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Once The First Dance™ is over and the songs start getting fast, other people start joining Percy and Annabeth on the dance floor of their gorgeous outdoor wedding venue overlooking the Pacific (somehow it was only in the course of the past year of wedding planning that Piper learned Annabeth’s dad is, like, rich-rich—like, East Coast old money mansion-in-Boston wealthy—so, that’s a whole thing). On Piper’s left at the bridal party table, Leo turns in his chair and holds out his hand.
“May I have this dance?” he says, pitching his voice deep and formal. Piper glances up from her phone, where Abbie is live-texting her Survivor binge, and smiles as she shakes her head.
“Not really in a dancing mood,” she says. “Sorry.” If Abbie were here, she might dance—but back when she got her invite they’d only been dating for like a month, and deliberately not U-Hauling, and there was some chance Abbie was going to be moving to New York for a work thing that ultimately didn’t happen (thank the gods), so… Piper didn’t ask for a plus-one.
She sort of regrets that now. She sort of doesn’t. It might be more fun with her girlfriend here, cause her girlfriend is fucking awesome—obviously—but it would probably also be kind of weird to try and do this event with a mortal date. Like, Abbie knows, of course she knows about Piper’s mom and everything—but only in theory. Only secondhand, what she’s heard from Piper and those of her demigod friends she’s met. Getting the picture all at once like this would be a lot for both of them, and this wedding on its own was already going to be a lot just for Piper to deal with. So she’s kind of glad it’s just her and her demigod friends. Family, in their own ways.
But she also really, really misses Abbie.
“Okay, fine.” Leo sighs. “Have it your way, maid of dishonor.”
“I wasn’t even the maid of honor at all,” Piper points out.
“I’m gonna make that your name in my phone,” Nico says from her right. “Maid of dishonor.” He tips his head back and drains what Piper thinks is his fourth glass of champagne, unless she’s lost count already. She’s pretty sure his steady drinking tonight has more to do with the fact that Will Solace is a) seated at the same table as Connor Stoll, and b) smiling affectionately at something on his phone, than anything else—
But who knows. It could be more than one thing; probably it is. There’s more than one reason she’s sticking with these two tonight, after all. They’re her best friends—but there are also deliberately uneven numbers in the bridal party, and a seat left empty at the table for the friend who should have been here, and isn’t. Touching, Piper supposes, and it’s Annabeth and Percy’s day and they get to mourn and pay tribute however they want, but it’s also kind of killing her. Jason wasn’t their best friend.
And that part is probably also why, Piper knows her best best friend well enough to suspect even if they haven’t talked about it, not outright—Leo’s only one drink behind Nico. So far.
Nico sets down his emptied flute, then pats his pockets and frowns. “Wait,” he says. “Shit, where is my phone?”
“Is it in your jacket?” Piper asks, reaching over to pat at the pocket on the side she can reach where it’s draped over the back of his chair. He shakes his head.
“No, those stupid jackets don’t have pockets big enough—”
“Welcome to my world,” says Piper. “Try not having real pockets in your pants.”
“Fuck,” Nico says, looking around, increasingly frantic—at least, Piper thinks, he’s grown out of withering everything around him when he’s upset, or the artfully-landscaped succulents behind them might be in danger— “where the fuck is my phone?”
“Nico, dude, calm down,” Leo says, leaning around Piper to look at him. “We’ll find it. It’s got to be somewhere around here. Did you go to the bathroom, maybe?”
“Oh, gods, I think I left it by Reyna—” Nico drags his hands down his face. “If she sees any Grindr messages I might actually have to kill myself—”
“Okay, how would Reyna see your Grindr messages?” Piper asks. “Does she know your passcode? Do you think she’s gonna open it up and start snooping? Are we talking about the same Reyna?” Nico’s shaking his head.
“No, no, no, I mean, like, lockscreen notifications.”
“Your lockscreen notifications show the messages?” Leo says. “Dude. I’m not even mad, I’m just disappointed.”
“Whatever!”
“I don’t think Reyna would actually be bothered by Grindr messages,” Piper says, stuck on this now. “We’re all adults. Well, I guess her not so much, kinda—but she still, like, lives in society, you know?” Nico groans.
