Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

                       I said stones,
a sack of shards and earth

to sag the trusses, splay joint and hip.
In weather such as this,

the pines blown bald
and shagged with snow. Through darks,

amnesiac stigmatic dark
our mothers never dreamed to fear for us.

I said stones. You asked how long.
I said until the sand they come to.

               —You Asked What the Heart Can Carry, David Lucas

—

The first inkling comes from, of all things, an Elysian shade. A whisper to another shade in the lounge, soft and susurrant: King Theseus has beaten seven challengers in a row, now. He calls for new champions.

Thanatos doesn’t worry, not then. Zagreus occasionally falls prey to whims even he can’t fathom; likely this is just another, a personal attempt to best Hell with nothing but a wooden stick, or some such thing. He will tire of it eventually, or worse, succeed, and they will all live with his immense self-satisfaction until the next fancy takes him.

—

The seasons turn, Demeter’s will as iron as ever, and Persephone goes back to Olympus. Zagreus isn’t there with the rest of them to see her off, but his mother’s travels back and forth have become regular enough that her departure isn’t nearly the production it used to be. Even today, only Hades, Thanatos, and Dusa watch her wave in silhouette from the great eastern doors.

“Too bad,” Dusa sighs as the doors close. “That the Prince has missed her, I mean. She’s been asking after him for a while.”

Thanatos only shakes his head. “I’m sure he’s off being run over by a chariot somewhere. He’ll be back soon enough.”

“Of course he will!” Dusa says brightly, though Lord Hades’s brow furrows.

—

He goes once to find Zagreus in Asphodel. He’d thought he’d felt him there, the faint, hot pull of his nature, but he’d arrived to an empty field of rock and magma. A few shades hover at the lava’s edge around some small, swimming shadow, uninterested at his appearance. No bloodless, though, no dracons; he must have just missed him. Not the first time he’s been too late to help. Ah, well.

Zagreus will find him if he needs him. Thanatos knows that, if nothing else.

—

He is in Athens when he realizes Mort has not called for him in some time. Curious, Thanatos visits the House and checks the courtyard outside the prince’s rooms: empty of all life, even the chattering skeleton Zagreus counts among his friends. The glass case of his keepsakes stands locked on the far wall.

He can see well enough through the glass he feels no need to try the lock. His butterfly lies in its regular home among the black velvet; another place stands empty in the last line instead, and Thanatos can’t remember its owner. Mort is there, too, resting innocently against the glass. Shady, however, is not, and Thanatos scoffs. He will never pretend to understand Zagreus’s affection for the knave-king.

Well, if he’s to be spurned for Sisyphus, so be it. Souls call for him endlessly; scissors click over and over in the back of his mind. He has work to do.

—

He doesn’t return to the House for a long while. Ares has fomented a great war among the mortals, and when the battles have ended and the violent deaths gone with them, Thanatos must pick his way through the ruined fields after. He likes this work well enough, despite its instigation; these mortals are more relieved to see him than most, and more than one lifts his neck gladly to the scythe. They pray to him, then, and he grants their prayers willingly.

End my suffering, Death. Bring me peace. Bring me the end of pain.

He’s just finished clearing the most recent battlefield when a vulture alights on the crossbar of a broken pike nearby. Its wingspan is enormous, the length of a man or more; its feathers shine glossy and black as it folds back its wings. The pike sways under its weight despite the anchor of the corpse it spears.

“Lord Ares,” Thanatos says, and sheathes his scythe at his back.

The vulture does not shift shape so much as it withdraws into shadow, and when the shadow eases Ares stands in its place, his hand gripping the pike-shaft easily. His smile is broad with amusement and admiration. “As always, O Death, it is beautiful to watch you work.”

“As always, you provide me no shortage of it.”

“Yes,” Ares says, smiling proudly as he surveys the charnel ground. “They will write songs about this one, I think.”

Thanatos doesn’t particularly care, but Ares also rarely stays so long after a battle. “Did you have a champion in this war, then?” He hasn’t personally escorted a mortal soul to the Underworld since Sarpedon, but he’s nearly through, and one more on his journey home will make little difference.

Ares scoffs. “I would not sully your holy office with such a thing. No, I come with a message.”

“A message?”

The shock must show on his face; Ares pulls the pike abruptly from the body beside them. It grows whole in his hands, shining, and Ares’s smile thins to a blade. “Will you hear what I have to say, Lord Death?”

Thanatos stiffens. “I apologize for any disrespect, Lord Ares. I’ll hear your message gladly.”

“My message is this: my sons who are Phobos and Deimos have received offerings lately which they find distasteful.”

“How so?” More importantly, why in this world or the next has Ares himself come to tell this to Thanatos?

“They are offerings of blood, O Death.”

Thanatos takes a rough stab at delicacy. “My lord Ares, I… am not closely acquainted with your children, but I would have thought this an acceptable offering to them.”

The sullen grey sky overhead rumbles with distant thunder. The fields around them, already black and barren with the aftermath of fire and pitched battle, seem to sigh with the approaching storm. A thin wind picks up, and Ares lifts his face to the smell of death it carries. “My sons are Dread and Panic,” he says thoughtfully, “and they travel often with me into battle. You are right that mortal blood is offered them from time to time, and not always willingly. This they gladly accept.” Ares turns to look at him, the slashed white streak across his eyes making their crimson burn even brighter. “They tasted divinity in this sacrifice, Lord Death, though the blood was as red as any mortal’s. And thus they came to me, and so I have come to you.”

The world has opened up beneath Thanatos’s feet. The wind dies to nothing between one breath and the next; singed flags at the ends of spears and pike-poles falter and grow still. Even the rolling promise of the storm above them seems to catch its breath in ghastly anticipation.

“When…” His throat is tight with horror. “Lord Ares. When did this happen?”

“Only a few days ago, near Taenarum. Hermes is gone at the will of my Lord Uncle Zeus, so I spurred the mortals here to bring you near to me.” Ares faces him now, square-on, no smile on his face. “Tell me that my kin who is your prince is safe.”

He can’t.

He can’t. When was the last time—two weeks? Three? Time passes strangely in the Underworld, let alone when Zagreus is in the middle of one of his runs, and Thanatos has been on the surface too long. How long?

Elysium. How long ago? Zagreus had carried Varatha in one hand, and with the other he’d pulled Thanatos down for a kiss goodbye. He’d been cheerful, eager as ever to hurry onwards; he’d tasted of the centaur’s heart. Three weeks as mortals marked them, perhaps. Perhaps longer.

The prayer hissed through his teeth is wordless, godless. Let him be safe—

“I see,” Ares says softly, “that you can make me no such assurances.”

His heart thunders in his chest. Fear is for the weak, breathes Achilles in his memory, but Thanatos is nothing but fear, now. “I have to go. I—thank you for the message, Lord Ares. I’m sorry, I…"

“Go. Find your prince,” Ares says. He flourishes the pike in his hand, bladed tip whistling through the air to point at Thanatos. “And know if you do not, O Death, that War will come to the very doors of the House of Hades.”

But Thanatos is already gone.

—

It seems impossible that the great hall should be so unchanged, given the frenzy now threatening to swallow Thanatos whole, but unchanged it stands. He lands squarely in the center of the hall before Hades’s desk, dispersing a few shades into indignant mist, and straightens at once. “My lord Hades,” he says, amazed that his voice does not tremble. “I must speak with you immediately.”

“Not now, Thanatos,” Hades says irritably. “We’re only halfway through—”

“Yes,” Thanatos demands. “Now.”

The first time in countless millennia he has interrupted Hades. The first time he has ever raised his voice. Hades sits back in his chair, brows raised, and says nothing.

It’s the only chance he has. Thanatos plunges onward. “I believe Zagreus is missing.”

“It’s hardly the first time,” Hades says slowly, but his quill has not yet returned to his parchment.

“No. Listen to me, please. Ares found me on the surface. His sons were given an offering of divine blood, and he came to tell me. Red blood, and very near here.” He shoves his hood back from his face, his knuckles white around the scythe’s handle. “Please, my lord. I would love to be proven wrong. I know there are many god-touched mortals who might have given up this offering. But it held too much power even for Phobos and Deimos to be pleased with it, and it’s been too long. Hasn’t it?”

He can hear his own desperation. Nyx has approached from his right, with Megaera beside her; Achilles now stands in the archway to the west wing. Impossibly, he expects Zagreus to stride out behind them all, scraping one hand through his hair and wondering what all the fuss is about.

But he doesn’t come.

“Hypnos,” Hades barks.

“Hup! I’m on it!” Thanatos hears behind him, and turns in time to see Hypnos flipping quickly—as quickly as he can, anyway—through the leaves of his ledger. He has to go back to the previous page, then the one before that, and again once more, and Thanatos’s heart becomes more ice with every turn. “Hmm. I’m not seeing his name, my lord. Oh, nope! There he is! Natural causes, just as expected.”

“When?”

Hypnos makes an indifferent gesture with one hand. “Well, you know how it is, Lord Hades, with time here being what it is, I can’t—”

“When?” Hades snarls, and Hypnos nearly drops the clipboard in alarm.

“I guess—about three and a half weeks? If we’re measuring by the mortal calendar, anyway.”

Hades’s eyes shift back to Thanatos like the deliberate shift of stone. “And you?”

“Three weeks ago, my lord. In Elysium.”

“I understand your nature allows you to feel the death of a god. Even such a god as that boy.”

“Yes, my lord, but only if I’m near.” His throat is closing again, blind panic warring with his determination to remain rational. Useful. “The surface has been busy lately. I assumed he’d died while I was away.”

“And you, Nyx? Megaera, first of the Furies? What have you to say?” Hades’s own voice is growing deeper, anger—at Thanatos? at the rest of them? at his son?—edging along every word.

“I haven’t seen him in Tartarus, Lord Hades,” Megaera says evenly, though Thanatos knows her too well to miss the concern. “But he’s had the Pact up for a long time, and the calls can be erratic. I thought my sisters were dealing with him.”

“Nyx?”

Nyx’s brow has creased ever-so-faintly, the only mark of her own worry. “I can sense my shield of darkness around him yet persists. I can tell nothing else.”

“Useless, all of you,” Hades snaps, before shoving the entire stack of parchmentwork on his desk to the side. He plants both palms on the stone surface and stands, but it’s not to leave the hall; instead he bows his head and shuts his eyes, and the room—

Bends.

Thanatos has never seen anything like it. The torches sputter into embers, all the color leaching from the jeweled columns Zagreus has spent so much time funding; the walls creak and flex away from the House’s master as he exerts his will upon his domain. The pressure is enormous, like the deepest reaches of the ocean might crash down on them at any moment.

No small thing after all, he thinks inanely, his spine creaking under the weight, that Zagreus has ever bested his father—

All at once, it gives way. The shadows recede into walls grown straight again; the torches resume their steady light. Achilles has bent at the waist, one hand braced on the column beside him, and gasps for air he doesn’t need.

Hades rises again to his full height, his eyes burning. “I do not sense him anywhere in the Underworld.”

“Nor I,” says Nyx, her own eyes gone black and starry. Megaera has folded her arms beside her, her face stony, but one thumb taps over and over at her elbow. At last Nyx blinks, and her eyes clear to reflect the light once more. She turns her gaze to Thanatos. “My son, you must search for him.”

“Of course,” Thanatos says, impatient it’s even in doubt, ready to be gone. “By your leave, Lord Hades.”

“My lords, might I have a moment?”

