Notes: Um, hello there. How's it going?

So, I feel slightly guilty starting a Rachel/Nico thing when I already have a drabble (oneshot) collection on them I can add to. But I like the pairing, and they've been demanding an origin story for quite a while now. This is (theoretically) where all the potential origin stories go till I can get something I'm actually comfortable with. For some reason, these don't strike me as things which fit in the other drabbles, which are set more or less in the same Universe.

There's just one right now, however. I suspect you should be thankful for that, if only briefly.

Option One: The Roommates Thing

Format: Twelve Facts

1. Rachel barely notices the depressed kid dressed all in black the first time she sees him. That state of affairs changes very quickly once he vanquishes the vengeful ghost, and if anything, she has to work on convincing herself that yes, he was human. Or half-human, anyway.

2. He doesn't want to admit it to Percy, but he really hates the Labyrinth. Too many bad memories; besides which the place is just plain creepy in the way it almost thinks. So he's very, very relieved when the mortal redhead takes one look at the four diverging paths in front of them and calmly walks into the second one with a hurry-along gesture.

3. The Battle of New York is fast and hard and terrifying, and makes her fell entirely out of her depth and almost wishing she'd stayed back at her Dads'. It takes till she spots Nico and is safely in his circle of whirling ice-sword (and Mrs. Jacksons' shotgun and Mr. Blofis' very vocal swordfighting act; the world just kept getting weirder) for her breathing to get back to normal. At this point, anything even vaguely familiar was worth latching on to.

4. He spots Rachel when he's humming his way along a random dark street, and has to blink a couple of times to make sure it's not the mist. Then she bullies a Pegasus (the bossy black one, even) into letting her fly into a no-mortal zone despite him repeatedly telling her not to, and he pinches himself a few times before deciding that being mortal didn't stop you from being a nutjob, and that this sort of thing was better left to Percy because that was what heroes were for anyway.

5. Following the thing with her absorbing a Mummy spirit into her body and delivering an apocalyptic prediction, she's given a blanket, hot chocolate and lots and lots of wary looks. Demigods looking at her that way makes her halfway proud (she matters now) and halfway nervous (oh gods, what had she let herself in for?), and it's a relief when Nico walks over and asks, sotto voce, what it was like to have an out-of-body experience. But she does think they're both glad when she can't answer the question.

6. While Camp was better than before, it still makes him uncomfortable. It didn't matter how many battle tides he'd turned, he was still borderline outcast at the place. The only people he felt welcome with were Percy (who was the best big-sister-substitute he'd had prior to Hazel), Annabeth (who'd come in on a close second), Clarisse (who didn't care how creepy he was so long as he could kick ass) and Rachel (who was sympathetic because she occasionally had it worse than him; people tended to run away when she walked purposefully towards them).

7. When Rachel found herself owning a brand-new apartment, the first thing she wanted to do was get a roommate. Because Percy and Annabeth were a package deal and they sometimes made her sick and because Clarisse was not the most soothing of companions, she was pretty glad when that someone turned out to be Nico. Even if she had to promise him she'd keep Annabeth and her life-organizing ways away from him before he finally agreed to it.

8. He didn't admit it (encouraging a combination of bribe-and-blackmail might not have been the brightest thing to do, after all), but he rather liked his new digs. It was quieter than camp and there were less rules he had to work around. Most importantly, the only person in continuous close proximity to him barely noticed his ongoing extreme affinity to dead people and went up in green smoke at random. Made him feel a lot less like a freakshow, both ways.

9. Her new live-in demigod brought a lot of baggage with him; he disturbed peace by talking to invisible things at night (apparently the ghost whisperer thing wasn't an easy gig), attracted Greek Things (she'd taken to hiding whenever she spotted anyone colourblind outside the apartment), and was focus of a Supernatural Family Soap Opera (she'd tried coaxing the Oracle spirit to hint at the next Nico-Alecto snark showdown, which was one of those things which absolutely demanded popcorn). And while she occasionally complained about the monster thing, she really didn't mind having the interest quotient on her life upped a little.

10. When he was about fifteen, the unthinkable happened- his Dad forced him to attend school. Nico had stared at Alectos' missive and demanded what he'd done to deserve this kind of treatment. Alecto rolled her eyes and broadly hinted at the involvement of Demeter (misplaced concern for his well-being) and Persephone (unadulterated sadism) before vanishing in a puff of smoke. Nico didn't stop spluttering till Rachel sighed and reminded him of her own years in finishing school and (ergo) her own screwed-up manipulative family. While it didn't technically make his situation any better, his misery did love the company.

11. Come September and Nico leaves for boarding school, as per orders from the Underworld. Alone in her lavish three bedroom apartment, Rachel is soon reminded why she went in desperate search of a roommate right after getting the keys to the stupid thing. So when Nico stomps back up to the apartment (muttering about how he was going to kill the next person who called him emo and that this was so the last time he was letting a spirit of vengeance choose his accommodation), she tackles him like Clarisse tackles a practice dummy.

12. While he'd realized he had a crush on Rachel quite sometime ago (about the time he'd started turning turn red at the ears when she ruffled his hair -she tended to absently do that a lot, and never seemed to realize that he didn't usually let people touch him- or the time he'd noticed a distinctive rise in his heartbeat whenever she stomped into the kitchen in one of her nightshirts -which was a lot, since artists had erratic sleep schedules-), it'd never really been an actual issue (because obviously; Oracle of Delphi) until the tackle. The tackle spun his world out of its' axis a little.

End Notes: Uh, yeah. It's a little... open-ended. Possibilities and all that. Bear with me, because something has to sustain my sanity till the forums get back up. XD