#whatever hazel

[hazelnutsummer]

Scar transmigration AU where he’s popped inside a book that he’s only ever skimmed through once from his mom’s shelves, and he somehow ended up, in less than a day after transmigration, marrying the Grian, Duke of the North.

Duke Grian, often known as ‘The Duke’, was rumoured to be cold, heartless and beastly. Or so Scar was told on the CARRIAGE to his MARRIAGE that HE WAS NOT MADE AWARE OF.

It seemed that neither of them were happy abt this marriage if you were to ask Scar…

[mediumgayitalian]

Hazel thinks she hates New York.

It’s not Camp Half-Blood. She likes Camp Half-Blood, actually, likes the sweet-smelling strawberry fields, the rolling waves in the distance, the way every colour, every conversation or moment, just seems more. Louder, livelier. It’s only been a couple days but she’s fond of the place, even though the people are odd and the customs odder (seriously — who came up with the curfew harpies? Hazel is no stranger to demigod structural violence, but a group of demonic bird ladies let loose at a random time of “after the sun sets, usually” to kill and devour children and teens is a new level of weird even for her. Percy assures her that the harpy murder is alleged, as he has spent several summers in camp and has not seen it happen, but he is also an amnesiac and an enabler so what does he know).

It’s the stars, she thinks.

New York doesn’t seem to have any.

It was a shock when she was first brought back. How dim the night sky had become, how devoid, bereft. Uranus’ dome now pales in comparison to the dazzling Alaskan skies decades ago, even in New Rome, huddled away from California’s worst light pollution. Even in the middle of the Pacific, in quiet midnights aboard the Argo II, the sky seemed lonelier. She’s gotten used to it, for the most part, the tar-coloured skies, but New York is like the inkwells on the desk she shared with Sammy. They spilled them, constantly, clumsy hands taking the slap of the ruler in exchange for tapping fingers and quiet giggles, and the dark-stained woodgrain is a perfect amalgamation of the skies she watches now; stifling over the screened tent roof, silent as a packed grave. Unsettling.

She should be sleeping. Gwen’s snores beside her are familiar, and the ground is solid. A welcome reprieve from the months she’s spent at sea. But despite the exhaustion twisting in her limbs and bagging under her eyes, she cannot convince herself to drift. Her eyes remain stubbornly open, locked in with the stillborn sky, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Even the moon is dull.

Finally she can take it no longer. Careful not to wake her friend, she creeps out of her sleeping bag, wiggling out over the course of several minutes to avoid the loud rip of the zipper, The tent’s door she can’t muffle, so she opens it as quickly as possible, somersaulting out and zipping it shut behind her in under ten seconds. She holds her breath, hands braced on the taut plastic, straining to hear a shift, a sniffle, a snort of disruption, but there’s nothing. Gwen remains blissfully unconscious, snores steady and even. Good.

Sword firmly in her hands, watching warily for demonic chicken ladies (who are nowhere as sweet or cool as Ella, awful cousins are universal among species it seems) or whatever other horrible ‘features’ Camp Half-Blood forgot to mention to them, she picks her way out of the Roman encampment, through the strawberry fields, and towards the main.

It’s around three in the morning, she’s pretty sure. She can’t be certain, because she cannot see the sky, but she’s always had a knack for navigating the dark. Nico can, too. Perks of being an Underworld child, she supposes.

Hopefully Nico is asleep. (She replaced his cabin door with a solid brick of obsidian to force him to sleep, yesterday, so he better be, but he’s a slippery little brat and she does not doubt his ability to squeeze through the air vents she left for him, or something. His hair was probably greasy enough to slide him right through. He better have showered, or she is going to smack him. Hard.) If he isn’t, though, she wouldn’t mind his company. She is in the mood to complain about the modern world. And if he is, maybe she’ll go wake up Percy. Or wander around until the sun rises. Who knows.

She notices, as she wanders along the edge of the wonky cabin-omega, movement coming from the Big House. Most of the windows are dark, but the bottom floor on the left — the infirmary, she thinks — is dimly lit, conscientious of the late hour, and there is definitely someone moving around. She pauses, watching for a moment, and — yep. A blond boy, every couple of minutes, rushes past a window, stethoscope bouncing off his chest, new thing in his hands with every trip.

He seems harried.

Without much thought, Hazel pushes through the rickety screen door.

At first, he doesn’t seem to notice. Hazel is camouflaged, slightly, but the shadows, her black bonnet and dark sleep clothes blending in with the many shadows cast by shelves of equipment and gently swaying privacy curtains. The boy is busy, flitting from cot to cot, scribbling on charts and tripping over chords. He moves so quickly he is blurry, hard to focus on. It takes him almost a minute to stop, freezing in the dead centre of the overcrowded infirmary, and turn to face Hazel. He is tired, she notices. His eyes are darker than the bruises under them; glassy like black labradorite, and widen as they notice her.

“Oh my gods, you’re — you’re Hazel Levesque! Holy moly.”