Achilles’s voice comes quietly, deferently, from the western hall. Thanatos knows the boundless respect Zagreus has for his mentor, but every inch of him aches to be anywhere but here, he needs to go—

“Greatest of the Greeks,” Nyx says, her hands outstretched in placation. “You have served this house with unquestioned loyalty. Please, speak.”

The moment stretches tight, but Hades does not stop her, and Achilles inclines his head. “I only wish to suggest that the Lady Persephone be told of her son’s absence. The la—the prince is dear to her.”

“To send a message to the Queen is to alert Olympus,” Hades growls, but it has no teeth. “You would have me announce the loss of my son to all the gods at once?”

“His lordship Ares already knows. His sons, as well. I only suggest that it is better for Her Majesty to be told by us directly than to hear it with less kindness from another.”

A short, tense silence follows. Then: “Fine,” Hades says, though anger still ripples behind the sound. “See that Hermes is sent for immediately. He and Charon will take over your duties for now,” he adds to Thanatos, who startles. Death incarnate, and he has not thought of his obligations even once since—

“Thank you, my lord,” he says instead, and reaches for the surface.

“Thanatos.” Hades’s eyes blaze, his jaw set stone. Power radiates with his rage, making all the inkwells rattle. “I charge you to find Zagreus and bring him home.”

“I swear it,” Thanatos says. Megaera’s eyes flash, and the world vanishes behind familiar green.

—

The surface is cold and damp and grey everywhere he looks. Persephone has been with her mother only a short time, and the snows have not yet begun to thaw; the only patch of green he finds for miles is at Persephone’s cottage, the plants there still resolutely stalwart against Demeter’s frost. Even though he’d expected it, the empty cottage strikes at him like a blow, the dust so thick inside it dances in the sunlit air. Zagreus has certainly not been here, not lately.

He loses track of time, not that it’s ever meant much to him anyway. The sun had not yet peaked when he’d left the House, but as he spans the peninsula from edge to edge it rises, reaches its zenith with weak, uncertain heat, and falls again into a thin dusk and a starless night. He searches over and over for the pinpoint burn that is Zagreus and finds nothing. Not even the familiar wisp of Nyx’s power brushes against his mind; he flings his senses to the farthest reaches he can manage and finds nothing but snow.

He rages against his own idiocy as he retraces his steps through the night, moving in long, tolling jumps along the path he knows lies between the garden and the gates of Hell. Three weeks. How had he never noticed? So ready to ascribe his absence to thoughtless inattention; so ready to dismiss the worry. It was only what Zagreus did best, of course. Leave.

Nothing. No signs of struggle, no tracks through the old, stained snow, no mark of a mortal’s passage. He stands at the precipice where the snowy path overlooks the night-dark sea and seethes. “By all the gods on Olympus, Zag,” he says aloud into the quiet cold, “if you’ve just forgotten to die I swear I’ll—” But he falters before he finishes. It’s a clumsy promise, and he’s already sworn one oath today before the Fury bound to destroy oathbreakers.

Zagreus had taken to calling him on every run lately. He hadn’t even been needed, not always; half the time he’d arrived to deal some trifling blow against the bone hydra already falling to pieces, or been called to a little chamber near the surface with the satyr poison already sapped and dried. Just so I get to see you every now and then, Zagreus had said, beaming through Thanatos’s irritation. But Mort lies in a glass cage a fathom below, unused and left behind, and—

Mort.

No. Not Mort. Shady.

Thanatos shuts his eyes, letting out a long, slow breath, and when he opens them again he stands in the grey-green gloom of Tartarus, the smell of moss and decay sharply pungent in his nose. Faceless shades huddle in the corners, alarmed at his sudden and wrathful appearance; before him, just rising from a crouch beside his enormous boulder, is Shady’s original owner.

“Master Thanatos.” A wry greeting, and not nearly humble enough for his tastes.

“Knave-king,” Thanatos says icily.

Sisyphus gives a rueful smile, scratching at the back of his head. The stone is worn in long, smooth grooves beside him, marking out eons of an endless climb. “I must say, I never expected to see you here again.”

“I’m not here for you,” snaps Thanatos. “You gave a keepsake to Zagreus. A memento.”

“Yes, of course I did. Prince Z. has been awfully kind to me. Bouldy certainly likes him, don’t you, Bouldy?”

The diminutive is infuriating, but he doesn’t have time to correct the informality. Besides, Zagreus has probably encouraged it himself, damn him. “When was the last time Zagreus called you for help?”

“Well, let’s see now. It’s been a while, I must say. You know, I can’t remember the last time now that I think about it.”

“Not recent, then. Can you feel him now?”

“No, I should say not. Not unless he calls first.” Sisyphus puts both hands on his hips, broken chains clinking, his eyes creased with concern. “Is His Highness all right?”

Thanatos almost doesn’t answer him. He doesn’t deserve an answer, this barbaric shade pretending at reformation, fooling nobody but Zagreus in the pretense. But—he’s changed a lot, since then.

…Maybe I have him wrong.

Gods damn every shade Zagreus has ever spoken to, and himself for caring at all. “…The prince is missing. He has been for some time, apparently. I’m trying to track him down.”

“Oh, no,” Sisyphus says, and draws up to his full height. He’s taller than Thanatos like this, his shoulders broad and spreading after an age of a boulder’s weight upon them. “I say, Master Thanatos, I’m sorry to hear it. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Not unless you can search the surface world for a prince who should have safely died weeks ago.”

“Oh,” Sisyphus says in a rather different voice. “What if—well—maybe not.”

“What,” Thanatos bites out.

“Well, he dies all the time, doesn’t he?” Sisyphus looks down at Thanatos, his brow furrowed. “I mean, that’s the impression Bouldy and I got. Runs through here an awful lot for no reason, otherwise.”

“Yes.”

“So he hasn’t died when he ought to have?”

Something catches in the knave-king’s voice; something catches in the back of Thanatos’s mind, ripping at a memory he’d rather forget. “What…are you getting at?”

Sisyphus smiles apologetically. “There’s only one thing I know of that can keep a god alive and bound when he shouldn’t be, Master Thanatos.”

Thanatos stares. “You can’t be serious.”

“It’s impossible, surely,” he agrees. “Isn’t it?”

Thanatos can hardly breathe.

Isn’t it?

—

Thanatos doesn’t visit the temple outside Corinth often. It’s deeply unapproachable for one, buried halfway up a mountain and overlooking only thin scrub and brown rock; besides, Mount Cyllene has always been beloved best by Hermes, and Thanatos prefers avoiding even the hastiest conversation when he works. Not to mention that he’s not exactly worshipped among the mortals. He has no priests of his name to neglect.

The temple itself is very small, rough-hewn from the stone and unpolished.  A small carving above the lintel proclaims his name in the mortal tongue, unimpressive in the grey pre-dawn light; inside is barely enough room for a small altar, an icon of himself with a stone wing, and an empty offering plate. But behind that, below, in a small berth carved directly into the back wall of the naos—

Hephaestus himself had made the case for Thanatos, after Sisyphus. After Ares had freed him from his own chains, after the knave-king had been apportioned his eternal torment in Tartarus. The acacia wood had been stained nearly black, reinforced at the corners with gold; the latch had been bound in ivory and agate.

Not now, though. The latch is broken.

Shattered, really, agate chipped and ivory in shards upon the stone. Worse, the case is too light; he knows even as he opens it that it is empty. He stares down at the undyed linen, its folds holding only the memory of Death’s chains now, and wonders what Olympus might do if he razed every mortal city from here to the coastline to ash and salt.

Mortals have stolen from the gods before. He knows this. Prometheus stole flame; Heracles stole the golden apples. But this—this is personal in a way that wrenches his stomach and fists ice around his heart, and when he finds Zagreus he will reap everyone who has dared beyond gall to touch him.

“Oh, hey! Thought I heard someone here. Didn’t expect it to be you.”

Thanatos can hardly think through the maddened rage. It is a struggle to stand, to turn. He leaves the worthless case flung open at his feet. “Hermes.”

The god smiles, haloed in the temple’s door by the sun rising behind him. A cold day, Demeter’s chill still stronger than the warmth of Helios; the dawnlight off his winged laurels glints thin and watery, untouched by rosy fingers. “Got to say, you’ve been moving faster than I thought. Glad to see it, given the circumstances.”

“I don’t have time for this.”

“I know you’re in a hurry, boss—believe me, I know the look—but I have a message that might help. Will you hear it?”

Hermes shifts as he speaks, just enough his face is not so stark with shadow. His smile is sympathetic and patient in a way he’s rarely seen from Hermes; that alone cuts through the anger. Or transmutes it, at any rate, into something stonier he can at least think through. “Yes. I will…I’ll hear it.”

“Great! Here’s the message, then: ‘My sons have received another offering. Go to Oetylus. Follow the crows.’”

Thanatos looses a harsh breath. “On the southern coast. I’m familiar with it. I’ll go right away.”

“Best of luck!” Hermes turns to leave, and Thanatos grips his scythe, but—

“Hermes.” The god glances over his shoulder, and Thanatos squares his shoulders. “Thank you for your assistance in all this. With Charon, I mean. And with the Queen.”

“Oh, don’t think twice about it. She was grateful to hear it from you lot, unhappy as the message was. As for the rest, well, the Styx does most of the work anyway. Good luck in Oetylus!” Hermes gives a quick salute, steps out into the open air beyond the cliff’s edge, and disappears.

Thanatos shuts his eyes and gathers his strength. It’s not a triviality for him to move this quickly, this far, along the surface. He hadn’t exaggerated when he’d told Zagreus it made him sick; even now his head pounds, temples pulsing with every heartbeat, though he can’t tell what comes from the surface air and what is his gritted teeth. Still, he will have traversed the entire length of the peninsula and back again in less than two days; only at Ares’s most bloody has he ever been driven so far before.

Watch Zagreus be fine. Watch this be some ridiculous project of his, with Death’s chains missing by pure chance; or perhaps some innocent joke gone seriously awry, some prank with unintended complications. He wouldn’t put it past the prince. (He would. Zagreus would never be so heartless.)

So he moves south, and he doesn’t know if he’d rather find Zagreus alive or dead.

Chapter Text

Oetylus is a barren wasteland. Plague stripped it to embers decades back; war has thinned it further, and as Thanatos descends to the city’s outskirts no mortal life stirs to either greet him or flee. Houses stand empty on either side of the limited main street, wooden beams rotted and sagging, the unbaked brick of their walls crumbling to dust. A wooden statue to Apollo stands long-forgotten in the city’s agora, overgrown in ivy and thick green moss. And perched on Apollo’s stern shoulder—

A crow, head cocked to stare at him with one red eye.

“Lord Ares,” he says, inclining his head, just in case the god has sent a fragment of his power along to supervise. The crow lifts off, winging westward; Thanatos follows, eyes trained on the slash of black through the cold grey sky.

He loses track of how far they go. Far enough the city’s walls dwindle to a few stone embankments at the side of a ditch; far enough the desolate fields yield to untended plain. The roads have frozen in irregular patches, more muddy slush than snow, and here and there dead trees have fallen across the untended path.

Eventually the road diminishes into a rough-hewn track, nothing but fields on either side as far as he can see; eventually even that falters into a mere suggestion of a dirt trail. Wild woods begin to rise on either side, poplar and cypress, young trees yet for all they thicken with every league.

It’s harder to track the crow here, despite its frequent alighting on branches to wait for him. Their pace is well beyond that of any mortals save perhaps Achilles at his fastest, but not fast enough, not fast enough—

There.

There. He can feel it.

