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She caresses delicate, orange petals. They open up at her, almost seeming to follow her every movement, hungry for her presence. She runs down her hand down the pomegranate tree, in the soft, passionate touches of a lover, and fruit start to form beneath the flowers.
From the corner of her eye she catches a dark mane of hair bobbing by. She watches her tree by the steady, garish light emanating from little heaps of jewels studded along garden floor. Her first inclination is to ignore the owner of that head, but life in the Underworld is dull. Especially so since Hecate has been busy in the Upperworld for a while now, cleaning up the mess after Gaea’s defeat. Even an argument would be a welcome distraction from the monotony.
“Child, come here.”she says to him, eyes not leaving the blood-red orbs blooming at an unnatural pace.
The slow, steady steps at which he approaches tells her that he’d seen her there, but had chosen to ignore her.
“Persephone, you’re here.”
She puffs. “Of course I am, it’s January. What are you doing here?”
“Father had a job for me. I’m staying at the palace.”
She puffs again;in the manner that some job he’s been given couldn’t be very important. She’s annoyed. After that mistake with Hades’sword, her husband has restricted her underworld tasks and it would take at least a century before she can demand some of them back. She wouldn’t really mind, seeing how tedious dealings with the dead could be, if her husband hadn’t seen it fit that the child would take over some of her responsibilities.
“I thought they’d made a cabin for Hades at that camp of yours. Or have they remembered you didn’t belong there?”she says nonchalantly, moving on to the next tree.
She hears the child’s breathing hitch up and gives herself an inner pat on the head. She had guessed the child would share the same grudge from their forced isolation as his father, and she’d been right.
“I’ll only be here for a couple of days,”he says, his voice making it obvious how much he’d like to end this conversation.
She turns to face him, and as always, his beetle-black eyes are so much like her husband’s that the corners of her mouth curl up in a sneer. “Why for so short-term? You seem to like it here, last time you were here for months! Or do you think there might actually be people who miss you?”
The child glares at her, and she knows she’s rubbed his weak spot yet again. She wonders absentmindedly what punishment she’ll inflict on him after he inevitably spews snarky comments and cusses at her, when the silence takes her by surprise.
He’s looking at her between the long strands of his bangs, the expression on his pale face unreadable, disconcertingly like Hades when he’s judging a soul in front of him. She isn’t prepared for the almost wondering, uncertain way he throws the question at her. “Do you like it here?”
She acts calm, but the tree under her hand does a small jolt, its fruit shaking delicately like a ruby chandelier.
“Why do you ask?”she says coldly. She takes her hand off the tree, and the pomegranates grow no more.
The child scowls, “It’s nothing. I won’t bother you anymore while I’m here. I’m sorry.” An apology? There was definitely something wrong with the child.
She holds out her hand threateningly as he makes to leave. “You haven’t answered my question.”
He ignores her. “You promised father you wouldn’t turn me into a flower again.
In lieu of his skull ring a single crocus is wrapped around his finger. He whips backs to snarl, “That was my mother’s.”
She knew, of course
His hand moves towards his sword. Another snap of fingers and where his chain belt was, a clematis vine wraps around his waist. He has to hitch up his pants, his clothes always too big for him.
“You might have a few tricks up your sleeve, but do you really think to best me at the very heart of my realm?” She says with more civility,”Come on, tell me.”
He glares and fidgets, but seems to decide his ring is worth it. “It’s just that, all the books. It says that father, he…”he pauses and she nods to encourage him. “…raped you.”He looks a little nervously at her. Checking if it’s true? Seeing if she’s offended?
It is, and she’s not. “You’ve only found this out now?”she’s genuinely a little surprised. It was common knowledge after all.
‘Well, I knew you were kidnapped, but not the...details.”he says, sounding affronted, but also embarrassed at the same, as if talking about his father raping his niece and future wife was an uncomfortable subject. Mortals and their moral codes, how amusing. He’d probably been fed a watered-down version of the story, which is how most ‘myths’are told to children nowadays. He asks, “But…didn’t you mind?”
“Bridal kidnapping was all the rage back then. At least I got some fun out of it, even though it was Hades.”
He’s looking at her like she’s crazy. She blinks. She’d thought heroes were all out for sex. How old was he again, anyway? He’s so scrawny it’s hard to tell. 12? 13? That seemed old enough. Or were these things different in this millennium?
“How could you forgive him?”he says. He’s angry now, which is usual, but the context seems strange. “He raped you! You got some fun out of it? How does that explain anything?”
