Chapter Text
When his brother’s boyfriend noticed his black eye, Hypnos thought he could feel his heart growing. At least three sizes. Just like in the story.
If you asked him ten minutes prior, he’d have said he was well over his childish infatuation with the Prince. This was an accomplishment Hypnos had been working on all summer. Partially because he didn’t hate his brother that much, but mostly because it was impractical and a waste of time to be constantly putting on this one-man Beauty-and-the-Beast tragicomedy routine when everybody over the age of eight knew that Beauties (Zagreus) never, ever fell for Beasts (yours truly) in real life.
Five minutes ago, Zagreus came rolling into Hypnos’ domain (the local gas station convenience store) and tossed a can of tea from the freezer at him, startling him so badly that he nearly fell off his stool.
He bent to fetch the can off the floor. “Abuse of employees is only allowed by management. It’s the first rule in the handbook.”
“Sorry, did I actually get you?”
“No, no, I’m okay.” His voice simpered and broke mid-syllable. God. What was wrong with him. He cleared his throat, trying consciously to lower its register. “Uh, that’ll be $2.85.”
Zagreus shook his head. “It’s for you.” He gestured vaguely at his own face, kindly leaving the specifics unsaid. “Ice helps keep swelling down.”
“Oh,” said Hypnos. He held the can to his shiner and felt his throat swell with love.
“Fifteen minutes on, fifteen minutes off.”
“Fifteen, okay, yeah. Gotcha.”
“You alright?”
Hypnos tried to smile. “Something something, the other guy.”
()
He held the can against his face for the rest of his shift, until it was sweaty and warm as a palm, and then went home and drank it room-temp as he worked on his comic.
Today the God of Sleep was doing battle with scurrilous blackguard and overall asshole… Gregeus. Or Greg-something, anyway.
He dispatched in him under ten panels, ending with a satisfying sketch of Greg(eus) being dragged into the pits of Tartarus by two tamed Nightmares—skeletal creatures with acid-eaten flesh, which required a lot of consulting the internet to get right.
Hypnos was very self-conscious of putting too much wish fulfillment into his comic. He didn’t have Hypnos win all the time. And although the Underworld Prince did appear semi-regularly to do battle with his most trusted companion, he’d never drawn them, like, kissing, or anything mortifying like that. He wasn’t twelve fucking years old. He could be mature about it.
()
Obviously, his real name wasn’t Hypnos. It was just a joke. A metaphor, for the cat-napping boy who dozed off constantly in class. Who’d happily spend all weekend in bed, burrowed into his blankets like a mole into earth.
That made his brother Thanatos—very fitting, with his whole uptight goth asshole shtick. And Mom was Nyx-like in that she was mostly around at night, arriving back home late after one-or-the-other of her jobs, eating her dinner on one side of the kitchen counter as they ate their breakfast at the other.
Hypnos couldn’t remember when he’d started the metaphor. In middle school, maybe. He’d had this big embarrassing mythology phase. Most of his phases were embarrassing. He had abnormal interests. He liked reading but didn’t get along with the nerds, and drew comics but was rejected by the artsy kids.
If it weren’t for his brother, he might’ve thought it was ordinary to grow up like a stray cat, solitary and unspoken-to.
It was unfair that Than had friends. Than with the long hair and piercings, the spiked black boots.
Once upon a time Than had been picked on, too, but then he brought a pocketknife to school one day and the bullying had stopped.
Maybe Hypnos should bring a knife to school.
()
After a fortnight’s perilous journeying, the Sleep God Hypnos, born of Night, Lord of Dreams, reached the rotten eyetooth of the cave.
Leagues beneath the sun-warm surface, he had done battle with countless foul foes: eyeless and hairless beasts, pale creatures which expired bloodlessly at the end of his many weapons.
Now, he had finally gained his destination. All was still. Without hesitation, he reached into the dread-black pool, and grasped the hilt which awaited below the water. The Sunless Sword rose silently, like the moon in the night sky.
()
It was Than who fetched him from the principal’s office. Their mother, he explained, was working; she wouldn’t be able to make the time to come.
Yes, he would convey their deep disappointment. Yes, he understood there were no second strikes. That expulsion was on the table. He was very sorry for his brother’s behavior. It would not happen again.
Outside, climbing into the passenger seat of Than’s ancient sedan, Hypnos asked, “Are you going to tell me how disappointed you are in me?”
Thanatos sighed gustily, which Hypnos understood to mean the same. “Where did you even get that knife?”
Hypnos shrugged. It was a rusty box cutter; he’d found it at the bottom of a toolbox in the garage. “Didn’t you do the same thing?” he challenged.
“Didn’t I do what same thing?”
“Bring a knife to school.”
Thanatos squinted at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Hypnos looked away. He felt let down. He wanted to ask him how he’d made it stop, then.
“Can you not tell Mom?”
“If you think I’m not going to tell—”
“I just don’t want her to worry,” Hypnos lied.
Than’s finger tapped on the steering wheel, which meant he was thinking about it. “Hm,” he grunted.
