Chapter Text
I begin to sing not of Melenor, the goddess with the beautiful hair, but of her son with the delicate ankles, Lance.
Like his mother, goddess of grain and bounty, Lance had a complexion warmed by sienna starlight, and a breeze of seasonable air swept through the meadow in which he sat now, resting, tousling his already unkempt, umber tresses. The grass had been sunkissed to a comfortable warmth, providing a soft bed for him to relax upon. He’d been resting flat on his stomach, but rolled over onto his back to turn his gaze upwards towards the heavens, towards home.
If he could fall in love with a day, this might be it. Skies endless blues, great cumulus creations of Shiro and Adam’s image too gaussian to blot out the sun, but present enough to provide a speckling of white over the zenith. The day had an unbearable, profound sort of potential to it — so much could be accomplished in one of these human days. Taking in a deep breath, Lance smiled, felt his chest swell and fill with the taste of flora and fauna in the wide open green, dirt and pollen and nature in its purest state, all mixed together with the soothing, sun-warmed midday air, honeyed and cozy like a cup of tea.
It was heedlessly, unabashedly beautiful -- picturesque, even -- and, as the god of flowers, of the god of springtime and of growth, beneath and around him, all the surrounding landscape was lovely for his company.
It could be the last time he saw the sky like this for a long time. He tried to commit the scene to memory, even if he was, like, really bored.
Like, fucking out of his mind bored. It was awful, because he felt guilty -- surely he should soak up every second of his time here, admire the sunshine and the breeze for how beautiful it was, but he’d been at that for hours now.
It had been down almost seven human days, and Lance was badly missing Hunk and Pidge, trapped as he was by the will of his mother in the mortal realm. There was some sort of drawn out affair going on, a delegation or something, involving several higher-order beings from the Underworld, so it was without surprise that she had decided to hide him away to be amongst the mortals for a few days.
Even the pantheon wasn’t deemed safe in her opinion -- she wanted him to stay on a separate plane for the entirety of their visit.
That said, Lance would be the first to admit that there were plenty of worse ways to spend his time. He quite liked Earth; he enjoyed blending in beside the humans, to flirt with their pretty women, with their soft curves and demure smiles, or to catch the eye of their broad-shouldered men, with their strong hands and lustful gazes. But, even so, such base pursuits became tiresome and tedious.
He always had to be so careful around mortals.
Melenor had nearly cast out a plague upon the harvest on the last city he’d lingered in too long, after getting barely involved with a mortal there. And, granted, he’d seen more than his fair share of gods and goddess get caught up in romances with those who resided on Earth, and they seldom ever ended happily, so it’s not like Lance didn’t understand his mother’s concerns… she, just, took it a bit far, in his not-so-humble opinion. Once, he had literally taken a girl for a walk, and his mother had explained to him that the resulting famine that struck that human village afterwards had just been a ‘coincidence’.
The first leg of his time away had gone over quickly, when he had enough to do as ways of distraction. He’d stopped into Athens during a busy day at market, just to watch the people bustle and chatter, and he’d even gotten wind of some tempestuous rumors -- evidently, there was a mortal woman who was so lovely that she had men and women favoring her even over the goddess of beauty herself, Honerva. Lance was always curious about these occasions that drew comparisons between the mortal and immortal, so he’d traveled to the kingdom to see the human and judge for himself. She was a princess, apparently, the youngest of three, and she was beautiful… but, she also looked a lot like his mother. Uncomfortably so, in fact, so while Lance was willing to acknowledge the fact that she was indeed an image of beauty, that was the extent of his interest in the girl. It was like trying to picture if his Mom was attractive and just -- ew, no.
That whole excursion had taken him about three human sun cycles, and he knew he was already pushing his luck in spending so much time in the cities. Whether it was just to observe and socialize or to attend some festival or another, Lance was forbidden from intermingling with mortals for too long a time or else Melenor would scale back his already limited freedoms, so he hadn’t even bothered to risk anymore metropolitan exploration.
After another day or so spent admiring the sea, Lance had elected to spend the remaining three or so days doing… well, this. Wandering the valleys and hilltops of various planes of land, sometimes resting, other times walking, tumbling, laying down, climbing trees or exploring burrows. Now, he’d been literally reduced to counting the blades of grass, one-by-one, or tracing scripture or sculpture in the clouds. There wasn’t anything left to do, and he hadn’t a clue how much longer he was supposed to be here.
Go to Earth, Mother said. It’ll be good for him.
How can a place be ‘good for him’ when he wasn’t even allowed to do anything there?
“Ugh,” he groaned, letting out a low sigh in an attempt to coax his muscles into relaxing. His shoulders did manage to unwind, if only marginally, and he allowed his eyes to slip closed.
He tried not place blame on Melenor, for her intentions were only with the interest of keeping him safe. She was his mother, and to harbor bitterness towards her made his heart feel dense, burdened by an uncomfortable, unwanted weight.
He yawned, blinking his eyes closed in the comfort of the sunshine; the warmth wasn’t exactly like being with Hunk, just an impression of the real thing, but Lance enjoyed it anyway.
Thinking about his mother sometimes just made him exhausted.
She was a... bit protective.
Melenor’s maternal whims did not have anything to do with whether or not one was mortal or immortal. There were lesser deities who would float in now and then for a specific reason, and Lance could hardly tell one from another -- at the mention of someone coming around the Overworld, his mother would invariably tuck him away somewhere, whether it be in clouds or gardens or mountains or, for longer occasions, leave him alone on the surface world. While he wasn’t supposed to interact with humans for too long, they were, for the most part, harmless.
Stay home, here, safe, but be ready to leave in case of visitors; go to the surface, but don’t interact with the mortals if you can help it; don’t wander, for you could get lost; don’t go anywhere with someone you don’t know.