“Hi,” she says, smiling slightly. “You look busy for this time of night.”

The boy waves a hand, returning to his fluttering — a little slower, this time, though. Less frantic.

“Oh, yes, well. Lots of things to do. Julia’s collarbone was totally shattered, have to keep monitoring that, and there’s a group who got drop kicked into a broken onager, their recovery concerns me, and we’re rationing nectar again, and I swear I’m always running out of bandages, and I keep getting that niggling feeling, you know, when — you’re forgetting something? Important? But of course you have no idea what, and — I’m sorry.” The boy twitches, freezing midway through changing an empty saline bag, glancing back over at her. “Oh my gods, are you injured? Fuck, of course you are, it’s the middle of the night and you’re here, obviously —”

“Wait, I'm completely —”

“Oh, no, you’re fine.” He sighs, a full bodied thing, and turns his attention back to the chart in his hands. “You’ve got an old riding injury ‘round your left patella, though. You should get that checked out.”

Hazel blinks.

She…does have an old knee injury.

It was a riding accident, when she was nine. She doesn’t remember much, only flying, warm wind kissing along her face, bubbling out of her lungs as she laughed and whooped and forgot who she was, what she was, forgot the stones popping up behind her. They couldn’t catch her anyways. And she remembers falling, wind at her back, instead, and she remembers Sammy’s face, and the panic that clouded it, and her mother’s shouting. She remembers cold marble and an oil-slick voice and cool hands on her forehead. 

She blinks, shaking her head slightly. The blond boy has moved past her, now, pacing up and down the rickety cots, trailing his long fingers over bandaged foreheads and crooked elbows. His mouth moves softly and silently, hands glowing along, shoulder sagging, slightly, with every person he visits.

“You’re exhausted,” she observes. 

The boy smiles slightly, finishing a whispered hymn before turning her way. “Who isn’t?” His fingers twitch, in absence of a task, and start picking at the bandage around his wrist, wrapping, unwrapping, wrapping, unwrapping. “Is your knee bothering you? Unhealed injuries last longer for demigods. Especially after battle. Something about unsettled scores, I don’t know. The concept pisses me off so I refuse to entertain it on principle, but I can ease the pain if you like.”

Her knee does twinge, actually. It’s a damp kind of ache, like a headache in a rainstorm, but it's old and familiar, and hardly even registers. It smarts far less than her heart, anyway. 

Gaea’s gone. 

So is Leo.

Leo is gone.

She swallows. “I’m okay. I’m used to it.”

“Three years ago, a man named Michael Moylon went to the ER for a ‘headache’ he’d been ignoring. Turns out he was shot in the head but was used to the pain, so he didn’t bother.” The boy stands starighter, scolding hands on his hips. Hazel stares at him. “So.” He pats a padded bench with a papery cover over the seat. “Let me take a look.”

…Camp Half-Blood will always be, Hazel thinks, a strange, strange place, with strange, strange people. It’s hard to believe she once thought the Apollo-descendants of Camp Jupiter oddities; it’s hard to believe she once found anyone odd. Even outside of Camp Half-Blood. 

Gods, child-eating harpies. She really can’t get over it.

The medic wastes no time. The second she forces her feet to move, settling in on the cot, he is in action, tapping her pant leg gently so she rolls it up – which she does, flushing red and pretending not to see his bit-back smile – and prodding gently at the area, humming to himself. 

“Jeez,” he murmurs, pushing the tip of her kneecap with his thumb until she winces. “You shattered the whole bone!”

“There is no way you could possibly know that,” she argues. “I broke it – gods, I broke it ninety years ago, almost. And it healed.”

“It healed ish,” the medic corrects. “By ish I mean maybe someone tied a bandage on it and you were on crutches for a week.”

Hazel has seen a grand many things, even for a demigod. She has faced Titans. She has faced Giants. She has won, in all of these fights, she has held fallen comrades, she has wept for them, she has wept for decades, cursing and loving her mother in equal measure. She has stood her ground in front of six of the most powerful demigods to ever walk the Earth and defended her brother. She has faced off her own Father, even, and the broken power behind his eyes. She has bent the Mist to her will. She has bent the Earth to her will. It is not cocky to say she is strong, it is not arrogant to claim she has seen all there is to have seen. 

Still, the small pop of her gaping mouth echoes in the quiet, midnight infirmary, and the boy smiles, sideways and crooked, and shoots her a wink. 

“I could tell you how often someone two hundred thousand years ago ate shellfish by looking at a fossilized tooth. Believe me, I know what a shattered patella looks like.”

Modern medicine is a wild thing. Hazel has found that a lot of her friends in modern times have no idea how good they have it, and how wildly medicinal science has progressed in the last century. Aside from machinery and accurate devices, the pure knowledge that is widely available is mind-blowing. Hazel still remembers the looks she got when recommending calomel to a stressed out mother of a colicky baby in a cafe – it’s not like she knew mercury was poisonous. She remembers dosing out her mother’s calomel solutions for her deepest depressions. 

