Chapter Text
"Can you verify your name and date of birth for me?" The nurse held up the bag and bundle of tubes like a bartender checking IDs. He was cute, the type of guy Nico would sit near in class just to be close enough to see him, with a mess of blond hair and eyes that matched the sky-blue scrubs he wore.
"Nico di Angelo, January 28th."
"Great." The nurse flashed Nico a smile that would have made his heart race if it hadn't already been going about sixty miles an hour. "My name's Will. Have you done this before?"
Nico shook his head, his mouth dry in spite of all the water he'd had that day. Scrubs weren't supposed to fit a person that well, were they? At best, all the nurses Nico had seen looked like they were in pajamas, but this guy made his monochromatic cotton and polyester outfit look downright flattering.
"A first-timer!" Will grinned appreciatively. "We're in a bit of a shortage right now."
When isn't the Red Cross in a shortage? Nico thought, before realizing that Will was definitely still talking and probably telling him something important.
—really good thing you're doing. I really appreciate it." Will smiled, and Nico got the feeling that the last line wasn't part of his official script. “Let’s get this started! Which arm would you like?”
“Right, please.”
"Squeeze this for me, alright?" Will placed a foam stress ball in Nico's right hand. "So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna mark your vein here, then I'll hook you up to the bag, and you're gonna squeeze that ball about once every five seconds until you're done." As he talked, he held Nico's arm in one hand, pressing gently on the inside of his elbow with his thumb. "Getting the needle in your arm isn't the most comfortable, and a lot of people prefer to look away, but you're in good hands here." Another smile. If this were anything but a blood donation, Nico would have sworn this guy was flirting.
Will drew an X on Nico's elbow with a small marker, and Nico did his best not to fidget. "What happens if I pass out?"
"Have you had enough to eat and drink today?"
Nico nodded. Hazel had made sure he'd had a large breakfast and an even larger lunch, and he'd gone through at least three refills of his water bottle.
"Then I don't think you have anything to worry about. It's pretty rare for someone who is well fed and hydrated to pass out, but if that does happen, we'll stop everything and slap a cold towel on your head." Will pointed to a cooler in the corner of the room. "I'll be nearby if you need anything. You're my last customer, so I've got nothing to do but make sure you're comfortable."
"Customer?" Nico wondered aloud. "Aren't you the customer, since you're giving me a T-shirt?"
Will mulled it over, wiping Nico's elbow with an alcohol swab. "If you think about it, you're technically buying a T-shirt with your blood. That makes you the customer."
"That makes me a prostitute."
Will snorted, dropping his swab. His laugh was infectious, and Nico found himself giggling, too, even though the comment hadn't been that funny.
"Oh, jeez," Will said, after both of them had stopped laughing. "I'm probably not supposed to laugh at that, I'm sorry, but that was too funny." He took hold of Nico's arm once more, needle in hand. Nico looked away.
"You ready?" Will's hands were gentle, his voice even more so. "Hold off on the squeezing until I tell you.”
"Yep," Nico replied, trying not to let his voice shake. He wasn't sure he would ever be ready, but he wanted it over with.
Will paused. “Hey, look here.” He pointed to his own face and Nico obliged. “It’s not gonna hurt.”
Nico didn’t think he could have torn his eyes away from Will’s even if he’d wanted to, and he really didn’t want to. Something about the way Will held his gaze kept him perfectly calm, like someone was whispering relax, hold still, it’s alright directly into his brain. He was so lost in staring that he didn’t even notice the sting of the needle.
"Perfect! You can go ahead and squeeze now, every five seconds." Will broke eye contact and Nico regained feeling again, like his brain had just been dumped back into his body. “You did great.”
Even though he knew it had very little to do with him, Nico felt a little bit of pride. He glanced down at his left arm, but quickly decided the weird and uncomfortable mess of red tubes wasn't worth paying attention to.
Will pulled a rolling chair next to Nico's weird little bed thing and sat down, scribbling something on a clipboard. The other nurses were collapsing the beds and packing up large boxes labeled 'HUMAN BLOOD: AVOID EXTREME TEMPERATURES.' One by one they filed out, calling their goodbyes, until there were only a few people, both donors and nurses, left.
"Hey, Will?" One of the other nurses waved him over. "I'm having trouble finding the vein here."
The donor, a woman in her fifties, shrugged apologetically. "What can I say? I've got thick skin."
Will smiled. "Useful everywhere else but here," he quipped, making her laugh.
Looking at the needle in his own arm felt gross, and there wasn’t much else to entertain him, so Nico watched intently as Will felt for the woman’s vein, talking the whole time.
“Eyes on me,” Will said, and the woman’s face relaxed, her eyes glazing over. Nico hoped he hadn’t looked that stupid.
The nurse beside him passed him the bag, and Nico watched in horror as Will put the needle in without looking . His gaze never left the patient’s, not for a second, until the needle was all the way in and he was giving her the ‘every five seconds’ spiel. Nico expected something to go wrong any minute now, there was no way Will had done that accurately, nobody could stick a vein blind. Christ, had Will stuck him blind? He’d been so busy trying to keep himself from drooling that he hadn’t even noticed Will barely looking at his arm. How the hell did he do that?
