Chapter Text
Everyone knows the story of Hades and Persephone in the way demigods tend to know stories, which is to say personally, and with the uneasy awareness that any missing detail might one day crawl out of a prophecy and try to kill them.
Hades takes Persephone. Demeter grieves. The world starves under the weight of a mother’s fury, mortals dropping in fields that refuse to give them anything back while Olympus does what Olympus always does, which is argue for an obscene amount of time before arriving at a solution that still somehow makes the problem everyone else’s fault. Seasons are born from the compromise, flowers become romantic, pomegranate seeds become symbolic. Gods help them all, poets get involved.
That’s the version people tell because it has shape, because it sounds ancient and tragic and clean enough to put in a textbook.
The version Will finds at half past two in the morning, hunched over a brittle old translation in the with his eyes burning and his third cup of coffee going cold beside his elbow, is considerably less clean.
There’s a footnote.
Will’s learned, over the past few years, to fear footnotes. Footnotes are where scholars put the things they can’t prove but very much want to ruin your night with. Footnotes are where Annabeth finds architectural crimes. Footnotes are where ancient Greek poets casually mention that a god once turned a shepherd inside out for being annoying. Footnotes are, apparently, where someone’s decided to record the tiny little detail that Demeter, in the earliest fury of her grief, cursed every child of Hades and Pluto who’d come after Persephone’s abduction.
Will reads the line once.
Then again.
Then a third time, because apparently his brain’s chosen denial as its emergency response and is insisting that if he stares at the sentence hard enough it might rearrange itself into something less horrifying.
It doesn’t.
Every child of the Underworld, the text says, shall suffer when the earth wakes.
Which is, Will thinks faintly, exactly the sort of sentence that should come with more practical information attached. Suffer how? Suffer when? Suffer in a grand doomed bloodline way, or in a manageable please-administer-two-ambrosia-cubes-and-call-Chiron-in-the-morning way? Ancient writers are always doing this, dropping the mythological equivalent of a live grenade into one passive clause and then moving on to describe somebody’s cattle.
Across the room, Nico breathes like it hurts.
That’s the thing Will keeps coming back to, the thing that drags his gaze off the page no matter how many times he tells himself to keep reading, because Nico di Angelo is terrible at being ill in the same way he’s terrible at being emotionally available, which is to say he treats both as personal insults and assumes everyone else will eventually become too exhausted to notice. He’s curled on one of the infirmary beds with his knees drawn up beneath a blanket he complained about needing and then immediately refused to give back, his face turned slightly away from the lamp, dark hair stuck damply to his forehead. His skin’s gone grey around the edges in a way Will hates with a force that feels almost physical, his lips parted, every inhale catching shallowly at the base of his throat.
His lungs sound clear, his temperature’s barely raised, his pulse is too fast but steady, oxygen low enough to make Will’s stomach tighten and high enough to be deeply irritating from a diagnostic standpoint, which feels personally malicious.
Earlier, Nico had tried to summon a ghost from the edge of the woods and nothing had answered.
That had been the first bad sign.
The second had been the way the shadows moved wrong around him, gathering sluggishly at his feet and then peeling away again like they no longer recognised him. Nico had stared at them for one long silent moment, face going blank in that dangerous way that meant he was either frightened or about to say something devastatingly rude. Then he’d taken one step forward, gone white, and pitched sideways into Will’s arms with a breathless little sound that Will’s going to remember for the rest of his life and possibly bring up in court if anyone ever accuses him of overreacting.
Now there’s this footnote.
Now there’s Demeter.
Will looks back down at the book and feels something cold move through his ribs.
“Oh,” he says aloud, in a voice that sounds horribly calm. “I’m going to kill a goddess.”
Nico shifts under the blanket, one eye cracking open. “Which one?”
“Demeter.”
Nico stares at him for a moment, breathing shallowly through his nose, then closes his eye again. “Get in line.”
