Covariance
Jul. 21st, 2020 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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120_minutenTeam: Mega-Team
Challenge: Hurt/Comofort: Altersunterschied (Päckchen #11)
Fandom: Heroes of Olympus/The Old Guard (2020 Film)
Charaktere: Nico di Angelo, Nicolò „Nicky“ di Genova
Wörter: 1771
A/N: Bei Gefallen für![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
servena, denn unser Chatverlauf ist zu 100% Schuld an dieser Verbindung. :)
Es ist der ursprünglichen Idee und der Challenge ein bisschen davongelaufen, aber Nico und Nicky wollten mehr miteinander reden als zu hurten und comforting presences zu sein.^^“
Zusammenfassung: Over the years, Nico seems to stumble into the same man again and again. Which would be way less weird if these encounters didn’t span over 80 years.
Venice, 1938
Nico loved the harbour. He could spend hours perched on the low balustrade in front of the little caffè Bianca liked so much and watch the nimble fishing vessels navigating between towering cruisers. When Bianca came here with him, they would make up stories about the sailor’s exploits, imagining them to be smugglers or pirates on daring adventures. If it was just him, like today, he dreamed about joining them, stepping up to the helm and sailing his own ship out into the sunset.
It was getting late and he knew he should be heading home. His mother was going to worry. But he couldn’t tear himself away. There was a commotion at the pier directly below his vantage point, where a sleek schooner had landed just minutes ago. Now, more people than should comfortably fit on the vessel were filing down onto the pier. The men huddled close together, supporting each other, sometimes even carrying each other. Their faces were pale and gaunt and Nico had a very weird feeling, watching them. As if they were ghosts.
An old man stumbled and lost his footing, but before he could fall off the plank, he was caught by a young man who pulled him upright easily. When he turned to lend a hand to the man as he stepped onto the pier, Nico could make out something strapped to his back that looked like a sword. He must have been a pirate.
“Aye, Joe, stop feeling up the poor guy, what is Nicky going to think?” a woman’s voice shouted in what Nico thought was Greek even if he had no problem understanding it. The speaker was a tall woman standing at the bow of the ship, watching over the steady stream of people on the pier, but laughing loudly at the rude gesture the comment earned her from the man.
“Nicky thinks that we should hurry up, boss!” That was Italian and the man calling out from the end of the pier was wearing a police uniform and herded the men in the direction of the cargo piers. “We’ve got a ship to catch and Joe has excellent taste in men!” Even as he said it, he didn’t look at the woman or Joe or the men, instead his keen gaze wandered over their surroundings. His eyes were impossibly grey and piercing when they fell on Nico. The boy swallowed heavily, unable to make himself look away.
“Knew you loved me!” Joe crowed.
“Sure I do, cuore mio.” Nothing about the police officer’s tone could have been mistaken for banter or joking. It was impossibly soft and earnest. Nico’s eyes widened and he could feel his face burning. The police officer winked at him and turned back to the men leaving the ship. “Sbrigati!”
Washington, D.C., 1940
“Can we get cotton candy?” Nico looked up at Bianca with wide eyes. “Please?”
She shrugged, attempting to look tough and failing miserably. “Sure. To celebrate.”
Nico tried very hard not to shout in glee as he turned on his heel and ran towards the vendor. Only to be stopped abruptly by barrelling into something hard and unmoving. He looked up and was met with piercing grey eyes.
“Scusi! Um, I mean, I’m sorry, Sir!”
The man’s eyes crinkled in a smile. “That’s okay, ragazzo.”
For a second, Nico thought he’d met the man before but that might have just been the feeling of familiarity hitting him at the softly rolled ‘r’, that sounded like almond biscuits and church bells and home. He couldn’t help but smile back.
“Nicolò?”
He whipped around at the unfamiliar voice calling out his name.
“Made a friend?” The man had curly black hair and a neatly trimmed beard and while he seemed as oddly familiar as the other man, Nico was sure he didn’t know him.
A soft chuckle sounded behind him. “Absolutely. This young man is far from home and in a hurry, I believe?”
Nico looked back to the man he’d run into who looked down on him with a raised eyebrow. “You’re--” he wasn’t entirely sure how he wanted to continue that sentence. Familiar, part of him wanted to say. Wrong, another part supplied. Pretty. That thought he pushed way, way down.
