Chapter Text
The planet ahead of them looks interesting, feels like a story, has the lilt of a song.
As they sail onward, the pull gets stronger, and they are lured towards the story like a moth to a flame, like a ship with torn sails to a whirlpool, like spacedust to a black hole.
And as they close in, sharks to bleeding prey, the story is strong and they know. They know there is an album here, a story for them to collect.
This is a planet of stories, and as they get closer, they know they cannot escape its grasp. Its siren song beckons, and they are wayward sailors.
They touch down on Labyrinth, and the Story begins.
Tim laughs as they land, because well.
This is a fucking Greek Mythology planet. Tim starts laughing, laughs until he’s wheezing, because he hyperfixtated on this shit in primary school. He is going to punch Heracles in the face, and maybe whatever other jackasses he remembers when he hears their names.
He smiles as they land because how hard can this be?
How hard can Greek Mythology be?
He knows this tale, and he’s ready to live it.
(At least, he hopes he is. He decides he’s going to be an Olympian moments after they touch down, because like hell is he going to be one of the tragic heroes.)
(He's been one once and it didn't exactly go well)
He steps off Aurora and pauses, thinking about gender for the first time in a quite bit, because when you have other things to do, like revenge killing your family for eating the last brownie, you don't often fathom your pronouns, and hm.
He/him is awful and wrong right now.
Sorting through pronouns, Tim looks for a decent set. Xe/xem is too nothing, ze/zir is too orange, fae/faer is closer, dae/daem is plainly wrong, ae/aer isn’t the worst, and finally she/her and oh.
Huh.
Been a long while since she was a more than 80% girl in the gender area, a few years at least, but well.
She’s a woman right now. She/her it's-a-threat. Been a while since that's happened. She whirls around to the others. “Before we split up and all that, are we doing hide and seek?” She starts, stretching an arm out to stop Marius from wandering off and becoming so impossible to find no one hears heads nor tails of him till they decide to leave. “Sure.” Jonny says at the same time as Ashes shrugs and says “I’m not really feeling hide and seek.”
They glare at each other a moment. A battle of wills between the most stubborn person Tim knows and the most firm.
“We are doing hide and seek,” Jonny growls. Hand edging towards his pistol. “We haven’t in ages and I’m fucking bored. ”
“I don't feel like it.” Ashes shrugs. “You lot can.”
“Ashes! ” Jonny gripes.
Tim sighs. “I am assuming we are doing hide and seek. I'm going to go hide. Fight it out you two. Also, more importantly, she/her for the foreseeable future.”
And then she’s off.
Aphrodite seems like a safe bet. Tim decides as she asks around. There doesn't seem to be one, as she keeps getting odd looks as she describes a goddess none of them know of.
She can already feel the ribbons of a Role wrapping around her, dragging her forward.
Not a tight role, not one that sinks its teeth in deep. So deep if you ever tried to tear yourself from it before it's time ends, a piece of you would go with it.
Also, Tim knows that she's gorgeous. She’s certainly pretty enough to do this, and she came from a sea of stars, which is rather close to seafoam if you squint a bit.
So she becomes an Olympian, and has a fucking ball of it.
She’d never really been one for rich parties, for the bourgeoisie.
But also... She remembers reading about how parties were “different back then” and well, they sure as hell are when you’re surrounded by Immortals just as off the shits as you, who aren’t tethered to this plane by a metal piece.
It's fun, it's really fucking fun.
People often forget that Aphrodite, while being a goddess of beauty and love, is also a goddess of war.
She’s wed to a man named Hephaestus but well... It's Ares who catches her eyes.
She smiles as he walks over, and from one war driven fellow to another, she and him are kindred spirits of battle.
And well, he’s taller than her, and while Jonny is great and all, she misses having to lean up to kiss someone.
So she and Ares have a lovely affair, and Aphrodite makes her home amongst the Olympians.
She knows she’s made the right choice as she sees a war start.
A short thing, an uprising ending in slaughter.
Not even a proper war really, a skirmish between districts. A rather standard battle all things considered. She and Ares laughed about it all night.