Love freely, but do so distantly; bring things to bloom, but never to blossom.
It amounted to Lance spending a lot of time like this -- that is, alone. He did not mind his own company, or that of the grass that thrived in the surrounding meadow, or the tickle of a breeze over his robes, but how long could that last, really, before he wanted for a little more? Avarice wasn’t his domain, though.
Lance had just started to doze off, trying to drink in the last of the bittersweet nectar that was his freedom in this realm, when the sound of something diaphanous, like a low ringing bell that continued to chime, began to buzz over the pastoral scene. Bleary eyed, Lance sat up in search of the noises’ source. At first, he mistook it for the slight ripple over the air that accompanied a rift between the Overworld and the mortal realm, and a resulting tremor of excitement fluttered in his veins as he wondered who had come down for him. Would it be his mother, finally telling him that the “threat had passed” and he was fine to return home? Or maybe, had Hunk or Pidge come down to help him to pass the time? Or perhaps Shiro himself was coming down, as he had always loved humans and their funny customs, much to Adam’s frequent chagrin.
Out, across the stretch of the meadow that had become his sanctuary and his prison, Lance watched a rift start to form in midair, focusing on the source of light as it began to coalesce into a stable divide between realms, and he considered getting up and racing across the open field to greet whoever might appear, but the thought had scarcely occurred to him before his anticipatory smile faded.
The colors were all wrong.
The shimmery blues or brilliant golds that Lance loved so dearly of the Overworld were absent, replaced instead by this miasma of inky black and splotches of sickly purple.
After a moment, the rift stabilized and with a sudden stab of anxiety that was like a hot knife pressed right into his abdomen, he watched as a boot stepped through the black, effervescent distortion, finding solid purchase on the grass below, then another, and the accompanying body and head and -- that rift is from the Underworld holy shit holy shit oh my god fuck I’m so fucked --
What was that? Some sort of… of daemon? Something Lotor had fashioned just to fuck with him?
Lance’s thudding heart, blessed be the immortal thing, was working overtime, and the back of his neck pricked in something that was neither fear nor curiosity, but some providence between the two. It was unnerving, and a deeply embedded instinct that warned danger was screaming at him in protest of his own inertia. This being was clearly dangerous, powerful, and sure, perhaps he was just as immortal as Lance, but this person was of an entire different caliber of power.
They’d emerged from the rift at an angle, so Lance could only see their profile -- he was quite sure they hadn’t even noticed him laying down in the grass a few dozen paces away.
The figure was like some sort of charcoal rendering, totally out of place in the freeing midday sunshine, a backdrop of bright skies and lush fields expanding out around them. Everything about the being was either black or white -- their hair, dark, messy as it framed their jaw and extended past their shoulders; their skin, ashen, complemented by great twin curves of black horns that protruded from their hairline. Their shoulders were broad, and tendrils of icher clung to him like a second skin from stepping out of the rift, like a sable shroud that fluttered around his torso.
Whatever it was -- Lance was content on labeling it a daemon, at least for now -- it began to look around almost… what, skeptically? That was close, their gaze shrewd as they craned their neck to examine their feet, then their own hands before finally squinting skyward. The unfamiliar, nefarious being released a big breath of air, and the disruption in space-time behind them began to seal shut.
In his imagination, Lance pictured Mother, already frantic and dragging him away by the wrist, but he didn’t move, found he didn’t really want to move.
What was it? Why was it here? Was it here for him -- surely it couldn’t a coincidence that they popped out here, of all places? Perplexed and intrigued, Lance found himself too transfixed on observing the mysterious presence to do much but watch. He’d had nothing to do for days, and he knew better than to flirt with danger like this -- he really did -- but it was just exciting that something was finally happening -- could you really blame him for staying put?
Sure, this daemon-thing could probably whirl around and murder him on the spot, but he’d be lying if he didn’t find that sort of… thrilling? It certainly explained the rush of adrenaline pumping in his veins, eagerly awaiting the other to do something, to turn and perhaps notice him. What would they do? Should Lance say something? Would they be violent if he called out?
And, gods above, why did that idea serve to entice him? Lance’s throat felt dry, unwilling or otherwise unprepared to deal with that train of thought at the moment.
Lance’s question was answered not a few seconds later, and let it be said that it was with no small amount of self-control that he kept from gasping audibly in surprise because the daemon threw their head back and started fucking screaming at the top of their lungs.
“SHIRO, WHAT THE FUCK?”
And as the curse was lost on the breeze, the interloper’s voice emptying out over the wide open field, the dark figure kept their head turned up to glare at the clouds, like they’d somehow personally offended him.
It took exactly three seconds of silence for Lance to lose his composure, and any latent anxiety that had rattled his nerves had been banished as he fell flat back into the grass, positively shaking with the force of his laughter. He gripped his sides and giggled like he’d never experienced humor before, while all around him, the grass had begun to turn to flowers, little red hycthincia sprigs and bright white camilla blossoms began rising up in patches, spreading outwards with him at their center. It may have been because he had been so heedlessly pent up for the past few days, or because the guy's dark mystique had been utterly ruined by the latter’s cursing at the sky like a lunatic, but, whatever the case, Lance could barely keep from outright cackling.
Oh, and the chagrin of the daemon; it only made the whole thing funnier. His annoyance was clear as sunshine on a cloudless day, visible even in the jarring image that was his eyes, pitched entirely black from sclera to pupil like a depthless fountain of ink.
It wasn’t surprising when he’d started to march towards Lance in response to his laughter, looking angrier than Alfor on a bad day, and Lance wasn’t stupid. He knew, could feel it in the core of his being, that he should be afraid, could feel his muscles tense with the deep desire to get the hell out of there and run until he wasn’t even in Greece anymore, but the whole abrupt, cataclysmic hilarity of the situation had rendered him little more than a giggly mess.
