  As Nico pulled away, Will noticed tears forming in his eyes.
  “What’s wrong, Nico? Was it not good?”
  “No! No, it was great. Really great. I just…I don’t know. I…I really like you. A lot. I have for a while now. But…. where I’m from….”
  “Hey, let’s talk in your cabin, okay? We can warm up inside, and we won’t have to worry about anyone else coming by.”
  Nico nodded.
  Once they went inside, Nico sat on his bed with his back against the wall and Will sat facing him.
  “I…I don’t like to think about it.” Nico said after a while.
  “Think about what?”
  “My life before I went into The Lotus Casino. I mean, I don’t like to think much about my life at all, but those memories are the most painful. But the thing is, I don’t want to keep secrets from you. I don’t want you to be in the dark about everything. I want… I want at least somebody to know my story.”
  “Nico, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. All I’m going to say is, sometimes talking about things help. So if you do want to talk, I’m here. I’m here for as long as you need.”Â
  Nico was silent for a minute. Then finally, he took a deep breath, and in a shaky voice, Nico told his story.
  “I was born in Venice, Italy on January 28th, 1932, right at the end of the Great Depression. My mother’s name was Maria di Angelo, and I had an older sister who was already 2. Bianca di Angelo. It wasn’t a good time to be alive. There was a horrible dictator named Mussolini. He killed so many people, and sided with Hitler. Even then, many people were sent to concentration camps. Jewish people and….gay people.”
  Nico’s eyes got teary. “Nico, you can cry.”
  “But boys weren’t supposed to cry.”
  “Things are so much different now. Yeah, some people still frown upon it. Stereotypically, girls cry more than boys. But it’s way more accepting.”
  “Like being gay?”
  “That’s exactly right.”
  Nico wiped his eyes anyway.
 “Boys were supposed to be tough. They were supposed to be the ones to be the head of the household, control the woman, have the job. A woman having a job was frowned upon, and they were limited in choice. Every girl was expected to grow up, get married, and have kids. Bianca complained about that to me all the time. She would tell me if she didn’t want to marry and have kids, she wouldn’t do it. But at least she had her fair share of crushes on people. I didn’t. From a young age, I realized there was something wrong with me. While all the boys at school talked about crushes, I felt…left out. Isolated. I was focused on playing pirates. I was obsessed with pirates back then. When they would ask me who I liked, I would tell them I didn’t know. They always looked at me funny when I would say that. They would talk about what kind of girls they were into, but I didn’t know. It probably seems weird to talk about girls so young, but that’s how it was. Most women were married at 18, and many even sooner. Anyways, as I was saying before, many gay people were sent to concentration camps. I found out what being gay was when I found out people were sentenced to camps for it. I went to a catholic church as a kid, and one of the things they taught you was that being gay was wrong. A sin. It was disgusting, and if you were then you were sick and you would go to Hell. So naturally, I believed that. I don’t know what Mama and Bianca thought about it, they never said. But because everyone around me said it was wrong, I thought so too. There was a man a couple of houses down who was caught kissing another man. I was playing with Bianca in the yard when one of the neighbors called the police. I watched as the two men were forced into a car to then be taken to a concentration camp. They were young. In their 20’s. The one that lived there used to come by to talk to Mama sometimes. He was really upset. After they left in that car, I never saw them again. Mama came out once she realized what was going on and made us go inside. She had a pained expression and she shook her head sadly. Many people I knew were sent to camps. I didn’t know where they were going at the time, I was too young. I think Bianca knew. But I didn’t know most of these people died. Anyways, as things got worse, so did Italy. Even though we were safe from the Nazi’s, that didn’t mean we were safe from Mussolini. He murdered people in cold blood. Helped Germany conquer and control other countries. But that was about all I understood. By the time I was 7, it was 1939. Once World War II started that year, Mama took us to America by boat. She told us it was a better place to live because we would have a president and not an evil dictator. We moved to Washington D.C. and lived in a hotel. While all of this was going on, I was having a really hard time in school, even though it was much easier back then. I couldn’t read, which started to become a problem. I couldn’t focus, and I always fidgeted. The teachers all called me lazy, and I was constantly made fun of. I learned in the orientation video at camp that most demigods have what is called ADHD and dyslexia, which is what I have. But nobody knew about those things back then. We also had many many monster attacks, but again, I didn’t really understand what was going on when I was that young. Plus the mist helped hide things.”
  “What orientation film?” Will asked.
  “Um, haven’t you seen it?”
  “No….? Nevermind, just continue.”
  Nico started picking at the holes on his pants. “Okay. Well, while Bianca and I were struggling in school, Mama tried to help us the best she could. She was amazing. She was always so kind to us, she never yelled. When we were scared at night, she would sweetly sing us songs in Italian. The one I can remember the most is ‘Soldatino.’ Mama got a really bad reputation for being single with two children, but she never let that get to her. She worked two jobs so that she could support us, even though she had a very hard time getting hired because she was a woman. She took us to the town of Split, Croatia. She liked to take us places, especially in Italy. But one day, when I was 7 and Bianca was 9, everything changed. It was a normal day. We had just gotten off school, and we were chasing each other around the hotel while a strange man we had never seen before talked to Mama. We didn’t hear what they were saying, but by the looks on their faces it didn’t seem to be anything good. The man also occasionally kissed Mama or put his hand on her shoulder. Bianca told me it was okay and that we shouldn’t worry about it, and I always listened to Bianca, so I believed her. Mama went upstairs, but just then there was a loud boom and we saw a flash. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them back up again, the strange man was using some kind of magic to surround me and Bianca. When I looked around me, the hotel was in ruins. And Mama wasn’t moving. I didn’t understand at the time what had happened. I knew something was wrong with Mama, but I didn’t know she was….gone. The strange man cradled her in his arms, crying. Then a lawyer picked us up. I asked him if Mama was coming with us, and he told me she was dead. I cried so much as Bianca held me against her. Then we were taken down to the Underworld where we were led to the River Lethe and….got our memories erased.”
