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jankwritten · 9 months ago

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Jasico Bingo Challenge: Boyfriend Sweater

When Nico walks into the dining pavilion wearing a golden yellow sweater, Percy does a double-take. Actually, it’s a triple-take: first, he thought it was a new Apollo kid, then he realized it was Nico, then he realized it was Nico. Wearing a color.

Is the world ending again? Was there something really wrong with the milk in his cereal? What in the everloving Hades was going on?!

Nico sits down at table 13, unbothered as ever, and pulls the sleeves of the hoodie up. It’s way too big on him, like Big Bird shed and some poor fucker decided Nico di Angelo needed the empty muppet skin in his wardrobe.

(Is it Nico? Maybe some changeling creature kidnapped their resident son of Hades and has decided to take his place? Maybe Percy needs to go over there and test him out, y’know, knick him with some iron or something to see if he burns. If it’s an imposter, though, they’re doing a piss-poor job. Is it an intentionally bad job? Gods, it’s barely eight AM on a Tuesday, does he seriously have to go save Nico from somewhere and kill a monster wearing his face? That does not sound like his ideal Tuesday, if he’s really real. He’ll totally do it, but he won’t like it, and maybe he should start planning how to take out a creature like-)

“I can see the mountain you’re building,” Annabeth says, popping Percy’s strangely detailed daydream of hunting down and killing a weird, half-Nico, half-demon gremlin creature. He blinks the image out of his eyes and looks up at her, her hip resting against the edge of his table.

She looks amused. He squints. “Nico’s been bodysnatched.”

“Mm, no,” she says easily, with a shake of her head. “Nico’s wearing a jacket.”

“A yellow jacket.” Percy looks at the son of Hades again. He just- can’t wrap his head around it. He hasn’t seen Nico willingly wear a color since the guy was ten years old. “A yellow jacket that’s, like, twice his size.”

“It’s a molehill, seaweed brain. A jacket’s just a jacket.”

“But it’s yellow.”

“What was your nightmare about?”

Percy physically recoils at the non sequitur, tilting back in his seat incredulously. His- what? His nightmare? What does his nightmare have to do with a jacket, anyway, that’s got nothing to do with this.

He folds his arms on the table and makes a face. “That’s unrelated.”

Annabeth’s mouth raise at the corners, her eyes watching him like an all-knowing hawk. An owl, three-sixty vision and nothing but questions, who, who?

She pets through his hair and pushes her weight back up. As she draws her hand back, she taps his cheek, then his chin, and says, “just leave him alone, then.”

Percy watches her walk back to her table. When she sits, he buries his face in his arms and groans.

“Jason has also been bodysnatched,” Percy hisses to Annabeth during pottery class.

“What makes you say that.” She throws her lump of clay at the pedestal in front of her and gives Percy the same look she gave him this morning.

Percy decides to ignore that look, because that is the look of reason and he is far beyond that now. “He was wearing this black jacket with, like, skulls in hourglasses and weird skeleton butterflies and shit during Latin.”

“He is related to Thalia, you know,” Annabeth hums. She wets her hands as the plate before her starts to spin. “Maybe he’s going through the family goth phase.”

Had she not just leaned in to start forming something magical and incredible out of clay, Percy would slouch over Annabeth’s shoulders and plead with her to at least consider that something weird is going on. Maybe it’s not bodysnatchers or changelings, okay, but something is strange! Jason Grace does not just decide to wear emo shit! Jason Grace once had a panic attack because the Aphrodite Cabin stole a pair of his jeans and cut them into shorts! This is a man who has a stricter sense of style than Nico, who, fucking hell, don’t even get Percy started on that. The yellow jacket has remained on all day and it’s haunting him.

Annabeth dips her thumbs into the top of her clay and does not respond.

Percy slumps down into the stool beside hers and huffs, more for himself than anything.

Change is okay. Change is fine. But change like this, with no reason, is the opposite of fine. Change like this is a low-blow stink bomb in an otherwise perfect Capture the Flag game, impossible to get out of his clothes and his skin and his hair. Change like this is how people die.

He claws his hands up into his hair and listens to the steady whir of the pottery wheel, the sound of wet clay being molded and shaped in different ways. There’s a lull of conversation from other campers in the class, kids from all different cabins, because to them this is any other day.

Maybe this should be any other day to him, too. No, not maybe. It should be. This should be a regular Tuesday, full of regular classes with his regular friends who are ordinary in whatever ways they can be, but instead, Percy’s brain has to go and mix up everything, make everything feel- out of control.

HIs next exhale shakes too hard for his liking. His shoulders are too tense.

Beside him, Annabeth keeps calmly shaping her pot. She dips her hands into the water every so often, probably executing some flawless plan of action she drafted the night before. She’s not always delicate with her hands, with art like this - Percy knows that’s something she’s self conscious about. She never thinks she can be good at finer things.

That’s normal. That’s normal for her. Ordinary, to think that Annabeth Chase would tackle arts and crafts in the same way she would a war strategy, devising the perfect approach for a flawless result. Executing it flawlessly.

She pinches too hard pulling up the walls of the pot. It crumples, then swings off the wheel entirely with the force of it’s motion, splattering wetly across Percy’s arms and the other campers at the bench.

Percy watches Annabeth glare at her failed creation. She sticks her hands in the dirty water to scrub the clay off, wipes her hands off on her shirt, and pulls on Percy’s sleeve.

“I hate pottery,” she mutters as they rise together.

Percy grins. “I think it knows that,” he teases, and follows as she stomps toward the exit.

When the answer slaps Percy in the face, it feels more like a gut punch in the way it makes him breathless and off-balance.