Brushing the near-tears from his eyes, Lance peeked through his lashes, breath catching in the chasm of his lungs when he realized the daemon was now right in front of him. He’d moved silently, quickly, and the change in proximity was alarming.
He maintained eye contact, though, if only because Lance was damn stubborn. Alfor’s glares were sharper than broken glass, and if Lance had learned not to wilt beneath the intense gaze of the god of war, then he sure as hell wasn’t about to submit to some random daemon who butted in on his alone time.
Lance could not have told you with confidence how long they stayed like that, glaring at each other, how long they were stuck in that silence that fell more assuredly than the sunset sinking over the western horizon. He was immobilized by his own terror and thrilled by his bizarre curiosity, and even more confused by the reality of the discord of the two.
In the surrounding grass, unconsciously, bright purple baubles of aconite had begun to bloom, mixed with the warm, familiar undertones of red oleander petals. A small webbing of ivy with white sprigs traced up his toes and feet, tickling and taunting him with the urge to laugh in spite of finding himself in the midst of such an utterly terrifying situation.
Eventually -- it could have been minutes or days, he really wasn’t sure -- the daemon broke the silence. Their voice was coarser than gravel and harsher than hail.
“Where is Shiro?”
They were no longer screaming, which was both reassuring but also noticeably less funny, and the change in tone made the remainder of Lance’s amusement vanish. “And what are you? Some kind of nymph?”
“A nymph?” He leaned forward in the grass, quirking a brow with something between amused and annoyed by the insinuation. “Uh, no. I may be pretty, but I’m not useless, thanks. As for Shiro, seeing as you seem to know Shiro, you probably know that he’s exactly where he always is.”
Lance raised a hand over his head flippantly, gesturing the skies, and the stranger seemed to get the message. Their eyes followed Lance’s hand up, and down again, until Lance rested his palms back into the grass behind him to support his weight. At that point, his gaze returned to Lance’s face.
Perhaps, he considered, these beings from the Underworld truly were as wicked as the rumors suggested, because this one had been here for not yet two minutes and Lance was already feeling rather… corruptible. That was the only explanation for why he would ever notice the strong lines of his torso, or the slight sculpt and curve of his shoulders and arm muscles.
Shit, was he really that impressionable? Maybe it was for good reason Mother kept him under such constant surveillance.
No, no. No. This was -- it was just some silly, perverse interest, only because this was something he had never seen before. That was all. It completely accounted for why his mouth was so dry and stomach twisted into at least three different knots.
What about the fever pitch of his pulse beneath his veins? Oh, well, that -- that was just, er, he was just… he wasn’t nervous, per say, just a little, well, unsure. After all, Mother would be furious if she found out that he had been within a stone’s throw of something or someone from the Underworld, and he’d never actually seen a daemon up close, so… so it was, just, normal to be a little on edge, right?
Yeah. Definitely.
“So…” Lance coughed once the silence had stretched on to the point of awkwardness, and he felt a grin tug at the corner of his lips with the daemon’s eyes flashed to his face. It was difficult to explain, looking into all black depths, but Lance had a sense of where he was looking without need of watching his pupils. “Do you usually scream when you leave the Underworld? Or was that a one-time thing?”
“No, I -- I was trying to get to Shiro. The Overworld, I mean. I’m supposed to meet with Shiro.”
Head tilted to one side, Lance crooked a small smile. “Yeah, I gathered that much from the way you yelled ‘what the fuck’ earlier. Maybe Shiro had to close travel between the realms, or, I dunno, your portal coordinates were off or something.”
They raised an eyebrow. “Portal coordinates?”
“Hey,” Lance narrowed his gaze. “I was just throwing out ideas, I’m not pretending to be an expert.”
“Clearly.” Their statement was punctuated by an annoying smirk, and Lance pursed his lips skeptically.
“Are you always this much of an asshole to people you don’t know?” he queried.
The other’s smirk and mildly open body language disappeared. The guy scowled at him instead, black tendrils coiling off his hands, and the ground beneath him turned to jagged obsidian. “Do you always sneak up on strangers and laugh at them when their guard is down?”
His jaw dropped. “Sneak up on…?! You just walked through to the mortal realm, I’ve been sitting here for hours. It’s your fault for not looking around before you started screaming!”
The guy -- seriously?! -- just rolled his eyes? At Lance? It didn’t even matter that he couldn’t even tell the direction the daemon was looking, and it was still painfully apparent what he’d just done, and the underlying disrespect in the gesture had pushed him over the precipice of annoyed to angry.
“Who even are you, anyway? What do you want with Shiro?”
The daemon wrinkled his nose, probably ready to throw back some snarky remark, but his words were cut off abruptly with a sudden gasp. Both their eyes darted down, and Lance clapped a hand over his own mouth -- shit, he’d gotten more upset than he meant to, and prickly tendrils of ivy vines had begun snaking around the daemon’s boot, innocuous with their white sprigs of petals but deceptively violent, hiding thorns beneath their leaves.
Such an amateur thing to do, he scolded himself. Lance was better than that, and he knew it, so he sprang forward and waved his hand, forcing the ivy to release their captive. He came just short of brushing his fingers against his leg, and it was only then, closer than he’d been before, that he realized that there was some sort of beautiful, bizarre happenings at their feet.
Upon the grass the otherworldly presence had walked, Lance could see a graying, wilting path of corruption in his wake; the grass turned dry, withering first to the color of wheat, then to a sickly shade of gray. At the edge of his own feet, where the flowers had spread outward when he’d been overwhelmed by the earlier laughter, the flora stood vigilant, almost stubbornly, toe-to-toe with the daemon’s boots.
