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There are a lot of problems in Icarus’ life. Some of them are directly related to the stress of being a university student trying to make ends meet; some of them stem from ghost baggage, several millennia old. If the latter category, the specific, here-and-now problem often starts with either a lecture from Apollo or some friendly bullying from Helios.
Today, it’s Helios, pelting Icarus in the back of the head with a snowball as he trudges through the snow on his way back from a shift at the library.
He’s on his motorcycle-chariot, whose motor is rumbling as it idles. Helios is grinning at him. “Get on, loser, we’re going sledding!”
Icarus gives Helios his deadest dead-fish stare. “Sledding? Really? You really are just a big five-year-old, aren’t you?”
“Five myrietes old,” Helios corrects him, and grins when Icarus frowns in confusion. “But yeah! Hurry up and get on!”
Icarus groans. “Helios… I really should be studying…”
Helios throws another snowball, narrowly missing Icarus’ crotch. “Listen, kiddo, you can either climb on yourself or I can tie you up and kidnap you again, your call.”
The thing is, Helios absolutely will do that. It’s not an idle threat. Icarus slumps and makes his way over carefully. “…You really enjoy that too much,” he says.
“I don’t enjoy it too much!… but yeah, I was kinda hoping you’d resist a little more,” Helios leers cheerfully at him as he climbs on the back of the motorcycle and clings tightly to him. It’s feeding the god’s ego to hold onto him like this, yes, but Icarus knows by now that Helios is gonna ride way too fast, and probably off-road. And as he’d anticipated, there is no sign of a helmet or any other safety equipment anywhere.
Helios drives slowly and responsibly through the city streets, getting Icarus to let his guard down. But once they get out to a stretch of road with no other cars around, the Titan abruptly gives a yell and makes his chariot roar at top speed, making Icarus shriek and grab tightly to the leather jacket.
At the end of the streak of speed, the motorcycle does a completely unnecessary, stupidly dangerous wheelie through a blazing ring in the fabric of space before them – the portal, to the Space Between Worlds.
Icarus has somehow gotten used to being here – sort of. It’s ceased to shock, anyway, though he still gets nervous. The gods use this space to travel and perform the majority of their godly tasks, or so they claim. Icarus feels uneasy, though, being here on Helios’ motorcycle. He guesses it’s no more or less safe than Apollo’s chariot, or Athena’s. But without walls around him, there’s a feeling that he could fall off at any time… and here, he might fall through the stars forever… if the gods choose not to catch him, again.
Would that be better, or worse, a fall that ends quickly, with pain and drowning?
He keeps a firm grip on Helios’ jacket as they fly through the inky blackness, and through another portal.
The daylight is glaring after the Space Between Worlds, and there’s the brief full-body flinch as he’s suddenly smacked with real cold – far colder than what they’d just left behind.
Helios’ chariot’s engine dies down to a gutter as they drive through drifts of snow with a godly disregard for the obstacle of traction – oh, actually, it’s been transformed into a snowmobile. A godly disregard for the permanence of objects, then.
Apollo is nearby, wearing extremely fashionable winter gear and inspecting his fingerless-gloved hand intently.
“Hey, Apollo! I brought Mop-Head!”
Apollo looks up. “Oh, excellent! Hello, Icarus. I was just taking a look at the snowflakes. We didn’t often encounter Chione the snow goddess, when we were in Greece – she was somewhat remote from us. I didn’t realize her artistry; these flakes are quite lovely.”
Sometimes the gods bring Icarus’ attention to the natural world in unexpected ways. “Hi, Apollo… Uh, yeah, they are, aren’t they? They say that each snowflake is totally unique, too.”
“I’ll have to compliment her artistic integrity.”
Icarus is about to ask how often they did see Chione, in the old days, but the question is lost as he attempts to disembark from the snowmobile and sinks into unexpectedly deep snow – he loses his balance and falls face-down into snow that completely buries his body in wet cold by at least a foot and a half.
Helios squawks in laughter. “Icarus, shit! Did you not notice there was snow here?!”
Icarus sputters as he struggles to push himself upright, out of the snow. It’s almost to his waist! With the way Apollo and the snowmobile were set upon the snow, there was nothing to indicate it was deeper than a couple of inches. “H-how the hell would I know how deep this was?!”
“Luckily the snow cushioned your fall,” Apollo tsks, pulling him upright. The god gives him a critical glance and then sighs. “You aren’t appropriately dressed for this weather, Icarus. I thought we’d spoken before about your disregard for your health.”
“I was dressed just fine for walking home in the city,” Icarus complains. His face is a little red; he chooses to chalk it up to the weather, rather than the way Apollo is holding him effortlessly and eyeing him over.
“I suppose that’s fair. Well, you’re a long distance north from where you started. Helios decided on this place after careful consideration, for its remoteness – Helios, you said this was Yukon Territory, correct?”