“Nico! Excuse me, sirs, is my brother bothering you?”
Both men turned to Bianca.
“Oh, not at all. Always good to meet someone from home.” The first man inclined his head politely. “Signorina. Nico.” He winked at him and both men vanished into the crowd.
“Everything alright, Nico?”
He shook his head. “Sure.” There was something weird about the two of them, something he couldn’t quite understand. And yet, he couldn’t help but smile after them.
Yin Mountains, 2013
“Careful, boy!”
Nico had fallen out of the shadows, somewhere, and straight into the arms of a man. A man who dropped a gun to catch him and that probably should have worried Nico but he was too preoccupied with not fainting and then with puking his guts out.
When he finally calmed down, still feeling queasy and so, so tired, there was a warm hand rubbing calming circles on his back and a second hand offering him a canteen.
“Sorry,” he croaked, willing the shadows to swallow him. Of course, nothing happened.
“Drink. It’s water.” The man’s voice was soft and calm as if boys stumbling into him out of nowhere and throwing up on his boots was something that happened every day.
Nico accepted the water with a mumbled thanks, not daring to look up at the man or away from the sniper rifle on the rocky ground. Where in Hades had he travelled to?
“Alright, it’s alright. Everything’s alright.”
When Nico finally lifted his gaze, he almost threw up again. He knew those grey eyes, but he had no idea how. He couldn’t remember ever seeing them before.
The man tapped his ear piece. “Boss, I got a situation here.”
Nico’s eyes widened.
“No, I don’t think so. More of a weird kind of situation.” The man turned his attention back to him. “How did you get here, boy?”
“You should be dead,” Nico blurted out. It was a weird thing to say, but undeniably true.
“Maybe.”
“Are you a monster?”
“I hope not.”
Nico shook his head. “There’s something weird about you…” There was something deeply, deeply wrong about the man, every fiber of Nico’s being itched with it and, yet, there was also something strangely comforting about the man’s presence.
“Tell me about it.” Another voice. Another man standing next to Nico, a revolver pointed to his head. “Nicky may be the love of my life, but, oh, is he weird. -- Wait. Don’t I know you, boy?”
Nico shook his head. He’d never seen either man.
“Washington? 1940?”
The man, tall, curly-haired and brown-skinned, was decidedly too young to off-handedly suggest they’d met over seventy years ago. Then again, Nico was eleven and had been in Washington in 1940.
“That’s impossible!”
“So is you just appearing on the top of a mountain cliff in the Gobi desert,” the grey-eyed man said. “How did you do that?”
Nico looked between the two men. Grey-eyes had picked the sniper rifle back up but held it loosely, the muzzle pointing to the ground. He carried a sword at his hip with an ornately patterned hilt that definitely wasn’t Greek.
The other man had his gun still pointed at Nico’s head but his other hand was reaching out, casually touching his companion’s elbow. Nicky may be the love of my life. Nico felt sick to his stomach.
“Are you alright, boy? You’re awfully pale.” The man lifted his hand and Nico pushed it away, almost jumping backwards.
“Don’t! Don’t touch me!” he screamed and the shadows pulled up around him and the last thing he heard before he vanished was a quiet ‘So that’s how he did that’.
Juárez, 2020
They tracked down the drakon in downtown Juárez. Not that it had been especially difficult to follow the line of destruction it had carved into the city. Will jumped out of the car before it had even stopped, hurrying to the group of civilians cowering in front of the half-collapsed library building. There was a lot of blood on the streets, Nico thought.
He send the car spinning into the monster’s legs and shadow-travelled himself out of it at the last second. The drakon roared and Nico hefted his Stygian sword. What was taking Jason so long?
“A drakon. Haven’t seen one of those in forever.”
Nico could only afford a short glance over his shoulder to see a tall woman, dressed in black and carrying a battle axe. She was way too old to be a demigod.
“I don’t know who you are, but if you can see it, I’ll take any help I can get!” He’d taken on the drakon’s sibling alone and his leg still wasn’t quite healed.
The woman laughed. “Try to keep up, kiddo!”
Axe whirling, she stormed past him, breaking to the left. So, Nico tackled the drakon’s right. Between the two of them, they made short process of the monster.