“Oh...” Lance breathed, his anger slipping away with a sudden rush of silent admiration and surprise; it was as if someone had painted brushstrokes of grayscale into the scenery, leaving behind a lush, monochromatic meadow that fluttered in the midday breeze, the scenic image calm in an empty, beautiful sort of way.
To his surprise, the daemon slowly began to lower himself, settling down to one knee and looking around him at the flowers. Tentatively, he extended a hand towards a nearby bunch of periwinkle and ran his fingers over the exterior petals.
Lance heard the daemon’s breath catch.
“Are... you doing this?” The dark-haired stranger asked, his voice surprisingly soft.
The sudden change in attitude had Lance second-guessing himself. Shyly, he nodded, watching as the daemon took one of the tiny buds between two fingers. It seemed like he was prepared to pluck it from the earth, fingers hovering about halfway down the stem, but he thought better of it and drew his hand back.
“Sorry, um, about the vines.” He averted his gaze, embarrassed as little flush of red darkened his cheeks, coloring them with the richness of cherry blossoms. ”I didn’t mean to get angry. I usually have better control than that.”
“Control?” The other repeated, mostly to themselves, before looking up. “So you’re… you’re not a nymph.”
Now it was Lance’s turn to roll his eyes, but he tacted on a well-meaning smirk to show that he wasn’t actually annoyed. “I said that already, didn’t I?”
There was a pause for several seconds, and the daemon licked his lips. “May I sit with you?”
“You’re basically already doing that,” retorted the efflorescent god teasingly, but when the dark presence continued to kneel, still as a stone statue, he sighed and gave a purposeful shrug. “Yes, of course. Sit, if you want. But Shiro really isn’t here. I don’t know why you can’t get to the Overworld; I’m stuck here, too.”
With deliberate slowness, the other began to settle onto the earth, one leg crossed and the other extended bent out and away from them. They kept their gaze fixed down, carding his hands through the cluster of vibrant periwinkle with feather-light touches, fingers barely stirring the tranquility of the silken petals.
“These are… beautiful,” the daemon uttered after a long pause, still fixated as he was with the periwinkle. The cool spill of blue petals proudly maintained their pop of color, stubborn even with the daemon’s draining aura, and Lance glowed in response to the compliment. (That is, he literally started to glow -- his eye scales, a lovely, inherited, gift from his mother, began to flutter and pulse with shades of aquamarine and morning frost.)
“Thanks, although to be honest, these just sort of pop up when I’m nerv -- when I’ve never been around someone before… yeah. Mm. Uhh.” Clambering for a different subject, he landed on the spectacularly uncreative topic of his birthright, surrounding him like a big blaring sign that read ‘I have nothing else to talk about’.
“Do you, uhh, have a favorite? I could make something way better if I was trying.”
”A favorite… color?” The other quizzed, fixing a scowl in Lance’s direction before continuing to card his fingers mindlessly over the patch of fresh blooms.
“No,” Lance huffed. “Like, a favorite flower. I make them, I figured that was obvious.”
“Oh.” For just a flicker of a second, they stilled, before resuming the absent-minded movements of his hand and fingers. “No. We don’t have anything like this in the Underworld.”
Ah. Well, that explained how he was so easily impressed with Lance’s utterly underwhelming, instinctual, I’m-a-nice-guy-please-don’t-kill-me, seat of his pants excuse of a meadow that was popping up around them. Stupid emotions.
“Why do you ask?” The other questioned, suspicious. “You still haven’t told me what you are. Were you banished? Cursed?”
Scoffing, Lance drew his legs up to his chest, crossing his feet as his ankles and holding his knees in place. “What is with your paranoia? You gotta work on that, really doesn’t make for a great first impression. But if it’ll help you to calm down, my mother sent me down here because there’s a whole bunch of -- well, your lot, I guess, all up there right now. I assume that’s why you were trying to get to Shiro in the first place, right?”
Judging by their expression, doubtful if not outright contemptuous, Lance figured he was about to get murdered. Brutally, probably, because this was a creature of the Underworld.
After a too long pause, the daemon did not murder him, instead responding to Lance’s question with an uncomfort lilt to their tone.
“I…well, yes. So then your mother is… a goddess?”
“Melenor,” he hummed. “And I’m Lance. Those who inhabit this realm have decided to call me Persephone, so you might know me by that name, but I really prefer Lance. Like how they’ve all got names for whoever, Zeus and Shiro, Ares and Alfor, you know. Blah blah.”
“Oh!” The daemon’s expression flickered with something close to recognition. “Yes, okay. Shiro’s definitely mentioned you before. I’ve… met Melenor… I had been told she had a daughter --”
“Son,” Lance corrected. “That’s part of the humans’ mythos, but. Yeah. I’m a dude.”
The daemon frowned. “Sorry. I knew she had… you, but I always wondered if it was like, well, not true? No offense or anything. I’ve just… been around for awhile and I’ve never met you?”
“Yeah, well, Mother doesn’t usually let me away from the pantheon… almost ever. This is an exception since there’s visitors, the mortal plane is… safer.” His attention flicked down to the demon’s blackened claws, a bit larger than an anatomically proportional human and decidedly deadly. “Usually. If you’ve met my mother and might cross-paths with her again, I’d appreciate you not tell her that we spoke. I could get in a lot of trouble. I’m… not supposed to really speak to anyone. Especially someone from the Underworld. I’ve never met a daemon before.”
Lance had tried for a smile through his explanation, but the gesture sat uncomfortable on his lips. His head had turned in the direction he knew was Thebes, though he was much too far into the fields for it to be visible.
“Sorry, I was rambling…That’s enough about me.”
Shaking his head, Lance turned back to look at the daemon, still preoccupied by pops of color surrounding their otherwise colorless world.
