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i.
What stirs in Persephone’s thoughts when she is alone in the dark, buried in a land untouched by Spring? She who wears the heavy crown of Death, and wears it well.
Does she think, could my life have been different? Does she think, could I have been better?
I wonder.
ii.
Monroe Fuches arrives at the German hospital wearing a dark suit and a familiar smile. Barry has not seen him in years—honestly, he'd wondered if the man would even recognize him—but when his eyes fall on Barry, they soften. “My boy,” he says, voice shaking like an injured man's. Like he’s the one curled up in a hospital bed, counting sunsets for no reason at all. Barry's eyes burn, but he doesn’t cry.
“Hey, Fuches.” His own voice is grainy and hollow. It’s an effort (always has been). Uncle Fuches approaches him, and there is something careful about the way he moves. Almost measured. Who knows what the doctors have told him already? They speak in German amongst themselves, but Barry thinks he heard someone use the word “killer” once, although he can’t be sure. Maybe he just heard it in his own head.
With a strange gentleness, Fuches lays his hand on Barry’s shoulder. It feels so heavy, somehow. Grounding. A gasp gets stuck in his throat, like so much desert sand. His eyes meet Fuches’ and he is surprised to find no judgment there, no reproach. It occurs to him that Fuches looks happy to see him. Why? His fist clenches under the thin hospital blanket as the panic begins to rise. Barry's eyes squeeze shut and he hears a woman scream in terrible grief. Why? Doesn’t he know? Can’t he see what I am?
A tense interlude of silence, and then,
“My boy,” Fuches says again, patting his shoulder lightly. Barry does not move, but his heart gives out every time he feels the weight of Fuches’ hand fading. Touch me, he thinks wildly, pleading like a child. Touch me, please. If not you, then whom? Then whom?
But Fuches is already retreating, one hand on the door. Before he leaves, he smiles at Barry, and says, “Don’t worry, son. I’ll take care of it.”
And so it goes.
iii.
The months that follow pass him by. It all happens quickly after Fuches makes his appearance. He is honorably discharged with very little fuss, and Fuches takes him by the arm and leads him right out of the hospital and into a plane heading to Ohio.
Fuches’ apartment is small and unkept. It doesn’t fit with Barry’s idea of him—he’s always been somewhat larger than life, a quick man with an easy smile and a good story to tell. But the reality of his life is, well. Underwhelming. Not that Barry is in any position to judge.
It is not a home, but Fuches is the closest he has to family. He adjusts.
They eat every meal together, which, with Fuches’ odd schedule, means they eat mostly at night. Barry helps with the cleaning when he can, but it’s hard, this new life. He misses the certainty of a mission and the weight of a rifle in his hands. A clear target in his sights. He does what he can for Fuches, but it never feels like enough. Because the thing is, he doesn’t know why Fuches keeps him around. Sure, he was friends with his dad, and the words “life debt” get thrown around a lot, but Fuches wasn’t that close to the family. He popped in and out of his father’s stories, earned a good laugh, but Barry never really saw much of him growing up. So why is he here now?
Barry thinks about Fuches' sad little apartment, with the leaky kitchen faucet and the stained carpet and the off-color wallpaper peeling off at places. He thinks about how no one ever comes around. Perhaps he's lonely? But no, that doesn't feel quite right. Fuches doesn’t really seem like the type of guy who gets lonely. So what is it? The way he sees it, Barry is nothing but dead weight. Unwashed, depressed, he spends hours spread out on Fuches’ tiny couch playing mindless platformers on an old Nintendo 64. Still, Fuches doesn’t ask him to leave, or suggest that he gets a job or his own place. Sometimes he comes back from wherever he disappears during the day and ruffles Barry’s hair on his way to the kitchen to grab a beer, like it’s nothing. A deep ache settles in the pit of Barry’s stomach and doesn’t leave. Touch me, he thinks, and hates himself.
iv.
It’s not entirely clear what Fuches does for a living, but he’s rarely home. And when he is, Fuches is constantly paranoid, uneasy. The apartment is always dark because he keeps the curtains firmly shut, and he instructs Barry to do the same when he’s gone. By now, Barry knows better than to ask.
Fuches does, too. He never asks about what happened in Korengal, but at the end he doesn’t need to, because Barry tells him anyway. He doesn’t know why he does it. Maybe he needs Fuches to hate him, to understand why he must hate him. Maybe it’s because earlier that day Fuches has to drag him out of the shower, wet with water and his own blood after he’d broken the tile by banging his head against it over and over again. Fuches patches him over, his movements clinical but his eyes so soft as he cleans the wound. Barry can’t explain it to him then, too busy choking down his shame. Instead, he drowses off on the couch while Fuches watches over him from his armchair, an anxious guardian.