It’s wrong, all wrong, but it’s there: the pinpoint burn of Zagreus’s power, muted—almost stifled—beneath the oppressive weight of Death’s chains. And beneath pain, too, so terrible it rips the breath from his chest. The bond between them shrieks with agony from a body that should have died a hundred times over. Inconceivable that he hasn’t felt this once in days of searching; this beats like the burning plains of Asphodel across all his senses, overwhelming in its wild, buffeting heat.

Thanatos overtakes the crow altogether. He doesn’t need it now, hardly registers the sharp flap of its wings as it wheels back eastward. Zagreus calls him with a desperation so potent he can taste it.

The scythe lands in his palm with heavy reassurance. He leaps forward, all fatigue vanished; somewhere his sister Lyssa must revel in the maddening rage that has swallowed him whole. He is close, so close, so close—

The woods break apart into a clearing. To his left the trees continue unabated; to the right they open to a green lake choked with bracken and chips of ice. And in the center: the ruins of some open-walled temple, so long out of use the name above the lintel has been scoured away by the elements. Many of the columns have collapsed, the cracked stone roof perched precariously on the handful left intact. The naos stands empty of icon and altar alike, everything but the crumbled stone pavers swept to the side. Snow still lies in the temple’s shadow where the sun cannot reach.

A few dilapidated wooden structures have been built in a loose circle around the ruined temple. Once priests’ lodgings, perhaps, or rooms for weary travelers. It doesn’t matter, because he can feel the scream in his chest that is Zagreus as clearly as if he stood beside him. It drags him like a hook to one of the smaller structures, almost a shed, nearest the temple and its empty altar. Half the tiles are missing from its sloped clay roof, and the wooden planks of its walls have gaps wider than a finger where the weather has warped them.

Blood stains the threshold and jamb alike, a familiar burning crimson. The earth too, spatters of unclotted blood in the dirt and snow in a long, unsteady trail through the temple’s arching gate. Ribbons of scarlet drag to the altar there, or the place where it used to be, pooling in pitted stone. How much is fresh? He can’t tell. It doesn’t matter.

The door is locked. Thanatos puts his hand to the cracked, weathered wood, touches the surface of his authority, and blows it to smithereens.

He does not flinch as the shards fly past him. He is as untouchable here as he is in his contests with Zagreus; the only thing in this world or the next which can harm him already binds someone else.

“Zagreus,” he says. His voice is raw.

A god does not wait for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He wishes, almost, that he needed to; it would be easier if he could absorb it piecemeal instead.

It’s just…it’s all blood.

Every vein has been opened. Both sides of his throat, the meat of his arms, the thick veins that run along the insides of each thigh. He lies, stripped naked, on his side, his knees pulled to his chest and his hands bound tight behind his back by manacles Thanatos knows too well. The chains are the only interruption to the scarlet smears; they are drawn hard around chest and elbows and knees and every joint, each link as broad as an obol, black metal etched with gold runes reaching deeper than the links imply. No slack anywhere he can see.

His laurels are gone. His feet are all but put out, only the barest orange glimmer at his callused heels implying there is anything left alive in him. Cold winter light shafts through gaps in the wooden walls, falling in stark white circles on his lacerated shoulder, his bruised hipbone. A coarse table stands against the far wall, an array of stained knives and skewers flung haphazardly atop it. A half-dozen clay ewers and cups are lined like soldiers along the near edge, all dripping crimson.

“Zagreus,” Thanatos says again, as if it might undo the horror. The prince doesn’t move. He doesn’t even shiver.

“Get away.”

The voice comes from behind him. A woman’s voice, old and reedy, thick with threat. Thanatos turns, beyond understanding.

She stands barely to his chest. She has hunched with age, a kerchief tied over wild grey hair, her nose long-ago broken and healed badly. She clutches a wooden pitchfork like a threat; her eyes are so wide the whites show all the way around. “He’s ours,” she says, and there is madness in her voice. “The gods gave him to us.”

“The gods,” Thanatos says, and unleashes everything he is.

He can count on one hand the number of times he has opened himself like this to a mortal. Sarpedon had been one; at the death of Achilles; to Sisyphus, in anger. He lifts from the earth, scythe in one hand and unsheathed sword in the other, and darkness gathers in sunless shadow at his back. His divine radiance is cooler than the warm gold of Olympus, but she still cowers back at the light in his face.

“You have offended every god,” he says. His voice echoes with power.

Spittle strikes his robes. The words are a snarl. “He is a gift from Ares!”

“You stole holy relics from a consecrated temple. You bound a god in Death’s chains.” Pasiphae married a prideful king and bore the gods’ wrath for it; Arachne wove well and was cursed. To take a god and chain him, to bleed him—there is no fitting punishment for the atrocity. “I, who am Death, will take you to Tartarus myself.”

The sword swings down. She splits from shoulder to hip, the drab brown peplos she wears shredding with it. But—

But there is no snip of silver scissors in the back of his mind. She does not fall. She stands instead, the pieces of her body leaned together, and the wounds reknit like oil closing over a length of rope.

“No, god,” she breathes, as her shoulder seals whole once more. “You won’t. You won’t.”

“Mother?”

The man who emerges from the nearest wooden shack is taller, hale, hewed strong and thick at the shoulder. Dark hair curls into his face, chopped unevenly at his collarbones. Thanatos can sense the godsblood in him. Long diluted, of course, but somewhere in his ancestry is strength, and he walks like one who knows it well. No weapon. The same insanity in his eyes, though. The look of one who has drunk where he should not have.

The man stumbles to a halt. “God,” he says, in recognition and not worship.

“Ares gave him to us,” the woman says again. “The rest of my sons died in Corinth. I was a priestess of Demeter then. But we saw the winter which would not ease, and the harvest which never came…war came instead, and one by one my sons fell. Except Phaethos, whom Ares spared for love of his courage.”

Thanatos strikes again, and again. A line splits across the son’s neck, bleeds something not blood, and is reforged; the woman plucks her arm from the snow and holds it against her own shoulder until it mends. The pitchfork lies forgotten on the dirt. He tells them, “Ares cares nothing for you.”

“He led us when I broke my oath to Demeter. He told us to take the road south from Corinth; he led us to the shrine where the chains were kept. He brought us here, and when we had waited long enough he brought us a god to sustain us.”

Thanatos is certain Ares has done no such thing, but it doesn’t matter. He banishes the scythe—unusable anyway on still-living souls—and grasps the man’s forelock in the same motion. With his free hand he swings the sword in one strong cross-blow; the starry steel cleaves him cleanly, and Thanatos flings the man’s head and shoulders to the packed earth before the temple gate.

The man does not bleed. His veins seep something clear and wet instead that sizzles like acid in the snow, his maddened eyes rolling to Thanatos in the doorway. His mother shows no alarm at all, only hisses like a serpent, and begins with feeble effort to drag her son’s legs back to the rest of him.

Thanatos goes to Zagreus.

His skin is so cold. He doesn’t flinch as Thanatos kneels beside him to touch his shoulder, his lank hair, as he cups his hand to his icy cheek and says his name. Perhaps he is dead after all—but no, there, his chest rises, so shallow he might have missed it if a reflection hadn’t shifted on his blood-smeared ribs. And—there. Another breath, wretchedly far apart. None of his wounds have healed, not one; even the most superficial still bleed as if they had been cut only minutes ago.

He is striped with bruises everywhere the chains rest. Thanatos can imagine it all too clearly, Zagreus straining until he broke against the bindings meant to keep him still. He can hardly imagine a worse torture for the prince of Hades.

“Zagreus,” he murmurs, leaning closer, sliding his fingers to the back of Zagreus’s neck. It is slick with cold sweat. “I’m here. Hang on.”

He might be imagining it, but the agony that is his bond with Zagreus seems to ease, just barely. Without letting go, he reaches over Zagreus with his other hand for the black metal manacles that bind him—

A massive weight slams into his back.

Thanatos throws out both hands to brace over Zagreus, desperate not to crush him. His gasp is more from shock than impact; the man has tackled him like an arena slave, arms wrapped in a wrestler’s vise around his waist. The world tips crazily—he sees in the corner a crate upended, a familiar scarlet chiton spilling out in a tattered puddle, a frayed belt still knotted to a little golden shield—

The man pants in his ear, all the muscles of his arms rippling as he tries to grapple Thanatos to the ground. No Heracles this, not with his single drop of gods’ blood—but Zagreus’s blood runs in him too now, quick and hot and alive, and Thanatos was only made to reap those already dead—

Two tries to throw him off. The man grunts as he’s flung to his back in the dirt, and Thanatos snarls, whirling on his knees. He reaches for his sword, incandescent with rage, but the woman kicks the hilt from him at the last instant, and the blade flashes away into shadow.

“We blessed Ares for his gifts.” The son now, rising to crouch against the wall of the wooden shack, his teeth dark and stained. “We offered him to Ares and the sons of Ares in thanks for their guidance.”

“Ares brought me here to kill you,” Thanatos snaps, wrenching himself to his feet. He flings out his arm; his sword reappears in his hand in effortless thought. “Your offering has offended him. Has offended me.”

“You lie,” the man snarls, mouth twisting in the first emotion Thanatos has seen from him yet. He charges like a bull, head lowered; Thanatos roots himself before Zagreus and brings the blade to bear.

The man doesn’t even attempt to dodge away. He impales himself like a butcher’s slab between the second and third rib, then grips the hilt above Thanatos’s hands and pulls himself closer yet. His clear, viscous blood drips in oily swaths from the exposed sword at his back.

“He will strike you down for your blasphemy,” he whispers, so close Thanatos can see his own face in his crazed eyes. “Look at this holy gift. Look at what he has given—”

Thanatos takes two steps forward and shoves the end of the sword straight through the wall.

The man hangs there, pinioned a good foot above the floor, gasping for air as his own weight pulls him deeper down the blade. He scrabbles for purchase and finds none; he grips the hilt and tries to lift himself, to finish the slice through his own skin, but he has no leverage, no choice but to be hung like a slaughtered cow from this hovel’s wooden posts. 

And the old woman—

Thanatos grasps her by the back of her torn peplos. She clutches at the chains across Zagreus’s chest, still trying to drag her prize out the shattered doorway to safety; Thanatos breaks two of her fingers in the breaking of her grip and doesn’t care. He throws her to the dirt at her son’s dangling feet. She gasps, rattled at the blow, and struggles to stand.

Only seconds before she’s up again. Only minutes before the man finds some way to free himself, and Thanatos does not have time to chain them for their livers to be eaten each morning. The need to help Zagreus is all-consuming; he needs to get them both out of here.

He calls his scythe from the aether. Even as he swings it across the open space between them he can tell it won’t suffice; they’re simply not dead enough to cull, not with Life’s blood coursing through them. Still, the conduit opens at his call. The dirt floor darkens to a starry void lined with the familiar purple of his authority, runes and sigils lighting here and there in transient white as he tries to find a hook in their hearts, a catch, something he can touch and hold and tear apart—

Thanatos whirls. He’d seen it just a second ago, spilling from the crate—there. He snatches his prize from the pitiful pile of Zagreus’s things, then plants himself between the prince and his tormentors. In one hand he lifts his scythe; in the other he grips the gold shield given to Zagreus by his father, the sigil of the house of the dead. The violet disc spins ever faster beneath their feet.

“Lord Hades,” he breathes. Not a keepsake meant for him, nor its borrowed strength; all he has is an anguished love for the one meant to hold it. “Hades! Hear me!”

The mortals’ eyes are so wide. The stars reflect there, lined in purple, still shaded by total madness. The son no longer tries to free himself from the pinning sword, transfixed by divinity manifest.