There was about a meters distance between where they each rested, and, like some sort of dividing line, not unlike a warning, the grass was cleaved evenly between their respective sides.
On his own side, the world thrived. Lush and alive and overflowing with flowers in response to his muddled emotions, nerves and excitement and interest and doubt; brambles of thorns began to rise in the stems of cream-colored quince and pastel pink roses, intertwining with narcissus and poppies and lavender. At this rate, if Lance didn’t get a grip, the place would make itself into a proper, utterly unkempt field of wildflowers.
On the other’s side, the world had been cast beneath a great shade, the essence of everything muted. Not gone, mind you, just… subdued. The grass was still there, just motionless and still; the sun continued to light up the world, but it was dimmer, desaturated in a sort of gradient with the daemon at its darkened center.
When it appeared the other didn’t pick up on his invitation to speak, Lance proded, “So...?”
“So, what?” they asked, and he sighed meaningfully.
“So,” Lance reiterated. “After I told you all of that, do I at least get to know your name?”
The daemon’s head snapped up, black icher of his eyes boring into Lance’s face, and he felt his heart rate pick up with that same sense as before -- danger, it whispered. Lance knew that, whatever this daedric entity’s intention, it could easily and completely destroy him -- forget being immortal, all bets were off when it came to beings from the Underworld. All it would take is but a slight persuasion of that calculated, cold gaze and a little bit of will to exercise his intent -- that sort of fearsome capacity for destruction, that scared Lance more than he would care to admit.
And yet, they hadn’t tried to kill him.
They hadn’t made any attempt to maim him or hurt him in anyway. They were a little rude and had the personality of an irritable deciduous tree, sure, but plenty of humans and plenty more gods were just as short-fused. This daemon was just… well, besides their permanent scowl, they were not especially cruel, and they certainly did not seem interested in hurting Lance.
“Keith.”
“Keith?” Lance blinked twice, focusing on his face. He was still gazing at the periwinkle flower, defiantly blue as it stood smartly between pointer finger and thumb. “As in…”
The daemon’s weight shifted slightly, and it was with a deep pang of sadness that Lance watched some of the soft grays around him turn darker, like someone had rubbed soot into the edges of a grayscale canvas.
“Hades, yeah. God of the Underworld. I’m... Shiro’s brother.”
Oh.
Huh.
Lance tilted his head to the side, a little too shocked to mind his manners or to think of something witty to say. He simply stared at the daemon -- well, no, they weren’t a daemon. He had to correct his preconceived assumptions.
They too were a god.
In retrospect, it made some amount of sense. The rift between worlds -- only Shiro could open those so far as Lance knew, so it wasn’t a reach to assume that his brother would be able to do the same on the other side; in spite of the frequent descriptions of disfiguration or monstrosities when it came to daemons, his anatomical appearance was more aligned with the forms the other gods would choose.
They started to pull themselves to their feet. “Anyways, I’ll go. I didn’t mean to bother you.”
“W-Well, wait.” Lance almost reached out his hands to stop him, but instead just held them in front of his chest in apology. “You, uh, you don’t have to go if you don’t want? Sorry, I guess I was just surprised… you’re, like, Hades.”
“I really prefer Keith,” he replied dryly.
“Keith, then. Sorry. Wow, my Mom will… uhhhh, right. If you go back up there, or see her anytime soon, or… ever... please don’t tell my mother that we spoke.”
Now Hades -- Keith, he made a point to correct himself not Hades -- Keith appeared to the be the one confused, relaxing a bit as he sat back down. “She really doesn’t let you meet anyone outside of the Overworld? I mean, I know I’m probably… not everyone’s favorite, but you really haven’t met anyone from the Underworld before?”
“Are you kidding?” Lance scoffed, and he leaned back on his hands, head pointed up to the sky. “She doesn’t even let me meet people in the Overworld besides those on Mount Altea. Other deities, visitors… It’s not safe.”
Keith chewed his lip. “If she believes you’re not safe in the Overworld, why does she think you would be safer down here?”
“Humans are harmless,” Lance said with a shrug.
A frown sat stone-heavy on the other’s lips, taking a moment before responding.
“Not every human is as humane as you would think.”
“I imagine that’s true,” Lance answered, almost absently. “I’ve only ever spent long enough around them to learn their names or a custom or two. I don’t want to linger, else they’ll suffer for it.”
Their question was implied when the other god said, “Melenor…?”
“She gets so worried, she makes herself sick. And when she’s sick...”
“...The Earth gets sick.”
Smirking, Lance leaned his head over to one-side, stretching out his neck and shoulders. “Yes, exactly. But it’s plenty healthy right now… as long as I don’t get caught.”
“I won’t tell her,” the chthonic god vowed, and for absolutely no good reason, Lance believed him.
Lance smiled and nodded his thanks, and Keith looked away, his own expression changing from sincere to intense when his attention settled to the bed of flowers around them, still mindlessly brushing petals with his fingertips. His hand stilled.
Suddenly focused, the chthonic god pursed his lips. “I wonder… if I…”
With the faintest snap, he plucked the flower from the soil, blinking down at it expectantly.
Nothing happened, and the dark-haired god seemed genuinely mystified. “These flowers you make… they don’t die?”
“Well, no. They will eventually.” Unable to resist, Lance added teasingly, “I’d expect you to be the expert on that, Mr. God-King-Ruler of the Underworld. Aren’t you supposed to like, torture lost souls or something?”
At that, Keith let out a loud, audible laugh, and the sound seemed to fit in the open air as seamlessly as a skeleton key might fit into any proffered lock.
“No, geez, is that what they say about me?” Some of the humor drained from his smile, voice turning wistful. “Dying is just as much a part of being mortal as living… I’m just in charge of overseeing that half of the journey.”