()
Mom was exactly twenty years older than him (same birthday). She was barely eighteen years older than Than. This was, Hypnos understood, not old enough. She was not married enough (at all), either. She was too glamorous and worked too hard, and wore no ring and never put on jeans.
They weren’t poor, but it was a hamster wheel kind of not-poor. Poor was always running after them and they had to sprint constantly to keep up.
He and Than had both gotten jobs as soon as they turned thirteen. It was understood from birth that they were to develop good work ethic, high ambitions, and practical, financially-sound passions. Than had a bent for chemistry and medicine, so he was getting an A+ on that front. Hypnos was getting, like, a B-, maybe. He got good grades in his classes so long as he tried really, really hard. He mostly failed if he didn’t.
Maybe this was why the nerds didn’t like him. He was somehow incredibly nerdy without actually being smart.
Hypnos mostly didn’t hate school, but all he really wanted to do was draw and daydream and make up stories. The problem was that daydreaming and making up stories didn’t pay the bills, not unless you were like Picasso or Shakespeare or somebody with actual talent.
()
Mom found out about the knife, anyway. Like Nyx, she was basically omnipotent.
She informed him he was grounded for the next month. Hypnos put on a great show of being miserable and upset, finding it difficult to not roll his eyes. Oh no, mother dearest, having to stay home all the time, all by my lonesome? Say it isn’t so!
It was like she didn’t know him at all.
“Hypnos. One more thing.”
“Yeah,” he said, scratching his eye lightly with a fingernail. It was getting scabby and itched like a bitch. He wondered if she was about to ask about it. Probably she could tell what was going on, even under all the beige concealer he’d heaped onto his problems.
She said, “What happened to the knife?”
He blinked at her. “The knife? I dunno. They, like, confiscated it or whatever. The principal’s probably using it to pick his teeth.”
“Hm. Make sure to get it back from them.”
“Uh, I don’t think they’re just gonna give it back to me, Mom. Even if I ask nicely.”
“Then you can buy us a new one.”
“Nobody was using it.”
“Everything in this house has a purpose.”
“Do you even know which knife I’m talking about?”
“The one from the toolbox in the garage,” she answered instantly. “Which we use to do plenty of things.”
Goddamnit. She was such a tightass.
()
Confined to the house (how dreadful!), Hypnos fetched the photo albums from the living room and spread them on the kitchen table. Night Incarnate was due for an appearance in this week’s chapter; he wanted some reference pictures of Mom.
He picked out a faded photo of her in a white dress and sunglasses. In his drawings, the scalloped neck of her thin beach dress dripped with jewels, and her hair floated about her like serpents.
When he was little, Hypnos thought his mom was the most beautiful person in the world. He loved to watch her sit at her vanity with her brushes and pots, like a witch with her potions, coloring her eyelids and drawing the thick dark flicks at the corners that made men stare whenever they went out to get groceries, or pump gas for the car.
She’d had at least a dozen jobs in Hypnos’ memory: bookkeeping, perfume selling, cab driving. Sometimes she was a personal shopper for rich people in the city. She’d spend hours every day picking out beautiful things for people who were uglier than her.
Her clients gave her gifts, sometimes. Broken jewelry, cast-off clothes.
Once she brought home a huge black-and-white mink fur coat. It was nearly as long as their couch, lined inside with a deep-purple silk which felt like touching a cloud. Than and him had begged her to try it on, but she had refused, took it straight to the pawn shop and came home with nothing but a fistful of ugly, plain dollar bills.
For a week or two afterwards, Hypnos had fantasized about buying the coat back. Once he’d actually gone inside the pawn shop to look at it, but the price on the tag scared him and put him back in his place. Anyway, she would’ve been furious at him. As she always said, you couldn’t eat pretty things.
()
The sounds of Zagreus’ loud-ass engine turning over in the driveway interrupted Hypnos. Quickly, he tucked the drawings into the back of an algebra textbook. He’d rather jump off a roof than let anyone see them.
“Hey, man,” said Zagreus as he came in, throwing his huge trainers onto the heap in the foyer. “How’s the eye?”
“Don’t encourage him,” Than complained instantly. “He just does it for the attention.”
“Yeah, ‘cause I just love it when people’s fists pay attention to my face. Fuck off, Than.”
“Go upstairs, Hypnos.”
“Listen, if you guys are gonna bang, can you at least clean up after? ‘Cause lemme tell you, the counter had some pretty suspect stains last ti—
“Shut up and go upstairs and, and—jerk off, or whatever you do in your room all day.”
Ooh. Somebody wanted to look tough in front of hubbie. “Hey, there’s an idea. Maybe I will, if you guys can keep it down long enough for me to maintain a hardon!”
“You’re a disgusting little pervert.”
“Fuck you, too. Zag, nice seeing ya.”
Zagreus’ cheek dimpled with a smile, like it always did when they argued in front of him. “See you, Hypnos.”
()
It actually, really irritated him that Thanatos thought he got himself hurt “for the attention.”
Yeah, so he used to fake being sick so Mom would have to come pick him from the nurse’s office. Yeah, maybe he’d done it so many times that the nurse would look at the thermometer readout and sigh and not even bother phoning her.