Still. There is a difference between modern medicine and near-divining her past with the barest touch of a bone through layers of skin and fat and muscle. 

The boy hovers wide, scarred hands over her knees, waiting for her nod. As he rests his palm on her skin she sighs, quick and startled like the quick collapse of a carnival tent; the bright, clear heat of his hands sinks into the pores of her skin and settles deep inside her brittle bones, warming a cold she hadn’t realised she’d been harboring. He begins to sing, under his breath, first, but slowly swelling with the night breeze through the open windows, swirling around the climbing plants hanging from the ceiling and weaving through the stone fountain in the room’s corner, pulling her lingering pain away with it. Hazel watches, wide-eyed, as the shadows take shape, chasing the song, of a horse, red-eyed and panicked, and a small little wisp of a thing, weak and limp. With every lilting note, the shadows get softer, and softer, and softer, until they wash away in the fountain’s stream. 

In the silence there is the warmth of the medic’s hand still on her knee. In the silence there is that same warmth, liquid, slowly pushing its way through her veins and blood, settling curled and tired in the marrow of her bones. In the silence there is, for the first time in nearly a century, a stillness, a total lack of the low, pulsating, ice-cold pain that has been quietly pushing from her knee for longer than it hasn’t. 

“Can everybody do that here?” she asks, finally, breathlessly. “Or just you?” 

Hazel makes no habit of the infirmary in Camp Jupiter, but biannual check-ups are mandatory and she is not immune to injury. Still. This is a relief unlike she has ever felt. 

The waves his hand, pulling back, and grins. “I take it you feel better?”

She answers honestly. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt better in my life.”

There is an ache, still, home in the dead centre of her chest, a lump still growing in the back of her through, and should she think too long, her eyes sting. But Leo is not…Leo is missing. And he is troublesome, like his great-grandfather, and slippery, and she has more faith in her friend than in Death. The ache is not overwhelming. The ache is tinged with something spiked and fiery, fueled by the genuine strength she feels in her body for perhaps the first time in my life. 

“Good.”

The medic twitches, slightly, as if he were about to reach out but thought better of it. He nods, instead, smiling, and walks back off to the end of the cots, where a monitor is beeping softly. This time, Hazel follows him, sliding off the bench and peeling the crinkling paper off her backside, stepping nimbly over taped-down cords and kicked-off blankets. She stands behind him, on her tiptoes, straining over his (too tall. People should stop growing after five-ten, she believes, except Frank who is an exception because he is cute) shoulders to watch what he is doing. He explains, around another muffled smile, each number and symbol, pointing to the freshly bandaged chest of the patient and muttering about reckless, thought-averse fools and internal bleeding isn’t real, nyeh nyeh nyeh and when I finally go insane and quit, they will have to beg for six business years to get me back I mean it. 

“Are the other medics this…” Hm. Unprofessional is probably not the word to use, here. “...Spirited?”

The boy raises a perfectly-shaped eyebrow. Hazel flushes. 

“The other medics are eleven and thirteen,” he says dryly. “And Kayla is currently over there –” he points to a snoring girl with dyed-green hair, who is bandaged in six different places and is sleeping upside down – “because she makes bad choices and has been demoted to assistant until I’m less mad at her, so.” He shrugs. “Spirited is what y’all get.”

“I didn’t mean to offend,” she tries. The boy just snorts. 

“Y’r’gonna havta try a whole heap harder to offend me, that’s for damn certain,” he assures. “If I was really gonna quit, I woulda done it two years ago when they slapped the head honcho badge on my shoulder and told me to get crackin’.”

Hazel stills. Demigod life is a – wild thing, she knows, and most have not lived as long as she has, ageing like amber in the depths of the Underworld while the world stretches on ahead. Percy’s face when he realized demigods could live longer than eighteen still haunts her nightmares. Camp Half-Blood is a loud, lively place, that burns brightly over its layers of ashes and yells over the sound of weeping ghosts left behind. That much she can gather. It should not be strange to her for an eleven-year-old medic, or an army of teenagers. Her own camp is guarded by an eight-year-old. 

But this boy still has stubborn baby fat clinging to his cheeks, for all his height. He cannot be more than fourteen. Fifteen, if she stretches. 

The youngest head medics at Camp Jupiter are twenty-two. Regardless of demigod life, skills take time to learn, and stomachs and hearts take years to turn to stone. 

“I’m – sorry,” the boy says, voice crackling like burning pyres. “I’m –” he forces a smile, a quick, strained thing – “I am, uh, spirited. Unprofessional. I haven’t slept in several days and I’m – uh, I don’t like working Austin too hard. He’s still learning, and he doesn’t like healing much, anyway.” He busies himself quickly with the patient he pointed out earlier – Kayla, the thirteen-year-old medic. It is quickly apparent that there is nothing to be done for her, and he stands there, back turned to Hazel, scarred hands twitching above her forehead until they settle, finally, featherlight, like he’s scared a touch will wake her. Like he’s scared a touch will hurt her. 