“Or Alaska, maybe.” Helios shrugs, already hopping off his chariot and dismissing it.
Apollo closes his eyes and concentrates; Icarus finds himself wearing an extremely heavy snowsuit, scarf, and hat; a little more reminiscent of the kid from A Christmas Story than Icarus really cares for, but the sudden warmth is welcome. He firmly ignores the way Helios is snickering at him, and is glad the ridiculously excessive face covering is hiding his face.
“Thanks – oh!” He startles as Apollo scoops him up bridal-style and begins walking off through on top of the snow.
“There is an area here that we had cleared out; the snow isn’t as deep. If Helios had more sense, he would have taken you there first.”
“I wanted to show him our snowmen!”
“Oh – yes, all right, good idea.”
“You’ve been out here building snowmen..?”
“And I did some heli-boarding!” Helios boasts, swaggering alongside Apollo. “I was gonna bring you, Mop-Head, but I remembered about your thing – ” Helios is referring, of course, to Icarus’ acrophobia/ basiphobia, as a result of falling to his death in his previous lifetime – “…So I heli-boarded by myself because some of us were busy staring at their hands.”
“I was critiquing art,” Apollo replies loftily.
“So you’ve been out here for a while, it sounds like?” Icarus asks. He files away for later consideration, the fact that Helios did actually remember Icarus’ thing. “Don’t you two have jobs to do?”
“Of course. But The days are shorter in winter, so we’ve had more free time.”
“But… it’s only winter in the northern hemisphere…”
“Yeah… the northern hemisphere is kind of where we are right now, Mop-Head.”
Sometimes Icarus is forced to take stock of his life and realize that, against all imaginable likeliness, he’s arguing with two Greek gods about whether or not it’s possible that they either are the sun, or drive it across the sky every day.
He tries not to let the annoyance show on his face, but his effort apparently fails, because Helios and Apollo are nudging each other and grinning. They love these conversations; nothing entertains them more than watching Icarus try to figure out how their bullshit ‘metaphysical astronomy’ works.
“Look, Apollo, he’s getting mad again!”
“I’m not mad,” Icarus says, testily. “It just doesn’t make sense. What about the sun in the southern hemisphere?”
“First of all, as Helios pointed out, we’re not in the southern hemisphere, hmm?”
“And it’s night there, anyway! C’mon, you know better than this, the sun is a day thing.”
“Then why are you both here instead of up in the sky?!” Icarus bursts out, making them both laugh out loud.
“Metaphysically, we are,” Apollo says, not bothering to hide his amusement as he uses that word again.
“Yeah. In the metaphysical sky, we’re working hard.”
“But you’re not! You’re here, bothering me!”
“What, you think we can’t multitask?”
Icarus scowls and throws both hands into the air in frustration as they laugh at him again. “Fine. Whatever. Have your fun.”
“Oh, we are,” Apollo teases.
“Aww, quit sulking, Icarus! C’mon, look! Here’s our snowmen!”
They’ve arrived to an open area where the snow is cleared to only a little higher than knee-deep, as Apollo had said. From the looks of it, the snow was all used to create a couple of massive snow-sculptures, easily thirty feet high.
One is a very Calvin-and-Hobbes-esque collection of several crude but evocative snowmen – one giant, roaring monster in the process of terrorizing two cowering, normal-sized snowmen, one with dreadlocks and the other with basically a bobcut, while a third normal-sized snowman with spiky hair charges bravely forward towards the monster.
The other sculpture is a very incredibly detailed statue of Icarus, wearing that skimpy Greek chlamys Apollo loves (his privates are, blessedly, covered – it seems that both gods are adjusting their approach to seducing Icarus). Snow-Icarus has a few more muscles than real-Icarus ever will, but the face is startlingly his, a perfect likeness, as he gracefully stares upwards into the heavens.
Not for the first or the last time, Icarus really hopes that the Google Earth satellite isn’t prowling immediately overhead at the moment.
“You guys… really have too much time on your hands,” he observes, staring flatly at the curve of his own ass, wondering how much time Apollo spent on this.
“Mine’s the best, right?? It’s got so much action!”
Apollo sighs heavily. “I’ll pretend the difference in skill is a matter of aesthetic choice; you’re clearly trying to tap into a kind of primal/archetypal aesthetic. At least one hopes this in intentional. And yet, the clear falseness of your assemblage is laughable at best, though perhaps you address this yourself in the choice of material in relation to the form. Snow, after all, is impermanent, which implies that your preposterous scene is an ephemeral moment of wild imagination.”