***
The shower in Cabin Seven has terrible water pressure, which feels personally insulting given that half the cabin can summon light from their hands but apparently indoor plumbing remains beyond the reach of divine inheritance.
Will stands fully clothed in the cramped stall with one hand braced against the tile, the curtain dragged mostly shut behind him and the water turned as hot as it will go, steam folding thickly around his face until his curls start sticking damply to his forehead. The overhead light flickers once, bright enough through the mist to catch against the spray in a faint trembling band of colour.
It is not much of a rainbow.
It is pathetic, actually.
It’s the kind of rainbow that would get bullied by better rainbows.
Will uses it anyway, because he is running on two hours of sleep, one cold cup of coffee, and the kind of panic that has stopped feeling sharp and started feeling functional. He digs a golden drachma out of his pocket with wet fingers, nearly drops it down the drain, swears so loudly someone in the main cabin room yells, “Are you dying?” and decides not to answer because the truthful response is too complicated for communal living.
“Oh Iris, goddess of the rainbow,” he says, voice low and rough in the steam, “please accept my offering.”
He throws the drachma into the light.
For a second nothing happens, and Will has just enough time to imagine the coin rattling down the pipes into whatever cursed plumbing graveyard exists beneath Camp Half-Blood before the mist shivers gold.
“Show me Frank Zhang,” he says, then adds quickly, because demigod communication systems love specificity and punishing people for not having it, “Camp Jupiter. New Rome. Wherever he is right now, preferably not asleep or naked.”
Frank appears a moment later in pale broken colour, his face half-lit by what looks like late afternoon sun and the other half cut by shadow. He’s standing somewhere stone-walled and Roman, which narrows it down to approximately all of Camp Jupiter, and he has a notebook tucked under one arm, looking tired in the sensible, responsible way Frank always looks tired, like exhaustion is just another duty he has agreed to carry because someone has to and Percy Jackson is busy making jokes near a body of water.
Will likes Frank.
He thinks that a lot, actually, in the private absent way people think things they don’t always say out loud. Frank is easy to like once you get past the fact that he can turn into a bear. He’s kind without making a performance of it, clever in a quiet way that people miss because he doesn’t seem interested in proving it, and steady in a crisis until the crisis involves Hazel, at which point he becomes a deeply polite wreck with the haunted eyes of a man realising he may one day have Pluto as a father-in-law. Will respects that. Will understands that. There is probably a very small support group somewhere for people romantically attached to terrifying children of the Underworld who were born in the wrong century and think explaining their feelings counts as a form of enemy interrogation.
He just wishes, with a sudden and almost nauseating force, that he were talking to Frank for any other reason.
“Will?” Frank says, blinking. “Is everything okay?”
Will almost laughs, which is how he knows things are very bad.
There is probably a rational version of this conversation in which he eases Frank into the situation, asks after Hazel, explains the source material calmly, and does not open with an ancient agricultural blood-curse like he’s trying to get himself banned from future diplomatic relations with Rome.
Unfortunately, that version of Will is currently lying dead in a ditch somewhere around the moment Nico tried to speak to a ghost and three separate spirits dragged themselves halfway through the infirmary floor before screaming.
“I found something,” Will says.
Frank’s expression shifts at once. “What kind of something?”
“The bad kind.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down.”
“Demeter,” Will says, and watches Frank go still. “Hades and Persephone. The famine. The whole thing. There’s a detail in one of Chiron’s older texts, and I don’t know how reliable it is because it’s in translation and the scholar writes like he’s never felt sunlight on his skin or spoken to another person without correcting their grammar, but it says Demeter cursed the children of Hades and Pluto after Persephone was taken.”
Frank’s face changes properly then, all the colour draining out of it in a way Will can see even through the mist.
For one horrible second, Will hears only the shower.
“Frank?”
Frank looks down, then back up. His mouth opens once without sound, and that, more than anything, scares Will so badly his fingers go cold.