The voice comes distant and perplexed, more a whisper in the back of his mind than a spoken sound. Worried. Thanatos?

“My lord,” he says desperately. Hades’s strength pulls at him like a riptide, impersonal and brutally demanding; he resists for a moment out of habit, but—isn’t this what he needs? Isn’t this what Zagreus needs? Half a breath to still his mind; half another to drop his guard, to step back, to let go.

Come, my lord.

His power fills him like an amphora overflowing, consuming every sense. Hades sees the mortals pinned before Thanatos in this tiny wooden shack, this defiled temple. He can feel the revulsion, the hatred nearly a twin of his own; Thanatos turns to Zagreus’s crumpled, bleeding body and it’s swallowed by a towering rage, so white his eyes burn and his hands tremble. A stern and uncertain love there too, cold and ice-thick at the surface and hot as Asphodel at the core, how dare they touch him, how dare they, they must die for this and he must see with his own eyes their binding in the deepest pit of Tartarus—

The bell tolls.

Gold light, godlight, leaps to the blade of his scythe like a wire curling in flame. It dances there as Thanatos lifts the haft, as he swings the scythe down into the collapsing circle of his power.

He feels the blade catch. He feels their souls tear loose from mortal flesh, Hades’s power an endless dominion over the bindings of the dead; the wire of golden light threads through the wounds and stops their healing. Their bodies fall limp, untethered.

Dead. Dead in every way that matters.

A few drips of thick, clear blood strike the dirt with soft hisses. Their corpses do not move. So small, now, without the insanity to drive them, and Thanatos’s jaw clenches so hard it aches.

There—the Styx. He can feel its rushing arrival—and there, there, two faded green shades arising in its wake, still new-enough dead they yet remember their forms, their faces. Gold light chains them at wrist and throat.

A vicious pleasure swallows him at the sight, and he can’t tell if it’s Hades’s or his own. But no—the lord’s power is receding like the tide, withdrawing back into Zagreus’s keepsake and further, and within a moment or two, Thanatos is left entirely himself. He must own the cruelty after all. 

“Lord Ares,” says the woman’s shade, bewildered, and she covers her face with her bound hands. The man only stares at himself blankly, the shafting light through the shack’s walls filtering through his shade’s form like old glass.

The Styx swells. The man wails as he’s swallowed, an agony Thanatos is glad to hear, and they are gone.

—

Silence. No birds outside; no zephyr to stir snowy branches. Even the nymphs have abandoned this place to ruin.

Thanatos goes to his knees beside Zagreus. The prince hasn’t moved in the slightest, save the same too-slow rise of ribs with each breath. Thanatos reaches over him, slides his fingers along the nearer manacle, and shuts his eyes.

The chains do not like Thanatos. They never have. When Sisyphus’s deceit had left him trapped, they had delighted in his tempered strength. Zagreus, though, they take less joy in tormenting; they open freely at Thanatos’s first command, the too-deep runes etched into their links surging light with his power and then dwindling once more. As if, perhaps, they recognized the prince’s nature and could not bear to bind him.

He’s just touched the other manacle when Zagreus lets out a shallow, rattling breath.

“Than?”

His eyes are barely slitted, only flashes of green and red peeking through his matted lashes. Thanatos cups his cheek, leans close. “I’m here. Hang on, Zag.”

“Kill…” the me has no voice to it, but he can read his lips well enough. Cracked lips, bruised jaw. Bleeding there, too.

“Believe me, I’m working on it.”

“Than…be careful, there are two—”

“They’re dead,” Thanatos says, catching and holding his gaze so that he understands. “Zag, they’re both dead. It’s over.”

Zagreus blinks, then squints beyond him until he can see the bodies still slumped against the wooden wall. His eyes fall shut again; his head leans heavy into Thanatos’s palm. “Couldn’t die.”

“I know.” His free hand finally finds the other manacle; he presses the command into the metal like an emboss, and the chains clink together gently as the shackle cracks open at last.

The abrupt release of tension slumps Zagreus even further into the floor. He has been bound so long he can’t pull his arms free on his own; Thanatos does it for him, wincing at every groan and hitch of breath as he stretches three weeks’ worth of fixed, cramping muscle. The chains peel away from him like the rind of an orange, reluctant to release his blood-sticky skin; he must lift Zagreus’s shoulders from the ground once to pull the last links from under him, and even that brief agony pushes Zagreus back into momentary unconsciousness. He sets the chains well out of reach, their power sapped, and eases Zagreus to the floor again. So harmless at such a little distance.

Like sluicing a dam, Zagreus’s bleeding stops immediately. His eyelids flutter; he searches the room in dazed confusion, finds Thanatos once more, and relaxes again with immense, exhausted relief. Not enough strength left in him to close the wounds themselves, not after this torture, but at least enough, Thanatos thinks, that the pain might begin to ease. Thank all the gods.

“I’ll take you home in just a minute,” Thanatos says quietly, once Zagreus is at last lying on his back and not his twisted arms, once he’s made a pillow of the torn red chiton and draped his own cloak over the prince’s chest. His burning heels are only an ember’s whisper now, and winter still clutches the world around them. “Once I’m sure the journey won’t destroy you outright.”

The corners of Zagreus’s mouth turn up in a ghost of a smile. “Not…so delicate.”

His fingers twitch, seeking Thanatos’s own; he grips them immediately, folds them between both hands and squeezes as tight as he dares. “No. But very, very bruised.”

One shoulder lifts in a jolting shrug. “Well. They were…really thirsty.”

“Zag,” Thanatos says, the grief overwhelming as a shipwreck. “I can’t. Not yet.”

“Sorry.”

“No,” Thanatos says again, utterly wretched. “The apologies are mine. I should have realized sooner. Zag—Zagreus—”

“Hey.” Just one eye cracked this time, the green one, and an impossible tenderness in his face, even here. “Than.”

He tugs on their joined hands. Thanatos goes willingly—will go wherever he leads, after this—and lets himself be pulled down into a very quiet, very gentle kiss. He strokes his thumb over his cracked cheekbone, ignoring the taste of blood; this touch is a line straight to his soul, his relief so potent his hands tremble and his eyes sting. He pulls back an inch or two, finds himself too weak to stay away, and kisses Zagreus again. Barely any pressure between their mouths, just enough to comfort. Still almost more than Thanatos can bear.

He has never really understood Zagreus’s almost compulsive desire for physical affection. Thanatos himself could happily go an age without touching another—and has, in fact—but to not touch Zagreus now would shatter what’s left of him. He runs his fingers through his hair in long, soothing strokes; he tucks the cloak more securely about his shoulders and rests his palm over his heart to feel it beat. If he could shut out all the world between them it still would not be close enough.

Zagreus hums. His eyes have closed again, the lines at the corners pulled tight with pain and exhaustion. “Cold here, isn’t it?”

Thanatos shifts closer to press his thigh against his red-stained arm, as if he has any heat of worth to give. “If you’d kept your blood inside yourself, you’d be warmer.”

Zagreus laughs, chokes, and clutches at his own chest. “Ouch.”

The bleeding has stopped. The smaller, more superficial scratches on his chest and cheek have started to close, but infinitely slower than Thanatos would like. The deeper wounds are still untouched. “We could try now, I suppose,” he says doubtfully.

“You know…how much I love sitting in one place,” Zagreus says, “but…”

“We’ll wait.”

“I’m surprised the Styx…well. Shouldn’t borrow trouble.”

“You reek of Death,” Thanatos admits, and presses another kiss to his cold, clammy forehead. “It will not take you for some time, I’d guess.”

“Mm. It’ll take more than one dip in the…pool to get rid of this anyway, I think. Lucky me.”

They lapse into an uneasy silence. Zagreus leans into Thanatos’s hand as it moves in slow strokes through his hair. His breaths still come too slow and far between, and Thanatos watches for them every time. The bruises left by the chains stripe like paint across his neck and shoulders, his calves where they emerge from Thanatos’s cloak. His feet still have not sparked.

“Than…”

“Hm?”

“Did…never mind.”

“What is it?”

Zagreus looks up at him with naked worry. “They said…Lord Ares…”

“Had nothing at all to do with it,” Thanatos says firmly, and clear relief washes over Zagreus’s face, more even than when he’d seen the bodies of the slain mortals. Of course, Thanatos thinks, of course. Of course Zagreus would fear more the loss of his newfound cousin’s affection than the weeks of torture. Of course the bruising of his tender heart would ache more than the rents in skin and muscle.

“Zagreus,” Thanatos says, not bothering to hide the fondness. “The mortals were mad. I promise, there was no truth in anything they said. Ares was the one who told us of the bitter offering in the first place. It’s how we realized…”

Gods damn. He’s stumbled right back into this all too soon, unready to explain the depth of his failure. Zagreus watches him without interruption.

“It’s how I realized,” Thanatos tries again, and now he can’t look him in the face. “Until he came to me, I didn’t…”

“Than—”

“I’m sorry,” Thanatos says fiercely. “Zag, I’m sorry. I should have noticed sooner. I’m sorry I left you here so long. I’m sorry I didn’t find you before all this happened.”

“Thanatos, please.”

He shuts his mouth. Zagreus covers Thanatos’s hand where it rests over his heart. His fingers are like ice, and the blood on his palm has grown tacky with drying. The sun has peaked for the day, the cold shafts of dusty light pulled tight to the walls now, leaving them both in a cool grey shadow. “Listen to me,” he continues, so kind it stings, and Thanatos listens. “I know what this looks like, all this mess, but…nothing that happened here was your fault, all right? None of it. I made…some really terrible choices—” he laughs breathlessly, and it’s only a little bitter, “—but they were mine to make. That’s all.”

Thanatos turns his hand upwards and links their fingers together. His blood sticks and smears over his skin. “If you won’t let me have the blame, I won’t let you, either. Let’s leave it to a pair of very insane mortals and be done with it.”

Zagreus smiles. “Fine. Better than being shoved off a cliff, anyhow.”

“Is that how they caught you?”

He hums assent. “I can only get so far into the world, you know. I could…feel the Styx starting to notice me, so I decided to sit on the edge of that little promontory and watch the sun come up. The cliff drops away there, but it’s not…” He lifts his other hand through the air as he speaks, describing it in gesture, and surely his strength must be returning, even in part, to do so. “It isn’t sheer. It falls off in sections. So if you go over, you won’t…go all the way to the sea. You’ll bounce first.”

“And you bounced.”

“Right after he tackled me over the edge, yes. It stunned me for just a moment, but I guess that was enough.”

His voice is wry, but he’s shut his eyes again. Thanatos presses his mouth to the back of his hand, then to the place on his wrist where the fetters locked. His pulse beats faint and erratic against his lips; his heart fixes after it, desperate. “And then they brought you here.”

“In a cart with a stolen donkey.” His expression turns wistful. “I really wanted to pet it.”

“I didn’t notice a donkey when I arrived.”

“They ate it. Before they realized…” he gestures vaguely at his own throat. “Sacrificed the rest to Phobos and Deimos.”

“Zagreus, the next time you try the underworld’s security, I will make sure a donkey waits for you on the surface.”

Zagreus lets out a full-bodied laugh, coughs at the effort, and looks up at Thanatos. His heels are still dull, but his eyes have sparked with more life than Thanatos has seen yet. “Don’t rush into a promise you can’t keep. A mule would do just as well.”

“Fine. Some beast of burden with a braying temper. I’ll lash it to your father’s gateposts.”

“My father—” Zagreus says in a wholly different tone.