His shoulders shake, slightly. It’s too dark for anyone else to see the twin droplets, splattering on the corner of her cot. 

Hazel’s chest smarts something awful. 

“Where are the other medics?” 

She knows there are none before he answers. He must know that she knows, judging the careful steadiness of her voice, the fleeting touch of her finger on his clenched fist. She pulls back when his hands begin to shake, worse than before, and his finger worms under the bandages on his wrist, pulling and twisting, twisting, twisting. He stands close to Kayla, still. Hovering, careful. His lips part, and Hazel holds her breath. 

“There were more of us,” he begins, hushed. His dark eyes track Kayla’s snoring. “I was the thirteenth. They were –” He looks up, suddenly, looks over, and the look in his eyes is like cracking ice, like a glacier that has stood for thousands of years breaking finally into the arctic sea and falling under its own weight to the sandy floor. Like the fractured flash of sky between lightning, like the azure glass shards of a Christmas ornament refracting back the twinkling candlelight. “It was so loud in here, once.”

Hazel tries to reconcile that, in her head. This boy standing at the edge of his younger sister’s hospital bed, his younger brother tucked safely away, awake for maybe the fourth or fifth day in a row. I was the thirteenth. 

Hazel knows a little something about unlucky number thirteen. 

“War?” she asks, quietly, remembering something Jason had told her, on guard on the Argo, about a Titan’s battle on two sides of the country. About an army of snake-monsters for them, and something on the other end. Something worse. 

“Slaughtered,” the medic says hoarsely. Another tear traces the path of the first, low light flashing off the sheen of it. “First the – first my sisters, the oldest, then my brother, then – all of them, at once, at the same –” He chokes, on something, on the truth of it or the pain of it or both. Something bubbles in Hazel’s chest, thick and oily, something like horror and pain and hatred; a pit of the same tar that killed her the first time bubbling through her veins and burning the back of her throat. Twelve children. Her throat dries.

“All of them?”

“Every last fucking one,” says the boy, and the pain swells from him so thickly and ardently Hazel is half-sure each ghost is standing behind her, boring into his gaze. “Every last one. I watched them.”

Hazel watched. She held her eyes open for as long as she could when the tar swallowed them, when Gaea dragged them down. Her mother’s kiss burned hotter on her forehead than the boil of the earth exploding around them, and the shine of Marie Levesque’s guilty tears glittered brighter than the diamonds popping like falling stars everywhere Hazel touched. She held her eyes open until the heat dried them blind. She watched, as long as she could, her prodigal mother sink, her beautiful, broken mother die. She had thought she would feel something worse, something like satisfaction. Vindication. Nico told her they hold grudges. She had known it about herself before then. But the pain of her body ripping from her soul was secondary to the pain of realizing, to the pain of finally understanding that her mother suffered, too. Pluto’s wanting had cost them both, and Marie had only barely been able to apologize. She had never been able to make amends. And now she walked, like all souls do, along the beaten paths of Asphodel, reduced to her guilt, to her anger, to her wanting. 

Hazel sits heavily on the one remaining cot. After a moment, the boy joins her. 

“I don’t think it’s worth it,” he admits, quietly. He meets her eyes when she faces him, blue-black in the candlelight. “All – this.”

She follows his gesturing hands. To the bandaged girl, Kayla, to the bloodied, to the sheets pulled over small faces. To the brothers and sisters slumped exhausted by bedsights, tear tracks dried on young faces. To the faded pictures rubbed worn with mourning, gentle fingers. 

They have never been thanked by the gods. 

She’s not sure it would be worth it, either.

“There’s nothing that will bring them back.”

It’s not consolation. It doesn’t sound like it, either; to her own ears it sounds defeated. Agreeing. 

“Do you think they’d even want to be back?”

“Probably not.” She swallows, thinking of Leo. Is he relieved? He’d insisted on being the sacrifice. She hadn’t fought him. She couldn’t blame him for wanting. “I wouldn’t.”

They sit in the non-silence. The medic pulls the bandages on his wrists until they are bruising; Hazel’s fingernails, unbidden, reach up to her lips, pick, pick, picking until salted iron dribbles down her chin, onto her pajama shirt. In the heavy stillness of the twilight there are people coughing, and snoring, and worse, moaning, groaning. Crying. Calling out for their mothers, for their sisters. Birds wail outside the open windows. Cicadas weep. Dryads murmur amongst themselves, sap dripping out of them in swathes.

“I know you’re a big-shot Prophecy of the Seven kid,” says the medic, smiling wryly at her. He sniffles, swiping a hand over his face; as the first rays of sunlight begin to stream in Hazel realizes he is spattered with a night sky’s worth of freckles. “But, uh. If you’re not busy, I could use a hand today. Every day, really. Whenever you’re free.” He exhales. "Sometimes it makes it a little bit worth it."

There is a veritable library’s worth of to-do lists for Hazel to work through tomorrow. Today. She’s a high enough rank that her presence and her direction will be missed. 

Regardless, she smiles back. 

