Chapter Text
I’d like to begin this story by saying this wasn’t my fault.
Not completely. Or well, not exactly.
The decision was mine, I guess. Except that it wasn’t a decision. More like an impulsive action that turned out to have big consequences.
But, in my defence —a line I’ve been using a lot these past few years, and, come to think of it, all of my life—, I was left unsupervised.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
I died.
Was it painful? Yes, very. Was it unfortunate? Many would disagree. Did I have it coming? I might have, yeah.
At any rate, my arrival in the Underworld had been most expected (by both the demigods alive and the ones whose deaths I’d had a hand in). All things considered, betrayal to the gods and my old camp-mates and whatnot, I hadn’t exactly hoped for a loving welcome committee.
If I’m honest, my judgement and the execution of my sentence were far less harsh than I probably deserved.
Hades himself was in charge of my fate, and to my utmost surprise, he vetoed the judges’ decision to let me burn in acid in the Fields of Punishment. Instead, he suggested I made myself useful, to account for all the destruction I’d brought.
“My domain has expanded exponentially in the past century,” Hades had said. “Daedalus has proved a worthy addition to my efforts to keep it organised efficiently, and you will follow his example if you’re smart.”
And for the past year I had done my job well enough to keep the Lord of the Dead content.
Daedalus was grateful for another pair of hands, so to speak, for I’m not entirely sure I really had hands, or if my spirit’s consciousness believed it hard enough to make it feel that way.
The old man was an incredible and astute engineer, but he had trouble controlling his workers. I, on the other hand, had no idea how to even build a bridge with legos, but I had lots of experience in the field of leading reluctant people, monsters, and even minor deities into battle, which meant organising souls into efficient work groups was a piece of cake. And so I did —carefully watched by one of Hades’ Furies, of course—.
At the beginning, I didn’t see any fellow demigods. Not any I knew, anyway. I was sure some of the souls working under me had been demigods in the past century.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have the time, Hades had given me Wednesdays off —I didn’t really know what day of the week it was, time is an elusive variant in the Underworld, but the Fury was kind enough to remind me—. I just didn’t have the courage to face my old acquaintances just yet.
I kept to the outskirts of Elysium. Souls don’t need to sleep, don't need to eat, don't need to do anything, truly. So I wandered around, looking remarkably like the souls who’d forgotten themselves after so many years.
One day, I was spotted by Lee Fletcher.
It felt like a dagger through my unbeating heart. Lee Fletcher had been my best friend and the second person I’d failed to convince to turn to Kronos’ side. I was glad Lee hadn’t joined in the end, but I’d been shattered when I learned of his demise in Zeus’ Fist at camp.
Lee didn’t look particularly surprised, though.
“I was hoping you’d show your face around eventually,” he’d said. “You deserve a punch in the face and a friend to listen to an explanation.”
I had then offered my old friend a crooked smile. “That’s why I didn’t come round.”
Lee walked with me for a while in silence. I didn’t feel like explaining, and I suppose Lee didn’t feel like forgiving just yet.
After a couple of weeks, it became our Wednesday routine. Lee dared to speak before I did. He told me of what he knew of our respective siblings, and what he knew of everybody else, really. Demigods died and brought news even after the Battle of Manhattan. Obviously, a lot less frequently, but demigod life wasn’t easy in peace times either.
At some point, Lee managed to convince me to meet Silena.
I assumed if anybody was also wary of our former friends it was her. She’d been a marvellous informant, but that had also made her an incredible traitor.
There was a fraction of a second of tense silence when we stood face to face. Then Silena bursted out into sobs and hugged me tight.
“We f*cked up,” she cried. “We f*cked up, we f*cked up…”
I agreed, of course. Gods, we’d f*cked up big time.
Slowly, Lee threw more people my way.
Traitors at first, all of them filled with guilt and remorse. I imagine if they weren’t, they would’ve been burning in the Fields of Punishment with the acid the judges had wanted for me.
Then, there’d been a couple of kids who’d never joined my side. They were reluctant, I knew, but they clearly respected Lee enough to go along with him.
Eventually, I got used to the nasty glares, but, more surprisingly, I started getting comments around the lines of, ‘Something had to be done, though’, ‘They really don’t care much about us, do they?’.
Through Lee’s diplomacy and my visible humility and apologetic behaviour —which wasn’t natural to me, but I wasn’t exactly in a position to start defending myself—, my old friends appeared on my Wednesday walks without being coerced. And I even stopped dreading those meetings so much.
That was until spirits started disappearing.
It was rather chaotic at first. There was fear around, which wasn’t common in Elysium.
But then the fear turned into hope. They didn’t disappear. Rumours said they were going back to life.
My inner curiosity got the best of me, as it always did.