“I know,” he says, “but she’s like my big sister, but she still looks seventeen, so now it’s also kind of like she’s my little sister and it’s fucking weird—”
“So, what, you don’t want her to know you have sex sometimes?” Piper says doubtfully. “Uh—I think that ship sailed in high school, bud.” She instantly regrets bringing up high school, cause there definitely still is that whole thing—the Will-shaped, Will-sized elephant in the room that is literally Will literally being somewhere in this literal room (outdoor reception area, whatever)—but right now Nico’s on this whole thing, so he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Yeah, but, like—”
“So go find your phone now,” Piper tells him, “so you’ll quit freaking out about it.”
“Yeah,” Leo says, “go find your phone so I can fix your fucking notification settings, you Silent Generation-ass—” Nico shoves his chair back with a nasty screech on the stone tiles and flips him off as he walks off towards the other end of the long banquet table, where Reyna is chilling with Thalia. “Dumbass,” Leo says, shaking his head. They sit there in silence for a minute, Piper texting Abbie, Leo nursing his drink, until whatever that Maroon 5 song was called ends and I Wanna Dance With Somebody comes on. Then Leo grabs Piper’s arm, jostling her excitedly now. “Pipes, come on! You can’t not dance to this! Please?” One look at her grinning best friend and Piper’s anti-dancing plans… well, go up in flames.
“Yeah, okay.” She follows Leo out to the dance floor and throws her arms around his neck and, for a few minutes, allows herself to feel joy. The song switches to a middle school throwback that’s even louder and faster, and that’s even better. Piper steals Hazel from Frank for a second to spin her and pull her into her arms, laughing, then they laugh harder at Leo when he gets a very game Frank to spin him. Percy and Annabeth dance their way over. Like that, Piper finds herself in a crush of the other five of the six of the Seven, and it’s perfect—all her senses are so overwhelmed by the combination of her friends’ bodies and pounding music and the one flute of champagne she’s had and oh fuck oh fuck don’t step on the dress everybody be really careful don’t fucking step on Annabeth’s dress that she doesn’t even think to miss the missing one until the song’s over.
Then the DJ puts on something slow, so Piper and Leo leave the couples to enjoy that and, as Cascada just finished suggesting, evacuate the dance floor. When they get back to their seats, Nico is back in his, with his phone on the table in front of him and a thousand-yard stare. Somewhere, somehow, in the… seven minutes? since they last saw him, he’s acquired an entire bottle of champagne. He appears to be drinking straight from it. That’s… not good.
“Ah, shit.” Piper sits back down next to him, in what had been Leo’s chair, cause Nico, in his tipsiness—or maybe it’s outright drunkenness at this point—stole hers. “What the fuck happened to you?”
“I got my phone from Reyna,” Nico says—
“Oh no, did she see something?” Leo says. “Amateur hour, hombre, I told you. Give me that.” He grabs Nico’s phone off the table—Nico isn’t paying enough attention to notice. “What’s your passcode?”
“And then you guys were gone and no one was bringing more champagne, so I went to the bar,” Nico is explaining to Piper, in a hollow tone that matches the devastated expression, “and Will was there—okay, maybe I also went to the bar cause Will was there—” Piper groans.
“Nico…”
“What’s your passcode?” Leo asks again.
“—and I was like, hey, and he was like, hey, and I was like, how’ve you been, and he was like, can’t complain, and I was like, well, hey, want to dance, like, for old times’ sake—”
“Oh no.”
“Nico. Nico. Passcode.”
“—and he said, oh, I don’t think I’m going to dance tonight, I’m not staying much longer, and then—” Nico makes a strangled noise between a sigh and a groan. “Right then, Lavinia Asimov came up and was like, Will, you promised to dance with me! And then he got all blushy and he was just like oh, sorry, bye—”
“Oh, gods.” It’s not funny, Piper tells herself. Do not laugh. “Yikes, Will.”
“PASSCODE!” Leo says very loudly.
“OKAY!” Nico snaps back. “One-nine-three-one! Happy?”
“One-nine-three—” Leo repeats as he types it in, then his head jerks up— “NINETEEN THIRTY ONE?” he yells at the top of his lungs. Nico winces. “Your passcode is your BIRTH YEAR? How are you ALIVE?” A number of heads turn. From here, Piper can see Hazel pressing her face into Frank’s chest on the dance floor as they both crack up.
