Lev complaining from across the room makes it hard for Nico not to smile, but he manages to suppress it after a momentary struggle, considering what he thinks the circumstances are.

At least until Abby starts actually talking.

He looks up at her like he'd been avoiding until now, surprised. Despite being, you know, fourteen, he hasn't spent much time around adults (who weren't gods or similarly mythical, and therefore similarly blasé about the health and safety of teenagers) for the last few years, and the last time he was regularly around them he'd been in military boarding school where hollering was basically the only form of communication. Even if Abby hadn't done that so far, he'd assumed this would start it.

Instead, she's trying to check up on him. He sits down onto the bench next to the mug like his strings have been cut. "I was dead?" he says like it's a question, even though it's not. He just has no idea how to actually feel in the aftermath of it, other than guilty because Lev got hurt. "But I made myself... manifest. As a ghost. But that's too cold, for uh— mortals, I guess." Probably for other demigods who aren't children of the Underworld, too, but that's needlessly complicating the issue.