aspect
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Listing Series
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facade by rowanisawriter
Fandoms: Hades (Video Game 2018), Hades (Supergiant Games Video Games)
05 Jan 2024
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Summary
Thanatos looks away, down at the empty bottle in his hand, the indulgence still on the tip of his tongue, so fleeting. “Nectar today, fish tomorrow.”
Zagreus laughs. “What? What does that mean?”
“It means, you’re under Dionysus’s influence today. Promising me nectar. And tomorrow, it’ll be Poseidon. Promising me whatever he can provide.”
Zagreus leans back, squinting one eye, as if trying to keep him in focus. “Weird thing to say,” he says. “I’m only ever myself, Olympic boon or no.”
Series
- Part 1 of aspect
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pantheon by rowanisawriter
Fandoms: Hades (Video Game 2018), Hades (Supergiant Games Video Games)
19 Aug 2024
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Summary
In between escape attempts through layers of the Underworld, the gods press their influence, and Thanatos notices their touch on his relationship.
A series of standalone stories inspired by the gods.
Chapter five: Artemis
His thoughts flicker and race in his mind, synapses firing and misfiring, all rational thought extinguished in Zagreus’s too close presence. He thinks this is what a hare must feel in its final moments, a calmness forced about by the utter chaos unfolding in its mind, and when the hunter silences that chaos—with a hit, with a kiss—it’s a relief.Series
- Part 2 of aspect
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ordinary by rowanisawriter
Fandoms: Hades (Video Game 2018), Hades (Supergiant Games Video Games)
02 May 2024
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Summary
His eyes open slowly. Red and green. Obviously divine. Thanatos thinks that when his eyes are closed and he’s laying in bed like this, he could be mistaken for a mortal, another soul to reap, another dead body someone else is crying over. How dangerous it is to love when death is always a whisper away.
“What makes you think the mortals are doing anything right?” he asks.
“They don’t have time to waste. If they’re doing something with their lovers, it always has to be very important. Special. I want to do that with you.”
Thanatos would normally ignore a request like this from anyone else, but love has made him soft. He sinks into the bed, into the warmth that surrounds him, right up against the churning, swirling, hot blood that runs through Zagreus’s body. “Okay,” he says, “I’ll see what I can learn.”
Series
- Part 3 of aspect
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quiet by rowanisawriter
Fandoms: Hades (Video Game 2018), Hades (Supergiant Games Video Games)
08 May 2024
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Summary
Zagreus pushes him onto his back on the grass, killing more of it. Behind him, his feet melt more snow. The sounds of blades of grass snapping and snow melting and their bodies shifting fills the air and through it, Zagreus whispers, “I don’t like when you’re quiet for so long.”
Thanatos’s hair falls from his forehead. On his back, he looks smaller, less formidable, more like the image of him Zagreus holds in his mind and in his heart. “I told you once before not to take my silence the wrong way… and yet you still try to misinterpret me. Your mind is like a maze. Your thoughts run into each other.”
Series
- Part 4 of aspect
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Summary
Thanatos isn’t sure how long it’s been since they were both young, or whatever young means to gods like them, but it feels like an immeasurable amount of time, he feels like an immeasurably different person and yet exactly the same. He is still serving at the pleasure of Lord Hades and, by extension, his son. He is still wincing at the sight of Zagreus’s blood on the floor. He is reaching, reaching into the space between them now in the sulfuric heat of Asphodel, to hand him the beating heart of a centaur.
Zagreus takes it. Their hands touch during the exchange. Time folds like a thin piece of paper, so thin he can see through it to the beginning, before Zagreus, and now. Now, during or after or whatever this is between them. Always reaching out to try and close the distance, never quite getting there.
Series
- Part 5 of aspect
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Summary
“Our Father, who art in heaven….” Thanatos ducks his head and listens. He tries to imagine the soul of the deceased rising from the coffin, leaving the body behind, rising into the air like a shimmering orb. The act of laying someone to rest, or giving the last rites, has always filled him with a profound sense of peace. Even now, at a funeral, despite the grief that sits in the air, he can also feel the relief of closure from the family, and he closes his eyes and absorbs it now.
He wants this for himself, this closure, this clean end, this putting away of old memories in favor of new ones. But Zagreus stands like a beacon at the edge of the crowd, and Thanatos can’t let him go.