She narrows her eyes. She remembers now, the child was born in some mind-washed war era. “Are you questioning my morals? Or are you insulting your father? Either way, you’ll have some explaining to do to him.”She sweeps past him, towards the palace.
“No no nonono.”He rushes towards her. “Don’t.”He makes as if to grab her dress, but he watches himself in time, flinching as if burned. She still stops for him, arms crossed, staring icily at him.
“I just wanted to know.”He stammers. “How are you so okay with it?”there’s a look in his eyes, again one that she’d seen many times on his father. She doesn’t see it nearly so much these days, but it had been a constant fixture on his face when she’d been first brought here, frightened and homesick. It’s look that’s almost-
Pleading?
She’s silent, not sure how to address this. This is not a sentiment she had ever expected to see on his face. Then, looking at the thin little thing below her, something clicks in her. He may be wary of sex, but plenty others aren’t.
She raises her hands above his head. He tries to move out, reaches for his sword, but she makes the clematis vine wrap around his sword as well, and her hand is already pressing down on his temple.
She’s seen the memories of ghosts before, for its judging, or just simply for gleaning information. She didn’t think it would work for humans, but this time they are both creatures of the underworld. For them, dreams and memories are as solid as the water is for fish and the wind is for birds.
The memory is more overwhelming than she’d assumed. Unlike the ghosts, he is alive, and his want and pain and shame have yet to be dulled by death. She ends the flow as soon as it confirms her conjecture.
She takes her hands off him and walks back towards the pomegranate grove. She inspects the fruits and picks the ripest, biggest one of all. No rain or dirt has disturbed these, and the pomegranate is a globe of perfection, reflecting the light of the jewels with a dull, blood-red sheen. She hears a sword drawn being drawn. “We’re having none of that.”She says lightly and snaps a finger at him. When she turns towards him he’s rubbing his silver skull ring, as if he’s making up for the few minutes it’s been missing. He’s looking dazedly at the ground, breathing heavily as though he really has lived through that memory again.
“Come,’she says, beckoning. He ignores her, so she sighs and waves a hand over them.
The shadows spit them out in the middle of a large, airy room. She clucks at the wallpaper. Why did she think last week that daffodils were attractive? She changes them to alliums, and the curtains purple to match.
She sat down in a chair, across the one in which the child had taken without invitation. "Where am I?”he asks. Only when he does so, does he seem to notice the wetness on his cheeks. He wipes it with his knuckles angrily, and she doesn’t comment.
“My drawing room.”The child isn’t looking as disoriented as she’d hoped he would, but then again he must not be new to travelling by shadows.
“It’s four times as big as my entire room. Who even visits this place, anyway?”
She wonders if she should have transported him somewhere else, as in the middle of the fields of punishment. But then again, she’s just found out he’s lived through Tartarus. He’d walk out of the fields easy-peasy and rat her out on Hades.
“None of your business,”she snaps at him. ‘Besides, I liked the 19thcentury. All those flower languages and tussie-mussies.”The child snorts at him. Hecate came here often. She wishes the goddess were here instead of the child.
She wonders, looking at him glaring a hole through the carpet, if the child disliked her more than she him. Probably yes, she concludes. As irksome as she finds him, he is a mortal, and by default, unimaginably insignificant. A fruit-fly being swatted at, would hate the swatter more than the swatter hated it. She says this last thought aloud to him, feeling a little proud of the analogy.
“Okay. What do you want me to say?”She holds her hands up at him, who’s staring at her as if he’s thinking of a dozen ways to destroy her, and none of them would be painful enough.
“You shouldn’t have seen that. That was my own memory. You had no right-“
She sighs, and breaking open her pomegranate, offers the half to him.
“What is this, you want me to stay here to torment me forever?”
She rolls her eyes at him. “I know you can eat the seeds, you’re a child of Hades.” She tries not to sneer too much at this thought. “And I know you already stole some from my garden, you really thought I wouldn’t know?”
He takes it, and she knows he gets it for what it is, a peace offering. Or at least a temporary truce.
“You answered my question, I suppose I might answer yours,”She said, as if their conversation had never been interrupted. “You asked me why I was so fine with Hades raping me. The truth is I wasn’t. I blamed him for everything. That’s in the books as well, I think, though some of them might have been stupid enough to say that I just missed my mother.”
“The thing is, you can’t be with someone for millennia without either hating him or loving him. I chose the latter. Plus, it was Zeus’ idea in the first place.”The child coughed, sounding suspiciously like Stockholms, whatever that meant.
