WPOV

I consume color like it's my lifeline. I wear bright shirts, I decorate my medical notebooks in rainbow stickers, I use bandaids that are the color of the sun on all my patients. I can't help it; after losing the ability to see color for a few days, I know exactly how much it hurts to lose this beautiful thing.

Nico doesn't use colors that are quite so bright, but he's doing the same thing that I am, even if he will never admit it. He starts wearing dark greens and blues and reds—not quite as bright as my yellows and pinks, but colorful nonetheless. I haven't asked him if he lost the ability to see in color when he was lost in the shadows—would he even know? Was everything black and white there anyway?

Once he's healed from the infirmary, we spend a few days never leaving each other's side. We're still a little on edge, and sometimes when I look over my shoulder I'm worried that he'll look too pale, or that the next time he shadow travels, he might not come back.

Judging by the way he walks everywhere, even when it would be easier to shadow travel, I think he's paranoid, too.

Hanging out together everywhere does have the added benefit of getting to know each other extremely well. I tell him about what it was like to grow up bisexual in Texas. He tells me what it was like in the Lotus Hotel. We share stories from our childhood—of games we used to play and foods we used to hate. No detail is too small and no feeling is too large. We share it all together.

About two weeks after getting released from the infirmary, we're baking cookies in his cabin. I like it because he usually comes to the Apollo cabin—I so rarely get to visit his.

"They smell good," he says, and a smile has been stuck on his face for the last half-hour. His whole cabin smells like vanilla now, but the countertops are an absolute mess. While the cookies are in the oven, I try to start cleaning up ingredients.

"You smell good," I shoot back at him, and he rolls his eyes, but he's still smiling.

"You know, some people would consider that a weird thing to tell me." He joins me cleaning, and I bump his shoulder. He bumps me back.

"Well, some people would think it's weird that you regularly sneak around behind the cabins, so maybe we're even."

"Yeah. Maybe we are," he agrees. When I catch him staring at me a few minutes later, it's with such fondness that I have to look away. I'm sure my entire face is red. I rub the back of my neck.

"Why don't we do this more often?" I ask while trying to clean the spilled flour off the counter. "It's so nice."

"Make cookies?" He comes over with a trash bag and helps me scoop the flour into it. "I would make cookies with you every day. You were the one that said that's not healthy."

I watch as he tosses the eggs shells into the trash bag too. Then he grabs our mixing bowl and uses a spoon to scrape some of the remaining cookie dough off the bowl and into his mouth. He glances at me to see if I'm going to scold him for risking salmonella; I would be a hypocrite to scold him though, because I'm grabbing a spoon to do the exact same thing. He grins.

"I don't mean making cookies," I tell him as I scoop some dough. "I mean hanging out at your cabin. It's nice to get the whole cabin to ourselves, don't you think?"

The smile melts off his face, and I regret asking. Maybe it was something personal that he hadn't told me yet. I just assumed he was trying to be polite by not making me walk all the way over here all the time. Apparently, I misjudged the situation.

He sets his spoon down and gazes at the mostly-empty bowl of cookie dough. "I don't really like my cabin."

"Okay," I say slowly. "Is there...a reason for that?"

At first, he doesn't answer. His spoon taps against the bowl. When he finally looks back up at me, he says, "It's kind of sad, isn't it? I finally get to see in color, and almost my entire cabin is just shades of gray. It's like nothing ever changed. If for some reason I lose my ability to see in color someday while I was in this cabin, the only way I would know is that the tiny amount of red on my bed would be gone. Everything else would be exactly the same."

I...did not expect that. I glance around his kitchen and dining area, and he is absolutely right. Everything is shades of gray. The only items with color are the ingredients we're using and a few gifts that I had bought him—a candle, a Mythomagic poster, a fake rose. (I considered getting him real roses, but I figured he would be too upset when they die. The fake one will last despite his terrible green thumb and general death-exuding aura.)

He changes the subject again after that—telling me how excited he is about these cookies. But I can't get that moment out of my head.

I show up the next day with paints. I had to sneak out of camp to do it; Chiron wouldn't approve a quest to Home Depot. I think Nico would approve; he's been telling me to embrace my rebellious side.

He opens the door to find me with a wheelbarrow full of paint buckets. I tried picking colors that match his aesthetic, but I threw in a few bright ones, too. I'm hoping he'll let me use one or two of the bright colors—I'm hoping it will remind him of me.

He grins when he sees all the paint—and together, we make his cabin into a piece of art.

I love seeing him happy. He takes the lead on deciding which colors will go where. He tells me to make the kitchen the color of evergreens, and the living room gets navy. He makes the bathroom lighter with the argument that the small space needs a way to stay bright—we paint it mint green.

His bedroom is last. I beg him to let me paint his room, and he agrees without hesitation. I grin at him—this is exactly what I'd been hoping for.

"Just don't make it ugly," he calls as I give him a kiss on the cheek and then hurry to his room. 

I pick out colors with caution—I don't want to mess this up. I know it's just paint, but clearly this is important to Nico if the monochrome room was so upsetting to him. I want to make it mean more than just paint.

I have to do multiple coats, especially on the accent wall. I ban Nico from going into his room until I'm done, so he does touch-ups on the rest of the cabin. I don't see him for hours because I'm so focused on my work, trying to get it perfect so that there are no uncovered spots anywhere. I've never been great at things like this, but painting a wall isn't the most difficult. I remember painting my old bedroom when I was young—I was helping my mom when we still lived in Texas. I remember she told me to use smooth vertical strokes. I'm finishing up the final coat when Nico calls from another part of the house—somewhere near the entrance, I think—that he's going to the mess hall to grab dinner for the both of us.

When he gets back, the paint is drying, and I'm grinning at Nico's walls.

"Can I come in my room yet, or am I still banned?" he calls, and I can hear him setting down food on the small dining table in the other room. "Also, I grabbed you a barbecue sandwich. Not sure if it holds up to Texan barbecue or not—you'll have to be the judge of that."

I'm so excited to show him his room that I don't even cave to the temptation to eat dinner first. "You can come in—your room is ready."

Nico's footsteps pause, then head toward the bedroom. He pauses in the doorway, and then hesitates in the doorway to his bedroom while he takes in the walls.

My heart is thundering in my chest—I think it might be echoing in here, I swear Nico must be able to hear it—gods, I hope he likes his room. His room is a simple square with four walls. Respecting the likelihood that he would want a darker color rather than a bright, attention-attracting room, I painted three of the walls a dark purple. The final wall is a light yellow, the color of the sun.

"It's us," he says, and his smile grows. "You painted my room to make it us."

"Do you like it?" I ask. "I can redo it if you think it's too much."

"Shut up, it's beautiful and I love it," he says, and then he strides forward, grabs my face, and kisses me.

I smile against his lips, my hand on his chest, and he's so warm. Gods, I love making him happy—I want to do this every day for the rest of my life. I never want it to stop.

I break away from the kiss for just a moment to say, "It's so that even when I'm not at your cabin, you have a piece of me."

And he pulls me closer, closer, closer, and I think I've made him happy again—it's an adrenaline rush. And I am happy, too—because we're soulmates, and he wants me, and I want him.

Word count: 1647

A/N: I split the epilogue into two, so you actually get a bonus chapter! The next chapter will be the end. See you there!

Yours,

Sunny