Chapter Text
It was a beautiful, dreary day in the House of Hades. Zagreus breathed in the underground stench of sulfur and the stink of dying righteous souls. He wrinkled his nose. (Said righteous souls smelled a bit like fresh popcorn mixed with grave dirt when they died. It was, quite frankly, fucking awful, especially when one was hungry, because the buttery scent of morality was all too appetizing to be paired with the metallic stink of grave-earth.)
There was really no reason for him to be outside the training chamber today, or his room. His stomach was grumbling, but gods didn’t really get hungry the same way mortals did. He knew perfectly well he could still train ‘til he dropped, and that would not be for a very long time. It would be a longer time still before anything so trifling as training would send him into a reeling darkness and then to the warm, bathlike blood of the Resurrection Pool. Gods were funny and immortal like that, especially Underworld gods.
He rubbed the spot on his godly side where, yesterday (however long a day was down here) some fire-beast’s red-hot jaws had gotten him on the last Father-sponsored “escape attempt”, and continued towards the kitchens anyway.
It was easy enough to promise the cook as many cave fish as he could catch on the next escape attempt, and he was in the middle of stuffing his godly face with sushi when Thanatos slipped into the barstool next to him.
“Hmrhg, Tham!”
“Please, Zagreus, finish chewing before you greet me.”
Zagreus swallowed and grinned. “Hi, Than.”
(What could he do but smile?)
“I merely came to inquire after your… recent employment.”
“You can say the escape attempts.”
Thanatos winced, ever so slightly. He looked weary, Zagreus realized. As weary as a god of death could. But then, weariness was an emotion familiar to the both of them.
Didn’t make it any less concerning.
Thanatos was still averting his gaze, so Zagreus dropped the subject.
“Okay. Are you hungry? The chef made this great sushi.”
Thanatos laughed, a gentle huff. “It looks exactly the same as every other time he’s made sushi, Zag. Not much variation in cave fish, is there?” The corners of his eyes crinkled a bit as he looked at Zagreus.
“It’s good!”
The Underworld felt more like home then and there, talking to Thanatos, than it had in the past three months. Almost ninety days, he realized- he’d slept eighty-six times since they’d last talked like this. Or since Thanatos had smiled at him like that. So much easy laughter, wasted to death in the still sulfur air of Hades on forty-seven escape attempts.
Zagreus promptly suffocated that thought in his head and continued shoving rice and river seaweed in his mouth, barely stopping to breathe or chew. What could he say? The sushi really was great.
“I never said it wasn’t good- Zagreus you’re going to choke.”
“Oo never said if you wanted some,” he mumbled around the food.
Thanatos pretended he hadn’t said that. “Chewing is not optional.”
He grinned. “It can be if you try hard enough.”
Thanatos suddenly sombered. Zagreus looked up, mismatched eyes searching, and found Death once again instead of Than.
It was easy to forget, sometimes, that they were the same age. Gods grew at different rates- Athena had sprung to adulthood in a near-instant after her confinement, while Zagreus had grown only slightly faster than a mortal would. He bled red, too; Thanatos had ichor in his veins, and his transformation from lanky child to looking every bit like a fully-grown god had happened near-overnight. Zagreus hadn’t been that far behind, but it had still taken him a good year to fill out and shoot up to his full height. Now, of course, both of them knew it was Persephone’s blood that had- if mildly- stunted his growth in the air of the Underworld.
Zagreus wanted nothing more than to keep talking. He should probably have been more surprised by that realization, but he’d ceased to really be surprised after the whole “your mother isn’t really dead, she’s just chilling in the mortal realm” incident. These days, he tended to roll with every epiphany.
Epiphany number one: Than was definitely his best friend. There was no question about that- they’d grown up in each other’s beds. Than had been his first and favorite sparring partner, and later his favorite competitor, the only one who could keep up with him. And, Olympus above, did he keep up.
Epiphany number two: There was the distinct possibility that Than might not want to be his friend any longer. Not just a loss of closeness, but a loss of contact. However awful the last three months had been, perhaps Than had gained a new perspective on his company. A bad one.
Epiphany number three: Zagreus had literally never considered that before.
Thanatos had always been there , no matter if they’d fought or bickered. However he drew back from anyone else, he’d always been right next to Zagreus. Even in anger, he grew distant, but to Zagreus he raged. (Zagreus could take it. Would take it, a thousand times over, if it meant Than didn’t have to hide from one more person. Besides, he was the son of Hades. They were more than a match for ire.) He’d grown uneasily used to Thanatos’ absence in his life the past three months, but the thought had never even occurred to him that it could have been the beginning of the end.
Endings were, contrary to popular mortal belief, something gods were plenty familiar with. Forever was a long, long time, and the nature of Time was that it ended everything it had begun some way or another. Zagreus had seen plenty of endings in his life.
It wasn’t that he had thought they would reconcile. Not in so many words, at least. It was more like he had grown complacent with the natural state of the universe- and through the upheaval of forty-seven escape attempts, he’d stayed blind to the possibility of a future without Thanatos in it. He’d been so busy eating and sleeping and breathing the thought of an unknown mother- Nyx had raised him, but the news that the goddess who’d given birth to him was still living and somewhere out there had set fire to his bloodstream. He’d fought like an animal with its back trapped to the wall. Than’s presence had barely registered.
Or the lack of it, by the middle, before Zagreus had gained enough shreds of peace of mind to pay attention to him and after Zagreus had lost them all. Even though through the fields of Asphodel and Elysium, they’d fought together, it had been a sort of autopilot.
Zagreus wanted, with a sudden ferocity, to see Than in action and breathe him in.
He pulled his chair out with a resounding scrape and stood up, the last of his sushi lying forlornly on the bone-china plate. Than rose with him, and said a touch too lightly,
“Where are you headed?”
“Training room. Spar with me?”
The question hung between them in the still air.
“Sure.”
It was that simple. It always had been.