I'm not asking you too. All I want is for you to think about it. Before it's too late."

Will yawned and wriggled still further down into Nico's lap. His breathing deepened. "I will."

Nico glanced up at the bed. The two of them dissolved into shadow for a few moments before reappearing on top of it, where Nico gradually eased Will off his lap and under the sheets.

Will groaned. "No. Where are you going?" he mumbled, a tiny frown wrinkling his forehead. His eyes remained closed as he groped out unsuccessfully for Nico.

"I'll be back soon," Nico said, planting a kiss on the side of Will's head. "I promise. I'm going to go and find the girl from the hospital and make sure she's okay. Well, as okay as she can be considering she's… you know. I'll see what strings I can pull down there. I'm going to make sure she has a better death that she had a life. You don't need to worry about that, at least. What was her name?"

Will smiled. "I love you," he said, blending the three words to one barely intelligible clutter. He still hadn't opened his eyes.

"Well yeah, I'm awesome, and you're not so bad yourself, but I need one more thing before you hit dreamland. Her name?"

"Oh. I think she was Italian. Or her name was, anyway. Should make it easier for you to recognise her."

Nico rolled his eyes. "I don't need help. Italian, Mexican, Martian, whatever. It makes no difference to me. If she's down there, I'll find her. Don't tell anyone, but I'm kind of a badass when it comes to this."

"Idiot." Will murmured. The sheets rustled as he curled himself into a ball.

Nico prodded Will in the shoulder. "Come on. One more thing before you sleep. Still gonna need a name over here."

"Huh?" Will turned his head towards Nico in confusion, eyes opening the tiniest crack and filled with accusation for the disturbance before he remembered Nico's question. As the pieces fell into place, his eyelids slammed closed again. "Right. Favianne. Her name was Favianne Salvatore. Pretty."

Nico blinked. His smile slid off his face. "Really?

"Yeah. Why?"

"Nothing," Nico said, dragging an unsettled hand through his hair. "It's just, well, Favianne was Bianca's middle name. And Salvatore…" He moistened his lips. "It means saviour."

But Will was out cold.

Nico watched him sleep for a few minutes with a contemplative frown wrinkling his forehead. He chewed on his bottom lip as he thought, churning away at the mental arithmetic. The girl who died had been thirteen; he was twenty-six. When he had been thirteen, he'd gone searching the Underworld for Bianca with the hopes of sneaking her out of the Doors of Death. But his father had told him Bianca had chosen rebirth... thirteen years ago.

And then there was the name. Did it mean something, or was he just overthinking it? Cold prickles of unease started to fester in his stomach. He was suddenly very aware of his heart in his chest. The bed felt like it was plummeting away beneath him; instinctively, he took two fistfuls of the sheets until his knuckles glowed white. His heart battered against his ribs, trying to get through and to some oxygen — he'd been holding his breath without realising. A deep gasp of air refilled his chest and then shuddered back out again. Cramp pulsed through his hands, but he couldn't let go of what felt like the only thing that was grounding him.

No. It couldn't be. It couldn't have happened again.

Could it?

When he finally managed to unclench his fingers, he used his trembling hands to tuck the blankets around Will. Then he disappeared to find the girl whose death may just have saved his boyfriend's life — and see if his sister had died for him a second time.