Eyes wide, Lance crossed his legs and leaned forward. “That doesn’t sound so bad when you put it like that. How’d you get such a… well...”
“Bad image?” Keith suggested, and Lance sheepishly nodded.
“It’s hard to know.” The darkness of his eyes narrowed, black slits examining the stem of the oleander petal as he gently twisted between his fingers. “Shiro guesses it’s just because people are afraid. Death is scary to think about for most people; no one knows where they’ll end up once they die. I don’t even know until they come to the Underworld, where they’ll be judged. If someone does something terrible while living, they have to pay it back eventually. Whether they’ll go to Styx or Elysium or… well, some souls do end up being punished. Sometimes forever. Not because I want to, but because it’s just about balance, you know?”
They’d scarcely said the last words before stiffening, no longer playing with the flower in their grasp. “Um, sorry, that was -- I sort of -- I got carried away.”
“Don’t apologize,” Lance chuckled a bit at his own expense, how unusual it was to speak those words. This was The Hades, and he was… apologizing to Lance? What even? “I asked. It’s interesting… I don’t know much about the Underworld. Or, you know, about anything that my Mother doesn’t approve of.”
Half-joking, he tagged on a grin, and Keith seemed relieved, if not grateful for the reassurance.
“Thanks. I can get carried away -- I just…” The subterranean god considered his next words with great care. In the end, it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself.
“I’m not a monster.”
“No,” Lance bit his lip to hide a smile. “I don’t suppose you are.”
In response, an almost gentle tug quirked up the corner of Keith’s mouth… and, well, Lance would have been lying if he didn’t think the expression looked good on him. He may be desperately in denial about finding the chthonic presence oddly charming, but he also wasn’t blind. Embarrassed, he looked away and chuckled, looking around at the excessive undergrowth he’d unleashed upon the unsuspecting landscape. It was utterly unrefined, haphazardly thrown together emotions and nerves spilling out around him and taking root in the grass, but there was something at least pretty about the disorder, chaotic and sincere whether he liked it or not.
It was Keith who eventually sighed, and Lance looked up to follow his gaze. He still held the oleander blossom, but it had since begun to fade, the warm splash of red softening and taking on different tones of shale and charcoal and ashen, fluttering weakly against the inexorable demands of the rippling shadow that was Keith’s presence, the life slowly yielding beneath his fingertips.
Keith released a low exhale, extending his hand between them, stopping where the ridge in the grass turned from green and lush to gray and immolant beneath his own arm.
“You should probably take this back. It... doesn’t really belong with me.” He wore a fond, if not achingly sad, smile. “It’s too pretty to ruin.”
Lance stared at his hand for a few moments, unblinking. Unconsciously, he began chewing the inside of his gums.
A breeze passed into the valley, brushing up grass and carding Lance’s hair gently with its invisible touch. Somehow, perhaps by Zephyr’s blessing, the silence that fell between them after that managed not to be uncomfortable. No, it was quiet and calm, like the descent of a feather or windswept petals, lazily enduring the gravity that pulled them under. It made what could have been terribly awkward into something strangely, intimately infinite, like they could have sat there in the wide open world for an hour, a day, a month, a year -- for all of time and for no time at all.
Their silence was, somehow, weightless.
There were rules, expectations, all manner of things that told Lance he should know better. That he should be afraid, even. The division in the grass, where the gray met the green, was, in the most literal sense a line that he was not supposed to cross.
But this is Lance. So of course he was going to cross it.
Hesitantly, Lance extended his own hand, but instead of taking the proffered flower, Lance curled the other’s fingers back over the ruined flora, at the same time closing his own eyes.
With an intentional release of energy, he felt the lifeforce of the tiny flower begin to flutter, resonating with the frequencies of his own soul, felt it fill like a cupbearer’s goblet. He stopped only when it reached the pinnacle of what life it could hold, enough to imprint his own image upon it.
When he opened his eyes and sat back, Lance could not help but to grin in response to Keith’s stunned expression. He opened his palm, and the oleander had turned illuminate, a soft, baby blue bioluminescence rekindling the color of the petals with life anew. Where it had been pretty before, it now shone brilliantly, and Lance could feel his eye scales softly aglow in response, as if the flower called out in song and his own heart was weak but to answer.
“Keep it. I’ve got plenty.”
The other’s mouth opened, looking prepared to say something, only to snap closed again after several seconds. He ended up smiling and nodding, pulling the flower back to his chest.
“I… you didn’t have to do that.”
Lance let out a big breath before flopping back into the grass, eyes trained up to the sky yet again. “I appreciated having someone to talk to. And it was interesting to learn a little bit about where you’re from, so, thanks.”
“I didn’t really do anything,” Keith protested with a small huff, though it didn’t sound like his heart was in it.
Lance just relaxed, a natural smirk fixing itself to his lips. “You didn’t really have to. That’s the point of a gift.”
After a brief pause, Keith sounded reluctant when he said, “I… I should probably try to get to the Overworld again. For what it’s worth, the things we’re discussing are almost done. I don’t know your mother’s whole… system… but hopefully you’ll be able to go home soon.”
“Hey, thanks,” Lance hummed, leaning on his elbows to get a good look at the god one more time before he was left alone again. “I’d say come visit sometime at my mother’s temple if you’re ever up there, but… If you’re ever up there, I’ll most likely be here. Sort of a bad loop, huh?”
Keith scratched his cheek, standing upright again. “Heh. Yeah… Thanks, anyways.”
“It was nice meeting you, Keith,” Lance smiled, warm and bright. “You can get your portal coordinates all turned around again and hang out with me instead anytime.”
The other laughed, and Lance’s own smile widened. “Sure. It was nice to meet you too, Lance.”