As if on cue, Will dropped himself into the rolling chair.
“How the hell did you do that?” Nico blurted.
“Hm?” Will raised his eyebrows, like he didn’t know what freakish miracle Nico was referencing.
“When you stuck her, you didn’t even look. You were looking at her. You should’ve missed. Why didn’t you?”
“Slow your roll there, and ease up on the stress ball.” Will put a hand on Nico’s. The gloves he wore were cool to the touch, and Nico relaxed a little. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, you get a kind of sixth sense after a while.” He grinned. “It is bad form to not at least pretend to look. You caught me there.”
“How long have you been a nurse?” Better to try and keep the conversation light instead of working himself up with more questions about how experience made it okay to not look when stabbing people .
“Oh, eight or nine years.” Will pulled a clipboard off of a neighboring bench and began sorting through the papers. “I got involved with the Red Cross in college and joined basically as soon as I graduated.” He paused on a sheet of paper and looked up at Nico. “Where’d you go to school? I feel like I’ve heard your name before, but I know we’ve never met. I’d never forget your face if we had.” A smile tugged at his lips, and Nico’s mouth went dry again. That was flirting. That had to be flirting.
“I’ve got a wicked good memory.” Okay, maybe it wasn’t flirting. Nobody used ‘wicked’ to flirt.
“I’m, uh, still in school,” Nico said when he’d found his voice again. “Gibson.” Even after a year and a half, he couldn’t bring himself to add ‘Community College’ to the school’s name. The people who knew, knew, and the people who didn’t, didn’t need to. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of going to community college, not really. It just didn’t fit with what his father had wanted for him.
Then again, very little of what he did— who he was — fit with what his father had wanted for him.
“Oh, Gibson! My little sister goes there.” Will smiled, and the pride in his voice almost made Nico want to go buy a T-shirt for school spirit, even though the T-shirts were the ugliest shade of green known to man. “That’s pretty far out of town, so we probably haven’t met before. Maybe I saw your name on a roster of hers.”
“Yeah, maybe.” The machine at the side of Nico’s bench beeped, and Will hopped up out of his chair.
“Looks like you’re all done!” He messed with the tubes in Nico’s arm, clamping them off and setting the now-full bag of blood on a table nearby, before taking Nico’s elbow in his hand. “Alright, time to get this out. Look at me.”
Nico met his eyes and felt the same sense of comfort wash over him. Relax, his brain told him again, in a voice that wasn’t his own, but then Will looked down as he pulled the needle out, and it was gone. It hurt way worse going out than it had going in.
“Hold this here, and keep your arm up over your head for thirty seconds.” Will pressed a cotton pad to the inside of Nico’s elbow, and their hands touched again, making Nico shiver.
Even after Will had let him go, his arm still felt cold, and the chill was spreading. His vision grew fuzzy at the edges. The whole room tilted, and then Will was by his side again, steadying him in his seat.
“Easy, now. Don’t go passing out on me after you did so well.” Something soft and wet and agonizingly cold found its way onto Nico’s forehead, and he closed his eyes to stop the spinning. “Uh-uh, keep those eyes open.” His eyelids felt like they weighed about ten tons, but Nico forced them apart. Will stood over him, holding the towel-covered ice pack to his forehead with a smile. “Told you I’d have it handled.”
“Thanks,” Nico mumbled.
“You stay right there, and I’ll get you something to eat and drink.” Will guided Nico’s free hand to hold the towel to his own forehead— damn , that was cold—, and walked off, returning a minute later with a juice box and a single-serving pack of Oreos.
Nico accepted the snack, which felt appropriate considering he was sitting in a middle school gymnasium. Will wrapped his arm in a red bandage.
"The bandage can come off in an hour, but the Band-Aid stays on for three hours." He passed the papers to a passing nurse and grabbed a large cooler lunchbox and a sweater from under Nico’s cot. "Stick around for another fifteen minutes, then double up on fluids for the rest of the day."
With the juice box straw still in his mouth, Nico held out his hand, already cursing his nerves for making him so awkward. Since when was a handshake an acceptable goodbye? Fortunately, Will didn't seem phased, and he returned the gesture with a smile.
His hand was no longer gloved, but the chill was still there, and Nico could have sworn it had gotten colder. When Will pulled back, his smile was still firmly in place, but the retreating hand trembled all the way back to its place at Will's side.
"No strenuous activities until tomorrow," he added with a wink, then turned and walked out of the gym, lunchbox in hand. It was almost four-thirty. If that was Will's lunch, it was no wonder he was shaking.
Weird that he wouldn't take a lunch break sooner, Nico thought, then busied himself looking around the gym at the posters declaring Clearview Cougars: Hear Our Roar! and Congrats Girls Volleyball State Champs!
Fifteen minutes came and went, and, after making sure he was good to leave with a nurse, Nico made a beeline for the bathroom. Doubling up on fluids had its consequences.
The locker room was a standard middle school petri dish, with a row of stalls separated from the showers by a wall of sinks. As he washed his hands, Nico became aware of a sound coming from the other side of the wall. It sounded like someone slurping a Capri-Sun. Nico rounded the corner, his shoes squeaking against the upsettingly wet tile.