“Yeah.” She reaches for his hand, and he releases his bandages, holding their palms together. “Yeah, I’ll hang out in here today.”

[cryoverlife]

The Seven’s sexualities are as followed:

Leo: hot people (pretty much everyone), he definitely had a crush on everyone on Argo 2 like once even if it was for five seconds

Piper: Who Knows At This Point, anyone can be pretty as long as they aren’t jerks

Jason: thought he was straight and is now suffering cause he’s friends with Leo and Piper (not cause he has crushes on them but because they enjoy shattering his world view by asking him if he thinks *insert random person* is hot)

Bonus for Jason: might have a crush on Leo

Percy: Annabeth, not actually but he has her so he doesn’t actually care about finding out.

Annabeth: suffering (refers to the entire paragraph in MOA where Annabeth thinks about her entire love life and the only thing good about it was like three months), but also Percy cause no way he’s ever leaving her

Hazel: a poor oppressed child who didn’t even know Not Being Straight is a thing until now, has a type for the precious ones.

Frank: honestly the straightest one of the group but at this point nobody actually knows

[cubbihue]

“He knows Timmy will come around eventually. It's only a matter of waiting for his clock to run out. And HP is very patient.” Hey uh.. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN HIS CLOCK TO RUN OUT is he waiting for Timmy to become a full fairy (Pixie?) and when that happens Timmy forgets about being a human entirely?

Sometimes Timmy wonders why he has grudges against certain fairies. Some of them, he can understand- like his dislike of Dr. Rip Studwell. But other ones, like with Cupid, it's a bit of a blur.

He must've been a very very vindictive 10 year old! Ah, well! Timmy's learned that he has to pick and choose his own battles wisely.

And uh. Fighting with the man who decides his paycheck and vacation days is not a battle worth choosing. Talk about a hostile work environment!!

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

[rustyrailways]

These two photos of Jayce specifically, thank you for coming to my ted talk.

[bayetea]

the scene in son of neptune that's like

percy: I feel as close to you guys as I do with anyone from my old life. I hope you trust me

hazel: (kisses percy on his cheek)

hazel: of course we do, we're family now. right frank?

frank (most angry he's ever been in his life): sure

[re-mortal]

forgive me, Progman, for I have sinned. I did not realize Jecka's Rachel may have been an allusion to Rachel Amber Life is Strange until halfway through You Can Fly [...]. I was blitzing through the story too quickly.

Also, belated Happy Halloween to those that celebrate. It's jeckole but pricefield. 3 cheers for Jecka owning a black jacket in canon.

[princessofghosts-posts]

Nico's Powers and Rick way of writing them.

Honestly,I've been wainting to write this.

We all know Nico powers:

Can manipulate the shadows and travel in them (Umbra-kinesis);

Can sense someone's death and soul;

Can summon ghosts and talk to them;

Can summon skeletons that obey to his orders and fight for him;

Can use dreams to send messages;

Can unconsciously split the ground and create cracks or Underworld's openings;

Can turn someone into a ghost and make them forgot their life and ability to speak;

Can turn someone into a skeleton;

Has influence on the dead and can evade them when he has to;

Can create earthquakes (not major ones like Percy);

Technically has Geo-kinesis powers too (like Hazel);

Can summon zombies to serve him;

Can conditionate the CJ's lares speaking ability by forcing them to shut up;

Can influence the dead ones with his mood;

Death-touch;

(If I missed some feel free to add)

Other than this,you need to remember that his title as Ghost King give him some more leverage,and his sword is an uniqueness in the world that give him the ability to suck someone's soul in it.

By only this list you can tell that Nico is extremely powerful,and he is still younger than Percy,with a weak physical body (depression and ED do some wonders to you-) and wasn't never "officially trained" like him since he wasn't around camp much. But he still pulled insane acts even without being 100% ok most of the time.

Nico powers,differently from Percy and Thalia,are extremely versatile. While those two can use whatever source or form of water/lightning to fight,they can't do much outside of their fathers's domains. And then you have Nico. Nico that can use his powers to travel around the world and sending messages with a mental link,other than use them to fight. People always talks about Percy controll over all types of liquid (even poison or the Underworld's rivers),but there is still water in them,so it's normal for him to do so. Thalia can use lightnings because it's normal for her to do so since those are Zeus's main sources of power. But Nico's powers are more than just controlling the dead,he can manipulate dreams (something that only the Hypnos cabin can do if I remember correctly) and can use geo-kinesis too,even tho not as much good or frequent as Hazel (before she started to work with her mist affinity). He can do it all.

I'm not trying to pull the "Nico is more powerful than Percy" argument here,but more focusing on Nico's versatility usage of his powers. And Rick made a mistake here with him,that he realized later and tried to minimize.