“I was going to Iris-message you,” Frank says.
Will’s grip tightens on the edge of the shower wall. “Why?”
Frank swallows. “Because something’s wrong with Hazel.”
The steam feels suddenly too thick.
Will says nothing, because there are too many responses trying to happen at once and none of them fit through his throat. Nico is one thing, which is a terrible thought and not what he means, because Nico is everything, Nico is in the infirmary right now looking like the shadows have chewed him up and spat him back out wrong, but Hazel too means pattern. Hazel too means this has shape. Hazel too means the footnote is no longer a footnote.
Frank glances away again, as if checking over his shoulder even though Hazel clearly isn’t in the room with him. “She’s been ill for days. Tired, mostly. Dizzy. She keeps saying she can’t get a proper breath, like there’s pressure sitting on her chest, but the medics here can’t find anything obvious and she keeps insisting she’s fine because apparently children of the Underworld think denial is a treatment plan.”
Will closes his eyes for half a second. “Yeah. That tracks.”
“It’s not just that.” Frank’s voice goes lower, and the quietness of it is worse than shouting. “It’s the jewels. The metal. Everything she can usually control.”
Will opens his eyes.
“What’s happening?”
Frank drags a hand over his face. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. At first it was like nothing would come when she called it. She tried to pull up a coin yesterday and it just sat there in the ground like it couldn’t hear her, and then when it did move, it came up too fast and cut her palm. This morning a ruby cracked while she was holding it. Just split right down the middle. She said she didn’t do anything, but then the training field started throwing up bits of bronze around her like the ground was spitting them out.”
Will’s stomach turns.
Frank gives a humourless little breath. “There was silver under the steps by the principia. It came up right as she was walking and she nearly fell. She keeps saying it feels like the earth’s too loud, which is not exactly a thing anyone teaches you how to handle in praetor training.”
Will presses the heel of his hand hard against the wet tile.
“Gods,” he says, and it comes out too soft.
Frank’s eyes flick back to him, fear showing plainly now. “Is Nico like that?”
Will thinks of the dead hands in the dirt. The loose soil shifting where no one has stepped. The ghosts gathering at the edge of the infirmary windows, pale faces turned inward, not summoned exactly, not free either, more like a door has been left open somewhere it shouldn’t have been. He thinks of Nico’s face when he realised he couldn’t make them stop, that awful flat moment of recognition before he buried it under irritation because apparently being frightened is illegal in the di Angelo bloodline.
“Yeah,” Will says, and the word scrapes on the way out. “Yeah, I think he is.”
Frank closes his eyes for one brief second.
It’s such a small thing, and somehow it is worse than anything else he could have done. Will has seen Frank in battle. He has seen him stand between Hazel and danger with that broad-shouldered, unshowy courage that makes people underestimate him right up until they realise the nice boy has become an elephant and is about to ruin their entire strategy. Frank is not weak. Frank is not soft in the way people mean when they are trying to make kindness sound like a flaw. Frank is solid, brave, decent in a world that keeps rewarding cruelty for being faster, and seeing him scared makes the fear in Will’s own body sharpen until it feels almost unbearable.
Because Frank knows.
Of course he knows.
There are not many people in the world who understand what it is to love someone like Hazel or Nico, someone with the Underworld under their skin, someone who can look at death like an old road and still get embarrassed when they’re fussed over, someone born with one foot in a century that no longer wants them and another in a divine inheritance that won’t stop reaching. Will and Frank don’t talk about it much because neither of them is particularly good at saying the soft thing directly unless forced, but there is a recognition there anyway, a quiet strange solidarity built from watching the people they love flinch away from care as if tenderness is a trap.
“It’s Nico too,” Will says, because if he stops now he might not be able to start again. “He’s getting worse. His breathing is off, his stamina’s shot, and his powers are misfiring. The dead aren’t answering right. Or they’re answering too much. I don’t even know how to describe it.”
