Happy National Coming Out Day! Congratulations to everyone who managed to come out, lots of love to everyone who's working it out, and energy and good wishes to those who remains closeted for their own safety. And to all those who don't believe in the closet, who simply don't want to come out, or who don't believe in coming out- you do you, my lovelies! I know I am! Also sorry this story is very, very late. My gay fanfiction writing was interrupted about arguing about homophobia being real on my Facebook status about this national day and how heteronormativity kills- I'm not kidding. This happened to me. Hopefully you'll like that this story happened to you!

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters portrayed below! Also I think I started writing this after Blood of Olympus came out, so this fic is basically back from the dead!

Just Have Me

We win some, we lose some, but there is always some.

-Anthony Liccione

Their first date was in New York City, which Will was rather proud of. Privacy was impossible around Camp Half-Blood, even in the fall when the population went down. If anything, that just made the children of Aphrodite thirstier and more desperate for gossip- especially after how juicy this last summer had been (Jason Grace left the highest seat of power in Rome for Piper McLean, Lou Ellen and Miranda had started going out after three years of anticipation, Percy and Annabeth just might have done it, et cetera, et cetera). Besides, a date who could arrange transport to the city? That was classy. Will kind of hoped that Nico had been at camp long enough for someone to tell him- he wanted to score as many points as possible. Sometimes. Nico di Angelo felt like a literal shadow- you could run as fast as you could, get as close as possible, but would you ever be able to grab on long enough for it to mean anything?

He'd had a vague notion, based on vague tidbits delivered by Mr di Angelo himself, that Nico would probably have a blast and a half running up and down the aisles of antique stores and used book shops. He'd done his homework with Percy and a few other New-York-based demigods, and bought subway tickets from the Stoll brothers in advance to get them there. Sure enough, he and Nico laughed for hours- reading each other lines from horrible paperback romances, Stephen King passages as Mickey Mouse, or children's books while imitating Mr D. They left the store with a copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which they hadn't quite been able to read jokingly to each other. Or at least Will hadn't. And even if he was hallucinating it on Nico's behalf, he liked it. The book hung in between them, held softly in between Nico's fingers.

They stopped for ice cream at a little shop. Nico slipped the book in his back pocket. Will didn't miss the fact that the hand now hanging between them was free. He took Nico's hand when the son of Hades was laughing- making him stop mid laugh.

"What?" Will asked. "I'm not funny anymore?"

Nico cracked a smile, but he didn't laugh again.

He still thanked Will for the afternoon when they got back to camp, smiled, and gave the book back. One particular page, a new poem, was dog-eared. Will could have asked Travis Stoll to tattoo it to his chest that very night.

"One more week," Will said, closing his eyes and sighing. This was the third time Bruce, rhymes with 'brute', son of Ares had punched him while Will tended to a nasty knee wound. If Will would have been less of a gentle soul, he would have been seized with the desire to re-smash his kneecap for him, see how he liked that.

"What's happening in one more week?" Nico asked him, coming out of nowhere. Will wasn't even surprised by these shenanigans anymore.

"Labour Day Weekend," Will said. "Kayla and I are going up to see her Dad. He's going to take us to the Canadian national team's archery range, make us food, show us around town… Are you going anywhere?"

"No," Nico said. "No plans for me."

Will wasn't sure if he could call their first kiss an accident- but the situation had totally been. He'd had a late lunch because of his rounds in the infirmary, and had volunteered to leave supper early to set up the instruments for the campfire. He was in the amphitheater alone. That meant that Nico wasn't supposed to be there. That meant that nobody should have heard Will sing to himself. That meant that Nico shouldn't have come out of nowhere like he always did and said;

"You can shoot, you can heal, you can sing… what can't you do?"

Especially not in that sly, cool voice that seemed to taunt Will to best him at something (anything!). To show him something even better than what he was seeing. Nico di Angelo would be at the Taj Mahal and Will would grab two slabs of marble with his bare hands and knock them together until they turned into a bigger palace. Or he would until Nico told him to stop it because he looked stupid.