You see,when you have a powerscaling system,you usually take the main character as the "default": it's from them that you start to build it so other people can understand where others characters stand,compared to the MC,on the scale. Most of the time,people want their MC to grow stronger after every fight,starting from the bottom,untill they are the most powerful character in the story. It's a format done everywhere (anime,movie,comics,fanfic,books,ecc...) and Rick Riordan also used it with Percy. And when you have as MC the "most powerful character ever" (in this case the most powerful demigod since Heracles times),you need to be careful with your side characters,especially when the author doesn't want them to outshine the MC. For this reason,most of the time,they are either weaker than them or have extremely excessive drowbacks. A good example of this is Jason: Rick introduced him to us as the roman counterpart for Percy,but made us understand that he wasn't never at Percy level of power. And when you have a "side" character as Nico,adding to the fact that he's most of the time the wild card for their victories and always know everything,you have a big problem.

Riordan made it clear that no one (for now) can surpass Percy in term of abilities. But he still went out of his way making Nico's powers more versatile than the others. Logically,he should have been stronger than Percy,especially because death cannot be stoped and it's part of everyone life,but canonically it wasn't going to happen since the MC is Percy. Riordan realized in a second moment that his powers were too much and decided to make sure Nico was always held back by something from going full out (like Jason).

Nico is the only child of the big 3 that,if he use so much of his powers,has extremely horrible drowbacks even when he shouldn't. I could understand during MoA-BoO events in HoO,he was either dying or disappearing into the shadows because of his kidnapping and Tartarus,and still had an extremely draining task to finish. But from HoO to ToA there is a big timeskip (I think 6 months or more but I'm not so sure) where he should had all the time in the world to heal and having back full controll over his powers. But he doesn't. Nico still faint after shadow-travelling,even tho after his trip with the statue he should have been stronger and not having problems for a normal trip. Which sucks,especially when Rick most of the time make him pull some jaw-dropping power-play that give you the full picture on how strong he really is.

I don't think Percy had so many downgrades with his powers,I never saw him almost fainting from controlling the waters. He get tired,yes,but that's it. Thalia has more restrictions because of her fear,but I also never saw her having so many problems after using her powers (after she went with the Hunters we never see her in general anymore). Neither did Hazel with her geo-kinesis powers (before Rick decided to make her learn mist manipulation). Jason is a whole mess because he faint every day when he gets hit by a brick,even when he isn't fighting or using his powers (Rick didn't do him justice either). It's only Nico that has so many negative effects.

And the fandom can explain it,in a canon logic,with: "He's s still young,he will have time to grow stronger." (I agree) ;"He wasn't never in a good physical condition so it's normal that he has this many negative effects." (Even dying he was still able to curse someone to literally becoming a ghost) ; "He was malnourished and depressed,since he didn't take care of himself before he still have problems,wait for him to be healthy." (Again,even in those conditions he still pulled insane stunts). But,outside of the narrative,Riordan totally nerfed him because he realized that he wrote his powers too powerful and useful compared to Percy's,and since he couldn't have his MC outshined,he made sure to slow Nico in any way possible.

In BotL and TLO there are 2 scenes that,for a long time,I thought I was the only one to ever have read them since no one talked about them.

In the end of BotL when Percy get out of the Labyrinth and went with Rachel to see the coffin,Nico created an earth barrier (or something closer to it) to help them escape form Kronos's attack. He never did that after it,and I never saw people acknowledge that scene so I legitimately thought that I was imaginating it. Which was strange since it came right after the famous "Did you just throw a blue brush in the eye of the Titan Lord?" scene,but no. It really happened and Nico did use the earth at his liking. After that Riordan decided to never bought it up and Nico never manipulated the earth in that way (he still split the ground a couple of times) again.

In TLO after Nico went to free Percy from the dungeons,they escaped the palace and went to the Styx. During their escaping Nico glared at the guards,while growing weaker and weaker with each one,and they ignored them. Again,since I never saw someone talk about it I genuinely thought I was remembering things wrong. Especially because it was part of the whole "Betrayal" plot that everyone know. But again,it wasn't the case,Rick just decided to never bring it up again. It was the only time Nico did something like that. Someone can say "Well,those are the royal guards and their boss is his dad they would never go against him." but the guards were against Nico,if he didn't do whatever the fuck he did,they were going to tell Hades about their escape. So,again,Rick realized he gave him a powerful trick and then hoped that one one would remember it after he used it one time.

All of this shows that,even if he is good at writing certain things,when it comes to others topics (like power-scaling,Tartarus's trauma and many more) he just can't write well and try to put patches on the holes,without having success. But that's for another post that I will do.

Rick lack of continuation in his work,and he needs to decide what the hell he is going to do with Nico,because the guy himself is a contradiction that needs to be solved. And if I see someone else say that he is weak because he continue to faint,I'm gonna crash out very very very bad since it's Rick's fault. Nico has grown enough in his power to stand tall and use them without having majors problems (if he abuse them,then of course he is in big troubles). He isn't anymore the 13 years old kid that was dying during a world-ending trip after days of being captive by the enemy,and Riordan needs to acknowledge it and move on from that.