Thanatos watches as Zagreus pulls his hand back to himself under Thanatos’s cloak, then turns on his side to face him. It’s not graceful in the slightest, too jolting with pain and the abrupt press of bruises to cold dirt. He curls his knees to his chest again, a mockery of how he’d lain when Thanatos had first found him, and sighs.

“Maybe I don’t go home after all,” he mutters into his own elbow. “Maybe you leave me here and we find out how patient the Styx can be.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“You don’t have to face my father’s acerbic judgement,” he retorts. There’s heat to it, too, and despite the sentiment Thanatos is glad to hear his temper. “Or my mother’s worry. Augh, blood and darkness. Can’t you and I just…stay here for the rest of eternity?”

“No,” Thanatos says remorselessly, though his traitorous heart jumps at the image. “Besides, your father was worried about you as well. He sent me to find you, and he lent me his power in the battle here.” And his rage, too, and his love for his son, but those are not meant for Thanatos to speak of. “I’m sure he’ll just be glad to have you home.”

“I’m sure he’s missed me exactly as much as Theseus has,” Zagreus says, but he lets Thanatos hook an arm under his back, lets him ease him up into a sitting position. “Augh, ouch.”

“Do you want to go via river, or…?”

Stronger now the prince may be, but the shift in position has him white-faced and sweating immediately. “I…I think you’d better take me directly if you can, Than. I don’t feel quite right yet. I’m not sure…”

It’ll mean a prolonged recovery, but better that than accidental annihilation. “Come here.”

“Well, you know I’ll never say no to a cuddle.”

“Idiot,” he says, wrapping the cloak tightly around Zagreus’s shoulders. “Wait just a moment. I’ll get your things.”

“What’s left of them,” Zagreus scoffs, though he willingly accepts the bundle Thanatos proffers a moment later. His bloodstained fingers trace over the sigil engraved in his father’s keepsake. “He came to help, did he?”

“Without hesitation,” Thanatos tells him, and takes him home.

Chapter Text

With the familiar tolling bell and green flash, they emerge on the steps of the Pool of Styx.

“Really?” Zagreus hisses in his ear. Then his knees buckle, and it’s all Thanatos can do to keep them both upright and out of the blood-red waters eddying at their ankles. “You couldn’t have picked anywhere else in the House for us to arrive so dramatically?”

“It’s habit,” Thanatos hisses back, and pulls Zagreus’s arm more securely over his shoulders. The prince grasps desperately at the edges of the cloak still tucked around him and stumbles again. “Come on, get your feet under you.”

“I am trying my level best to not denude myself in front of every shade in my father’s domain. Have a little patience.”

“And what would they see?” Thanatos grips Zagreus’s waist, supporting his weight while he coaxes his legs to cooperate. “The handsome prince of the house alive and well after a terrible ordeal, safely home once more.”

“The handsome prince of the house bleeding like a stuck pig and dragged half-dead through the hall because his handsome godly lover has this really old, weird thing about bondage.” Zagreus staggers again as Thanatos stops, then looks up and blinks. “Oh. Hello, Father.”

Hades stands before them. He stares down at his son with a hard look, inscrutable even to Thanatos who has seen so recently into his heart. The hall has gone silent, Hypnos watching with enormous eyes from his chaise, Nyx pausing her approach in the archway to the east. Achilles stands in Persephone’s place—the Queen must not yet have returned—with one hand fisted hard to his chest. A handful of shades linger in shocked stillness among the drifting petals, drawing as little attention as possible. He does not see gold wire at a single wrist.

Hades shifts after a long moment, crossing his massive arms. Torchlight glimmers along the jewels in his belt, his golden bracers. “So here you are at last, boy. Finally tire of mucking about on the surface, have you?”

“More like the surface got tired of mucking about with me,” Zagreus retorts. Thanatos squeezes his waist in warning, but he’s gotten that mulish set to his chin that means he’s ready to take the fight. A fine inclination for someone dressed in nothing but Thanatos’s cloak. “I suppose you kept it all running swimmingly without me here to distract you.”

Hades draws himself up, and up, and up, and Thanatos winces, but— “No,” says the god of the dead, as close to kind as Thanatos has ever heard him. “It seems you were missed. By all of us.”

Zagreus sputters. “Well—all right, then. I—it’s good to be back, I suppose. It’s certainly warmer.”

“Hm,” says Hades, and he reaches out one enormous hand to rest on his son’s head.

Zagreus’s eyes fall shut. He goes very still. Thanatos drops his gaze to his feet—as close as he stands, this is not for him either—and sees only in his periphery the slow motion of Hades thumbing a bit of dried blood from his son’s forehead, then moving down to squeeze his shoulder carefully through the dark cloak. At last he says, voice low, “Go and rest. You’ll be back ransacking my domain soon enough.”

“…I will. Thank you, Father.”

“Welcome home, Zagreus.”

Zagreus’s breath catches—Thanatos can feel it in his own ribs—and nods. Hades lets him go, then turns. “And you, Thanatos. Well done.”

Thanatos gives as much of a bow as he can while supporting Zagreus, and without looking at either of them again Hades makes his way back to his desk. Hypnos boggles as he passes, clipboard forgotten at his feet; Nyx beams in silent approbation. The moment the god passes him, Achilles straightens from his bow and comes to Zagreus’s other side, reaching for the knotted bundle of skulls and leather and linen still dangling from Zagreus’s wrist.

“Welcome home, lad,” Achilles says, the warmth in his smile reaching clear to his eyes. “You had us all worried.”

“I didn’t mean to, sir. I’m sorry for causing such a fuss.”

“No fuss at all,” Achilles says, and together they resume their limping progress towards the prince’s room. Thanatos is glad of Achilles’s steadying influence; not only does he help catch the prince twice when he nearly collapses, his pervasive calm stifles any more dangerous impulses Zagreus might have had in the short walk. Nyx inclines her head as they pass but doesn’t stop them, for which Thanatos is grateful, and without further accosting they gain at last the prince’s chambers.

—

The drop of Zagreus to his bed is just shy of unceremonious. He goes a little pale at the impact, though the choked laugh offsets it, and lets Thanatos push the cloak from his shoulders. At last, at last the deeper wounds have begun to heal. He presses his palm to the side of Zagreus’s throat where one of the most grievous cuts runs; already it’s a quarter closed, and the flesh on either side has lost its livid flush.

“That feels good,” Zagreus says, smiling, and covers his hand with his own. “It must be looking better for you to have lost your angry eyebrows.”

“Angry—” Thanatos says, abruptly aware of his eyebrows as he’s never been in his immeasurably long life. He forces them to smooth by will alone. “Just be still, Zag. For once.”

The smile turns cheeky. “Only because it’s you asking.”

“Where shall I set this, lad?” Achilles hefts the wrapped bundle of Zagreus’s things.

“Oh, just anywhere. You can toss it to the floor.”

“Put it on the desk,” Thanatos counters, frowning at Zagreus. “This room hardly needs more of your inattentive clutter."

“It hasn’t complained to me yet,” Zagreus points out, then calls, “Achilles, sir? Would you mind waiting a moment?”

Achilles pauses at the doorway, bladed spear held easy at his hip, then comes to stand by Thanatos at Zagreus’s bedside. “How can I help?”

“Just a second. I have to—” Zagreus catches a breath, then wrenches his eyes shut. His bloodstained hand moves in open space in a gesture Thanatos can’t parse, fingers closing to a fist over and over; then, all at once, the haft of a golden spear shimmers into existence. It’s slower than it ought to be, like flame licking along curled paper rather than the instant appearance of Thanatos’s own weapons, but eventually the gold flame tapers to a sharp, symmetrical double tip, and the weight drops fully into Zagreus’s waiting palm.

He almost drops it. Achilles catches it with his free hand, fist closing in support around the shaft just above Zagreus’s trembling fingers. “I have it, lad.”

“Thank you.” Zagreus lets go, yielding Varatha to Achilles’s familiar grip. “I couldn’t reach her before.”

“I’ll see to it she’s put home again.” Achilles shifts the spear to his other hand, the two poles nestling easily together despite Varatha having half a head again on Achilles’s own spear. “Now get some rest,” Achilles adds, leaning down to clasp Zagreus’s shoulder. “For Lord Thanatos’s sake, if nothing else. Your mother will be home soon, and I’m sure the Queen would hate to see him harried.”

“Yes, sir,” Zagreus sighs, and Achilles gives him a fond smile before making his way from the room. He returns almost immediately with a tray of pomegranate slices and a glass of something golden and shimmering—from Dusa, certainly—and places it on the bedside table before withdrawing once more.

A soft silence falls between them. Not peace, not after all that has happened, but a welcome stillness. Thanatos removes a few of the heavier pieces of his armor, including the pauldron and gauntlet, to perch gingerly on the side of the bed. Zagreus immediately rests one hand on his hip. “You’re bleeding again,” Thanatos says.

“Varatha,” says Zagreus in explanation. “I hid her pretty deep when…well. It hurt to dig her out again.”

“You’ll ruin your bedcovers.”

“And your cloak,” Zagreus snorts, though he does put pressure on his own neck. “If I’m the god of blood, that ought to be my prerogative, don’t you think? Well, fetch me a rag or something. I didn’t hoard all those gems for that vulture Contractor to destroy the bed now.”

It doesn’t take long to find a towel tossed over the chaise in the corner, and at Zagreus’s direction Thanatos dubiously soaks it in the scrying pool he keeps in his chambers. While Zagreus is not yet strong enough to sit up on his own, they do find he can keep his balance once Thanatos has helped him up, his feet planted on the floor beside the bed, two pillows at his right side for support and Thanatos on his left. His toweling-off is slow and clumsy, and more than once Thanatos bites back an offer to do it for him. There’s something in the way the prince watches the scabs peel free, the dried blood be reduced to smears and then nothing, that tells Thanatos this is not something he can help with. Not yet.

He’s just started work on his bruised thighs when the door to his chambers slams open. “Zagreus.”

“Does everyone in this House just really want to see me naked?” Zagreus gripes, but there’s no real irritation to it. “Hello, Meg.”

She doesn’t bother to greet either of them. Instead she stalks across the bedchambers, bends close, and takes Zagreus’s face in her hand. It’s a hard grip, his mouth pursing a little between her thumb and forefinger, and she turns his head this way and that as if inspecting a pomegranate for soundness. He allows it without complaint.

“You look terrible,” she announces at last.

“Then you can only imagine how wonderful I feel,” Zagreus says brightly. “Good to see you, too.”

“Thought you could get out of fighting me by leaving Hell altogether?”

This time his smile is real, and Thanatos feels something ease in his chest. “You know I’d never leave you behind like that, Meg. I enjoy our sparring matches far too much.”

She scowls, looking him up and down. Zagreus lets her, unashamed, and Thanatos surreptitiously braces an arm behind his back on the bed. Finally, she says, “Hypnos said a pair of mortals trapped you up on the surface. I suppose they’re the ones who gave you these lovely mementos.” She traces a fingernail over a black bruise on Zagreus’s shoulder, and Thanatos feels him shiver. Not excitement. Fear.

But Megaera sees it, too, and immediately withdraws, rounding on Thanatos. “And you. That was one of the stupidest stunts you’ve ever pulled. Don’t do that again. I have no interest in finding out what happens if I have to hunt down a god.”

He knows it’s as much to spare Zagreus the attention as it is a reprimand for his behavior, but Thanatos bristles regardless. “It worked out.”

“You got lucky.”

Zagreus’s perturbed gaze darts between them. “What happened?”

“Death here decided to swear a binding oath he’d find you and bring you home.”

“I meant it.”