"Nothing, once I put my mind to it," he said. Nico looked away. "Here, have you ever played?"

"Of course not."

"I could show you."

"Don't make this like some tacky rom-com."

"I'm surprised you've ever seen tacky rom-coms."

"Persephone gets the Winter blues, believe it or not."

Will burst out laughing.

"So what's so wrong about this?" Will asked.

"For starters, you're trying to make that scene happen where some tone-deaf idiot sits down with a guitar and relies entirely on a musically-abled idiot to put his arms around him and hold and strum said instrument," Nico said.

"Would that be so bad?"

"I don't want to be a trope."

So Will just kissed him. Right away. No questions asked. On the lips. Of course on the lips, if it wasn't on the lips it didn't count- but Will was so utterly surprised and delighted at it, that for a while he wondered how this could be just a kiss.

Nico pulled back for air, but it was Will who looked most deflated- who dropped down on a stool and looked at Nico giddily.

"Don't look like that," Nico said.

"Like what?" Will asked, suddenly panicky.

"Like… like you're so…"

Nico bent down to kiss him again, but long story short it was a lot easier if Nico just sat on Will's lap and so he did. Will didn't have a lot of thought-power at the moment, but if he would have been thinking about anything other than the cheap coffee on Nico's breath- he may have wondered how they had gone from shy to each other's touch to absolutely desperate. Hungrily, sloppily, maybe even laughably (but it felt too good) desperate.

Then the hinges of the amphitheater doors opened and Nico jumped off, hit the floor and pretended to be plugging in an amp.

Will considered it a success that Nico di Angelo sat next to him during a counsellor's meeting.

A week later, when he put his hand on the table and Nico put his on top, Will could have completely interrupted Chiron by screeching to the heavens. Screw you Apollo, Aphrodite is my homegirl!

And when they walked back to their cabin and Will tried taking Nico's hand and Nico pulled away… Will was cursing the very goddess.

"The cool thing about my dad is that if you pray correctly, the bills for art or med school will magically disappear," Will said.

"Nice," Nico said. He looked at the brochures on Will's bed. "So, which one are you leaning towards?"

"I still have time," Will said. "I mean, I'd need a bachelors of science first, of course- so that I would like to stay in New York for since it's close to camp if they're ever short on healers, or if something happens. The dean of medicine from New Rome University approached me during the war and offered me scholarships, already."

"Wow," Nico said. "That's cool."

"Yeah, but I'm really tempted by John Hopkins University as well," Will said. "It's just down in Baltimore, has one of the best medical schools in the country, they're directly related to a major teaching hospital, they have a great pediatrics program…"

Nico nodded as Will went on, looking over the brochure.

The end of the line was while playing Capture-the-Flag. Go figure. Nico and Will were exploring, on a mission to find a daughter of Ares who had sent up an emergency flare. She was new; Chiron figured that she'd just gotten mixed up and gotten lost, but it was pretty important to find her before a monster in the woods did. Will, who was training to replace Chiron as Capture-the-Flag field medic, and Nico, who always sat out Capture-the-Flag but who was just generally good to have when things got freaky, went.

It took them about seven minutes and twelve seconds to bump into a dracanae. Surprise! There had been rumours of dracanae leftovers from the Battle of the Labyrinth colonising the woods, but Will had never seen them. Well, ta-dah! Oh cool, the daughter of Ares was right there too, hanging upside down from a tree. Might as well, right?

"What do we have here to ssssssssee?" It hissed.

"Don't worry about that for too long," Will said, notching an arrow and starting to calculate angles and wind and how much room he really had to draw…

"Ah yesssssss," it hissed. "I can alwaysssssss tell when thossssse of your kind are too far from daddy'sssss sssssunshine. A sssson of Apollo and- what an unusssssual ssssssssmell…"

He had it.

"Don't stress too much," Will said. "Just a son of Apollo and his boy-"

Nico made a choking sound and something big and steel clanged to the ground. Will spun around. In that second the dracanae fled. She left the daughter of Ares hanging, and thank God she did because Will needed something to keep him busy while they made their way back to Camp. He might have bitten off Nico di Angelo's cute little head if it weren't for the importance of treating shock before it became a problem. Fuck.