[justaz]

My personal hc? Zeus has demigods frequently and Hera is enraged (rightfully so as goddess of marriage), Hades has demigods on occasion and Persephone is understanding since Hades only takes lovers during spring/summer when she’s away so she forgives him, and Poseidon (canonical whore of the three brothers - worse than Zeus) has demigods on the regular but the agreement between him and Amphitrite is that she is made aware as soon as the baby is born and she has all rights to go out and have a demigod of her own to even the playing field.

[samthecookielord]

Idk if im gonna go anywhere with this i just like designing the outfits

[bugwolfsstuff]

Nico on day 1 of knowing Lou Ellen: I promise Lou Ellen will not be a problem. We will not let her turn people into pigs anymore or handle projectiles, potions or card games unsupervised.

Nico on day 100 of knowing Lou Ellen: We have armed Lou with a dragon.

[trashfr0g]

Did someone say Hook siblings????

[livwritesstuff]

boston pride is today so here have an edited repost from when i walked in the parade last year

Steve is getting boring in his old age (forty-four, almost).

It was inevitable, he supposes when he looks back, and he likes being boring. 

He likes the steady routine of the life he and Eddie (married for seven years, now) have built with their three daughters (four, seven, and nearly ten, a notion Steve is choosing to ignore because there’s no goddamn way Moe nearly has an entire decade under her belt already), and he doesn’t find himself making attempts to mix things up all that often.

Naturally, Eddie is the one to suggest they make the trip into Boston with their daughters for the annual Pride parade, and when he does, Steve isn’t automatically inclined to agree.

Look – Steve knows it’s important for kids to see the world and do new things and all that enriching shit, but maybe he still bears some of the scars from keeping a semi-feral pack of teenagers alive amidst the eldritch hellscape of their hometown, and it’s not like they don’t keep themselves entertained at home – Hazel had finally got the gist of Go-Fish not too long ago and that’s been a whole new ballgame Steve is perfectly content to continue exploring.

In the end, however, the logical side of him (and Eddie’s ever-persistent badgering) wins out, and come mid-June of 2011, they all make the drive into Boston to see the parade.

It doesn’t take Steve long at all to acknowledge that it was a good idea. He hadn’t been to Pride in many years (again – he’s boring in his old age), and he’d forgotten how much fun it is – a true celebration of love and happiness in the face of a lot of fucked up shit and all that. The parade’s pretty good too (definitely a few floats he hopes the girls are too distracted chasing after candy to notice and ask questions about later, but only time will tell), and so is the festival afterwards. It ends up being a really great time for all of them.

Of the whole day, though, Steve’s favorite part is the trip home, a drive that should have only been thirty minutes, but turns into nearly two hours with all the traffic on I-90.

The girls are still riding the sugar rush of an afternoon’s worth of lemonade and fried dough and candy thrown from parade floats (Hazel might be succumbing though, if Steve’s quick glances in the rear-view mirror at the way her eyes are drooping closed are anything to go off of), and it seems as if the day’s contagious joy had followed them into the car. Robbie and Moe have been asking a lot of questions – mostly chatter about what floats were everyone’s favorites and who got the best face paint until Moe, perceptive as she’s always been, hits them with, “What’s Pride for?”

Which turns into, “Why do people think it’s a bad thing?” and that becomes, “So how did you and Papa fall in love?” at which point Eddie, who’d been fielding their daughters' questions so Steve could keep his focus on the stop-and-go highway traffic, launches into a dramatic and involved retelling of how their relationship had begun nearly eighteen years ago.

“So I told him that I liked him and what do you think Papa said?” Eddie eventually asks as he approaches the end of the story.

“What?” the girls ask with eager smiles and wide eyes.

“Nothing,” Eddie says ruthlessly, a wicked grin on his face.

“Alright,” Steve cuts in over the laughter coming from the backseat, “Let’s not be dramatic. I said something...eventually, and it wasn’t even that long later – four hours tops.”

“That’s right,” Eddie concedes, “And then we all lived happily ever after and all that jazz.”

“Good,” Robbie says, “’Cos if you hadn’t, today wouldn’t happen.”

“Hate to break it to you, sweet pea,” Steve replies, “but I’m pretty sure Pride would still happen even if Dad and I weren’t there for it.”

“We wouldn’t be here," Moe corrects him, "All together.”

Steve blinks.

Jesus Christ, these kids are gonna be the death of him. Can’t drive the damn car if his eyes are misting over, can he?

“Yeah,” Eddie says as he reaches over to curve his hand around the back of Steve’s neck, “Yeah, bug, that’s true.”

And thanks goodness for that.

[daemonskitty]

Matthew Gray Gubler has the prettiest, most kissable lips I've ever seen in a man in my whole life. And his nose is so beautiful ugh. And his eyes, oh my goodness, his eyes they're like so so damn beautiful wdym. And his hair, Idk what he does, but omg. His tummy, I love his tummy so much, I wanna bite it (in a lovey way!!!) so bad ugh. I love his style, is so unique. I love his soul, I love his heart, I love his mind, all the creatively that's insanely amazing and yk like I love Matthew Gray Gubler, I love him so much.