“Thanks a lot, Leo,” Nico says sourly, “now I’m gonna have to change it.” Leo drops his head into his arms and screams, muffled, into his suit jacket sleeve. “Anyway,” Nico says, raising his champagne bottle— “then the bartender gave me this look of total pity, so fuck her for that, but gods bless her too, cause more importantly, she just gave me a whole bottle.” He holds it up in a bitter toast. “To Will still hating me. Not that he shouldn’t. And to me being the dumbest asshole on the face of the earth. Saluti.” He tips his head back again and takes a long swig.
“Yeah,” Leo agrees, looking up, “salud, I’ll drink to that. Not about Will, though, about your fucking passcode—”
“Hey!” Nico holds the bottle away from him when he tries to grab it. “Mine.”
“You just said—”
“Drink your own drink!”
“Okay, no,” Piper says, much more successfully grabbing the bottle out of his hand while he’s glaring at Leo, cause this is just wrong. Leo just shrugs and goes back to Nico’s phone. “Dude,” Piper tells Nico, unfazed as he turns the death glare on her now, “that’s a way worse look for Will than for you. You were trying to be nice and amicable and he got caught with his pants on fire trying to give you the brush-off.”
“Was I trying to be nice and amicable, though?” Nico says, cocking his head to one side, glare faded now—or maybe, like, turned inwards instead. “Or was I being messy and stupid?”
“... I guess I don’t know,” Piper says. “Were you?” She grabs Nico’s chin and pulls his face toward her, frowning at him. Now that she’s looking for it, she does catch, like, a little bit of an aura—a vibe coming off him— “Oh, you fucker,” she says, “were you seriously trying to hook up with your ex at our friends’ wedding reception?” Nico’s cheeks turn even redder than they already were.
“... No.”
“Nico!”
“It happens on TV!” Nico says defensively, then, “Shut the fuck up!” as Piper and Leo both burst out laughing.
“Okay,” Piper manages to say, “okay. Sorry. It’s not funny, it’s…”
“Pathetic?” Nico says.
“... Sad, but I guess not that surprising,” she tells him. Now that she thinks about it. Especially considering he’s as drunk as he already is.
“I’ll take it.”
“But—babe, he’s been on his phone, like, the whole reception,” Piper points out. “And you know who else has been on their phone like the whole reception?” She points at herself. Nico frowns.
“You have not. You were dancing.”
“Okay, no, I didn’t mean literally,” Piper says, “but. What I mean is, from the vibe I get off him tonight, I think he probably has a partner who didn’t get invited.” Nico’s shoulders slump.
“Yeah,” he says, “good point. He’s like never single anyway, so—”
“Yeah,” Piper says. “Yikes to that part too.” She leans her elbow on the back of his chair and rests her head on his shoulder for a moment. “Don’t worry about it. There’s lots of other people at this reception you could hook up with.” She tries to think of an example— “Ooh, Connor! You could always try and seduce Connor. Complete that sex triangle.”
“Ew,” says Nico.
“To Connor?”
“No—well, kind of—mostly to sex triangle.”
“Okay,” Leo says, looking up for the first time in a minute or so, “I fixed your notification settings.” He pauses before he hands Nico his phone back—“Can I see your Grindr messages?”
“No, fuck you, give me that.” Nico snatches his phone back and shoves it into his pants pocket. Gods, Piper hopes it stays there the rest of the night and they don’t have to go through this again.
The phone comes out again eventually, but she does manage to keep the champagne bottle away from both Nico and Leo, at least for a while. She loses track of it eventually, but doesn’t see either of them drinking from it again—admittedly she also loses track of Leo for a while, though since he announced before he walked off that he “had to go annoy Malcolm for a while” he probably wouldn't be that hard to find—and actually she’s about 90% sure it ends up in Thalia’s possession, which… better her than either of Piper’s two already-unruly companions, she supposes? Even if she is physically like 15 years old, but she’s also technically one of the older demigods here. And Piper still can’t look her in the eye for too long, even after all these years, but she imagines they might be having a lot of similar feelings tonight.
can’t believe I’m still this sad over some white boy, she texts Abbie, cause all night she’s only been able to type on her phone the things she can’t bring herself to say out loud. Then she immediately wants to smack herself for it, cause making a shitty joke out of grief and trauma to deflect it’s the exact same kind of behavior she’s been getting on Leo’s case about for years now. ignore that, she adds, I’ll process for real when I’m home I promise
hugs hugs hugs, her girlfriend says, gods bless her. Then she adds, look babe I never met yours but if you’ve gotta be sad about some white boy I can think of a lot of worse options, and that actually makes Piper laugh, and then she can at least try to pretend that’s why she’s wiping tears from the corners of her eyes.