But well, the war was a tad too familiar.
A tad too real to her.
It was a tad, just a bit too close to the one she still wakes up screaming about, heart racing as she turns, stumbling to the lights, as she holds a gas mask to her face as she wheezes wheezes wheezes.
Ares holds her close those nights, he might love the glory of war, the violence, the slaughter and the blood, he cares for Aphrodite, and of course, he knows the face of the fear of the aftermath.
The wars here are never towards the heavens, never near Olympus.
They're deep in tunnels, and the government has no qualms about who it sends fighting, some are too young to grow beards, some so young they are hardly more than children and that well…
That hits a bit too close to home.
She’d been sent off to fight at hardly 17, died at 20.
And child soldiers make her very uneasy.
But well, she can set that aside, smile and laugh, detached as she is from the mortals.
She is a Mechanism Olympian, and she does not fear the deaths of mortals.
She plays in this role, the line between Gunpowder Tim and Aphrodite blurring, but the line is always there. Never gone, and if things went sour, she could tear herself from it without losing too much of herself in the process.
She’s always herself, Gunpowder Tim, under a woven dress of lies.
The Role is a fun one, but she never settles in it too deeply where she becomes just as much Aphrodite as she is Tim.
Not like Ashes as Hades, where the line between act and self blurred into nonexistence.
There is no line between Hades and Ashes, they are one in the same, and Ashes is deep in the Role.
Regardless of Ashes, Tim plays a part.
And sometimes, very rarely but sometimes, while she gives Psyche her tasks, or the time she, Athena, and Hera fought over the title of the most beautiful, she finds she would not be able to pull herself out.
She’s deep in the story, and she must play her part.
That is the will of the universe, after all.
That is the path the Story must take.
For there to be a Trojan War, there must be an Aphrodite.
But those times are far and between, and overall, the Role is a loose one.
But as the Trojan War stirs, the role loosens it's grasp.
And Aphrodite finds herself on a date with Ares, and a new war stirring.
“Aph!” Ares’s eyes are bright as he sits down, gleaming with hardly concealed excitement. “You remember that boy, the one who deemed you the most beautiful?”
She nods idly as he speaks. Only half-listening as the first half of that sentence was lost to the void that is having shit auditory processing.
“What was his name? I think it—”
“Paris?” She adds, hoping she didn't just make someone up or is thinking about a different thing. She only got half the first sentence, so she might be wrong.
“Yes! Paris! That’s the name.”
She exhaled a tad sharply, thankful she hadn’t just made that whole interaction up.
“Right, what about him?” She sits up a bit straighter, twirling her hair around her finger. Anything about that flaming mess of an interaction was bound to be at least a bit fucking interesting. If being an Olympian was anything, it wasn't boring. “Did his father die? Is he king now?”
“You know how you promised him the most beautiful wife?”
“Mmhm? What about it?” Aphrodite looks up, meeting Ares’s gaze.
There is a dangerous light in his eyes, the light of a war brewing. A light Tim would recognize if she were Tim enough to notice. “Well, Paris he,” That smile is dangerous, gleeful. “He took a woman named Helen from Sparta, and claimed that as you promised him a wife he has rights to her.”
Her immediate reaction is to nod and listen to him ramble, but this does pique her interest. Bound to, at the very least, be some juicy gossip. But as Ares talks about the rising tensions around Troy, she understands his excitement.
As the Olympian who profits most from wars, he’d absolutely be the most excited here.
She passes through the conversation as Aphrodite, listening to Ares ramble about weapons production and how everyone might take sides in this war, how being the main supplier of weapons, he would be key in the conflict, and sips her drink.
Later that night, sitting alone, Tim is Tim enough to recall her lessons, centuries ago now, on the story of the Trojan War, and pauses. Blood running cold.
Because she was branded Achilles eons ago.
And this Role had been getting looser.
She thinks back to her conversation with Ares, as he smiled a bloody, evil smile and his gleeful talk of the war that was brewing, and knows that her time here might not go quite as planned.