Helios groans. “Do any of those words even mean anything? Sometimes a thing can look the coolest even if it’s not ~perfect~! And your statue is made outa snow too – ”
“I like them both,” Icarus lies quickly, hoping to head off another argument. He knows by now that Apollo’s snooty art critique was mostly just to needle Helios, but the natural progression of the argument is to point out that the snow-Icarus is impermanent too, and that implies that Icarus won’t be young and… unrealistically beefy and handsome forever. Which is, well, true. He doesn’t know if Apollo spends any time thinking about this fact or not, but he doesn’t want the sometimes-moody god to have to address it here and now. Icarus isn’t sure he’s ready to hear their thoughts on the matter.
So he claps his heavily-mittened hands together with some difficulty – the snow suit is extremely thick – and says “Weren’t we going sledding?”
His distraction works; the gods hurry him out of their makeshift art gallery and out to the slopes…
…Which are considerably steeper than Icarus had been imagining.
This is clearly a mountain somewhere, tall and imposing, the slope at least hundreds of feet long, possibly as long as a mile, and seeming to Icarus’ basiphobic mind as being almost a 90-degree angle to the ground.
The gods give each other a brief glance and take either of his hands of one of their own.
“We have a three-man toboggan that Hermes stole for us,” Helios says.
“We’d both be with you the whole way,” Apollo adds.
“You wouldn’t leave the ground even once!”
“It would be considerably less dangerous than riding on Helios’ chariot; if you survived that, this will be as peaceful as sitting on your couch at home, in comparison.”
“Hey!!”
This joke manages to bring a reluctant, only slightly hysterical bark of laughter out of Icarus. “Isn’t that… kind of a hyperbole? I thought you were the god of truth!”
“Exactly.”
“Hey!!”
They coax him onto the sled. Icarus is sandwiched in the middle; Helios, with the smallest mortal form, is in front ‘so you can take in the view without Apollo’s hair in the way.’ Apollo and his beautiful voluminous hair are behind Icarus. He doesn’t want to admit it, but their presence does settle his nerves somewhat.
Only somewhat, though, and the descent down the mountain is completely fucking terrifying and exhilarating and fast, so fucking fast!! The view of the snow-covered trees and the mountain peaks on either side fly past in a blur. Icarus has no idea how (or if!) Helios is controlling the toboggan, or how he plans to stop it. He clings tightly enough to the Titan that he must be crushing a few ribs. Behind him, Apollo is holding firmly to Icarus, his legs squeezing tight around him.
The incline tapers off eventually, allowing them to drift to a gentle stop at the base of the slope, among a scattering of pines.
Helios twists around to grin at Icarus. “Well? Here you are; ya made it to the other end! What’d you think?”
Icarus looks at him stupidly and mutely for a moment, still too shocked to answer right away; then he slumps back against Apollo and laughs in a relieved release of nerves. “Haha! Y-yeah, it was – it was all right!”
Helios whoops and gathers Icarus’ legs in his arms, hauling him onto his back as Icarus clings to his shoulders. “SWEET! Bring the sled up, Apollo, we’re goin’ again!!”
He races back up the slope, with Icarus on his back, running atop the snow and up the incline faster than could ever be natural. It almost feels like flying. Icarus is laughing by the time they reach the top.
They go down the slope a few more times, always with Icarus in the middle, taking turns on who gets to carry him back up.
They eventually leave him under the trees, briefly, with instructions not to peek, while they make a surprise for him.
Icarus lays back in the snow. He doesn’t have work or class, but he should probably be studying. That’s what he always used to do when he had any free moment: working, constantly, on something. He’d never have gone out to play in the snow, before these gods showed up and started basically kidnapping him.
The… metaphysical sun is starting to set; or perhaps it only has gone down behind the tallest mountain peaks. It’s getting noticeably colder, but his snowsuit is sufficient for now. Still, he’ll have to tell the sun gods it’s time for this fragile mortal to go back soon.
He lies there, breathing in the sharp air, scented by pine and snow, and makes a few snow angels for no other reason than he’s already lying down.
They come back for him after about ten or fifteen minutes. They both do a double-take at the snow angels, but make no comment, choosing instead to blindfold him with the extra length of his scarf and lead him to their surprise.
When they remove the blindfold, he sees, in the last of the setting sun, that they’ve made a to-scale replication of Apollo’s temple at Delphi, out of snow. Complete with ‘Know Thyself’ carved into it.
“A reconstruction,” Apollo says, looking wistful.
“Minus the stray cats,” Helios adds.
They wander through and the gods share a few stories they think might interest Icarus: about Python; about various historical figures that wandered through Delphi, including Aesop; about Helios’ favorite stray cat, named Gobsmack by the Titan.
Eventually Icarus begins shivering, and as the sun gods can’t release their heat without melting the snow around them and possibly causing an avalanche, they gather him up and take him back to his apartment, where Icarus makes his contribution to the snow day by making hot chocolate for everyone.
He dreams of flying that night, and it’s the first time in – well, ever, that it’s not a nightmare.