“They always do,” Megaera says, irritated, and flicks her hair back behind her shoulder. “Look, just be careful about how you word it next time. You didn’t leave yourself a lot of leeway.”

“Fine, fine,” Thanatos grumbles. It isn’t worth the argument anyway, not here, and he can feel Zagreus sagging against his arm. “I’ll be careful.”

Megaera purses her lips, leaning down to look Zagreus in the eyes. He meets her gaze steadily, though fatigue and pain still carve deep furrows in his face, and he doesn’t flinch when she cups his cheek. Much more careful this time, her palm curved to his cheekbone. “And you,” she says quietly. “Don’t you do that again, either.”

“No promises,” Zagreus says with weary cheer, and she snorts. “But I’ll try my best.”

Megaera tugs his hair enough to make him yelp, then straightens. “I’ll let you rest, then, since you clearly need it.”

“Everyone keeps saying that, but no one actually lets it happen.”

Her lip curls, but she lets it go as she looks to Thanatos. “When you need to go, let me know. I’ll sit with him. Not like he’ll be calling me to Tartarus any time soon.”

This rush of gratitude is entirely genuine. While he has felt no urgent call to tend to the dying these last few days, thanks to the support of Charon and Hermes, he dislikes burdening them more than he has to. He’ll have to go soon enough. “Thank you, Megaera. I’ll find you.”

“See that you do,” she says severely. Then she kisses Zagreus on the forehead, kisses Thanatos on his cheek, and strides from the room without looking back.

—

They’re quiet again, just for a moment or two, but eventually Zagreus holds out his towel by its corners and scrutinizes the wet bloodstains. “Should we take wagers on who comes through next? Hypnos? Orpheus? My father, perhaps?”

“Meg will keep them out.” Meg saw how tired you are. “Would you…like help with that?”

Zagreus hesitates, and Thanatos will not push, but even he can see the prince is reaching the limits of his endurance, and after a second or two he rolls up the towel and hands it to Thanatos. “If you like.”

He does, and he shifts on the bed until he’s more squarely behind Zagreus. The cloak has tangled at his bare waist just enough for modesty, and Thanatos does his best not to twist it further and pull at too-tender skin. Zagreus’s back is a mess of crisscrossing lacerations. There are deep and even slices just below every rib, long cuts down his spine; overlying them all are countless shallow nicks and scratches, much less organized and of varying lengths and depths, as if mapping out the mortals’ descent into madness. Most of them have stopped bleeding, though a few still seep sluggishly as Thanatos passes the damp towel over the scabs.

“You’ll need a few of these bandaged,” Thanatos says quietly. “Unless you feel up to a trip through the Styx.”

“Do I still smell like those chains?”

“Yes. Better than before, though.”

“I’ll wait.” He snorts, his ribs jumping under Thanatos’s hand. “Bandaged. Somewhere Theseus is laughing his head off.”

“Perhaps he misses you, in his own way.”

“He doesn’t, and you’re not kind for saying so.” Zagreus fumbles behind him for Thanatos’s free hand. Thanatos takes it, locking their fingers together, and continues, doing his best to clean the wounds and minimize pain without practice or experience in either. The terrible bruise near the prince’s shoulder-blade makes Zagreus flinch every time he touches it, even an accidental brush; before Thanatos can think better of it he leans down, cloth sliding to the small of Zagreus’s back, and presses his mouth to the whole skin just adjacent.

“Than?” Soft, unsure.

He tries to speak and can’t, overwhelmed all at once with the immense, blinding relief of having Zagreus home safely once more. Unbound. Undestroyed, for all the mortals’ efforts. “Zag,” he manages, too hoarse, and must settle for wrapping his arms around him from behind and dropping his forehead into the dip where his neck meets his unbruised shoulder.

Zagreus lets him, touches his fisted hands, coaxes them to a gentler grasp. His fingers land on the nape of Thanatos’s neck; his head comes to lean against his. Such a selfish thing for Thanatos to seek his own comfort here, with Zagreus still actively bleeding from weeks of torture, but he can’t not, and he drags in a shallow breath against Zagreus’s skin. He smells of blood, mostly, but beneath that faint fire and smoke. At least that is still as it should be. At least that can yet be trusted.

“Hey, Than.” Still soft. “I’m all right.”

“Yes, clearly,” he says, muffled in Zagreus’s shoulder. “Why don’t you stand and run to the other side of the room for me, then.”

Zagreus laughs, more a tremble of his muscles than anything audible. “All right, you have me there. I suppose I’ll have to just stay right here forever.”

“I wish you would,” Thanatos says ruefully, and must be satisfied with the longest stillness he is likely to have from Zagreus for the foreseeable future. Still, in the end he must let Zagreus’s hand fall from his hair, must let the prince’s tentative, burgeoning warmth remain in his own skin and not be sapped to soothe Thanatos’s new addiction to his heat. He takes up the towel again and finishes what is left of Zagreus’s back, his arms; when that is done Thanatos slides from the bed and kneels at Zagreus’s feet.

“Than…”

He takes Zagreus’s left foot in his hands. “What?”

“…Nothing.”

“I thought so,” Thanatos says, and bends his head. The heels have not sparked, but the embers there are certainly aglow with a gentle orange-gold light, warmer than the rest of him at last. Even here they’ve bled him, slashed the soles of his feet and between his toes, dug in on either side of the tendons in his ankle. No wonder he had struggled so badly to walk.

He washes both of the prince’s feet, his ankles, and his calves, ignoring the twitches he gives as he works on the callused heels, finishing what is left from Zagreus’s earlier progress. He rinses his hands and the towel in the pool and the water comes away as clean as ice; he finds an ancient unused stock of bandages from the early days training with Achilles and wraps the worst places: his ankles, his ribs, his wrists, his throat. Dusa would have done a much better job, Thanatos thinks, but it will suffice for now, and for all his bravado Zagreus’s head has begun to droop.

A little blood is left yet from a cut on his chin, from a shallow slice beneath his green eye. Thanatos takes his face in his hands and passes the corner of the cloth over both places until the last of the red is gone. Zagreus lets out a low, tired sigh and kisses Thanatos’s palm. “Are we nearly done then, you think?”

“Yes. Do you want anything else? Something to drink?”

“That’s all right. Actually, I’d rather get some clothes on. Even here I’m freezing.”

This Thanatos can do as well, and he hunts down a woolen tunic and underthings from one of Zagreus’s perpetually overflowing drawers. Zagreus is able to mostly dress himself, though Thanatos must help him with the tunic when the monstrous bruise on his shoulder prevents him lifting his arm above his head. He’s shivering again, this time from the chill. A good thing, perhaps; perhaps a sign his strength returns.

Finally, when the prince is clothed and bundled, Thanatos removes his cloak from the bed, pulls down the thankfully unbloodied sheets, and all but shoves Zagreus into place. The prince laughs again when Thanatos tugs the covers back up to his shoulders. “You’re fussing again.”

“You’ll have to learn to like it.” At least until he’s strong enough to argue back, anyway. “Don’t undo all my hard work.”

“Your hard work,” Zagreus grumbles. “Wait, Than—don’t leave yet.”

“I was just going to fetch this chair.”

“No, sit here.”

He does, back on the edge of the bed at Zagreus’s hip, and again the moment he’s within reach Zagreus has curled his hand around his thigh. “I fear I’m becoming a distraction,” Thanatos admits.

“No,” Zagreus says again, something else in his voice now. “Than…” He trails off, gaze drifting to his high ceiling, brow furrowed. “Agh, never mind.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll ask you later,” Zagreus says, and lifts himself just enough off the pillows Thanatos recognizes his expectation of a kiss. He obliges, cupping Zagreus’s head in his hand, and eases him back to the pillow again. “I might get the question out, but I wouldn’t last the answer.”

“Then sleep,” Thanatos says gently. “I’ll stay as long as I can.”

“All right,” says Zagreus, and at last, at last, at last—he rests.

—

Thanatos wakes in confusion, all sense of time lost. The room has gone dim, the torches burnt low with the prince’s sleep, and he’s not sure what’s woken him. He doesn’t even remember lying down atop the covers, though here he lies behind Zagreus all the same, his forehead pressed to the mess of his black hair, his arm looped over Zagreus’s chest. The prince still sleeps, though fitfully, and Thanatos pushes his nose into the nape of his neck with drowsy affection until he calms. Out of habit he reaches for the surface, but no mortals yet cry for his aid. He will owe Charon and Hermes a thousand years of favors for this.

“Thanatos,” comes the soft whisper once more, and it takes everything he has to stifle the jolt.

A shadow stands on the far side of the bed. Tall, slender—how had he not seen—and then banked torchlight catches gently on hair the color of wheat, as untamable as her son’s, and Thanatos must force himself not to move for an entirely different reason. He barely manages to whisper through the mortification. “Queen Persephone. I…”

“Please don’t move. Please,” she says again, holding out her hands to stop him. “I’m sorry to have woken you at all. It’s just—I’ve only just got back, and I had to see him for myself.”

“Of course,” he murmurs in complete understanding, and they both freeze as Zagreus shifts in his sleep, mumbles something unintelligible, and settles once more.

“I tripped twice on the way in,” she admits once it’s safe. This soft, her voice is almost a summer breeze. “I knew I’d woken you. I don’t think I can get out again safely either, so it seemed more prudent to at least say hello.”

He barely suppresses the snort. Zagreus. “Only twice, Your Majesty?”

“So far.” She smiles so that her eyes crinkle, and the low light catches on the lines. “Thank you for caring for him, Thanatos.”

“Of course,” he says helplessly. She smiles again, brushes a bit of hair from her son’s eyes, and withdraws. The flames dance in their sconces as she passes, and he hears only one thump and a bitten oath—“Darkness, are these weights?”—before the door clicks closed again.

Zagreus stirs, presses back against his chest, and lets out a long sigh through his nose. His voice is thick with sleep. “Than?”

“I’m here,” Thanatos murmurs, his arm tightening about his chest. Easier to ignore the blazing embarrassment in the dark, anyway. “All is well. Go back to sleep.”

And miraculously, Zagreus does.

Chapter Text

With very little consideration for Thanatos’s preference, time continues to pass. He wakes the next time with a familiar whisper at last in the back of his head, the snip of scissors; Zagreus still sleeps soundly, though he’s turned over in his sleep and now has his face buried in Thanatos’s shoulder. It is exquisitely hard to leave him—harder, in fact, than many things he’s done in the last century—but no matter how he looks at it the prince is safe now and will continue to be so, and Thanatos has an intrinsic obligation to the world above.

There’s a brief moment of struggle as he rises and re-armors himself, but Zagreus accepts his goodbye with sleepy disappointment and not much argument. Another at the door, as its opening reveals one of Cerberus’s massive snouts jammed into the hall in search of the erstwhile prince, but that is sorted too when Cerberus, pouting, consents to smell Thanatos’s clothes instead. Persephone and Megaera both slip in to take Thanatos’s place, closing the door behind them, and when he’s sure the sound will be sufficiently muffled he lets the tolling bell take him away.

Two mortals alone. Two mortal souls among millions, tarnished by cruelty and loss.

His nature will not let him punish the rest of the world for their sins, but it’s all too easy to imagine it. He is not quite so recovered from the sight of Zagreus chained and bled like an animal for slaughter to forgive them yet.

So. The mortals pray to him as they die, and he grants them the deaths they beg for, and thinks of the line which marks the thin place between murder and mercy.