Zagreus, the wayward secret son of a cardinal, unexpectedly returns to the village of Hades after escaping to discover the truth of his parentage. Thanatos, the duty bound priest, tries not to let it get to him. Over the course of two days, Zagreus tags along on Thanatos’s duties of the sacrament of the last rite, while they both seek closure of a different kind.
Series
- Part 6 of aspect
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Summary
The shape of them there, two boys, two sets of broad shoulders, one hand hesitantly reaching, one set of crossed arms, sits in the back of Achilles’s mind like a stone tossed onto a thin stream, altering the course, changing the flow, a change he can’t ignore.
Achilles avoids his reflection, in the west hall mirror and in the childhood friends whose relationship is evolving before his eyes.
Series
- Part 7 of aspect
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Summary
Zagreus looks at him with mismatched eyes. “Than,” he says, his voice almost swallowed by the crash of a particularly fierce wave. “Don’t be afraid.”
A biblical AU with Zagreus as the fallen son, and Thanatos as the archangel that falls shortly after in more than one way.
Series
- Part 8 of aspect
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Summary
This is not a time loop. Some things are a little different. Zagreus takes Coronacht, slinging it across his back. He takes Stygius, strapping it to his waist. He takes the Fists, standing with his arms a little out at his sides to accommodate the size of the weapon. His face is always the same, jaw set with determination, focused in a way Thanatos has never seen before but is getting used to now. He endures his father’s booming, heart shaking voice as it cuts through the heavy tension in the air. He leaves. He comes back, emerging from the pool, shaking his head, and everything is the same again.
Thanatos goes to the surface and looks up at the moon. It’s waning. He goes back to the House. Zagreus is emerging from the pool again.
Series
- Part 9 of aspect
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Summary
“Let me just—” Thanatos takes a breath. One of his hands, the armored one, grips the handle of his sword. The sound of the armor against the metal of the sword cuts through his words, as though to emphasize them. “Let me just work through this, and perhaps you may help me fill in the blanks. But you’re an Olympic god, you dwell in utter ease in Zeus’s domain, drinking ambrosia all day and doing little else. And one day you realize you can die. And so it becomes a game to you. Meanwhile, I am dragged from my important work to take your soul to the Underworld, which I cannot do because you cannot stay dead, disrupting my duties for the day, and now you want me to drink ambrosia with you. Do I have this right so far?”
Zagreus, a perpetually bored Olympic god, finds some entertainment in dying again and again when he learns that the mysterious Thanatos is always summoned to collect his uncollectable soul.
Series
- Part 10 of aspect
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Summary
“This doesn’t make sense to me. Clearly he’s bound to the House. In his long and immortal life, no matter how many times he ends up on the surface and lives there for a year or ten or a hundred or a thousand, eventually he will face a death and just come back down here. So what’s the point in helping him escape? Why can’t he just stay here? Is it that intolerable here? Are we that intolerable?”
Nyx is quiet as Thanatos catches his breath. He doesn’t need to breathe but there is a pressing feeling in his chest, a pressure that eases as he sucks in the still air. He keeps his eyes on the floor, unable to look at her.
“My dear child,” she says. “Your feelings for him run deep. Your anger is built on a foundation of love and friendship. Draw on that instead.”
“I can’t.” To his horror, he can feel his eyes prickle and burn. He swipes at them impatiently. “I can’t feel anything but anger.”
Years and years after Zagreus’s successful escape to the surface, an untimely and unexpected death brings him right back down to the underworld, and shatters Thanatos’s fragile truce with himself.
Series
- Part 11 of aspect
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Summary
The weapon shudders in Thanatos’s hand, anticipating death. “You must hate me,” he whispers, “to keep doing this to me. To keep making me do this.”
Zagreus is still, and Thanatos finds himself leaning in, chasing the warmth. He hesitates. His scythe shakes in his hand again. Impatient.
“I don’t hate you,” Zagreus says, his voice and his face even, determined. “But I will break you.”
Thanatos as the Asphodel boss AU. It’s snowing on the surface, the Phlegethon burns, and Zagreus’s infernal heat slowly melts through Thanatos’s icy resolve.
Series
- Part 12 of aspect