, Nico wasn't letting go of all the blissful memories of his early childhood, the ones of bubbly laughter and innocent playfulness, the ones he got to relive and cherish in his dream before it turned sour. Not just yet.

He was losing count of every stage of darkness he had encountered subsequent to the first one with Bianca's death, which was the worst one by far. Listening to her scream with defiance, then hack her way into the automaton, followed by a haunting silence, chilled his already curdled blood to the core. As of now, he had already re-experienced his mother's death, a bizarre but scary incident during his lengthy stay at the Lotus Hotel & Casino, the time Cupid had tortured secrets out of him for his friend Jason to hear, and many more.

And now, he was suffocating in the jar from Tartarus. Shockingly, this form of maltreatment wasn't too awful. It felt like a reopened wound that didn't have time to heal itself, so it had never stopped bleeding in the first place. Ironically, it was a relieving change from the panic-inducing sounds he was forced to listen to before: screams from the people he cared deeply for and his own petrified voice as he watched himself suffer.

So he waited in silence and let his mind talk, not his mouth. To lighten up the mood as much as possible, Nico referred to these stages as the "trials of appalment", though he wasn't exactly sure why he found it laughable. Maybe he was slowly going mentally insane, gradually losing his sanity as he sat here, cramped in this container, with no way out.

Nico lost complete track of time. He thought it had just been minutes since he had entered this new trial of appalment, but he felt like it had been hours. He took in a gulp of air, which was now running scarce. Trying to hold his breath and conserve what little oxygen he had remaining, a part of him suddenly wanted to breathe as much as possible to quicken his inevitable suffocation.

That was something the old-Nico would think, though. The new-Nico would behave more like Will: gazing up at the sky, not down at his shoes; focusing on the present; not the past or future; drying the dark thoughts he was drenched in with a towel, not letting them drown him; soaking the sunshine when it came, not hiding from it because it was too good to be real.

Over the past month, as Nico got the chance to really get to know Will, he felt something he had been deprived of for most of his life: hope.

And so Nico swallowed the tiniest molecule of air, probably as small as a pea, and closed off all circulation into and out of his nose and mouth.

Eventually, after what felt like years, his oxygen supply was becoming dangerously meager. He could tell from how each succeeding breath came with increased difficulty. Nico was not sure how much longer he could endure this, even holding his breath for minutes at a time proved unsuccessful in prolonging the unavoidable death.

So this was what he really was doing. Not just staying awake in this jar, not just appreciating the calmness that had overcome him with this stage. Nico was evading death for as long as he could, which for a son of Hades, seemed anomalous to even just try to do so. But he had learned a lot of life lessons with this whole nightmare experience.

For one, living is a Hades lot harder than dying. Nico already knew that; every demigod that ever existed was fully aware of that. However, that doesn't mean one should take the easy way out of life. Sometimes, it pays off to walk the more rough terrain, and Nico was now willing to take that path instead.

It was a strange but pleasant feeling, finally coming to peace with his mind. Although, he was running out of time to truly enjoy it. Nico didn't need a mirror to see that death was etching itself deeper into his forehead. Lines creased his forehead, stretching from ear to ear; his eyelids occasionally drooped, wanting to permanently fall.

Whatever was coming next, he was ready.

That is, until he heard one of the most appalling sounds he had ever heard in his life. It worse than his paralyzing trip to Tartarus, worse than Cupid cackling with laughter, worse than listening to his own grief for Bianca and his mother.

He was not ready to hear a short, pierced cry from Will Solace.