The spitfire words - kill yourself - still echo in the air around that one spot at the dining pavilion and people avoid it like the plague. It's brushed clean of tracked dirt from the soles of shoes, a person shaped hollowness, representative of their fears.
He'd cried a little after he said it. When the camper he'd screamed it at lifted their knife and cut their own throat so deep they could not be saved.
Blood was heavy in the air, thick like iron. Jason inhaled it over and over again and watched Nico freeze with wide eyes as everyone around him cried out and scrambled forward. The little girl he'd been defending stopped crying.
Jason hadn't met her before. She was brand-new to camp, my niece, Nico had said in a voice note when asking Jason to visit. The daughter of blessed death and going to sleep with a quiet sigh and deflating lungs, painless and comforting.
And Nico had come back from a three-day excursion in South America - Brazil or Peru, Jason couldn't remember - to find out that some hardheaded son of Ares had been bullying her. Quietly out of view of other people who might've agreed but would've chastised him. Apparently she didn't fit. He thought she should leave with her uncle and never come back.
Jason knows Ares, Mars, whichever one the god chooses to be at any given moment, likes death. Needs it to make his wars. There's no goal if death isn't there. No sense to it but the slaughter and maybe Ares is more bloodlust than Mars but one in the same, how can violence prevail if everyone is too busy fighting the same war over and over again.
So the kid doesn't match up and now he's dead in the ground. Nico left into the shadows only minutes after. Calanthe went with him.
Jason remembers Nico muttering to him about how, despite Will's careful kind words, he still felt like a pariah, eyes watching him, people wondering why he was still around. Jason didn't know how to tell him his fears were right. People whispered and the air was soft and sweet, carried those whispers right to Jason's ears and drove him mad with protective care.
It doesn't shock him when the whispers become bolder, louder, in Nico's absence.
Nico had said once, This place isn't meant for the Underworld. It's too bright for us. We're cave-dwellers at heart. He'd called things off with Will hours after that and sometimes Jason wondered if that was what he'd meant. Olympus was high on the mountain, bright in the sky, like Will and all the others. Nico was grounded in dirt and darkness.
Jason didn't mind burying himself with him though.
He was pretty sure he could find air in the depths.
The blood was scrubbed clean from the concrete but sometimes its resurfaces, pooling and puddling in the pores. It tastes sharp and bitter in the stale air. It smells like a reminder. Jason mentions it once, offbeat, as he walks Lou Ellen into the cozy cottage hidden clustered in far edges of a forest and Nico just rolls his eyes and mutters something about his brother and threats.
Zagreus despises Olympus almost as much as he loves his father. As much as love his mother and his siblings.
Zagreus would burn it down if he could but he settles for subtle threats and crafting a forest to hide all the dark and dreary, the children that belong to shadows and solitude and exhale gravedirt from their lungs and drive madness through whispering waking nightmares.
Jason never asks how Nico did it. But he dreams of it. It's not the same as charmspeak. He remembers how that had felt, when Piper used to talk to him and his world went fuzzy around the edges, and he was hazed away, not really himself, but unaware that something was wrong until she was finally gone and days faded into months and suddenly the air was sweeter than it had ever been.
Her words had crowded into his head so fierce his memories had been pushed away. The headache that had pounded for days after while he finally recovered who he was, or, rather, who he'd been once before.
The dream turns him from a bystander to a victim, to a bully feeling greater than themselves, and it makes him laugh. Jason has always been bigger than britches, deserved and fought for with teeth and claws and a determination to survive that this dreamlike body doesn't carry. Couldn't even comprehend.
But Nico's words hit him and it warps everything. Oh. He does want to kill himself. He wants nothing more than to drive the knife into his throat and die. So he does.
Over and over again, mechanical and determined.
It's like a twist in his very being - different from Piper's pretty soft words. If she'd told him to, he'd paused and questioned it until she repeated it with more conviction. If she'd told him to kill himself, the world would've gone fuzzy around the edges and he wouldn't want to so much as he'd be convinced to. She's so pretty. Why not do it? Just to make her happy. When he snapped out it - either when the knife made contact with the flesh of his throat, or maybe further past that when Thanatos was collecting his soul - he'd wonder to himself, Why did I do that?
With Nico's words, they're vicious and to the point. It sinks like heavy hot fog into his soul and warps him different. He wants to do it. Not because Nico said to. But because he wants. He wants to kill himself.
So he does. There's no question. And there's no wondering, there's no why.
When he wakes up, Jason tastes blood on his tongue and wishes he cared. But he doesn't. So he doesn't ask about it. Nico isn't afraid to speak. Sometimes Jason doesn't know if it was an accident, too much force, too much anger. Or if it was intentional, rage and reactivity being what they are.
He knows that - knows it like the snap of his jaw around another's throat for calling Dakota a bastard and making his eyes well up thick and heavy. Knows it like the twitch of his fingers, the itch to claw, when the whispers at camp become heated and nervous.
Lou Ellen leaves and Clovis leaves. They all follow Jason like pups to the feast. The Underworld does not breathe at camp anymore. You'd think that would make all their fears sleep easy but it just makes them anxious.
He wanted them where he could see them, Percy had said late one night, when Nico was fast asleep, sandwiched between them. Percy's hands are soft on Nico's hair. He smells like saltwater and it mixes with Nico's graveyard scent easy. Jason could track that scent from the other side of the country.
Who did? Jason asked, and Percy's lips twitched, brows furrowing.
