Work Text:
There are flowers on the graves Persephone visits now.
Beautiful, tall bouquets dot the landscape, bright yellow flowers popping against green grass, blue blossoms falling from others like the tears of those left behind. Some of the flowers fade to brown, and Persephone lifts a hand to them, watching as the colors brighten again and the stems stand once more.
She pays special attention to the smaller flowers, the singular ones left by themselves, and to the graves with no flowers on them, the ones so old that none among these people still remember those dead. Persephone remembers, though, especially when she comes across the graves of the girls and women that flock to her side when she is by the river.
Those sets of graves she lingers by, trying to decide what she should do. The flowers are easiest in the spring and summer, when rose strewn hedges grow near the edge of the cemetery, and she crosses the grounds with a pair of scissors Hades bargained and brought from Hephaestus’ workshop. Then she cuts the prettiest roses from the stems, her hands uncut by thorns, and adds more flowers to each grave.
Sometimes she finds someone in the cemetery too, the old men bent and withered, staring at the site that will one day be his, or a woman dressed in a gorgeous gown, hair and makeup carefully fixed. The old men she takes by the hand, pressing a flower into it and speaking of their lost loved ones, fathers and mother, spouses and children alike, until they leave the flower on a stone and walk with her back to the parking lot, where she watches until they finally leave safely.
It is not their time, not yet, though when she remembers - when she can, when the other duties she has do not keep her from what she wishes to do - she meets them again when it is their time, a flower pressed in their hand for the journey and a vase left behind for the living.
It is the woman’s time, though she is unwilling to leave.
This is the part that is hardest in the spring and summer, for Persephone cannot go with her, cannot lead her to the afterlife by hand and deliver her safely. She can only speak, in careful sentences different from the last time she had to make this speech, judging what will best comfort each new woman or man or child she meets.
Eventually, the woman agrees. Persephone promises she will visit her as soon as she returns to the underworld, a promise she hates to make without speaking to Hades first, but one she knows he will understand when she sees his spectre waiting at the edge of the cemetery.
They cannot speak, not now, but Persephone waits there until she sees both the woman and Hades vanish.
Then she turns back to her rose hedge. There are more graves to visit, and more of those left behind to comfort.