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When all is said and done, when they stare upon her with disgust, when they spit at her feet and in her face, when they shove her away from her own children’s tombstones, they will have one question; they will want to know one thing, and one thing only, and that is all she is good for, anymore. How, they will ask after - how do you murder your own child? How could you ever even contemplate such a thing?
How does she tell them just how easy it was?
She could hang them. This is the most obvious solution and she has thought about this, she has had the nooses ready, two lengths of rope coiled around each other like brothers, waiting in the bottom of her linen drawer. She knows how to tie a good noose, after all, could probably tie two at once, one in each hand. It would be so easy.
But it is not right. She does not want to choke Jason, she does not want him to claw at his neck with a sliver of manic hope that he can get himself out of this. She does not want this to be a process, doesn’t want him to stare wide-eyed and watch death hurl towards him. She doesn’t want him to wait and feel something rush up at him; she wants it to slam into him, she wants him to be blindsided, to have no idea what hit him. She doesn’t want him to be able to see it coming.
So no hanging, no nooses. It’s for the best: it won’t hurt him, not in the right way. It is only after she has discarded the idea that it dawns on her that it wouldn’t have worked anyway; the ropes are cut to hang adults, they would not have reached low enough for the children.
She could poison them. This, too, is easy: too easy. She has the bottle of poison waiting. If she is being honest with herself (which, as she knows full well, is a rare thing), then maybe that’s what the poison’s been for, all along. Maybe that’s why she bought it in the first place, to poison Jason. Maybe Kreusa came in a flash of panic, when she forgot who, exactly, had Jason’s blood running through their veins. This was always meant to taint his blood.
So the poison could work, would work - but this, too, is not right. She does not want Jason to writhe on the ground. He will pull at his skin as if he is in control. He will have time to process it. He has seen it before, he will understand; and she does not want him to understand. He has never helped her to understand anything, has always kept it from her so the news hit her secondhand, barreled into her and swept her off her feet, and it must be the same for him. He cannot lie there, writhing, clawing at his skin, knowing what is happening. No. That is not right.
So she sets the poison aside. Too slow. This needs to be an electric shock strong enough to stop his heartbeat immediately, not a bunch of little shocks that only make his heart stronger.
She could choke them, could suffocate them; and this would perhaps be the easiest way of all. She could sneak into their bedchambers while they are sleeping, poor things, and could end it all without any pain: a quick squeeze around the neck, a face pressed just a bit too hard into a pillow, into gentleness: too much softness is just as fatal as too little, but, gosh, it is easier to overdose your children on pleasure than pain. It would be so easy for her; it would make her job so much easier, not having to listen to their precious little voices screaming.
But this is exactly what the problem is, and exactly why she knows she can never choke them. Because it is too easy. Because it is too removed. Because it does not hurt them, and so it does not hurt him. She does not want him to be unaware of what’s happening, doesn’t want him to sleep through it and never wake up. She wants him to feel it. She wants him bloody. She wants his body wet and dripping, all of his body, for his hands already are. She wants the rest of him shining with red, and she will not get that by suffocating him while he sleeps.
So she sighs and sets the easy option to rest. She can’t do this. It is easy for her, but that means it would be easy for him, and - no. The whole point of this is to see him hurt.
The whole point of all of this is to spill his blood - their blood, his blood, it is the same, it is made of the same essence, isn’t that what would make them all kings - so that he can see the essence of himself running along the floor and scream and scream and scream.
Spill his blood.
Spill his blood.
And this is when she realizes exactly what she must do.
She could stab them, drive a knife deep into their flesh, into his flesh; she could see their blood scurry along the floorboards. And then, when he saw his own blood staining the floor, he would tear himself apart from the inside. His blood would already be spilled, and he would destroy himself so it could splatter the way she has shown that it can.
She wants the pain to slam into him. The shock first, like when you feel the hilt of a knife knock against your ribs; the pain a splitsecond later, when you process the blade inside of you. The neverending agony a second after that, when the knife is removed; the agony that lasts the rest of your life. Yes. Yes, this is how she wants it, exactly this: she will stab him, and watch him collapse in a puddle of his own blood, collapse in a puddle of all that is left of his bloodline.
Their blood, his blood. It is the same thing. It is made of the same essence. Jason is in them and they are in Jason, and so to obliviate one, she must obliviate the other. Jason will survive if his blood survives (that is how royalty works, after all). He will live if his blood persists. So, to kill him, she must make sure that it cannot.
What does it feel like to see your own blood spilled?
It is indescribable; she cannot tell you, even though she, of course, has seen the same. Her blood, her bloodline splattered on the floor: her doing. She has done it before, and, like the delayed feeling of the knife, the pain is just now catching up to her. The agony of her blood spilling will haunt her forever.
It will now haunt him forever too.
It does not for a moment occur to her that their blood is half hers, too. How could it, why should it? It is the male bloodline, after all, that matters. The blood that splattered the floor when she gave birth to them is of no significance; the blood that soaked them outside did not matter as much as the blood in their veins.
Well, now they will be one and the same, and Jason will see. Jason will hurt, Jason will bleed.
She raises her knife, and they blink awake. His eyes: they have always had his eyes.
So it is his eyes that widen when she leverages the hilt. It is his eyes that fill with terror, and then with anger, and then with pain.
It is his eyes that slowly fade to black. And Medea is glad of it, to see his eyes forever suffused by nothingness.
As she leans over them, she catches a glimpse of herself reflected in the shiny blackness of his pupil. She stares at herself in the mirror that is him departed, seeing herself clearly only now that he is gone.
She relishes the moment for a heartbeat, and then she closes their eyelids, so that she will never have to meet his gaze again. He will never see her again.
As she leaves, it is utterly lost on her that they will never see her again, either. And like the knife’s blade, this is a pain that will not come until later. Later, when it is too late to stop the bleeding; later, when the blood has already irrevocably stained the floor.