" Thit !" The figure on the other side of the wall whipped around, and Nico came face-to-face with Will, holding what did not look like a Capri-Sun and covered in what was definitely not fruit punch.
Nico didn’t have time to react before Will moved— how the hell did he move that fast— around him to block the door. The blood bag—yeah, not a Capri-Sun— in his hand swung, splattering some of its contents onto Will’s pants.
Will hurriedly changed his grip on the bag, throwing his other hand out, as if Nico wasn’t frozen in place. "Thith ithn't what it lookth like," he blurted.
"How is this not what it looks like?" Nico's voice was a little too close to a terrified shriek for his taste, but he decided to forgive himself. "Are you not drinking human blood in a middle school bathroom?"
"Okay, maybe thith ith what it lookth like," Will relented. His eyebrows furrowed. “One thecond."
Nico watched as he ran his tongue over incisors that had not been there fifteen minutes ago, and that were probably causing the lisp that had also not been there fifteen minutes ago.
He should have stayed on the cot longer, because this had to be a hallucination. Will’s incisors were retracting, sliding back into his gums until they were normal-sized.
"I can explain."
"You'd better, because— Oh, my God, is that my blood?" Nico squinted at the bag in Will's hand. He hadn't seen where Will had put his blood bag, and where else would he have had one?
Will’s eyes widened. "No! Absolutely not! You're a universal donor, your blood is way too valuable!" He turned the bag so Nico could see the label had someone else's name on it. "This is a bag from a drive we did about a month ago. Blood is only good for forty-two days, so this wasn't gonna make it to a recipient anyways, and I really prefer A positive because of the benefits, plus it's the most common, so—" He paused his rambling. "You're probably more concerned with why I'm drinking blood, aren't you?"
"No shit. Are you some kind of vampire freak?"
"'Freak' is hurtful, but yes, I am a vampire."
"No, you're not." Nico crossed his arms. "Vampires aren't real."
Will blinked in confusion. "You some kind of supernatural expert?"
"No, but my sister is."
"Who's your sister?"
"Hazel Levesque. She's a witch, and she knows a lot of other witches and werewolves, and she told me vampires aren't real."
Will’s panicked expression faded, and he laughed. “ That’s where I know you from!”
“ What? ”
"Your sister Hazel kicked my vampire ass at BINGO last Tuesday. She's either lying or she's messing with you."
"Wh— No. Hazel wouldn't—" Nico faltered. She would . Hazel wasn't one to lie, but fooling Nico into thinking vampires didn't exist when she knew one personally was something she absolutely would do.
Will glanced at the door. "Listen, Nico, I'd love to explain, but I've got dinner plans. Can I give you my number?"
Nico nodded dumbly, and Will pulled a marker out of his pocket. With nothing else to write on, he scrawled a number on the bandage around Nico’s elbow.
"Okay. You can text me if— if you want." Will backed away, looking nervous once more. Nico didn't say anything. After another awkward beat of silence, Will pulled his blood-soaked scrub shirt off, and Nico almost choked on air.
Will wasn’t shredded or anything, but he certainly wasn’t out of shape. He looked like he could bench press Nico’s entire body weight with ease. Look literally anywhere else . Nico tore his eyes away from Will’s chest, forcing his gaze downward. That’s worse! He resigned himself to staring somewhere off to the side, stealing glances whenever he could.
"Gotta get the sweater— but the blood…" Will mumbled, pulling on his sweatshirt gingerly. Folding the blood bag, presumably so it wouldn’t leak, he put it back into his lunchbox. He looked back up at Nico. “Look, I’m sorry. You weren’t supposed to see that. I promise I’ll explain everything if you just text me.”
“Okay. I will.” Will’s sweater was oversized, so the neckline exposed just enough of his collarbone to make Nico’s brains mush.
The smile spreading across his face, coupled with the too-big sweater and his unruly mop of blond curls, gave him a very dorky and very cute boy-next-door look, if you ignored the blood on his hands, face, and scrub pants. Nico found himself a little too willing to ignore that blood, which was something he needed to work on. Red flags were one thing, cannibalism was another.
“Great. Tell Hazel I said hi, if you see her before next Tuesday.” Will grabbed his lunchbox and headed towards the door.
“Wait.”
He paused, and Nico almost regretted stopping him. If vampires weren’t real, this guy was nuts, and there was no reason to help him.
But if he was telling the truth…
“You’ve still got blood on your face.”
Will’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, damn. Thank you.” He grabbed a handful of towels from the dispenser on the wall to wipe off the red smudges, then caught Nico’s eye in the mirror and grinned. “I’m usually not that messy of an eater, so I appreciate you catching that. I’ll see you around, alright?”
He left without waiting for a response, leaving Nico to wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing. There wasn’t any blood on the floor, but, then again, most of Will’s spit take had ended up on his shirt.
Nico looked down at his arm, which still had a phone number written on the bandage, confirming that he wasn’t going crazy. If he ever found his way out of the twisting halls of Clearview Middle, he was going to give Hazel a piece of his mind.