“You’re good, kid.”
“You’re incredible. – Who are you?”
She nodded, accepting the compliment easily and with dignity. “Andromache of Scythia. You can call me Andy.”
“Pleasure. I’m—”
“It’s you! Shadow boy!”
Andy turned around to the man standing behind her. “You know the kid, Nicky?”
Grey-eyes chuckled. “We seem to run into each other, don’t we ragazzo?”
“I… I don’t actually—” China, on a cliff. Washington, on the National mall. Venice, at the port. Nico blinked against the sudden feeling of vertigo. “I guess? My name’s Nico.”
The man laughed in delight. “Right, I remember! -- I’m Nicolò.”
“Who are you people?”
Andy shrugged. “Could ask you the same thing, kid.”
“Nico, honey, glad you’re making friends, but I could need a hand here!”
They all turned to Will who was kneeling beside a woman, both hands pressed on her stomach as if clamping down on a wound. Nico flushed red but nobody else seemed to react to the nickname.
Next to Will, a young woman and a bearded man were clearing away debris. The man looked up at Will’s words and smiled. “Nicky? What he said.”
“Sure, honey.”
Nico watched the man, Nicolò, join his companions not without briefly touching his hand to the other man’s and could feel his face burning. This felt wrong. All about this situation and the four fighters and their easy familiarity felt unbelievably wrong. It just also felt incredibly right.
Challenge: Hurt/Comofort: Altersunterschied (Päckchen #11)
Fandom: Heroes of Olympus/The Old Guard (2020 Film)
Charaktere: Nico di Angelo, Nicolò „Nicky“ di Genova
Wörter: 1771
A/N: Bei Gefallen für
servena, denn unser Chatverlauf ist zu 100% Schuld an dieser Verbindung. :)Es ist der ursprünglichen Idee und der Challenge ein bisschen davongelaufen, aber Nico und Nicky wollten mehr miteinander reden als zu hurten und comforting presences zu sein.^^“
Zusammenfassung: Over the years, Nico seems to stumble into the same man again and again. Which would be way less weird if these encounters didn’t span over 80 years.
Venice, 1938
Nico loved the harbour. He could spend hours perched on the low balustrade in front of the little caffè Bianca liked so much and watch the nimble fishing vessels navigating between towering cruisers. When Bianca came here with him, they would make up stories about the sailor’s exploits, imagining them to be smugglers or pirates on daring adventures. If it was just him, like today, he dreamed about joining them, stepping up to the helm and sailing his own ship out into the sunset.
It was getting late and he knew he should be heading home. His mother was going to worry. But he couldn’t tear himself away. There was a commotion at the pier directly below his vantage point, where a sleek schooner had landed just minutes ago. Now, more people than should comfortably fit on the vessel were filing down onto the pier. The men huddled close together, supporting each other, sometimes even carrying each other. Their faces were pale and gaunt and Nico had a very weird feeling, watching them. As if they were ghosts.
An old man stumbled and lost his footing, but before he could fall off the plank, he was caught by a young man who pulled him upright easily. When he turned to lend a hand to the man as he stepped onto the pier, Nico could make out something strapped to his back that looked like a sword. He must have been a pirate.
“Aye, Joe, stop feeling up the poor guy, what is Nicky going to think?” a woman’s voice shouted in what Nico thought was Greek even if he had no problem understanding it. The speaker was a tall woman standing at the bow of the ship, watching over the steady stream of people on the pier, but laughing loudly at the rude gesture the comment earned her from the man.
“Nicky thinks that we should hurry up, boss!” That was Italian and the man calling out from the end of the pier was wearing a police uniform and herded the men in the direction of the cargo piers. “We’ve got a ship to catch and Joe has excellent taste in men!” Even as he said it, he didn’t look at the woman or Joe or the men, instead his keen gaze wandered over their surroundings. His eyes were impossibly grey and piercing when they fell on Nico. The boy swallowed heavily, unable to make himself look away.
“Knew you loved me!” Joe crowed.
“Sure I do, cuore mio.” Nothing about the police officer’s tone could have been mistaken for banter or joking. It was impossibly soft and earnest. Nico’s eyes widened and he could feel his face burning. The police officer winked at him and turned back to the men leaving the ship. “Sbrigati!”
