Chapter Text
As usual, he finds Meg in the lounging area, drinking before she has to leave again. Shots this time, it seems, which probably isn’t a great sign. She senses his approach before he greets her and turns scornful eyes his way.
“What the hell did you have on your arrows that time?” she demands, her voice cold. “I didn’t like it.”
He gives the question serious thought as he slides, uninvited but unforbidden, into the chair next to her. It does require serious thought to answer: each attempt bleeds into the one before it and the one after, an indistinct jumble of violence and pain and daring cut abruptly short each time by failure. Sometimes he can’t even remember which weapon he has on him at a given moment. Arrows, Meg had said, which means Coronacht, and the latest boon granted him when he had Coronacht in hand was—
He winces. “That would be the blessings of Aphrodite,” he says wryly. “She was… attentive that time.” He keeps to himself the thought of the goddess’s syrupy voice and her flirtatious eagerness for him to reach the surface. And good thing, too, because Meg is looking at him in utter disgust, as she might look at some larval creature from the bowels of the earth.
She’s too serious by far, and he can’t resist teasing when she looks like that. “I guess it was her interference, not her son’s, that we should have been watching out for this whole time,” he says, remembering a conversation from long ago, before they’d figured out how to be fond of each other.
In an ideal world, she would appreciate the reference and smile along with him. No luck there, but he hits some kind of mark, at least. Without a word, Meg turns her withering glare from him to the shade tending the bar. The shade catches her meaning and hurriedly serves her another shot, which she tosses back silently. Only then does she look back at Zagreus. She catches his chin between thumb and forefinger, inescapably, and speaks.
“It would pain Nyx to no end if I drove the butt of my whip up through this soft flesh beneath your jaw and into your stupid little brain,” she says, slowly and very clearly.
He swallows. “You’re right, I imagine it would,” he agrees, affable. It would pain him, too, in a rather more immediate sense, but that has less bearing on whether or not Meg would do it. Jealousy is, after all, her domain. Professionally speaking. It radiates from her, as possessive and entrancing as a serpent, never mind the many reasons they don’t belong to each other anymore.
She releases his chin. “Consider yourself lucky,” she says.
“I’ll do that. Although I suspect my luck will run out before we see each other next?”
“Oh, I’ll make sure of it,” Meg hisses. She glares until he takes the hint to stand. He wonders how she’d react if he told her—honestly, sincerely—that the goddess of love could never mean to him what Megaera did and still does. Circumstances and the supernatural power to attract be damned.
She narrows her eyes as if she suspects his thought. “Get out,” she orders.
“All right.” He lifts his hand in a good-bye. “See you around, Meg.”
“Unfortunately.”
With a gracious little bow, he cedes the parting shot to her this time and leaves her be.