—

He sweeps back towards Taenarum both soon enough and all too soon. There is precious little he wants to do less than return to Oetylus, but he can’t leave Death’s chains there any longer for another hapless mortal to chance upon. The sun has almost risen when he arrives in a green flash, the clouds grey and scudding across the sky, the promise of heavy snow in their bellies.

The grounds look little different. The temple is still a ruined wreck; the shacks still stand in their erratic circle, untouched save the door he blasted apart. The grass has died where their corrupted blood fell; he does not think it will grow again. Zagreus’s blood, though, has left patches of wildflowers and crimson larkspur growing in its wake, startling blooms of color amid the snow.

Fitting. Sickening.

The body of the old woman is gone, he realizes as he steps into the shadowy wooden hut. Dragged off by wolves, maybe, if the gnaw-marks left on the man’s corpse and bloody paw-prints in the dirt are any indication. Perhaps some pack will find itself long-lived, then, with the last dregs of Zagreus’s stolen power. It hardly matters.

The shack is cold as ice, the wind whistling through the gaps and cracks in the wooden walls. He plucks his chains from the earth and folds them neatly, wrapping the links around his arm to secure them for the trip. He will have Hephaestus make a lock this time, of pearl and ivory and garnet, and this time he will seal the case shut with his own power. He ought to have done it long ago, but he’d been weaker then, both in body and mind. He’d wanted nothing more than to get the things as far from him as possible and forget they’d ever been forged.

The table on the side of the room still holds the remnants of their torture, knives and skewers and clay cups. He smashes it in one blow with the flat of his sword, his rage channeled with all his power into the strike. Clay shards fly into the air; metal cracks and yields at the weak places, wooden hafts splintering into dust. No blade with the temerity to bleed a god should be permitted to exist, he tells himself as the dust settles, as he lowers his sword in the ensuing silence. He can still taste Zagreus’s fear in the air, thick and tenacious as smoke.

A shadow falls across the entryway. Tall, broad-shouldered; and with it comes a familiar cultured voice. “Ah, such memories this brings back, O Death.”

“Lord Ares,” Thanatos says in greeting, and makes his way from the shack out into the tepid dawn. “Old memories indeed, and most of them unwelcome. Save your assistance, of course.”

“I felt the call of your power, and thought I might find answers with you.” Even here, Ares’s eyes burn a brilliant crimson, his gaze fixed on the familiar chains wrapped around Thanatos’s arms. “I see my questions were not what they ought to have been.”

“I’m not even sure the Fates foresaw this. Regardless, it’s done.”

“Then I take it you found your prince.” The snow has begun to fall; when it strikes Ares’s armored shoulders, it does not stick but instead vanishes with a tiny hiss of steam. “My sons have not sought me out again with their troubles.”

“Yes. He is home safely, recovering.” Thanatos meets the god’s eyes, forcing his gaze up from his arm. “I am in your debt, Lord Ares. As I suspect is the entire House of Hades. We wouldn’t have found him without your guidance. Certainly not as quickly.”

Ares waves an impatient hand. “As I said, I merely delivered a message. Regardless, I mislike it when mortals presume my favor. If I give my blessings to a human,” and now his grin is wolfish, “the corpses in his wake will leave no doubt of it.”

“I understand. All the same, the next time you have need of my aid, I’ll do all I can.”

“You are generosity itself, Lord Death.”

“Only occasionally,” he tells him, then steps forward. “I came to destroy this temple, too. Unless you object, of course.”

“Not at all. It is an unholy place, now, corrupted. Whatever divine spark might have rested here left long ago.”

Thanatos inclines his head, and when he stretches out his scythe towards the precarious temple, one of Ares’s short, straight swords joins him. “At your leisure,” he says, and together they raze it to the ground. It takes less than a minute to reduce it to rubble, grey dust and ash mingling with the grey snow and grey sky. Every last stone stained with Zagreus’s blood is buried in the fall. Good.

Silence falls, cold as the thin snow, and Thanatos grips his scythe in bitter satisfaction. Ares seems content to watch the pillars settle one after the other, smiling with clear pride at the wreckage. They stand in the quiet together for several minutes; then he stirs, shifting his dark limbs in subtle, lithe stretches, and sheathes his sword without flourish. “As pleasurable as this has been, O Death, your prince is home again and my curiosity is well-sated. I shall not trespass further on your time. I will pass on to my lord uncle what happened here.”

Not exactly what Thanatos had hoped, but he does owe Ares, more than he can ever repay, and most of the Olympians likely know half the tale already. Better that they hear the rest from a reliable source and not some troublemaking nymph. Or, say, Dionysus. “My thanks, Lord Ares.”

“Give my regards to my kin,” he says, the smile turning sharp once more. “Tell him I will see him in all his glorious strength again soon.”

“I will,” Thanatos says, and means it. Ares gives him a polite bow, then looks up towards the sky, and a vulture lifts away from the earth in two great glossy wing-beats, veering north towards the growing storm.

—

He restores the chains to their case, seals it properly under his own name, then hides it once more in its stone temple in Corinth. Hermes does not find him this time; in fact, the rest of the journey is made in blissful silence, only the faintest calls of mortals here and there pulling him from his intended path. Even without the assistance of Hermes and Charon, they rest in a peaceful lull. A rare gift.

He desperately wants to return to Zagreus.

He loses count of how often he almost shifts home, how often the world tinges green around him as he brushes against his power. But every time—every time, he remembers Persephone’s grief as she touched her son’s hair in the dark, and the look in Megaera’s eyes as she kissed Zagreus’s forehead. He is far from the only person who loves Zagreus in that House, and he cannot lay claim to his every waking moment. Even if he wishes it.

So he stretches back across the continent, listening with meticulous attention for even the faintest calls for his aid. When that is finished he passes a third time over the southern peninsula, and when he’s done there he goes to the rocky promontory just outside Hell’s gates where Zagreus was taken by the mortal man, and he stands there to watch the sun rise and swallow up Nyx’s sky. How many sunrises has he watched since he left the House? He isn’t sure, and it’s not like they track the time below well anyway.

Finally he can stand it no longer, and he calls himself home. Only Hypnos looks up at his entrance, a sunny smile on his face where he speaks with Dusa in the hall; the loose gaggle of shades around them barely flicker an acknowledgment.

“Hi!” Hypnos says cheerily as he approaches. “You’re back!”

“Oh, it’s so good to see you, Lord Thanatos!” Dusa adds, bobbing what he thinks might be a curtsey. “The prince will be so glad to see you, I know it!”

Thanatos looks towards the eastern hall. “Is he awake?”

“Yes, but you know, now’s probably not the best time. You see, Lord Hades is in there speaking with him.”

His head snaps back so fast it might have tweaked a muscle. Dusa looks faintly alarmed. “What?”

“It’s true!” Hypnos says in a stage-whisper—which is to say, still easily carrying throughout the entire hall. “The Queen came out after…oh, who knows? A long time, anyway. She went over and talked to the master for a while where even I couldn’t hear them, and then he got up and went right in!”

Thanatos searches his memory for the last time Hades went willingly to his son’s rooms. Childhood, perhaps. Perhaps farther. “I…won’t disturb them, then.”

“Meg’s drinking in the lounge,” Dusa offers helpfully. “You know, if you’d like to say hi. I know she’d be happy to see you, too.”

He thanks Dusa, fairly certain Meg will be lukewarm at best, and goes to the lounge.

She’s there indeed, seated at her usual table. Her wing is curled tight to her back, a sure sign she is annoyed, and she grips the neck of an open bottle of ambrosia like it might be Zagreus instead. She doesn’t look up as he sits down across from her; nor does she offer to share. He’d be more alarmed if she had.

“Megaera.”

“Thanatos.”

One of these meetings, then. No matter; he’s patient enough. The chef brings him a small glass of nectar—stocked, he’s sure, from Zagreus’s impressive stores—and he watches its golden surface ripple, grow smooth, and reflect his own face. Hard eyebrows again. He leaves them be.

Megaera shifts in the chair. Not a slouch—her discipline is impeccable at all times—but her wing flicks out and curls in again, and she tightens her grip on the bottle. “Those shades…” she says, and then nothing.

Those shades. Every line of his body goes stiff as stone. “What about them?”

Her lips curl. “Lord Hades wants me to give them to Alecto.”

“It…is her domain, I suppose,” Thanatos says, cautiously feeling out the thought. “Violence out of anger. Even if the anger wasn’t directed at Zagreus.”

“I don’t care about that,” Megaera snaps, then grimaces. “That is…ugh.”

“Meg?”

“I want them in my hands,” she says, low. Vicious. She stares unblinking at the gripped bottle. “I want to see it myself. I want to tear them apart with my own bare hands, over and over, until they realize—” She cuts herself off abruptly, downs the rest of the ambrosia in three swallows, then slams it on the table. “I should get back to work.”

“I understand, Megaera. I do.”

She scoffs bitterly. “You got to kill them. You got to watch them die. Some of us had to sit here and wait.”

At what cost? At the cost of Zagreus bound and bleeding and desperate to die. He’s not sure the scale has balanced. “For what it’s worth, I…don’t think Lord Hades would object, if you asked him.”

“It’s not my charge.”

Thanatos, though, has known Megaera far too long, and he recognizes in the set of her jaw the same hatred that sits oil-thick behind his heart, impossible to cut out. For all he’s lectured Zagreus over the years on their greater duties to the House, his own perspective here is nonexistent. “It’s personal. They made it personal.” He takes a sip of the nectar: clear, cold, sweet. “They broke an oath to Demeter when they left her service. Get Zag to find some ancient scroll in the archives to give you permission. You know he’d do it. He’d probably pay you for the privilege.”

Her jaw unclenches: a smile from anyone else. “As if I need any more ambrosia from that idiot.”

“Enough to drown in,” Thanatos agrees, and Lord Hades emerges from his son’s bedchambers.

They turn in silence to watch. His massive brow is furrowed, his frown thoughtful and stern, but there is no anger. He pauses at the hall, glancing westward; a moment later his wife comes to join him, her hand tucking into the crook of his arm, and they go together into the privacy of the gardens. The door closes behind them, though gently.

“Hm,” Megaera says, then adds, “You might as well go on. He’s been waiting for you.”

“It hasn’t been that long.”

“Tell that to the pathetic glances he’s been giving at every faint bell in the House.” She runs her thumb around the bottle’s rim and licks it, ignoring Thanatos’s fidgeting. “I hope you’re not waiting for me to repeat myself.”

“No,” Thanatos says, and stands. “Megaera. In Tartarus, when they…”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Good.”

—

Zagreus’s laurels are back.

Thanatos doesn’t know why that’s the first thing he sees, considering the rest is a blur of wide arms and flame-licked heels and a joyful, “Than!” approaching far too quickly.

“Should you be out of bed?” he manages, right before Zagreus’s left ankle gives out and he takes a hard knee at Thanatos’s feet. “Ah.”

“Don’t ‘ah’ me, help me up. I thought I heard your bell.”

“And I just saw your father leave your chambers. Have a little patience, Zag.”

Zagreus doesn’t bother to look even slightly embarrassed as Thanatos helps him sit again on the side of his bed. One of the massive, oversized chairs has been pulled to the bedside; faint char-marks on its legs suggest its previous occupant. “You’ve been gone a long time. I wanted to make sure I saw you.”

“It really hasn’t been that…” Thanatos begins, but it’s not like Zagreus will listen to him anyway. Instead he reaches out and touches his cheek, just beneath the brilliant red eye; Zagreus leans into it instantly, smiling. “You look like you feel better.”

“Oh, much. Father thinks I’m ready to die any day or night now with no risk of consequences.”

“Oh?”