This would, Piper has thought more than once, have been a great opportunity to see how Abbie would fit into this particular group, the mess that is Piper’s mom’s side. At this point Abbie’s mostly unfazed by the Hollywood piece of Tristan’s world, being a comedy writer who lives in LA and all, and while she was definitely more out of her element in Tahlequah when they went for two weeks in December she still managed to be her usual easygoing self. That served her pretty well with Piper’s friends and family there—just as it has, Piper knows, with lots of communities in lots of places to get her to where she’s at now. She’s really good at code-switching. It’s something they have in common, along with the complicated feelings that go with it. But a little part of Piper can’t help but wonder if Abbie could still keep her cool and adapt even here, faced not only with this weird, ragtag community of traumatized twentysomethings, but multiple actual gods. If all of this being a lot would actually turn out to be too much.
She’d like to think it would be fine—and if she’s wrong, she thinks it would probably be better to find out now, less than a year in, and sure she’s head-over-heels and it would break her heart, but at least they don’t share a lease (well, they won’t for a few more weeks), let alone a pet, or gods forbid a child. But there will be other opportunities, and it’s not like Piper’s super worried about it. If nothing else, she’s pretty sure Abbie will get along great with Hazel, and probably Frank, and she’s already a big fan of Leo and fond, if a touch more cautiously, of Nico—and Piper thinks it’ll inevitably bring her great joy to have Abbie meet Percy and treat him just like he’s any other guy. More people should. In fact, she’s pretty sure Percy would agree with her on that.
She has no idea what Abbie will think of Annabeth, or vice-versa. She’s not inclined to dwell on why that gives her a little anxiety on both fronts.
At some point, as the night wears on, Hazel comes back over to the big table to try and get her brother to dance. The odds wouldn’t seem great to Piper, considering by then everyone at the table has added a shot of tequila apiece to their respective champagne counts—but Nico’s a lot more cheerful now than he was before, and it turns out he’s surprisingly steady on his feet as he hops up to take his sister’s hand with a smile. She wrinkles her nose, Piper assumes at his breath.
“If you drink this much at my wedding I’ll kill you,” she announces. Nico’s eyes go wide—
“Wait,” he says, “oh my gods, is it happening? Did Frank finally propose? Did I miss it—?”
“No, no, no no no,” Hazel backtracks quickly, holding up both hands as he drops hers to grip her shoulders excitedly, “you didn’t miss anything, I’m just saying, whenever I get married eventually—”
“Oh, okay.” Nico slumps back to normal. “Well, I won’t—promise I’ll not drunk—wait—I promise I won’t get drunk—” Hazel snorts.
“Okay, don’t hurt yourself. Message received.”
“Just don’t invite Will,” Piper advises her, “and you’ll be in the clear.” Hazel’s eyebrows fly up, but now she looks at her brother with a little more understanding, if not quite sympathy. Nico, on the other hand, glares at Piper again. She doesn’t see him do anything, but something sends a little tremor through the pavilion floor and cracks the tiles around where he’s standing—
“Nico,” Hazel says sharply, and there’s a smaller tremor as the first one halts and the stone, like, knits back together. “Come on.” She tugs on his hand. “Let’s go dance, then I think somebody’d better put your drunk ass to bed.” Her tone makes it clear that somebody is not going to be her.
Once they’re out of earshot, Piper sighs and looks over at Leo. “Not it,” she says. He looks at her with his brow furrowed in confusion for a solid minute before she sees it click behind his eyes. Then he sticks his lower lip out.
“But Pipes,” he says, “I’m like… so drunk.” They stare at each other a moment longer. Then they both burst out laughing.
It takes a truly heroic effort, but at the end of the night—after another round of fast songs pulls Piper and Leo back out to dance with their old friends, plus Nico this time, after Annabeth keeps Piper on the floor through the first of the last slow songs to dance with her (and unintentionally throw on a whole new layer of messy feelings Piper can’t deal with tonight, but it’s fine), well after the groom’s parents have excused themselves to put the flower girl to bed—the three of them collectively manage to get themselves back to the two-queen hotel room that Piper and Leo booked to share in this fancy fucking resort. Piper actually has no clue where Nico is supposed to be tonight, but… apparently he’s here now.