Frank’s voice drops. “Do you think it’s the curse?”
Will wants to say no.
He wants, with an intensity that borders on embarrassing, to say no and mean it. He wants this to be a virus, or exhaustion, or some weird Underworld flu with a stupid name and a treatment plan that involves fluids, rest, and Nico being threatened into compliance with a thermometer. He wants Frank to laugh awkwardly and say actually Hazel is fine, she’s just been overdoing it, and Will to say same here, crazy coincidence, sorry for calling you from a shower like a deranged oracle of plumbing.
Instead, the book’s footnote sits in his mind like a small dark seed.
Every child of the Underworld shall suffer when the earth wakes.
“I think,” Will says carefully, because if he says it too quickly his voice will break, “that there are two children of the Underworld in two different camps with the same vague illness and the same power instability. I think Nico tried to tell me he was fine and then almost passed out on me. I think Hazel’s magic is reacting to the earth like it doesn’t know whether to obey her or attack her. I think Demeter has a history of making grief everyone else’s problem on a continental scale.”
Frank stares at him.
Will exhales, shaky and hot. “So yeah. I think it might be the curse.”
For a few seconds, neither of them speaks.
The shower keeps running. The steam keeps building. Will’s entire cabin is probably going to assume he has either drowned or started stress-cleaning the grout, and honestly both options sound less humiliating than explaining that he is using the bathroom as an emergency communications hub because his boyfriend’s divine bloodline may have been hexed by the goddess of cereal.
Frank looks down at his notebook, then closes it with deliberate care.
“What do we do?” he asks.
Will wipes water from his jaw with the back of his wrist. “Bring Hazel here.”
Frank looks up sharply.
“I know,” Will says before he can argue. “I know it’s not simple, and I know moving her might make things worse, but if this is the same thing then I need them in one place. I need to compare symptoms. I need Chiron. I need access to the infirmary stores. I need Nico to stop pretending he’s personally immune to consequences because he survived Tartarus and now thinks biology is optional.”
Frank gives a faint strained smile despite himself. “Hazel’s going to hate this.”
“Nico already hates it,” Will says. “We can start a club.”
That gets half a laugh out of Frank, thin and frightened, gone almost as soon as it appears.
Then his face settles again.
“I’ll get her there,” he says.
“Don’t talk. Pack.”
Frank nods once.
The mist flickers harder now, the rainbow thinning as the water pressure gives another pathetic cough. Will reaches up to adjust the shower head and nearly slips, which is exactly the kind of death he refuses to have recorded in camp history.
“Frank?”
“Yeah?”
Will forces himself to hold his gaze through the shimmer. “If Hazel gets worse on the way, Iris-message me immediately. If her breathing changes, if she gets confused, anything.”
“I will.”
“And Frank?”
Frank’s expression tightens, like he already knows.
“Don’t let her downplay it.”
This time Frank’s smile is small and exhausted and painfully fond. “You’ve met Hazel, right?”
“Unfortunately for my blood pressure, yes.”
Frank huffs softly, then looks past the mist again, probably toward wherever Hazel is being stubborn in a way Will would admire more if he weren’t about to develop a stress ulcer over it.
“I’ll get her there,” Frank says.
The Iris Message wavers.
Will lifts his hand to cut through the mist, then hesitates, because ending the call feels too much like stepping away from the only other person who understands the exact shape of this fear.
“Will,” Frank says quietly.
“Yeah?”
“We’re going to figure it out.”
Will nods, even though Frank probably can’t see it properly through the steam, even though his throat feels raw, even though the book is waiting for him in the infirmary with its horrible little footnote and Nico is waiting there too, pretending not to be scared because someone apparently once told children of Hades that fear is only acceptable if you bury it under six layers of sarcasm and a leather jacket.
“Yeah,” Will says. “We are.”
Then he swipes his hand through the rainbow, and Frank disappears.