One Wednesday, I led Lee and Silena to Melinoe’s cave. She wasn’t home, which made me wonder whether she was in her father’s castle or just roaming around, scaring the sh*t out of innocent mortals.
When Melinoe wasn’t in her cave, there was always Thanatos, I knew, making sure nobody snooped around like we were doing. Thanatos was a rather strict fellow, and a very good ally to Hades.
In retrospect, it was easy to see he hadn’t been seen around in a long while. But then again, it’s easier to notice those things in hindsight. Time, as I said before, is hard to keep pace of in the Underworld.
“I don’t like this,” Lee said. “I don’t think we should be here.”
“Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “Worst case scenario, they’ll blame me.”
Lee smiled. That had been a thing even before I left camp. Whenever something fishy happened, Chiron was always quick to point at me rather than Apollo’s golden son.
“I’d rather they blamed nobody,” Silena said. “This place feels terrible, let’s go back.”
I stared at my friends. Didn’t they realise? Thanatos wasn’t here, neither was Melinoe, the Furies would need some time to catch us.
“It’s a way out, guys!”
“Out?” Lee’s expression turned uneasy. “Listen, Luke, we shouldn’t mess around with that idea.”
“It’s been done before,” I insisted. “Or almost.”
“I’m with Lee,” Silena said. “What’s happened, happened. We can’t leave. We can’t go back.”
“There’s nobody here!” I took another tentative step into the cave. I felt a pull, pushing me out into the open, but I went further in. “It feels… strange.”
I felt warm and cold at the same time. I hadn’t felt much since I’d died. My spirit had felt a trace of sensation, but it was muted. As if it was a memory rather than the real thing.
Could I possibly go out? Into the living world?
Over the past year I’d pushed down those feelings of incompleteness. There were still so many things I wanted to do. So many apologies. But two in particular. There were two people I’d have given anything to see.
And perhaps, if there was nobody to stop us, we might be able to leave!
“Luke, stop it!”
But Lee’s voice grew dimmer in my ears.
I could meet them again, my two girls. Explain, tell them how sorry I was.
The force pushing me back grew stronger with every step, but it was no match for my determination.
Step after step, the sensations enhanced in my chest. Cold and warmth, and even a hint of nausea. The ground sloped down, slowly at first, then steeper as I kept going.
Then I realised I could smell. It didn’t smell like a musty old cave, it was the smell of summer. Of hot wind and freshly cut grass.
It only made my resolve stronger.
It was pitch dark. The light from the entrance of the cave had been lost completely.
I went another step further. Then another step. And another step.
I took a deep breath. I could breathe. I was breathing!
Another step. Another step. Another step.
The sound of my heartbeat filled my ears. Loud, strong, quick. Deafening.
Another step. Another step. Another step.
The force pushing me back was so strong now, that I almost tripped. But I regained balance and managed to keep going.
Another step… Another step… Another step…
Then the ground disappeared.
And I fell.
My first sensation when I woke up was warmth in my face.
A memory stirred in my mind. The smell of ripe strawberries, the laughter of children free for the summer holidays, the rhythmic sound of waves, a towel under my body, and the warmth of the sun hitting my exposed skin.
It was the sun. The sun! I was feeling the sun on my skin!
Then the feeling disappeared, and the brightness I could see through my closed eyelids banished.
A soft hand patted my cheek carefully.
“Hello?” Said a woman’s voice. “Young man?”
I opened my eyes slowly. Outlined by a halo of sunlight the face of a pretty woman of about thirty hovered around a metre away from me.
I tried to speak but my throat felt like sandpaper.
“It’s okay,” she said. Her voice held a trace of an accent. “It takes a while to get used to being back.”
Back.
In spite of the burning feeling in my throat, my face split into a grin.
“Back,” I rasped. “I’m back.”
The woman helped me sit up.
I studied her properly now. Her skirt, blouse, and sweater looked old-fashioned. Her hair was loose, but it curled in that style I’d seen in a thousand WWII movies. She had a warm smile and a clever look.
“I’m Luke,” I said, offering her a hand. “My name’s Luke Castellan.”
“Maria,” she replied.
She looked at my hand and shook it after a second of hesitation.
“I keep forgetting Americans shake hands. So impersonal,” she stated with a raised eyebrow. Her tone was teasing though.
“Are you—” I caught myself. “ Were you dead too?”
“Right to the point, yes?” She smiled. “Yes, I was dead. I have been for a while. But now I’m here, and I need to find my son.”
“Your son?” I was surprised.
My perception of ‘mother’ isn’t the best, but this woman didn’t look like a mom to me. She looked like an old time movie star, those that always had perfect make-up, in the black-and-white photos I’d seen in the cinema close to my place in Connecticut.
“Yes,” she said. “My little boy. He should be an old man by now, I would have expected.”
“But he isn’t?” I wondered.
She shook her head, anger and sorrow transformed her expression.