Piper collapses on the end of the bed she claimed for her own when they got here. Nico settles into the big upholstered chair in the corner, dumping his jacket, dragging his tie off over his head, and unbuttoning his shirt halfway down his chest before he seems to forget that’s what he’s doing. Leo’s jacket is long-gone, Piper realizes—they must have forgotten it down in the pavilion; shit—so he just kicks off his shoes and falls right down to lie on the floor in between them.
“Are you drunk?” he asks Piper, squinting up at her. “Cause if I’m super drunk—and he’s super drunk—”
“Who’s driving the car?” says Nico, then frowns at himself— “What car?”
“No, I’m good,” Piper says, ignoring him. She’s a little tipsy, after the tequila, but not drunk. Definitely nowhere near these shitfaced dumbasses. She doesn’t really get drunk, ever, in general, too many horror stories and awful stereotypes loud in the back of her mind. “I’m just tired, and…” She sighs. “I miss Abbie.” Her girlfriend. Who she loves very much, and wants a future with. The kind of future Annabeth is going to have with the love of her life.
“We know,” Leo and Nico both say in unison. Leo levers himself up extremely haphazardly for a very sloppy high-five.
“I should text Abbie,” Piper muses aloud. Even though she’s probably asleep by now, Piper said she’d text her when she finally heads to bed, and even if she’s not getting in bed yet, she is on it now. She’s made it to the room. Nico smiles slightly.
“I should text Graham,” he says. “I haven’t texted Graham in, like… three days.”
“I can’t believe you’re dating a guy named fucking Graham,” says Piper.
“We’re not dating,” Nico says, like he didn’t just say he should text him all sweet like that. “I slept with ’m twice n’ he fixed my toaster oven.”
“I could’ve fixed your toaster oven,” Leo says. “You should’ve called me. I could’ve made it better.” Nico looks down at him, arching a doubtful eyebrow.
“Yeah, but would you’ve fucked me in the kitchen after?”
“Maybe,” Leo grumbles, “you don’t know my life.”
“Okay, but you should date Graham,” Piper says, not wanting to linger on that. “A guy who fixes your toaster on the second hookup is relationship material.” Nico sighs.
“I know. That’s why I haven’t texted him in three days.” Piper shakes her head.
“Nico, seriously, you need to stop self-sabotaging whenever a guy reminds you of Will—”
“I know! Shut up!”
“—’specially cause the bar for reminds you of Will is wants more than an orgasm—”
“Piper!” Nico whines.
“—and isn’t an asshole—”
“Shut—”
“—and now here’s a guy who does nice things for you—”
“Ugh!” Nico slumps down so far he’s at serious risk of sliding out of the chair, hands over his face. “’S Percy’s wedding and Will has a fuckin’ partner he wouldn’t stop texting and my sister’s probably gonna get engaged soon and I’m—’m really drunk. Why’d you make me think about my like—cazzo—life choices?” Piper throws up her hands.
“You’re the one who said you should text Graham!”
“Yeah! I know! Shut up!”
“You don’t really care that it’s Percy’s wedding, do you?” Leo asks.
“No,” Nico says, lifting one hand to wave it vaguely in the air, “but it’s, it’s the… the spirit. Of the thing.”
“Sure.”
“Percy isn’t even that hot,” Piper says. “Never has been.”
“Mm, no,” Nico says, “bullshit, you only thought that cause you’re a lesbian.”
“Yeah…” Piper sighs. “You know,” she admits, even though she’s pretty sure she’ll regret it as soon as it’s out of her mouth, “I might kinda care that it’s Annabeth’s wedding.” Yep: there it is. Regret.
“Yeah,” Leo says, “I knew that.”
“Hey!” Piper shakes her head. “Whatever. I’m gonna text Abbie.” Who is nothing like Annabeth, and so much better for Piper, she’s pretty sure, than her friend ever would have been. In a world where she could have been. So, she texts Abbie:
hi angel I hope you’re asleep already! I’m safely back in my hotel room and going to sleep soon. missing you ♥ love you so much sweet dreams!
When she looks up again, Leo has curled up on his side and closed his eyes. Piper’s not sure if he’s fallen asleep or just resting—until he snores, loud enough to jolt Nico, who’d been looking close to passing out himself, wide awake and halfway out of his chair again. He gives Leo a look that’s mostly disdainful, but Piper thinks also at least a little affectionate.