Nico had woken up screaming and sobbing and calling out for his mom and when Jason had aprooached him, he'd scrambled back in fear, screeching bloody murder. Percy had come barreling into the bedroom. The scent of popcorn filled Jason's nose, but the food itself had been scattered in the hallway with Percy's rushed footsteps.
There was no flinching from Percy when he approached and Jason had thought it was Tartarus thing but Nico's fearful gaze, trained and tracked on Jason's soul, made him quickly realize that, no, this was something different.
Your dad, Percy answered carefully. He stroked Nico's hair sweetly and Jason wondered if Nico knew that Percy loves him. He wanted our cousins where he could see them and when Hades refused to send Nico and Bianca away, he tried to kill them.
He kissed Nico's forehead and held his clammy hand tight in his grip. Nico murmured something soft under his breath, faintly Italian, and curled deeper into Percy's protective hold.
That's why he was scared of you earlier.
Nico had once told him he had a soul like his father - electric yellow and loud. It had made Jason squirm to consider. It made him bitter then, with Percy's words and Nico's fear and the fact that even with Nico cuddled next to him, he felt like he was miles away.
It still annoys him to think. He doesn't want to be his father, paranoid and cruel. He wants to be like the Jupiter, the Zeus, the one that represented leadership and strength, law and order, the sky and thundering rains.
Not the coward that kills children because he's scared of being dethroned, and sends monsters after his own son until that child is driven to the Underworld to taste the protection of pomegranate seeds just because that child called out his own stupidity.
Percy doesn't visit camp anymore either. Although his father loves him, and he is hurricane of a demigod to deal with so monsters cower from him more than they chase him. He's loyal to his friends and with Annabeth aging out of camp and Grover venturing further and farther, his bindings to the place that caused him pain have more than unshackled from his skin.
He worries, though, about the people that will come after him, the siblings that are on the way, toddler feet no doubt scampering over tile and hardwood floors right now, and Nico rolls his eyes and mutters, Poseidon was thought to be chthonic too sometimes. And Percy relaxes.
He wouldn't want his siblings to grow up in a world that looks at Nico and thinks him dangerous instead of beautiful, even with blood on his hands and a fire in his teeth. Maybe that's a curse of being wolf-raised. He sees more love in fangs born hard into flesh and bloodied meat piled on dirty floors than he does in empty words and love letters he can't read.
But Poseidon is different from Zeus, Neptune different from Jupiter. The Underworld is depths below the earth and darkness and caves and monsters, and the ocean understands all of that well.
So Jason is welcome because he is touched by darkness from the ruby stain of bitterness on his tongue, and Hermes is welcome, in fragile spades, the ghostly kids that hid themselves and their powers until they saw Jason walk out with Thanatos's young son asleep on his shoulder, and whispered, "Can I come?" and chased him as their father chases the wind and ghosts.
Jason only ever visits to bring them back here. To hear the whispers from satyrs being sent on quests and outrunning them as wolves outrun their prey, as the wind reaches shores, sweeping up kids with shadows in their veins and gravedirt in their lungs before the enemy can touch down in a tornado of future pain.
There's few of them on the radar - their parents love them as the ground loves a corpse, and keeps them safer than the sky ever could. And the ones off the radar, untouched by howling winds and unscented in grasping air, visit regularly, touch their beloved siblings and cousins and teach them how to hold their heads held high.
The ones who can't go home, who have no home to return to, stay with Nico and Jason remembers bitter seeds chewed up in his mouth, watching his uncle crowded by doting loving employees, who were more family than the people on the mountain miles above and states away.
It is more love than he has known before. Wolf hearts and warm fur meant more to him than wide eyes begging him to speak when he didn't know how words fit in his mouth. When the pedestal they dragged him onto was too cold and too high and he wanted to be back in the grass, rolling in the dirt, and growling at birds.
He learned to make his own heat, and learned not to crave the warmth of another's hold.
It was different now. Warmer. Softer. The cottage is one-story, unassuming, until you walk down and down and shadows pull you into cave-like structures decorated in string lights and soft golds. It's dim and comforting and no one has to sleep alone just because there isn't anyone to call them a sibling. Everybody shares and everybody has their own space and everyone pulls Jason into cuddlepiles, seeking his heat and strong arms to snuggle.
Before he'd seen his muscles for warrior strength, but now it's to lift four or so conked out preteens to bed and rearrange furniture, and that matters more to him than anything. But even still, no one bats an eye when he shoots forward and sinks his teeth into monster flesh and no one complains when he licks blood from his hands.
The inhumanity of his humanity is never questioned here, not among the otherworldly spectators who see beauty in dark things.
Nico pours him a glass of pomegranate juice and chases Jason into their shared bed. It feels partially-empty without Percy on the other side, but Hazel drops into the space with a loud yawn and it's better.
Hazel visits often. Frank doesn't follow, but he calls. Hazel disappears into shadows and emerges in the outdoors to answer the calls. She will not jeopardize their safety in anyway, even though Jason is sure Frank would follow her into the wrong side of any war if she asked.
The kids love Hazel as much as they love Nico and the covet all the time they get with her. She wilts whenever she has to leave and Jason wonders how long it will take before she stops. Before she ditches her house in New Rome and crafts her own space deep below the earth where the shadows whisper and gold lays.
He wonders how long it would take Frank to settle in with the rest of them. Not long, he thinks.
Once you've seen the beauty of the dark, it's hard to return to the harsh ugliness of the light.