“You’re…huh?”

Annabeth clicks her tongue. “You two couldn’t think of a better way to do this?” she gestures between Nico and Jason, standing awkwardly side by side as if they don’t know what to do with themselves.

They’re still wearing the wrong jackets. Each other’s jackets.

Percy makes a face, then realizes that might not be the best response to his two friends telling him their dating, so he tries to make a different face.

The world’s not ending. They’re just…together. Sharing jackets, like couples do.

“We didn’t want to make it a big deal,” Jason says. He keeps glancing at Nico and chewing on the inside of his lip. Nico, with the golden sleeves of apparently-Jason’s-jacket pulled over his hands once more, looks stubborn. Like he’s ready to fight about something.

Percy wipes his sweaty hands off on his shirt and gestures, though he’s not sure at what. “But Nico’s wearing a color?”

He feels more than sees Annabeth’s disapproving glare at the side of his head. Jason draws himself up, then seems to falter. His head cocks to the side and he shakes his head.

“What?”

“That’s a big deal,” Percy reiterates. “Nico doesn’t wear colors.”

“Nico is standing right here, wearing a color,” Nico grumbles. He shoves his hands into the pocket of the sweatshirt and gives Percy a glare that is far more familiar than literally anything else happening right now. “I’m allowed to wear whatever I want to wear, for the record.”

“But you don’t!”

“Well I do now. If you have a fucking problem with it-”

“I never said I had a problem with it,” Percy snaps back, immediately on the defensive. “I was fucking worried about you, you little shit, I thought something was wrong. I thought- I don’t know what I thought! I thought you two were swapped with some other versions of yourself, I thought you’d been- I don’t know- abducted by aliens, or fairies, or something!” He throws his hands up in the air, then drops them back onto his head, staring sort of at the middle point between the two of them. “You can’t do that shit and not expect- I mean, because, come on, guys, you’re you, you two fucking freak out if someone so much as touches your clothes. What were we supposed to think?”

The hearth crackles. It’s too pleasant a sound for the sick Percy feels.

Annabeth takes his hand, at least, and squeezes. His face burns with the shame of yelling like this, over this, it just feels so fucking stupid all of a sudden. He feels so stupid. Annabeth tried to tell him it was nothing, and he let it all get away with him, he let that nasty part of his brain win and win and win, and now he’s taking his losses out on them.

“I’m happy for you two,” he makes himself say, when no one else speaks. “I think I just also need therapy.”

Finally, Annabeth snorts. It’s a noise Percy knows, one he can ground himself with, same as her palm hot in his, her weight tilting into his side as her head bonks into his chin.

The stress he’d held bundled up in his spine and his shoulders and his stomach all day releases in an instant. He slouches back in against her and laughs against the top of her head.

“Jesus Christ,” Nico mutters, when Percy can’t stop himself, dissolving into a fit of hysterics over his own bullshit. “This is why I said we should just tell them. He’s laughing at us.”

“I think he’s laughing at himself,” Jason says. He sounds uncertain.

Percy hugs Annabeth tight, and laughs himself hoarse.

EXTRA

Nico stares at himself in Jason’s mirror, with the sweater hanging halfway down his thighs, sleeves hanging off his hands, the peak of his collarbone through the freaking collar. He narrows his gaze into a glare.

“I look like a toddler,” he says derisively.

Jason, still getting dressed himself, laughs. When he appears in the mirror behind Nico, looking far more proportional in Nico’s sweatshirt (which is frankly fucking unfair), his grin softens into a smile that’s- something. Sweet.

Nico twitches his nose.

“I look like I’m six years old,” he says, grabbing the hem of the sweatshirt and yanking down. “Why are we doing this.”

“‘Cause it’s silly,” Jason says. He presses a kiss against the side of Nico’s head and hugs him loosely from behind. “You don’t look like a baby, either. You just look your age.”

Nico looks down at himself. Maybe there’s a point there, a point to be made about how he dresses for practicality, dresses to blend in, but never to express himself. Maybe there’s a point to be made about how his discomfort isn’t really for how he feels about this, but how he thinks others will feel about it.

He tugs at the hem again, and looks back up. Jason’s eyes in the mirror are bright, as if taking in the sight of Nico in his hoodie like this is something to savor.

Nico likes when Jason looks at him like that. He likes how it feels to be looked at like he’s attractive. He likes how it feels to be wanted.

“I guess,” Nico concedes, leaning further back into Jason’s chest. Immediately, Jason’s stance is more solid, sturdy, holding them both up as easy as breathing. He holds Nico like it’s a promise that he’ll never let go.

He looks at the pair of them in the mirror, a cohesive unit rather than two separate halves. Jason in black is definitely something Nico wants to see more of, especially with the way Nico’s clothes fit snug over him, just a little tight at the biceps and chest. He looks good, not that he doesn’t look good otherwise. Different.

With Nico his contrast in yellow…maybe it isn’t so bad. Maybe he likes being the counterbalance, even.

Jason squeezes him again. Those damn eyes in the mirror are making Nico too warm, like his stomach is full of hot jell-o.

“Okay, fine, let’s do this,” he huffs. The difference in his tone must be audible, though, because Jason perks up and grins, his eyebrows up, face aglow. Nico can’t look at him for too long. It’s still strange knowing he can make someone feel like that. He doesn’t know what to do when Jason turns the full puppy-love thing on. “And stop looking at me like that, you’re going to give me cavities.”

“Okay,” Jason says in a voice identical to his expression.

Nico grabs his hand and squeezes it twice.

Jason squeezes back, so tight it aches. Nico’s heart swells with bright affection.

Alright. Maybe yellow isn’t so bad, actually.