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Zagreus is bleeding.
The crisp, chilly air whips at his wounds as he limps out of the Temple of Styx, the crimson silhouette of his father's cloaked form coming into view. His feet sizzle in the snow as he comes to a halt.
" Father." he calls, voice poisoned with resentment. "Get out of my way."
"Your pitiful attempts to best me are only proof of your naivety, boy," Hades' voice sneers back at him. "You mean to join a world you hold no place in; a world that does not want you. You've learned nothing the last fifty times— what do you think another fifty will earn you?"
Rage and indignity boil in Zagreus's gut, but he doesn't bother summoning the will to reply, instead simply readying his stance and gritting his bloodstained teeth as Hades spins around and carelessly shrugs the cloak off of his shoulders.
Zagreus barely has time to throw himself to the side before his father is across the courtyard, plunging a spear into the air where he was standing moments prior. He tucks, rolls, dashes to the side again, slashing at Hades' exposed back, and bares his teeth in a vengeful grin at the dull grunt of pain that follows.
Zagreus is quicker than most, even injured as he is, but Hades is twice his size (if not more), and his reach reflects that. A splitting pain slices its way across his back as his father's spear cuts a wide arc through the air, throwing him forward with the force.
This time, his tuck-and-roll instinct does him the favor of stopping him from slamming his head directly into a stone pillar-- however, the same can't be said for his shoulder, which makes contact with a nasty crunch. This dull flare of pain is an entirely different flavor than the sharp stinging of his back (or the burning of his leg or the aching of his feet or the--), but no less disorienting. He chokes out an exhale, and an inhale after that, willing himself to get up.
The heavy footsteps approaching him finally spur his brain into movement, and he grabs at his fallen sword with one hand, feet slipping on the snow as he desperately rights himself. He uses grooves of the pillar to push himself up, ignoring the awful rush of dizziness that accompanies the action.
"Enough, boy." The booming voice of his father commands. "You've gone far enough with this... prolonged tantrum of yours. Your efforts to beat me mean nothing. I had thought you would’ve learned that by now.”
Something snaps in Zagreus.
He lifts his head up, wild in his desperation, glaring at his father's shadowed face. He raises the stygian blade defiantly, his white-knuckled grip on it doing little to help the tremble running through his arm, sees Hades's grip on his own spear shift as Zagreus reels back in preparation to strike, one last useless attempt at retaliation--
--And the sword leaves a track in the snow as it's tossed to the ground at Hades's feet.
Hades looks at the blade, looks back at his son. Opens his mouth to speak.
"Kill me, then," Zagreus spits at him. "I know you want to. Kill me."
His father, for as long as Zagreus can recall, has never been struck truly speechless. But Hades does pause, blink once, twice, and then his face hardens back into the same stony, disappointed expression he previously wore. Zagreus doesn’t know what was there before; It’s not a look he remembers ever seeing on his father’s face.
Even so, he’s not sure he could have recognized it regardless. Not through the bitter, angry tears blurring his vision.
“This is for your own good, boy.” He hears, and a long, wretched moment later, his vision fills up with red.
He hadn’t even felt the cut.
———————————————
The blood of Styx, or so Zagreus is told, isn’t actually quite like the blood spilt by mortals— it’s much colder, less watery, more viscous. It slides off of his skin uncomfortably as he pulls himself to the surface, tries to drag his newly-healed body out of the pool in the House. His hands grip stone, and he collapses briefly against the side of the pool before reluctantly hauling himself up and onto the floor.
He gasps in a breath as he stumbles to his feet, caught in a sudden rush of something like anger, but more— maybe fearful, or hollow, or something, something that rattles his heart in his ribcage and pricks in the corners of his eyes, threatening to spill indignant tears again, so bitter it makes his jaw ache. He squeezes his eyes shut and wills himself to push it back. Not now.
He slowly opens his eyes again, fully upright now, and shakes his head to rid himself of the last remnants of... that. He wills himself to look up around the hall.
Hypnos is absent from his usual post, and as Zagreus walks further into the hall he belatedly realizes that it's almost entirely deserted. Cerberus's bed is empty, his father's desk left unattended. Orpheus is nowhere to be found. He doesn't even look into the west wing.
That awful kind of empty turbulence he'd felt before rushes in again twice-fold, and he clenches his teeth, trying to drown out the roaring of his heartbeat in his ears. I'm fine. Again. Let's go again.
Again. Right.
He feels his legs carry him towards the east wing, not bothering to collect his unspooled focus in order enough to make any of his usual social stops along the way. Faint noise is coming from somewhere in the lounge, talking and laughing and the occasional clatter. A turn to the left. Keep breathing. Forward, to the left again. His feet meet the tile of the courtyard.
Numbly, he makes his way to the cabinet that holds his well-worn collection of keepsakes. The array of shapes and colors mean nothing to him right now, his brain refusing to translate them into anything useful. He closes the doors and steps away.
He watches himself walk across the courtyard, and has just enough time to feel a distant, alarmed spike of vertigo before he's landing the harsh drop into the stonewrought wastes beyond. The impact jars something in him, and he has to take a couple of shuddering breaths before he can move again.
He makes it to his feet, raising his sword in muscle-memory preparation.
His sword, right. Stygian blade. Didn't think to swap it out.
Didn't think of much of anything. Tried not to, maybe. Fine. It's fine. Go again.
He slashes through the first wretch, and the next, and the next after that, unrelenting. He haphazardly shoves the gems that appear into his pocket and stumbles through the first doorway he sees, not bothering to look at the warning symbol above it.