[nobodysavemysoulitsperfectlyfine]

(The kind of sigh that's more like the gasp that comes after running for the first time in months)

I love multishipping

[bayetea]

there are many things about hazel's povs that have an intensely de-racialized vibe to them (read: divorced from the black girl experience) but I think any black person will tell you that the most obvious sign is the complete lack of attention paid to her hair

like firstly:

she's from the 1930s her hair was definitely getting permed and straightened (it was not acceptable to just wear your natural hair out back then. optics + cultural assimilation/you'll be hard pressed to find photos of black american girls with unstraightened hair in that time period unless they're from like..... harlem)

I do believe that marie was straightening it for her For A Time but then she became more neglectful and stopped so hazel had to do it herself. I'm almost positive that hazel wouldn't have even been permitted to set foot in her school building without straightening it because that's just how much of an expectation it was

ok she comes back from the dead. what's she doing to her hair now bc it's not just gonna be cutesy effortless curls falling over her shoulder no matter what the length is

how does she feel about living in a time period where natural black hair is more accepted (read: more, absolutely not fully)

there are no black people around her At All. in fact she's around a lot of white people on the argo (+nico) so that would probably be giving her some intense feelings of double consciousness (look this term up if you don't know what it means) and that would inform how she feels about her hair

theoretically she ought to be wearing her hair in braids for simplicity's sake but I think it's more likely that she would cling to what she knows (perming/straightening) because it's not easy for a 14 year old girl (PSA hazel is 14.5 in hoo not 13 btw 👍) to go from assimilating to deeply-ingrained white hair beauty standards to just proudly wearing a distinctly black hairstyle all by herself

mind you black women and girls can do whatever they want with their hair and straightening/perming it does not always/have to come from a place of self-hatred or whatever but in this particular case back then straightening one's hair was political And a survival tactic. it was as normal as brushing your teeth. it was enforced through dominant cultural messagings about the Absolute Necessity of conforming to white conventions of beauty. if you don't understand then think of it similarly to how you'd think of 1930s women needing to be perpetually dolled up and modestly dressed in order to be considered "good women" and anyways I'm just saying that this would be a lot to unpack for a 14 year old girl so hazel's probably just continuing to do this impractical thing (straightening her hair all the time) like 60% out of habit and 20% out of shame and 20% she doesn't know what else to do

something something about a missed potential character arc regarding all of this and in general there's so little mind paid to race in hazel's povs which is just ridiculous to me because a black girl from the jim crow era should have at least a few feelings about where she fits into modern society even if that society is camp jupiter. rick demonstrates his capacity to talk about how his characters feel about their race most notably in the kane chronicles so I don't think was too much to ask for. see this quote from an early son of neptune chapter:

^ like....... hazel's feelings of out-of-place-ness are There in the text and important to take note of when understanding her character (note that she's been there for like a year already and she still feels like she doesn't belong) but the emphasis is always put on her Being from a different time or Being undead and is never put on her out-of-place-ness regarding her race as a black girl from segregation times who is literally so out-of-place in this weird post-racial camp jupiter society. it feels like such an obvious thing to consider so its glaring absence really bugs me when I reread her povs and it bugs me when her hair is never talked about by extension because It Matters

you might be thinking "well she had a lot going on and she's not a superficial person maybe she just didn't care what was going on with her hair" and my response is simply that Black girls don't get to "not care" about their hair it is not the same thing as a white person going to school with bedhead it's not the same thing At All (if you aren't black then chances are you've never actually seen what untouched black hair looks like in the morning), especially when it's been beaten into your head for your entire life that your hair is ugly and you have to "do something to it" for it to be acceptable (and again...... she's from the 1930s so that feeling is magnified like 50x over). remember that perpetually dolled up modest 1930s woman I mentioned previously. picture her time traveling to camp jupiter of all places in 2010 and struggling to drop all of her makeup/hairstyling routines and internalized misogyny and conceptualizations of what women are "supposed" to be. this is the kind of fascinating character exploration that we really missed out on with hazel (and tbh regardless of her race she was never believably written as someone from the 1930s. I don't think rick even really tried to be honest)

you might also be wondering "how was rick supposed to know/attempt to portray any of that" and then my second answer is that If you're going to write a character who is not the same race as you then you should do some research and we have the internet now so research has never been easier 👍 this would be especially important to do if that person is a poc from the jim crow era I think! (he could have at least googled black hair 1930s)

anyways what I choose to believe (this is pure fanfiction) is that during hazel's first year at camp jupiter (remember that she was there for about a year before son started) nico would have helped her figure something out after observing her distress over her hair c: like they both secretly watched youtube videos on black hairstyles circa 2010 and then they got attacked by monsters for using a laptop (neither of them know how to use a laptop but he's trying his best for her) but then after killing them he helped her do her hair as something she likes that is easy to maintain <3 (I could also see reyna doing this because she surely knows a thing or two from her spa days)