She continued, “You might not think Hades cares for me, but he does, very much- however he may seem on the outside. He just has his own ways of showing things.”The words sound a little forced, and she assumes the child would do something stupid like smirk at her, and then she would have to stay true to the ‘fields of punishment plan’, when he says,”I know.”
“Good that you do.”she says, trying not to sound surprised. She suspects the child thinks the same way about Hades’feelings towards him, and the fact that they’re sharing something else in common, on top of that thing she just found out from his memories, annoys her into getting angry at him again.
To be honest, Hades is loyal compared to most other gods, and especially so considering his two brothers. She’d only had to ignore a handful of half-bloods in the last millennia, and he’d sired just a couple of godly offspring the whole time she’s been here. He isn’t like Zeus, who fucked everyone just because he could, or Poseidon, who, true to the aspect of the ocean being the bearer of life, can’t keep it in his pants. Hades is the god of the dead, and for the dead there are no animal passion, only love. It sounds mushy, but she’d been the one Orpheus had sung to, and the one to whom Psyche had proved her love for Eros. Love is stripped of its worldly concerns in the land of the dead, and love that endured here, are the truest of them all. The ones loved by the god of the dead, his wife or his children, are no exception to this.
“Your father should know about this.”She says coldly, and watches the child blanch.
“No, he shouldn’t. I…just made a mistake, it won’t happen again and it doesn’t even hurt anymore. It’s all over now I am fine.”He drags the last word in anger. “Don’t you dare tell him, or I will spend the rest of my existence, alive or dead, finding out ways to make you suffer.”
He shared his father’s flair for dramatics, she noticed drily. He’s so willing to please his father. It could be worked as a weakness towards him, she notes for the future.
“Well you’re obviously not fine.”She imitates him, and waves a hand to dismiss him starting angrily at her. “You asked for my advice, and I gave it to you, didn’t I?”
“I never asked for-“
‘You asked me just how I was okay with being raped. In your situation that is asking for advice. And I gave it to you didn’t I?”
The child looks confused, and she sighs openly. She’d never pegged him to being especially stupid. Apparently she’s been wrong.
“I blamed him, remember that part? Not me, but him. It was a very fowl deed on his part, and seeing that was what made me move on. If I’d blamed myself, I’d have never been able to accept his penitence, and I’d never have been able to love anyone back, much less him.
The child is rolling his ring, and his expression is again unreadable.
“You know what we think when we look at you mortals? Your lives are so miniscule and short, it’s ridiculous. And yet you live your little fruit-fly lives trying to make them miserable. You don’t even need someone swatting at you.
You have too little of life, so live it.”
“Got that from some self-help book?” he says. At this, she ready to turn him into a rafflesia, whatever promise she made to Hades, and make him stew in his own in his own stink for the rest of eternity when something makes her stop.
The child is smiling. Not sneering, but smiling in earnest. It’s a small, tentative one at best, and it’s gone before she knows it. But still, it’s enough to shock her into silence.
The child stands up.“I have to go. I have to talk with Thanatos before he leaves. Thanks for the…pomegranate.”
He doesn’t look at the seeds in his hand, and she knows those aren’t the ones he’s referring to. In some way, she has saved his life in that bronze jar.
She knows that Hera has her husband’s son, Jason Grace, as her champion. As she watches the child pull the shadows, always omnipresent in the palace, towards him, she muses. Could the child’s loyalty towards Hades be big enough for two?
“Nico,”she calls before the shadows surround him completely, and it’s his turn to stare at her in shock. “If you want a bigger room in the palace, tell me. Whenever.”
He’s smart enough to realize that whenever means a much larger time frame than a half-blood’s inevitably short life span. She’s granted that rare sight again, only bigger this time, and she catches the sight of his white, wonky teeth just before the shadows swallows him.
She leans on the back of her chair, watching the alliums on her wallpaper sway softly to a non-existent breeze.
She longs for spring, and wonders if Nico would ever meet her favorite child.*
(*By her favorite child, I mean Makaria, goddess of blessed death. Nico meeting her would mean him facing a blessed death, or perhaps that he’d reach the Isles of the Blest. I took the liberty to assume she would be Persephone’s favorite, since Hades was often seen as an infertile god, and thus has had few children with her. The only other possible offspring between Hades and Persephone seems to be Melinoe, and the short story ‘The Sword of Hades’made it pretty clear she wouldn’t be anyone’s favorite.)
If you're not absolutely sure what's going up on there, or would just like to read more on this, try my story, An Abyss for Atonement Thank you!! :D