He cuts through one, two, four again, and barely has time to throw himself to the side before one of them spits a swirling ball of hurt at where he'd been standing moments prior. he tucks, rolls--
Kill me.
--fumbles his landing, phantom pain lancing through his shoulder. He scrambles to recover and swings blindly at the last shade, slicing it into a mist that quickly dissipates into the air.
He tries to take a breath in and finds that he can't. Something invisible and so, so, much is winding crushing, icy claws around his ribs, a rush of dizziness clouding his head. He desperately scrabbles backwards across the floor, his entire body jolting with a flinch when his back hits against a wall.
"Breathe--" he chokes out, willing the command to come true. His breath is coming in shallow, panicked gasps, his vision blurring over as he slowly sinks down to sit on the floor.
The hollow rush in his chest is drowning him now, closing up his throat, impossible to ignore, to shove aside. In some distant corner of his mind, he wonders if he's dying again.
I know you want to. Kill me.
Zagreus drops his head into his hands and lets out a bitter, wretched sob.
He pitches forward with the force of it, body wracked by shudders as he struggles to keep from stopping breathing entirely. Tears drip from between his hands, splattering onto the stone below him.
His mind is a whirlwind of panic, unable to keep thoughts on track. He fleetingly wonders what the hell his father would think of him now-- the prince of the underworld, son of Hades, curled up in an empty corner of Tartarus, sobbing his guts out on the floor. Pitiful, probably.
Through the panic-haze he hears something clatter across the chamber, some kind of sound coming closer to him. One last shade, here to finally kill him, then. The thought of returning to the house again just then prompts another sob to escape him.
"Lad," he hears a gentle, worried voice say, and a moment later something soft touches his shoulder. A hand.
Achilles.
The hesitant rush of relief that sweeps through him isn't quite enough to steady his breathing, though, and he continues to struggle to take shuddering breaths as he moves a tearstained hand up to lay over the one on his shoulder, leaving the other to stay covering his face.
"Breathe for me, lad. You're alright. It's alright." He feels Achilles's other hand gently wrap around his wrist, pulling his hand away to instead lay flat against the shade's chest. He moves his other hand across to hold Zagreus in a one-armed hug, his cloak draping over Zagreus's shoulders.
"Take deep breaths, in time with me. You're alright," Achilles repeats, and Zagreus takes in shaky lungfuls of air, forcing himself to focus on the slow, steady rhythm of Achilles's breathing. As they sit huddled together, his breathing slowly, finally evens out, leaving him with only the wretched shaking and what stray tears remain.
Too ashamed to uncover his face fully, he instead leans to the side, tucking his head into the crook of Achilles's neck, and feels Achilles rest his chin on top of his head in turn. They sit together like that for a long while, prince and mentor.
Cold is not a feeling Zagreus can say he's very familiar with, but something in the way he continues to shake makes him think of the sensation. Achilles's arms provide no warmth, only a neutral, steady weight.
"...How did you find me, then?" Zagreus eventually asks, voice only just above a whisper.
"Nyx sent me after you, actually. She said she saw you leaving, and she thought something seemed... off about you. She wanted me to find you. I wasn't sure exactly why, but I... I suppose her instincts were correct."
Zagreus hums weakly. "She's never sent anyone after me into Tartarus before. I wonder why she didn't come herself, if she was that worried."
"She... seemed to want to, but she told me to go." Zagreus feels him give a one-shouldered shrug. "And besides that, I admit I was concerned about you myself, lad. You didn't look yourself last I saw you."
"Thank you, then," Zagreus says, and after a moment, "I'm sorry for worrying you, sir."
Achilles huffs out something that's not quite a laugh; his voice is a slight bit thicker than before. "Oh, lad."
He tightens his arm around Zagreus, fitting them closer together. Zagreus has since taken his hands back to in front of him, and he wrings them together.
Zagreus feels a pang of something like loneliness run through him, oddly. "I told him to kill me," he blurts out suddenly, and then takes a sharp breath in.
"Told who?" His ghostly mentor prompts softly.
"I-- my father," Zagreus's throat is dry. He swallows. "I made it to the surface, faced him again. He was-- I wasn't going to win, and both of us knew that. So I threw my sword at his feet, and..." His voice peters off, wavering. "I begged him."
Achilles hums, shifts in place ever-so-slightly. "And he sent you home."
Zagreus answers with the smallest of nods, not wanting to disturb where Achilles's head still rests upon his. The thought comes to him rather suddenly that he doesn't recall having touched his father in a very long time, not since being held as a small child. In fact, the only time he remembers even coming close to him at all has been during their recent confrontations-- which is to say, while getting a spear in the back, mostly.
Something about the line of thinking makes a new ache well up in him, one that he feels less in his lungs and more in his heart. He'd never given it much thought before, always caught up on other things, other people.
It's not a good feeling.
Eventually, though, he forces himself to move, ungluing himself from Achilles's side. His mentor offers a few soothing shoulder pats as Zagreus scrubs at his face, ridding himself of left-over tear tracks.
"I-- don't know how to get back to the house from here," Zagreus realizes, looking up. Achilles laughs, getting to his feet.
He offers a hand to Zagreus, who takes it gratefully, pulling himself up. "I know a way around, lad, don't worry," he says, and after a pause, "Care to come back to the lounge with me? You look like you could use a drink in you, if you don't mind me saying so."
Zagreus smiles. It's been a long while since he's let himself take a rest.
"That sounds wonderful."