Maybe, one time, when he’d fallen during one of his and Than’s squabbles and skinned his knee, Than had caught him picking at the wound in the bathroom, digging his little fingers in to make the blood brighter and larger as tears ballooned hot in his eyelashes, ready to display for Nyx when she came home.
Sorry! Fucking sorry! Sorry for not being a cold-blooded reptile like his brother, who hated being held even as a baby, who would’ve changed his own diaper if he could. Than, who shied away from hugs, and was probably still a fucking virgin even with the most handsome, loving, wonderful boyfriend in the world, because he’d had the fortune of being born with a lump of coal in his chest instead of a beating fucking heart.
He turned onto his stomach, scratching his eye against the rough edge of the pillowcase.
Sometimes, he did wonder why he didn’t fight back more.
Zagreus would’ve fought back. Even Than would’ve fought back. People fucked with Hypnos because he made himself easy to fuck with.
He wasn’t much of a boy.
()
They were doing swimming in gym this week. Hypnos wished he were a girl, so he could join them in copping out with vague period-related complaints.
He hated being forced to display his body. He always wore a t-shirt into the water, but the fabric clung to him, advertising the cavernous shape of his underdeveloped chest, his chicken-bone arms.
He was an okay swimmer, but they weren’t doing swimming, they were doing water polo, which was basically thinly-veiled warfare conducted under cover of the thrashing, foaming water.
At at least one point, Gregeus looked Hypnos straight in the eye while kicking him hard in the shin.
At least Hypnos wasn’t the only getting kicked. Half the class was catching elbows in the rib or a ball to the head. He kicked back half-heartedly, but missed.
“That’s a point for team red! Atta team!” shouted the coach. He featured in Hypnos’ comic as Poseidon, the oblivious, blustering God of the Sea with the handlebar mustache.
The worst part was yet to come: surviving the warzone of the boys locker room. The best strategy was to avoid all eye contact, get as quickly as possible into one of the showers, and hide in it like a soldier in his foxhole until the room had emptied out and it was safe to leave. Hypnos was always showing up late to his next class, fingertips pruned up like raisins, but whatever.
He made it into the shower and stood, gasping a little, under the hard, metal-smelling water until the room was quiet. But when he drew back the curtain, the bench where he’d left his things was empty.
His stuff was gone.
Someone had swiped his fucking towel and his fucking clothes.
Briefly, Hypnos considered just hiding out, naked and wet, in the stall for the rest of the day. He really might’ve done it, if he had his sketchbook and a pencil with him.
He looked left and right and left again before exiting the stall, like he was planning to cross a six-lane road.
Well, the shower area was empty, but it turned out the lockers weren’t. There were boys there. They had cameras. Amateur mistake. Wouldn’t happen again.
()
The Sleep God was a peaceful God—which made his ire when raised all the more fearsome.
The ashen prisoners trembled on their knees, so that their chains played a pathetic melody in the blood-warm air. They knew they would be shown no mercy. The trespasses they had made were foolish and unforgivable. They didn’t understand why the fuck they’d done what they’d done.
()
Hypnos figured he just wouldn’t go to school until swimming was over.
Staying home was ridiculously easy. Mom’s schedule was all over the place, so she rarely saw them off in the morning. All Hypnos had to do was camp out quietly in his room with the door closed. Mom never came into their rooms. She respected their privacy—you had to give her that.
With the lights off and the blinds drawn, he swaddled himself in his comforter like a wineglass in bubble wrap. He slept in snatches, waking dry-mouthed to yellow afternoon light. He took some headache pills he had stashed in a shoebox. He thought maybe he’d work on the comic a little, but he didn’t have much energy.
()
Clattering from downstairs. Large shoes being thrown in a large heap.
He knew whenever Zagreus came over because he’d hear Than laughing.
Zag was the only person on earth who could undo the chronic constipation that constituted his brother’s existence. He once made Mom laugh with nothing but a two-minute string of increasingly shitty puns.
He had the closest thing to a superpower Hypnos had ever witnessed. Being exposed to his personality at close range was like being exposed to a controlled substance. People loved him as if it were a law of physics.
Even Hypnos couldn’t hate him—and he hated many people who were loved.
()
His door swung open.
“Why didn’t you go to school today?”
Hypnos wondered how Than would react if he told him the truth. Would he go psycho on their asses? Whale on the kids who’d humiliated his baby brother?
He didn’t think he and Than had that kind of relationship, really.
“I feel sick,” he lied.
“Uh-huh. You get sick more often than anyone on earth.”
“Sure. I’m fragile.”
()
“Lord Hypnos.”
“My Prince.”
The Underworld Prince’s cheek dimpled at him. “My friend,” he said. “Where to today?”
()
Overall, life wasn’t too bad.
He was fifteen with shitty skin, knees that bruised easily, and a chin that couldn’t grow a hair. He had a job and a mom and a brother. He had the callus on his writing finger for company.
He liked sleeping because he dreamt while he was asleep. He tried to dream as much as possible, generally.