“Can you help me get him up there?” she asks, jerking her head towards Leo’s bed. Nico heaves an almighty sigh, but he nods.
“If I can stand up,” he says. He manages it, though it takes two tries, and on the second Piper has to jump up and help steady him til he has his bearings. “Okay.”
“Okay.” Piper tries shaking Leo’s shoulder—his eyes flutter open briefly, and he mumbles,
“‘M not gonna throw up.”
“Okay, that’s good,” Piper says. “I’m gonna put a trash can by your bed anyway, though, okay?”
“You’re the best.” Her best friend smiles beatifically up at her, and to her pleasant surprise actually manages to help carry his own weight—like, a little of it—as she and Nico pull him up and sort-of help, mostly drag him over to his own queen bed. Piper makes sure he’s lying on his side, to be safe, then pulls up the covers over him before she goes to grab the trash can out of the bathroom.
Her mistake, leaving the room for even a moment—when she gets back, Nico has sprawled out facedown across her bed.
“Hey.” Piper knees him in the calf where his foot is hanging off one side. He groans. “That’s my bed, Nico. Get up.” Nico groans louder and rolls onto his side.
“D’I have to?”
“Yeah.” Piper sits down next to him and starts unbuttoning her shirt. “Where are you supposed to be sleeping tonight, anyway? Cause it’s not here.” Nico sighs and rolls all the way over onto his back.
“My own bed,” he admits. “I thought—I’s gonna shadel-travow—wait, no—” he stops and frowns as Piper laughs at him. “Shut up. Thought I’d just go, go back down, to LA, but—now—”
“Yeah, you can’t do that right now,” Piper agrees. “You’d probably end up on the moon or something.”
“That’d be bad,” Nico agrees absently. “Too much dairy.”
“—What?”
“All that cheese,” Nico explains. Piper snorts. “And, and—” he raises a hand as if to punctuate his point— “And—” He frowns.
“And?” Piper prompts.
“What was I—?”
“Not shadow-traveling to the moon.”
“Oh, yeah.” Nico nods. “And, Lady Artemis’d be pissed. Y’know back when the—the moon landing, you know?—they named ‘em after Apollo—some demigod in NASA ‘r something—to get him t’intervene for ‘em, so she wouldn’t—” He sighs. “Will used to…”
“Yeah,” Piper says after a minute, as it becomes clear he’s trailed off into silence. She sighs. “Okay, how about this? You can stay here while I get ready for bed, then we’re gonna move you to Leo’s with your own trash can—” Or maybe the ice bucket will suffice, but worst comes to worst she can always charm next door out of their bathroom trash can, probably— “cause I want my bed to be a hangover-free zone tomorrow morning.” If morning Leo has a problem with that, he can take it up with morning Piper, but—right now Piper kind of doubts morning Leo is going to be in any condition to have a problem with anything besides his own senses and stomach.
“Fair,” Nico agrees. So Piper strips out of her wedding party suit and her bra, long past giving a shit when she’s this tired and tipsy and the only person conscious in the room is a gay man who only barely counts as conscious in the first place, and drags on the t-shirt she brought for this very purpose. Then she forces herself to brush her teeth and wash her face before she can finally collapse for the night.
She checks her phone—Abbie hasn’t texted back, which is actually a good sign, Piper thinks, cause that probably means she is asleep. As she should be: it’s almost 3 AM. Piper takes a second to herself to be sad she has to sleep in a hotel bed all by herself, instead of with her sweet big-spoon girlfriend in one of their beds. If she’d known shadow-traveling back to LA was Nico’s plan—not that it was ever actually going to work, apparently, but if it could have, if he’d mentioned it—she probably would have tried to get in on that.
But then she wouldn’t have had a hotel bed to sleep in if and when things turned out this way, she supposes, and at least this way she does. Before she can get in it, though, she has to get Nico to move. As she rounds the corner from the bathroom and opens her mouth to tell him it’s time, he sits up on his own and leans over on the edge of the bed—for a second Piper panics, thinking he’s about to throw up, and she dives for the ice bucket—but instead Nico swings his legs around and rests his elbows on his knees to just sit there for a moment, holding his head.
“Domattina me sentirò di merda,” he mutters.
“Yeah,” Piper says. She’s not 100% sure what exactly he said—but she can pick out merda easy enough, and me sentir, so probably something along the lines of I feel like shit, and, yeah, that tracks. When Nico looks up at her, his eyes look the blackest they ever do.