A familiar whistle of air, not unlike a blade being dramatically unsheathed from its holster, rang out suddenly and another rift began to open, that same devastatingly pitch black coalescence forming a void through which Keith moved, a final small smile and wave sent over his shoulder, and Lance returned it in kind.
And then, just as abruptly as he’d entered, the god of the underworld was gone, and Lance was alone again.
--
It would be about twelve more hours, give or take, before Lance was welcomed back into the Overworld. Coran had come down to fetch him, which presented a nice opportunity for some companionable conversation; the messenger god interacted with everyone, across all realms, mortal or immortal alike, so Lance found it endlessly interesting to listen to him talk about his stories.
The problem was, however, with Coran’s fierce loyalty to honesty. If he suspected Lance had done wrong, he would not hesitate in informing Melenor.
Carefully, Lance asked him about his times spent in the chthonic realm as made the familiar ascent, queried about his interactions with the gods there. He used the week’s long delegation as an excuse for his curiosity, which the moustached man seemed to buy just fine.\
“Well, they’re a very stringent bunch. Rule abiding, for the most part, but they’ve got tempers and aren’t afraid to vocalize when they see a disagreement. I think it was especially hard on Honevera, however. You might consider calling on her sometime this week to see how she’s doing.”
“Ah.” Lance sucked his teeth, sitting back low in the chariot seat.
That made sense, if Zarkon had been there; she’d had an affair with the Chaotic deity, and Lotor was the result. The two got on well enough in the Overworld on their own, but Zarkon refused to acknowledge the entity as his son. It had kept Lance from getting to know the other god for a long, long time, until Honerva had finally had it and made an angry claim against his mother to be discriminatory -- that, in keeping Lance from Lotor’s company, she was in effect insinuating that she didn’t think Lotor righteous enough to be a friend to her own son.
It was… definitely awkward for Lance. He didn’t really like Lotor, but the guy was… alright? Their interactions always felt forced and uncomfortable, probably not unrelated to the tension between their mothers.
“Shiro seemed incredibly pleased with the whole thing, though,” Coran tittered on, bringing Lance back to the present. “But then, he always seems happy whenever he spends time with his brother. The two are strangely similar, but so different at the same time... but then again, I suppose that’s appropriate isn’t it?”
“I, um, guess so. I wouldn’t really know.”
“Right, of course,” Coran twisted the end of his moustache thoughtfully. “Which reminds me, Pidge and Hunk were both anxious to see you again, but your mother requested you to her temple straight away. Perhaps check in with them if she can spare you for a bit of time?”
He crooked a smile, nodding. “Thanks, Coran. How are you, by the way? Was it a good… whatever, visiting-trip-delegation-thing?”
“Oh, very well!” the man responded with a grin of his own, bouncing on his heels. “I’ve got a large set of new appointments to take care of now, so more work for me, but it was indeed productive. Good for everyone, I think.”
“That’s what Mother always says to me,” Lance murmured, speaking without thinking. “When she sends me away, I mean. That it’ll be good for everyone.”
Coran steadied his hold on the chariots reins as they entered the cloud lines surrounding Mount Altea, his voice taking on that distinctively sage quality whenever he spoke about something he deemed important.
“Well, she cares about you an awful lot my boy. I just think her biggest fear is seeing you hurt. There’s a lot of terrible things out there, many of which would jump at the chance to hurt one of our own… The realms are divided for a reason.”
Lance didn’t have a response to that, but he didn’t want to appear rude, so he agreed with a noncommittal, “Yeah.”
“Although,” the man acquiesced, his tone conspiratorial as he glanced over his shoulder to wink at the younger god. “I do think it silly that you aren’t allowed to contribute to such affairs. It’s just that, if you stayed --”
Lance, grateful for Coran’s honesty, chuckled and turned around, watching the receding world.
“Mother could get sick with worry, and humans will die. I know, Coran.”
The older man let out a low noise that, if Lance didn’t know better, sounded unusually sad for his usual spirits.
“I’m sorry, lad.”
“Don’t be,” Lance hummed. “It’s for the good of everyone.”
He crossed his arms, laying them around the back of the chariot, his skin tingling with the transition between realms. It was always obvious with the way his lungs felt fuller, his skin warmer, his vision sharper -- all of it reacting to the saturation of raw energy that soaked the clouds, steeped into the air like a slow settling mist, a spritz of citrus spray that rose off lemon rinds but instead of sour, the taste was clean and fresher than on Earth’s surface. No grit or substance whatsoever.
Lance belonged here, he knew. It felt right, and his soul unbound in the plane of the immortal. This place was the comfort of ambrosial delights, where the ethereal roamed free of mortal desires and agendas. This was his home, and he’d waited days to finally return, and yet, he looked upon the passing buildings with their sleek Altean architecture and grandiose columns with…
Coran cleared his throat, and there was a strained edge to it that immediately made Lance feel guilty. He’d been zoning out, rudely forgetting that he had company.
“Did you want to stop off by Adam’s? I know you’re always keen on borrowing from his library.”
“Oh, um.” Turning back around, Lance rubbed his palms restlessly against the edge of his seat. “No, that’s okay. I think I’ve read through everything there.”
“You’re welcome to borrow one of my books too, if you’d like,” the man offered, and Lance had to laugh at his gusto -- you could practically hear him glowing with pride.
And Lance did consider the offer, seeing as it was one of the few hobby’s of which his mother approved, but ultimately declined.
“Nah, I think I’ll just work on my own stuff for awhile. Thanks, though.”
“Very well!” He sang, turning the chariot in anticipation of letting him out in front of his mother’s temple.
Beaming with such warmth that it caused his eye scales to glow, Lance couldn’t help but respond in kind with a goofy grin of his own as he waved the man goodbye.
