1/2
[He tenses and holds his breath, though he doesn’t know what to expect. He doesn’t want to get his hopes up. His current memories are mostly painful and miserable. What he does remember of his life before Bianca died and everything spiraled downward is distorted and fuzzy, like trying to piece together a television program through heavy static.
He doesn’t regain his lost childhood. Maybe those parts of him are lost down the River Lethe forever.
But Yuuki does untangle a more recent memory. All he really remembered was rage, and screaming, and then seeing the looks on Coach Hedge and Reyna’s faces before he collapsed. It could have been the trauma of the act, or some kind of mental self-defense, or maybe his body gave up the memory because it was dying anyway.
Bryce Lawrence was in front of them, threatening them with execution and torture. He’d called up skeletal soldiers that Nico couldn’t control or destroy – oathbreakers. Nico was fading, his hands transparent and smoky. One more jump through the shadows would end him. And then Bryce attacked Reyna.
It was more the threat to expose her darkest secret to the Roman counsel than the line of blood he left across her cheek that set Nico off. All of his anguish – his pain, his anger, his misery – as well the memories that caused it – his days struggling through the hellscape of Tartarus, the giants who eventually caught him there stored him away in a jar to rot, his confrontation with Cupid, who forced him to expose his own closely guarded secret - poured out of him and assaulted everyone around him. The earth turned black, then white with frost as the temperature around him dropped dramatically. The skeletons Bryce had summoned fell away into ash.
Bryce sank into the earth, clawed at it to escape. Nico ignored his begging. There was no mercy in the Underworld, only justice.
“You’re already dead,” he said. “You’re a ghost with no tongue, no memory. You won’t be sharing any secrets.”
Bryce slipped farther into the earth. His body became whispy and dark, indistinct. His final pleas gave way to a whisper before he fully dissolved into ghost and was swallowed up into the Underworld. ]