"The moment I met you,
I held my breath.
And you've been taking
it away ever since,
Nico di Angelo."
[ NICO DI ANGELO x MALE OC ]
[ PERCY JACKSON SERIES ]
[ HEROES OF OLYMPUS SERIES ]
cover by @humaneity !
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0003. | GODS ACHE AND BONES BREAK, SUCH IS FATE
Vela, for the first time, twisted the handle to his shower on. In the same second, gushing hot water flooded from the tap and Vela was secretly mildly impressed by Leo's plumbing (the Aphrodite Cabin had never been so efficient with such good quality water pressure).
The water was searingly hot, almost scalding, but when Vela wet his fingers beneath it, he couldn't deny the familiar rush he felt as his skin reddened and welted. He recalled a similar time to him after they had won the war against Kronos and Vela could find comfort in only a very few things, pain being one of them.
Vela wasn't a sadist by any stretch of the imagination, but he did find a comfortability in pain because it was familiar to him. Vela knew pain like he knew himself—he could see it in his scars, the mark made by Artemis on his ribs that left his body asymmetric because of the great chunk she had taken out of him, and what hadn't been recovered by the scar tissue that covered his left side. He could see it in the cut down his face, that golden scar that he had once been disgusted by, but he had since chosen to keep because the pain it wrought and the nightmare of how he received it was a part of him now, just as pain was. He saw it in the slashes of silver like scars under his skin, barely visible nor noticeable unless one knew to look for them there across his chest. His scars from Lycaon. And he could see it in his back, that growing tree of lightning that spread and arced its way up his back, spraying outwards in wonderful tendrils of gold, the perfect mark of his survival by the Great God Zeus's Master Bolt that had struck Vela for trying to save the world.
And he felt it too. He felt it in that drudging heaviness of his eye that he knew should be marked by black and rotten from the magic of the Styx. Though his body was made uneven by Artemis's bite, and his face unbalanced by Kampê, Vela knew the true secret and shame of himself was the hidden mark of his blindness. Vela became a trickster with his facade when he took that potion to fix his face. Vela would forever be skipping around the route the Fates had planned for him, not succumbing to even his blindness, but only he could escape such a Fate.
Vela was pleased by the ache of the boiling hot shower because, to him, it felt like punishment. It felt suiting to what he deserved because who was he to dodge the punishments of the Fates when the boy he loved most was subject to the worst kind of torture imaginable? Without his punishment, Vela had as good as lost his divinity.
Vela hurt himself because he truly believed that if he and Nico were bound as they were, and if they were one as they were, then maybe if he was in pain enough, if he felt agony enough, then that pain might be lessened from Nico because at least then he wouldn't have to face it alone.