Washington, D.C., 1940
“Can we get cotton candy?” Nico looked up at Bianca with wide eyes. “Please?”
She shrugged, attempting to look tough and failing miserably. “Sure. To celebrate.”
Nico tried very hard not to shout in glee as he turned on his heel and ran towards the vendor. Only to be stopped abruptly by barrelling into something hard and unmoving. He looked up and was met with piercing grey eyes.
“Scusi! Um, I mean, I’m sorry, Sir!”
The man’s eyes crinkled in a smile. “That’s okay, ragazzo.”
For a second, Nico thought he’d met the man before but that might have just been the feeling of familiarity hitting him at the softly rolled ‘r’, that sounded like almond biscuits and church bells and home. He couldn’t help but smile back.
“Nicolò?”
He whipped around at the unfamiliar voice calling out his name.
“Made a friend?” The man had curly black hair and a neatly trimmed beard and while he seemed as oddly familiar as the other man, Nico was sure he didn’t know him.
A soft chuckle sounded behind him. “Absolutely. This young man is far from home and in a hurry, I believe?”
Nico looked back to the man he’d run into who looked down on him with a raised eyebrow. “You’re--” he wasn’t entirely sure how he wanted to continue that sentence. Familiar, part of him wanted to say. Wrong, another part supplied. Pretty. That thought he pushed way, way down.
“Nico! Excuse me, sirs, is my brother bothering you?”
Both men turned to Bianca.
“Oh, not at all. Always good to meet someone from home.” The first man inclined his head politely. “Signorina. Nico.” He winked at him and both men vanished into the crowd.
“Everything alright, Nico?”
He shook his head. “Sure.” There was something weird about the two of them, something he couldn’t quite understand. And yet, he couldn’t help but smile after them.
Yin Mountains, 2013
“Careful, boy!”
Nico had fallen out of the shadows, somewhere, and straight into the arms of a man. A man who dropped a gun to catch him and that probably should have worried Nico but he was too preoccupied with not fainting and then with puking his guts out.
When he finally calmed down, still feeling queasy and so, so tired, there was a warm hand rubbing calming circles on his back and a second hand offering him a canteen.
“Sorry,” he croaked, willing the shadows to swallow him. Of course, nothing happened.
“Drink. It’s water.” The man’s voice was soft and calm as if boys stumbling into him out of nowhere and throwing up on his boots was something that happened every day.
Nico accepted the water with a mumbled thanks, not daring to look up at the man or away from the sniper rifle on the rocky ground. Where in Hades had he travelled to?
“Alright, it’s alright. Everything’s alright.”
When Nico finally lifted his gaze, he almost threw up again. He knew those grey eyes, but he had no idea how. He couldn’t remember ever seeing them before.
The man tapped his ear piece. “Boss, I got a situation here.”
Nico’s eyes widened.
“No, I don’t think so. More of a weird kind of situation.” The man turned his attention back to him. “How did you get here, boy?”
“You should be dead,” Nico blurted out. It was a weird thing to say, but undeniably true.
“Maybe.”
“Are you a monster?”
“I hope not.”
Nico shook his head. “There’s something weird about you…” There was something deeply, deeply wrong about the man, every fiber of Nico’s being itched with it and, yet, there was also something strangely comforting about the man’s presence.
“Tell me about it.” Another voice. Another man standing next to Nico, a revolver pointed to his head. “Nicky may be the love of my life, but, oh, is he weird. -- Wait. Don’t I know you, boy?”
Nico shook his head. He’d never seen either man.
“Washington? 1940?”
The man, tall, curly-haired and brown-skinned, was decidedly too young to off-handedly suggest they’d met over seventy years ago. Then again, Nico was eleven and had been in Washington in 1940.
“That’s impossible!”
“So is you just appearing on the top of a mountain cliff in the Gobi desert,” the grey-eyed man said. “How did you do that?”
Nico looked between the two men. Grey-eyes had picked the sniper rifle back up but held it loosely, the muzzle pointing to the ground. He carried a sword at his hip with an ornately patterned hilt that definitely wasn’t Greek.