  “Woah, woah, woah, you got your memory erased?! Why?!”
  “I’ll get to that later. Afterwards, we had no memories of anything. We only knew our names and each other, but nothing about ourselves. I also realized I had a major fear of thunderstorms, though I didn’t know why. Now I know it was probably because of how Mama died. We lived in D.C for a while and the lawyer would check up on us sometimes while we went to a boarding school. Some time later, we were sent to the Lotus Hotel and Casino where each passing day new things would be added, new video games. We thought they were so cool. I met a few different people I became friends with, but things get a little blurry when you’re in there. We thought that we were at the casino for a few weeks, when in reality it was over 70 years.”
  “I heard that Percy, Annabeth, and Grover ended up in there! Did you ever see them? You were really in there for 70 years?”
  “Well, how else would I not be an old man? And no, I never saw them. In a place like that, you don’t typically notice things. You get so sucked into what you’re doing. We might not have even still been in there when they showed up. After what we thought was a few weeks, a lawyer took us out and told us that our parents were dead but they had left behind a lot of money for us. We were sent to a boarding school called Westover Hall in Bar Harbor, Maine. I had gotten obsessed with a card game called Mythomagic. The summer before we left the school we were shocked to see how different things were. At this point we were 10 and 12. The school in Maine was very militant and structured. It was also old fashioned, we were probably sent there on purpose so we would still think we were in the same time period. My grades and Bianca’s grades were terrible. We struggled a lot. We got made fun of a lot still. I still felt like something was wrong with me. But things were a bit different. Once I saw 2 girl teenagers kissing. Some people gave them dirty looks but others didn’t. I was confused, because I thought they were supposed to be taken away for doing that. But they didn’t get taken away. But around now is when my story pretty much started. It was a school dance in December, a few days before Christmas. Bianca and I were sitting on the bleachers and I was playing Mythomagic. At this point, I had all the cards and figurines except for one; Hades.”
  Will smiled. “I remember you playing Mythomagic.”
  “Yeah, well, it was stupid. Anyways, we were sitting on the bleachers when these teenagers walked in. Teenagers I had never seen before. One had brown hair and acne all over his face with a goatee. He had a rasta cap on. There was a girl with electric blue eyes and spiky black hair, and she wore a leather jacket with spikes on it. There was another girl with blonde hair and stormy grey eyes. She was pretty tall. Finally, there was a boy with black hair and sea-green eyes.”
  “Percy, Annabeth, Grover, and Thalia?” Will asked.
  Nico nodded as he played with the ring on his finger.
  “Soon, we were taken by the principal, and he dragged us down hallways. Bianca asked where he was taking us, and I was just really scared. But soon, the green eyed boy came down the hallway with a sword and fought our principal as he turned into a monster. That was when…. I developed a crush on Percy Jackson. He was so brave and amazing. He was like Mythomagic brought to life. When he took us outside and after Annabeth fell down the cliff, we were told by the Hunters of Artemis, who had come in just in time and saved us, that we were demigods and that the gods were real. I was ecstatic. I started asking about hit points and a whole bunch of geeky stuff. Then Bianca told me she was joining the Hunters, and I was so upset. She was abandoning me. I had nobody left. Anyways, what happened next was that Apollo showed up.”
  “Wait, my dad showed up?!”
  “Yep. I had just found out I was a demigod and I already had met Hades, Artemis and Apollo. Well, he drove the hunters including Bianca, and Percy, Thalia, Grover, and me to camp in his sun chariot. That’s when I met Mr. D, watched the orientation film, slept in the Hermes cabin, blah blah blah. In the morning, I was about to go with Bianca because she was going somewhere, but Percy stopped me. He was going instead. I made him promise to protect Bianca, but….he came back without her. The last thing from her was a Hades figurine, which I threw on the ground. As I was screaming at him for breaking his promise, these weird zombie skeleton things were coming after Percy. I knew that I didn’t want anything to hurt him, and so I freaked out. I somehow opened a crevasse in the earth that swallowed them up before closing again. Percy looked at me with wide eyes, but I was running away. I was scared of my powers, but also scared of my feelings. That’s when I stumbled across the Labyrinth.”
  Nico talked about his horrible time in the Labyrinth. How he was consumed by bitterness and hatred. How the happy little boy he was was gone. He burned his Mythomagic cards. His skin paled. How he was manipulated. About everything up to the time when they met up on the battlefield.
  His life story almost brought tears to Will’s eyes. How could someone go through so much pain? It wasn’t fair. Nico was only 14, and he had already lost so much.
  Will grabbed Nico’s shaking hands and looked into his dark brown eyes. Those broken beautiful dark brown eyes that looked about ready to shatter. He thought about how he was a doctor. He was supposed to help people.
  “Nico, it’s my job to heal people. And I’m going to help heal you.”
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