“My daughter passed away,” she told me. “Not too long ago. She should have been old, but she was still a girl.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I looked down, and when I spoke it was full of bitterness. “Children’s lives should never be at risk.”
And despite what many may think, I do believe that kids shouldn’t be put in the line of fire.
Maria nodded, swallowed, and composed herself so fast I felt a little thread of envy. If only I could’ve put up a cheerful façade that quickly…
“You don’t look old enough to die either,” she decided, giving me a once over.
“I think I deserved it,” I admitted. ‘It was my choice’ sounded a bit too harsh. “Besides, I’m 23, that’s better than dying as a child.”
Maria huffed. “23 is still so young.”
“As opposed to…?” I asked.
She seemed horrified by my audacity.
“A lady doesn’t ask nor answer that question,” she said firmly. “And neither should a gentleman.”
I shrugged. She sounded fancy. I guessed in whichever time she came from, old-money people stuck to those ridiculous social rules.
“What do you know of your son?” I wondered. “Do you know where we can find him? Hell, do you know where we are?”
I scanned my surroundings. My eyes were unused to the sun, which made me squint a bit.
It looked like a meadow. The land was flat, not a hill on sight. The grass was green and soft under me, and far to my right, there was a big house.
“Italy,” she said. “Veneto.”
Holy sh*t.
“A bit far from where I expected to be,” I said.
“The Underworld has many exits,” Maria told me.
My muscles tensed. I had assumed she was a lost mortal, who had followed the path out of the afterlife by accident, but mortals in Italy wouldn’t be likely to call the Underworld by that name. Nor, I guess, would they be likely to have children who were supposed to be old but looked young.
“Oh, I know about all of this,” she smiled. “My children are— were, like you. Demigods. I’m… what’s that term he used? Clear sighted?”
I nodded.
Italian demigods. Did I know Italian demigods? Probably a fair few, but I wasn’t sure if any of the ones I’d met were from Veneto.
And she said she had died ages ago. Whoever her children were they would have been taken out of time.
It rang a bell in my memory, but my mind wasn’t clear enough yet for me to recall properly. Not to mention I’d known dozens of demigods who had bizarre stories.
Thalia was a tree for a while, she’d looked younger than she should have been that time she pushed me off that cliff.
Annabeth and her little gang had been in that Casino thing in Vegas, that had messed up time for them, too.
And the Sea of Monsters, there were a lot of islands there where children could have been stuck in time for decades.
“Are your—,” I hesitated. “Did your children ever get to camp? Camp Half-Blood, in New York?”
Maria’s expression turned dubious. “I think so. Bianca didn’t explain much, she didn’t stay long. But I reckon wherever my boy is, it’s in America. That’s the last place I saw them.”
That’s where she had died then.
“Then camp’s our best bet,” I said. “He’s alive, he’s likely to have at least crossed paths with somebody from there.”
She nodded.
She turned and pointed at the house in the distance. “That’s my family’s home. You can stay there for a bit. To rest.”
She stood and offered a hand for me to get up too.
“I— Yeah, thanks,” I said. I felt weak. I’d just come back to life. She was right to say it took some adjustment. I wondered how long she’d been back. “I could use a place to sit for a bit.”
In exchange, I could help her find camp and her son. Assuming the kid was still alive, that was. I wouldn’t go to camp myself. I’d be stoned the moment I set a foot in there. But leading Maria there was the least I could do after she’d been so kind to me.
I just hoped her son wasn’t somebody I knew. That could make things awkward.
We walked for a bit in silence. As we got closer, the house grew bigger and bigger. ‘House’ was an understatement, I thought. The place was huge .
Balconies, huge floor to ceiling windows, at least four storeys tall. It had a path that led to the main entrance lined with orchard trees, and off to the side there was a less pretentious dirt path that I assumed went to the servant’s entrance.
“I’m sorry,” I said, before I could stop myself, pointing at the immense building in front of us. “But did your family own Italy?”
Maria gave me a funny look. “It’s not such an ostentatious place.”
Perhaps if you are related to the Windsor family, then Maria’s family’s house isn’t ostentatious. If, like me, you come from the US suburbs, then it’s something taken right out of Downton f*cking Abbey.
“My father was a marquess,” she explained, when she caught my cynical expression. “ Sua grazia, il Signor di Angelo , and all the paraphernalia it came with. The house is all right, but we weren’t…”
But I had stopped listening.
Di Angelo. I did remember that name. Di Angelo was that little kid who’d popped out of nowhere with an army of undead soldiers and his godly father on toe.
But not even I couldn’t be that unlucky.
“What’s your son’s name?” I asked, as casually as I could.
“Niccolò,” she said with a proud smile. “But everybody always called him Nico.”
Nico. Nico di Angelo.
Well, f*ck. To nobody’s surprise, I could be that unlucky.