The other man had his gun still pointed at Nico’s head but his other hand was reaching out, casually touching his companion’s elbow. Nicky may be the love of my life. Nico felt sick to his stomach.
“Are you alright, boy? You’re awfully pale.” The man lifted his hand and Nico pushed it away, almost jumping backwards.
“Don’t! Don’t touch me!” he screamed and the shadows pulled up around him and the last thing he heard before he vanished was a quiet ‘So that’s how he did that’.
Juárez, 2020
They tracked down the drakon in downtown Juárez. Not that it had been especially difficult to follow the line of destruction it had carved into the city. Will jumped out of the car before it had even stopped, hurrying to the group of civilians cowering in front of the half-collapsed library building. There was a lot of blood on the streets, Nico thought.
He send the car spinning into the monster’s legs and shadow-travelled himself out of it at the last second. The drakon roared and Nico hefted his Stygian sword. What was taking Jason so long?
“A drakon. Haven’t seen one of those in forever.”
Nico could only afford a short glance over his shoulder to see a tall woman, dressed in black and carrying a battle axe. She was way too old to be a demigod.
“I don’t know who you are, but if you can see it, I’ll take any help I can get!” He’d taken on the drakon’s sibling alone and his leg still wasn’t quite healed.
The woman laughed. “Try to keep up, kiddo!”
Axe whirling, she stormed past him, breaking to the left. So, Nico tackled the drakon’s right. Between the two of them, they made short process of the monster.
“You’re good, kid.”
“You’re incredible. – Who are you?”
She nodded, accepting the compliment easily and with dignity. “Andromache of Scythia. You can call me Andy.”
“Pleasure. I’m—”
“It’s you! Shadow boy!”
Andy turned around to the man standing behind her. “You know the kid, Nicky?”
Grey-eyes chuckled. “We seem to run into each other, don’t we ragazzo?”
“I… I don’t actually—” China, on a cliff. Washington, on the National mall. Venice, at the port. Nico blinked against the sudden feeling of vertigo. “I guess? My name’s Nico.”
The man laughed in delight. “Right, I remember! -- I’m Nicolò.”
“Who are you people?”
Andy shrugged. “Could ask you the same thing, kid.”
“Nico, honey, glad you’re making friends, but I could need a hand here!”
They all turned to Will who was kneeling beside a woman, both hands pressed on her stomach as if clamping down on a wound. Nico flushed red but nobody else seemed to react to the nickname.
Next to Will, a young woman and a bearded man were clearing away debris. The man looked up at Will’s words and smiled. “Nicky? What he said.”
“Sure, honey.”
Nico watched the man, Nicolò, join his companions not without briefly touching his hand to the other man’s and could feel his face burning. This felt wrong. All about this situation and the four fighters and their easy familiarity felt unbelievably wrong. It just also felt incredibly right.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-21 07:03 am (UTC)Aaaaaaah, du hast nicht gesagt, dass du mir ein Crossover schreibst! Und du hast schon gar nicht gesagt, dass es so ein schönes Crossover werden wird! Ich liebe alles hierdran, von der Idee bis zur Umsetzung. Die Widmung nehme ich dankend an! ❤️ Außerdem sind sie alle soo niedlich! Und der erste Auftritt des Teams in Venedig ist ja wohl perfekt.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-21 10:58 am (UTC)Aaaaaaah, du hast nicht gesagt, dass du mir ein Crossover schreibst!
Na, ein bisschen Überraschung muss ja sein! ;)
Und, um fair zu sein, eigentlich sollte das Team auch immer nur in der Peripherie auftauchen und Nico einen "Es ist okay, out of time, Krieger und schwul zu sein"-Gegenentwurf geben, aber... dann wollten die Universen sich treffen (will sagen: Nicky wollte nett zu Kindern sein und Andy ist vermutlich wirklich ein Halbgott, wenn beide Universen parallel existieren?) und ich hab mich daran erinnert, dass Nicos Erinnerungen gelöscht wurden und... Tadaaah!
...Ich mag die Idee immernoch.
Und der erste Auftritt des Teams in Venedig ist ja wohl perfekt.
Aww! :)
Jetzt bedauere ich, dass es Booker aus Platzgründen nicht reingeschafft hat. (Und den Mangel an Nile bedauere ich sowieso. ;))