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By now they have a routine: after she returns to the House and after her customary report to Lord Hades, Megaera stops by Zagreus’s chambers to… spend some time with him. He usually falls asleep after, not waking until his bruises begin to fade. But Megaera doesn’t have the luxury of waiting around this time, and honestly he’d been in an annoying mood to start with, testy and defiant. So when he begins to drift off with his arm over her back, she pulls away and gets dressed. But the creak of her spaulders’ buckles wake him, and he makes a noise of exasperation.
“Meg, come on.” He sits up. “Would you just rest for one minute?”
Megaera pinches her lips together, exhaling through her nostrils. Here is where they’ve slipped into arguments before, frequently and easily. He should know by now that she can’t just rest whenever she wants to. He should know that she is already stretching her time away from Tartarus to spend it with him instead, and that it’s straining the limits of credibility to claim to Lord Hades that all she’s doing is keeping him in line. But, by the same token, she knows that Zagreus’s stubborn response will be to insist that she needs rest: time to herself beyond the intensity of their trysts. He will insist, too, that she’s better off when she takes time to relax and that he’s happy to serve as an excuse. He never does keep in mind that she just doesn’t have the time to sprawl around like he does—there is so much to do in this place—but Megaera can’t deny the value of rest when she can get it. And right now she doesn’t feel like having the fight. Without a verbal response to Zagreus, she unbuckles her shoulder armor once more and drops stiffly into a nearby chair, flicking her wing in an implied well? How’s that?
She expects him to crack a soft grin and lie back down, or to come on to her again (as if that were in any way restful for her). She doesn’t expect the sarcastic curl of his eyebrow, a little too far from kindness, as he says, “See? Was that so hard?”
Heat spreads up the back of her neck, and she gets to her feet slowly and deliberately. “Say that again,” she orders, her voice dangerously low.
He doesn’t, instead rolling his eyes with a movement of his entire head. “Here we go, then.”
Here they go, indeed, fighting after all. Megaera stands tall and tense over him. “Do you understand how important my work is, Zagreus?”
“Oh, of course.” He squirms out from under her glare and stands (she’s still taller), pulling his tunic over his head as he continues. “It’s crucial that the eternally damned are kept suffering every second of every day and night. If you take one moment to yourself, they might be a little less than absolutely miserable, and that would bring the entire Underworld crashing down around our ears and probably the surface world with it.” Megaera raises a hand to slap him, but he catches her wrist. (So he can stop her, when he’s not in the mood for it.) He sneers. “Is that what you tell yourself, Meg? Or am I making this up?”
She pulls her wrist out of his grasp. “The shades of Tartarus are condemned to eternal torment. And they resent it with every drop of blood left in their bodies. Do you know what they say about my sisters and me when we leave them alone? Do you know what kind of sedition they plot when they think we’re not listening?” They’d attempted an uprising last week, until Tisiphone tore the rebelling wretches to shreds. Zagreus would have known that if he paid any damn attention to the world beyond the tip of his nose. “They cannot be left to themselves.”
Zagreus snorts, a dark look on his face. “You really think that. You really think your job is to keep them too oppressively miserable to even think of something better.”
“I don’t think it, Zagreus, it’s written in my contract.”
“Of course it is. That’s how this place works, isn’t it? And I suppose the addendum about how you’re supposed to treat me says something similar?”
“All it says is that I’m to bring out maturity in you, by whatever means necessary. Which is a hell of a job all on its own.” Lord Hades only assigned it to her because he has no idea how to do it himself, and every day that Zagreus pulls something like this is another failure on her part.
Zagreus spreads his arms in a shrug of faux innocence. “So that’s why you’re so desperate to get back outside. At least out there, you can preserve your perfect record. Because the wretches bow to your control where I won’t.”
“At least they understand their place in things,” Megaera snarls.
“And for that, they’ll be stuck in it forever.” Zagreus shakes his head, a hint of something wild in his mis-matched eyes. “Not me.”
She scoffs. “Trust me, you’re not getting out of this, either.”
“I am. I will. There’s nothing here for me.”
Blood and darkness, she should tear out his throat for those words. There is so much the Underworld could use him for and he refuses to see it. But before she can tell him this—for the thousandth time—he thrusts one finger towards the door.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he says, his voice almost as dark as his father’s. “Get out of my chambers.”
For a long moment, she glares at him. She’ll talk sense into him someday—she has to. But it would be a waste of time to try right now, and anyway, she doesn’t have time for it. She bares her teeth in a grimace and seizes her spaulders. “That was the whole idea, you brat,” she reminds him, and stalks away.