He turned around and looked up the stoop, sighing. Melenor’s Temple was similarly grand to all the other major deities, modeled after some fusion of the pantheon built in their honor with elements of traditional Altean pews built into it. There was perhaps two dozen steps he had to climb to get to the front, and Lance did not hesitate in strolling through the columns and into the foyer.
As expected, his mother was waiting for him, a glowing grin on her face.
“Oh, sweetheart, I’ve missed you,” she urged him inside, and Lance fondly rolled his eyes while she pulled him into a hug. “How was Earth? Did you have fun?”
“I missed you too, Mom.” He squeezed her before letting go. “It was fine. I had… well, not fun. It was nice, though. Warm.”
Her hands held his shoulders with a light but sure touch, her smile warm and open. They were about the same height, though her preferred robes were customarily wide and fluttery and made her naturally more demanding of attention in comparison. She mindlessly began fixing the clasp at his shoulder. “Good, good. And are you feeling alright? You didn’t eat or drink too much in any of the cities, right?”
“No, Mother. It was really a normal trip.”
“I’m glad,” she breathed a sigh of relief before pulling him into another brief embrace. “I was worried. I know you’re always so responsible son, but you know things can get crazy when those from the Underworld visit. They just put me on edge.”
Lance let out a small exhale, reveling in the warmth of her embrace, a guilty twist in his gut intensifying for having lied to her about her brief not-so-normal encounter with the god of the underworld.
“I know, Mama, but we’re all okay now. See? I’m here, they’re gone. Everything’s fine.”
“You’re right, as always,” she laughed, giving him one more once over when she finally stepped back, and Lance scratched the back of his neck. “You’re probably exhausted from the travel and the time away. Hunk and Pidge were anxious to see you, of course, but I think I’d feel better if you at least took some time to stay home and relax.”
He managed to swallow the urge to groan. “Ahh. Sure. I’ll be in my room.”
“Excellent. I’ll be around, should you have need of me.”
With a brief, tight-lipped smile, Lance turned away and made a beeline for the adjacent hallway. The walls were wide, towering in height and spotlessly crisp grey and white with blue and gold patterns inlain in the molding at the base and ceiling. His eye traced a mindless path while he took the familiar route to his room, turning again at the end of the hallway.
His room opened to a sort of greenery, which his mother allowed after some insistence. It was divided into two levels, the top lined with his own collection of books and trinkets and other things he’d collected over the years, crowded by some chairs and comfortable seating. The lower level held his bed, closet, another sitting area, and then, about halfway into the circular expansion, the entirety of the room was cleanly severed from the rest of the room, like someone had burned the sun straight through into his room at a distinct angle, but instead of the otherside being reduced to ash and vapor, the workings of his private topiary had begun to overtake some of his more basic belongings. Vines and great, heavy leaves bowed towards the earth, ivy itched up the wall and with it clymadius blossoms tangled in the tendrils all the way up to the ceiling. Out, beyond, the foliage had grown so thickly that it was hard to tell what lie ahead, like the entrance to an Earthen jungle, and Lance generally preferred it that way. He liked seeing what the plants would do on their own if left to their devices for awhile, intervening only on occasion.
Releasing a long breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, Lance smiled and walked forward into his room, ready to --
Just kidding.
His leg caught on something, and he fell face forward onto the cold, stone ground.
“Fuuuck,” he groaned, quiet enough that his voice wouldn’t carry to have his mother running down the hallway after him. “What did I...?”
At the edge of the doorway, he’d failed to notice a tome that had been left for him -- it looked like one of the books he’d borrowed from Adam. Crap, had he left it there and forgotten to return it? Groaning, Lance rolled onto his backside and clawed at the book, pulling it forward and into his lap.
A Comprehensive Guide to Botanical Taxonomy
Oh, it was probably from Pidge or Hunk, or maybe even Matt if he’d been roped into the scheme by either of the former two; probably some sort of prank or stunt.
Cautiously, Lance thumbed the pages, opening to find, exactly as expected, a thick tome that detailed the taxonomic breakdowns of different varieties of plantlife as observed in the mortal world, illuminated with vivid descriptions and sketches of of different Earth plants and their subsequent names. It was one of his favorites, if only because it was amusing to see human’s label his own emotions in such a way -- that, what they called a forget-me-not was in effect that hollow feeling of happiness he would feel after saying goodbye to someone, knowing he would not see them again for a long time, or that they correlated roses with romance when, in fact, they were just extensions of himself when he felt particularly conflicted about something -- thorns and petals, they were a heavy and complicated marriage between pain and beauty.
Just when Lance was starting to get sucked back into the text, he flipped to a page somewhere near the center of the tome and let out a little gasp.
There was a note wedged into the margins of the page, a black and dangerous looking vapor pouring out around it. His attention flickered to the image printed on the page beside it, honing in on the caption.
Nerium oleander, or commonly, “oleander,” is a shrub or small tree, and it is toxic in all its parts. Sweet-scented, the petals cluster at the end of each ‘branch’ (for examples of ‘shrub branches’, pg. 191) and extend from the center in a pinwheel pattern, typically consisting of five petals. The leaves of nerium are lustrous and glossy. Depending on the maturity of the nerium plant, the stems may have a glaucous quality and, in age, begin to take on a grayish, stiff quality not unlike bark. They bloom in red, pink, or white.
Lance’s heart sped up, fluttering hummingbird-quick in his chest, and he snapped his door shut with his foot while taking up the folded missive in his hands.
His fingers had never felt so clumsy in their haste to open the neatly creased piece of parchment, revealing a hasty scrawl underneath in an ink so black it reminded him of…
Thanks again for the flower.
P.S. If you still want to learn more about the Underworld, I have to go to again Earth in three days.
Maybe I’ll see you there?
-K