“Pipes,” he says quietly, “you’re—you’re an Aphrodite baby. I have to—do you—can you tell—?”
“What?” Piper sits down on the bed next to him, feeling her eyebrows draw together. She can tell a lot of things, though right now anything she could tell about Nico and his heart would be so muddled by the alcohol she doesn’t think it would be worth counting on.
“Did I give up my only chance?” he asks. “At—you know, at—falling in love—” He gulps, or maybe it’s a suppressed sob. There aren’t quite tears in his eyes, but they’re glistening. “Was that it for me? And now he’s gone forever—”
“...Oh.” He must’ve been stuck on Will for the last five minutes or so, Piper realizes, since he got to him from the moon. Not that he ever isn’t stuck on Will, in a bigger sense. She sighs and sets a tentative hand on her friend’s shoulder. He leans into it instead of shrugging her off, so she lets it settle more firmly and squeezes.
“I don’t know,” Piper tells Nico honestly. “I do know you’ve never been—like, with any guy you’ve been with since we’ve been in LA, you’ve never been the way you were with Will.” Nico nods. He knows that too, Piper knows; of course he does. “But—” she shrugs. “I used to wonder the same thing all the time, you know. Exact same. But it wasn’t true for me, so—”
“‘S not the same,” Nico interrupts. “You—you mean Jason, right? Your—your blond boy you broke up with.” Piper nods. Nico shakes his head. “But—but, no, Pipes, it’s different, I’m actually gay. I mean, I actually love men, and I loved him so much—and you’re—you’re gay and you didn’t know yet, so that, that was comp—compul—and Jason, he’s—he’s really gone forever, he’s—” Now there are tears, and they’re welling in Piper’s eyes too.
“He should’ve been here,” she blurts out before she can stop herself, cause she just can’t stand not to have it out in the air, said aloud, named, any longer. “Today. He should’ve been alive, we should’ve all been together, all seven—but he’s not—and they couldn’t just not make us think about it, they—the open space—it—”
“Yeah,” Nico says quietly, and to Piper’s surprise shifts out from under her hand only so he can wrap that arm around her shoulders and pull her in against his. They sit there for a moment, hugging and sniffling, before he heaves himself up—Piper grabs for his arm to try and help keep him from overbalancing, then drops it again when it seems he can manage—and stumbles around to the far side of Leo’s bed, though not without taking the ice bucket when Piper wordlessly hands it to him.
“Good night,” she says as Nico drops his belt on the floor, then drags his shirt off over his head, before he disappears on the other side of Leo in the bed. Once she’s heard him mumble, “g’night,” back, Piper crawls under her own covers and turns out the light.
She didn’t close the hotel room’s blackout curtains all the way, cause she’s always hated how much it disorients her to wake up mid-morning to a fully dark room, ever since she was a little kid—so the thin moonlight coming through the gauzy privacy curtains lights the room just enough that, once her eyes adjust, Piper can look over at Leo across the gap between their beds.
For all Nico’s been the messier drunk tonight, it’s actually Leo she worries about more as she lies there, catching briefer and briefer glimpses of her best friend between her eyelids. With few exceptions, he’s always been so, so good at putting up a cheerful, carefree front—laughing shit off, and when he can’t bring himself to, well, he gets quiet. Piper knows. She’s been around the block. She’s seen. She can tell.
They should talk, later, just the two of them, once they’re back in LA. And, much as Piper loves him, away from Nico. Cause gods know she knows Jason meant a lot to him, as the first of his friends to know he was gay and be okay with it; but Jason was the same to her, and so much more than that, and he meant the world to Leo in other ways, some of which Piper sometimes thinks she’ll never fully know or understand.
And she’s not always sure Nico really understands that. Maybe because he’s always worn his broken heart on his sleeve, while Leo tries to cover his own up with laughter. Leo’s still her best friend in the world, and the years and maturity have only made them closer, but Piper thinks there’s still a lot even she doesn’t always get to see.
But at least they could try to get it out in the open, between the two of them. At least. For now, though, as she catches her last glimpse of his face in the dark before she falls asleep, Piper tries to focus instead on the memory of him dancing her around the floor tonight, laughing, happy.
One benefit of being the (relatively) sober friend on a night like this: she, at least, will get to remember every second.