He wakes up from his impromptu nap all sore—but not cold, he notes, because a blanket has been thrown over him. He dutifully folds the blanket, walks into Fuches’ room, and tells him the truth. He tells him everything. What he is, what he’s done. And waits for the screaming to begin, the accusations. “Murderer,” “psycho,” he already knows how this goes, has done it all before.
But Fuches is different.
“You made a mistake, Barry. It happens,” he says almost casually, once Barry stops talking. Barry’s eyes are so wet that he can scarcely see, but he thinks that Fuches might be smiling. The idea of that is bizarre, so completely removed from what he’s feeling, what he was expecting to feel, that he goes cold. Fuches keeps talking. “A crack shot, huh? We should head to the firing range sometime, show me what you’ve got.” He stands from his bed, ruffles Barry’s hair like he’d done dozens of time, the exact same way, and walks over to the kitchen.
“Want a beer?” He asks. Barry glances at the clock. It’s almost 4 in the morning.
“Yeah, sure,” he says, and thinks, for a moment, that he might be smiling too.
v.
It’s mostly theoretical, at first. Barry has a talent, Fuches says. Wouldn’t it feel great to put it to use, and what’s more, put it to use in the aid of others? Because there are bad men out there, Barry. Men who hurt people. You don’t have to go overseas to find them. Hell, the whole damn country is at war. But these men are rich, they’re smart. They’re not out in the desert, waiting like sitting ducks for an American bullet to find them. It takes a skilled man to deal with men like that. You’re a skilled man, Barry. Don’t you want to make something of your life?
His purpose, Fuches calls it. Barry nods along. He doesn’t know that he believes him, until he does.
There is some training, but most of what he needs he already learned from the Marines. Still, killing outside of war, at home, is not something they taught him. So Fuches takes over.
Fuches is a patient teacher, to a certain point. When Barry hesitates, or if he gets distracted, Fuches closes his fist around the back of his neck and pulls him down forcefully. Barry is so much stronger than him, could take him down in an instant, but it does not even occur to him to try, or even to resist. He just mumbles an apology as his face reddens—the lack of oxygen, he tells himself, as Fuches squeezes his neck. Nothing more.
Fuches teaches him the ins and outs of being a hitman, an effective one, one that doesn’t die. Barry knows the precision of a gun, but he has yet to understand the precision of a plan. He knows how to stalk an enemy from a watchtower, but he learns how to follow a mark from afar, to surveil them, to know them, so that he can kill them. He can kill a sheep fucker, but killing a man who looks no different from himself, no different from Fuches, is something his tour in Afghanistan didn’t train him for. “The end always justifies the means, Barry,” Fuches reminds him. Barry empties his clip into a dummy and feels nothing at all.
vi.
The first time Fuches puts a rifle in his hands and says, voice casual but eyes razor sharp, “so there's this guy…” it all clicks into place. And, in a moment that Barry will come back to many times in the following years, will obsess over, will always fall short of understanding, he feels a blessed relief. This, he can do. This, he is good at.
He takes aim and shoots.
A bad guy dies.
Fuches is so proud, so happy. When Barry comes back from that first job, he hugs him, laughing, and proclaims, “fuck yeah, that’s my boy! That’s my man!” It was a sniper job. Easy, impersonal. He barely had to look at the mark. Afterwards, Fuches counts the $100 bills one by one, grinning at Barry when he’s done, and stashes them carefully in his sock drawer.
Barry wipes the invisible blood from his hands and thinks, home.
vii.
See, I don’t believe the myth is true. Persephone was not taken; she was not dragged down screaming to unfathomable depths, like one of Zeus’ brides. That is not how it goes. Because I know now: Hades needed only to speak. Perhaps he called her his own—gently, calculating—and she followed, aching to belong.
Perhaps Hades did not speak at all.
Perhaps he merely gestured slowly with his chin, an understated “follow me,” and Persephone, who dared not look at what lay behind her, could do nothing but obey.
And when she saw herself there, amongst the dead, building a home out of bones and bullets, who could she blame but herself? She took his hand, yes. She followed. She accepted his guidance. She complied. But it wasn’t him who willingly stepped into the darkness and sank deeper and deeper until he was choking on the waters of the River Styx; how could he, when darkness was his nature, all that he knew? Perhaps it was her nature as well. Why else would she have let herself fall so low, so deep?
How unfortunate, then, that it is also in her nature to wonder.
Could I have been better?
When his eyes fall on Barry, they soften. “My boy,” he says.
No, perhaps not.