Once she was safely entrusted to Chiron, Will pulled off his medic sash and tossed it off. He stormed back to camp. He was vaguely aware that Nico followed, but not in a rational way- more like, just enough to hear a fly buzz around his ear.

"Where are you going?" Nico finally asked. Will turned around. He was on the Big House porch. Oh. Too late to stop now. He stepped in and slammed the door.

Nico opened it and shut it behind him. Will crossed the House and made it all the way to the other side of the Big House. He leaned against the porch, facing an empty camp where only the little girl tending the hearth squatted.

"Are you okay?" Nico asked. "Did the dracanae get you?"

"No, but nice of you to notice I was there," Will said. "Did it help that maybe, oh I don't know, I'm always there?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Nico said.

Will took a deep breath. He was going to be patient. He was going to acknowledge that Nico hadn't been around for most of the twentieth century and a sizeable chunk of the twenty-first. He was not going to forget Nico's surprising confession one day, when he'd joked around about being too emotionally crippled for one of Will's joke but froze up a bit when Will had pushed the subject. He was going to remember the little things- how Nico once told him about his Tartarus nightmares, how Nico did hook his ankle to Will's when they were sitting together or sometimes take his hand or stare at Will when he played basketball shirtless or lay down with his head in Will's lap, once, when they were alone in the strawberry fields. He was going to remember that he loved this stupid boy, and that there was a chance -a very good, very sizeable chance- that this boy loved him back. He was going to hope that this boy did. He was going to… Oh fuck it, Will didn't know how to do this.

"I'm from Louisiana where I could get fired from any job I hold and even arrested for being gay," Will said. "My mother would tolerate it, but my grandmother would write me out of her will if she knew I was gay. It's important to me to call you my boyfriend and to be as open as possible with you. I'm sorry, I can't... I can't be in the closet. Not even a little bit. Not for anyone."

"What?" Nico frowned. "No, Will, Will that's not at all what I- that's not why I don't like you calling me your boyfriend, don't think that!"

"I'm sorry Nico, I just don't know what else to think," Will said, eyes grave.

"Okay. Okay, I… I can tell you." He took Will's hands, and squeezed his eyes tight- as if he was about to take a dunk in a saltwater tank. "When you call me your boyfriend, it means I'm yours, right?"

"Right," Will said carefully. "Is that too possessive or something?"

"No," Nico said. "No it's what I want. But if I'm yours, it means you're mine, right?"

"I want that too," Will said. "I… I don't know what it was like in the 1940's, but it's a two-way street, Nico. Takes two to tango. All of that."

"I know, I know," Nico said. "But it just scares be, because if I can have you I can lose you. I don't need to say it poetically, that's how it is. And it's not that I don't trust you, because I do. It's just happened to me too often for it to not be something I think about. I don't have ambition and dreams and a cute idea of how the future will look like you do to cheer me up; all I have is what I know. All I have is now. And it scares me, because even if I always have an escape route and a plan and a trick up my sleeve, I don't know what I would do if something would happen to you."

Will pulled Nico into a hug. Nico had admitted that he could listen and feel out heartbeats once, when Will had brought him on his monthly volunteering trips to the hospital he had hated every second of it. But Will had never told him that thanks to his father's powers as a healer, he could do the same. Nico's entire body seemed to relax and slow down in Will's arm- and that made Will crazy every single time it happened. Which it always did. Nico always relaxed in Will's arms, it was something he now prided himself in.

"If the world collapsed in an atomic explosion, you would survive. If something happened to me, you would survive. In the meantime, just have me, okay?" Will said.

Nico smiled for a single second.

"If you insist," Nico said.

Will pulled back, his hands sliding down Nico's arms until their hands were clasped.

"As your boyfriend?"

"Significant other," Nico said.

"Boyfriend?"

"Partner."

"Nico. Ewe. No. Boyfriend."

"Okay, now you're just being annoying," Nico said. Still, he put a hand on Will's jaw and shifted his weight onto his toes so he could kiss his boyfriend silly.