“Well. I’m fairly sure that’s what he said, anyway. I confess the guh-dong was an active distraction.”

“Zag,” he sighs, and kisses him anyway, reveling in the casual and precious affection. He does look better. Almost preternaturally so, his laurels back and burning brightly in his black hair; his feet lit once more, though not yet, perhaps, quite to the level of their previous flame. The terrible bruise on his shoulder has faded to a blotchy purple-yellow, the cuts in his skin to mere scratches. Nearly all the bandages have been removed except for the ones around his ankles. “Tell me the truth. How are you feeling?”

“Oh, perfectly fine. Can you believe I miss the Styx?” He leans back on his hands. “I must confess I’ve even toyed with, however briefly, missing Theseus.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I’ll mean it right up to the first ten seconds I speak to him again.” Zagreus curls a hand around the back of his neck, pulling him back down for another kiss, but his mirth is less sharp when he pulls back. “Hey, actually. Do you need to leave right away? I mean, have you got a little time?”

“Of course.” He goes to sit in Hades’s abandoned chair, but is immediately pulled down to the rumpled bed beside Zagreus.

“Than…” he starts, then looks down at where his hands rest on his own thighs. “Hm. It turns out I’m not sure how to ask this.”

“Just ask.”

“All right. I’d like you to kill me before I go out on another run, just to make sure it properly takes.”

“Ah,” says Thanatos.

“I’m feeling so much better. I am.” Zagreus looks at him now, one red eye, one green, both startlingly earnest. Leaves of his laurels wick upwards, embers vanishing into nothing. “I can’t go out there again with fear at my back.”

You could just stay, Thanatos thinks, but immediately discards the thought. Unfair to them both. Particularly cruel to Zagreus. “I don’t…sense Death’s hold on you anymore.” That’s true, at least.

Zagreus’s mouth twitches as if he wants to make some joke, but manages to restrain himself. “There we go. Just need to get one under the belt.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Then the Styx spits me out just as bruised as I am now.”

“Or not at all.”

Zagreus scoffs. “Nyx doesn’t think that’s likely.”

That gives Thanatos pause. “She said that?”

“In so many words.”

He purses his lips, but Nyx would not have let the prince persist in a misunderstanding so serious. He is surprised by how much the idea comforts him. “Are you…Zag, are you sure about this?”

“Of course,” he says, surprised, because—of course he is. How like Zagreus to seize on an idea and execute it immediately without the slightest consideration of potential consequences. Even when they include such things as utter obliteration.

Thanatos rubs his eyes, then runs his fingers through his hair. “When were you thinking of doing this?”

“Well, you said you weren’t busy.”

He should have expected this, too. Zagreus rests his chin on Thanatos’s shoulder, staring hopefully at the side of his face. Even out of the corner of his eye, the soft smile stings. “Please, Than.”

“Tch,” Thanatos says, an answer in itself, and Zagreus grins. He shuffles backwards on the bed immediately, propping himself up on his pillows, crossing his glowing heels at the ankles where they are bandaged and tucking both hands behind his head.

“Make it nice, okay?”

Thanatos glowers. Shifts towards him, though, rising up on his knees next to him on the bed, pulling in one smooth gesture the scythe from the aether. The angle is short and awkward, and he must grip the haft much closer to the blade than usual, but Zagreus watches him with a terrifying trust. “Does your father know you’re doing this?”

“Yes. We were talking about it before you came home.”

Zagreus is many things, but he is not a liar. “And he approves.”

“He doesn’t disapprove.” Zagreus lifts his chin, exposing his neck. “I really am ready, Than.”

Thanatos rests his free hand on the pale throat. His thumb skates over the pulse, beating hard and faster than usual, skipping here and there as he puts light pressure above the vein. Zagreus watches in silence, though color rises to his cheeks, spreads across his collarbones. Even now Thanatos craves the revelation of his warmth. Make it nice. Not exactly his métier.

The side of his hand skims over the purpling bruise on his shoulder. The last marks of the chains, the last scars of the mortal’s torture still persisting. Zagreus has borne them too long without complaint.

Thanatos rests the tip of the scythe just beneath Zagreus’s right ear. Then he bends and presses his mouth to the top of the bruise, and then to Zagreus’s lips. His hand has shifted to the back of his neck; one of Zagreus’s hands fumbles south to entangle with it. “I’ll see you soon,” he says against his mouth. Zagreus smiles—

—

Has it ever taken this long? Thanatos stands on the steps at the Pool of Styx, every inch of him leashed wire-tight to keep from pacing. He’s never died within the House before. Could that matter? He thinks he hasn’t, anyway. He’s fairly sure. Of course, the Styx had taken his body immediately, but—surely this is too long. How long has it been?

Hypnos flutters at his shoulder, prattling on about the last time Zagreus had died in Tartarus. His words wash over Thanatos like water, clear and without substance. There, a shadow in the Styx—no, only a shade’s hand, lifting momentarily from the red and submerging once more. Too long.

The Styx bubbles. That is familiar. Yes. That is right, this growing froth right at the base of the steps; his heart lodges in his throat.

Zagreus emerges from the Pool.

His laurels burn bright as ever, his feet awash in flame from calf to heel. The bandages are gone. He doesn’t need them now. Every inch of his skin is restored, unsinged, untorn; even the bruise is entirely vanished from his shoulder, the red chiton standing in stark contrast to his even paleness. Unmarked, exactly as he ought to be.

He plants both hands on his hips and shakes out his hair. Magnificent, Thanatos thinks without embarrassment, and cares very little about the blood-red Styx-water splashed over his feet. The prince made whole. Gods, his throat has gone so tight.

“Excellent!” Zagreus exclaims, and claps his hands. This time it is Hypnos splashed, and his brother recoils, disgusted. “Lovely work, Than. Just as nice as it ought to be. Though I hope you don’t go doing it that way for everyone you reap.”

“Certainly not,” Thanatos says, affronted, but doesn’t resist in the slightest when Zagreus wraps an arm around his waist and pulls him down for a brief, slightly damp kiss, right there in front of Hypnos. “How do you feel?”

“Right and ready as ever.” Zagreus lets him go; Thanatos regrets the loss. “Really, Than, don’t look so worried. I feel perfect. Never better. You could kill me again right now if you doubt it.”

“No!” He’s rattled by the very idea. “Once was enough. Plenty.”

“All right, all right.” Zagreus grips him by the shoulder. “Are you okay?”

He allows himself a faint smile. “Yes, of course. Do you plan to go off immediately?”

“No time like the present. Achilles says it’s best to get back on the horse right away.”

“Whatever that means.”

“I’ve no idea either.” Zagreus leans in, eyes searching his. Hypnos has started an explanation about horses that neither of them listens to. “Are you sure you’re all right if I go? I can wait, if you need me.”

His thumb traces little circles of heat on Thanatos’s collarbone. If he stays, he’ll never leave again. “No. Go on. I’ll catch you out there, Zag.”

The prince smiles, a quick flash of open affection, and squeezes Thanatos’s shoulder. “I’ll see you soon,” he says in warm echo, and then he’s off, his heels striking sparks on the stone with every step.

Chapter Text

Days pass, and nights, and routine returns to the House of Hades. Zagreus dies with comforting regularity, returned to the habitual combative routine with his father and the mundane inhospitality of the world above. Thanatos resumes his duties, glancing in on Zagreus as he can, spending what free time he has with him at the House afterwards. It’s as close to before as he could have hoped. Zagreus calls him for aid every now and then, usually when Theseus has particularly aggravated him or the satyrs in the temple swarm too tightly, but other than new and lingering kisses between the calls it all seems very familiar. As if nothing had ever happened. As if…

Megaera finds him one day on the balcony overlooking the Styx, waiting for Zagreus to die. She says: Lord Hades called the shades before him in the great hall while Zagreus was gone, and they cowered on their knees in bewildered terror. She says: they apologized without understanding, gold-fire gleaming at their wrists and throats, Ares’s name in their dead mouths. She says: they have been given to her for penance without an end, and she feeds them coals, and strips the shade-skin from their backs, and leaves them for weeks on end in the deepest pits of Tartarus where no light falls, not even that of Ixion.

Not enough.

And not his duty. He thanks Megaera sincerely and is not hurt at her scornful noise as she leaves. He considers going to Tartarus himself to see them, but that would neither please Zagreus nor ease his own lingering anger. Instead—he considers—

Thanatos shuts his eyes. He’d found Zagreus early this run, still in the first rooms nearest his chambers and nowhere near Asphodel. There is likely some time before he returns to the Styx, to Thanatos where he waits. He has time, surely.

Thanatos pulls himself towards Tartarus in a flash of green.

Sisyphus rests one hand on the boulder beside him as he arrives, as if soothing some uncertain beast. The green gloom of Tartarus hangs heavy here, the stone tiles cracked and worn and dully reflecting the light. Thanatos would like to sneer, but he came here for a reason, and he knows Zagreus’s feelings towards the shade. “Knave-king.”

“Master Thanatos,” he says cheerfully and with no deference at all. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing,” Thanatos snaps, then lets out a breath through his teeth. “I’m sure Zagreus has been through here lately.”

“Oh, yes. I was ever so relieved the first time Prince Z. came through again. I knew you’d find him, but I was so worried in the meantime. So was Bouldy, for sure.”

“Hmph. I only came to…” Spit it out, already. “Express my gratitude for your suggestion, that day or night. It was useful.”

“Oh! Well, nothing to thank me for, I’m sure. His Highness has been far kinder to me than I deserve. I’ll always help him any way I can.”

Wretch. “Then I’ll be on my way.”

“Master Thanatos—wait, please!”

He waits. He’s not sure why. Some whisper of Zagreus in the back of his mind, perhaps; some faint memory of an eons-old rage, of the horrible weight of chains and of Sisyphus turning away from him with a cold smirk. So different from the diffident smile the knave-king wears now, one hand scraping up the back of his head. Thanatos thinks abruptly that Sisyphus means to apologize. He will rip him to shreds if he tries.

Sisyphus sees it, perhaps, and lets his hand drop with a wince. “I—I thank you for telling me, Master Thanatos. About His Highness. I’m glad I was able to help.”

“Zagreus cares about you,” Thanatos says coldly. “Gods know why.”

The knave-king bows his head. Thanatos opens his mouth again, irritated beyond reason, when—

Than!

Panicked. In pain.

Terrified, blazing through all his senses.

The world flashes green, and he’s gone.

—

Tartarus, still. One of the larger rooms, large enough it takes Thanatos a half-second longer to find the prince. No—not because of the room—because of the chains that cover him neck to knee, disguising every beloved familiarity of his shape.

Wringers. Dozens of them, all but harmless and all but overwhelming Zagreus with sheer numbers. Coronacht lies forgotten at his ankles; his eyes roll red and green with the blind terror of a hunted animal. No sooner has he freed himself from one set of chains than another drops around him from behind. They tug his body this way and that, jerking at his throat, his elbows, his waist.

Thanatos splays out his fingers before him, the ornate signs of his authority marking each of them for death; his scythe swings out in a practiced flourish, then cuts across them all in a quick, hard slash. A few of the twisted souls cry out, a sound he feels rather than hears.

They vanish upwards in a lick of purple flame. There’s a faint tinkling as the chains surrounding Zagreus drop to the ground; the cracked chamber walls echo with the tolling bell. Then, nothing.

“Than?” Hoarse, as if he has been screaming. He takes one confused step and sways on his feet.

Thanatos goes to him immediately, takes his face in both hands and forces him to meet his eyes. “Look at me. Zag, look at me. Come on.”

He laughs, but there’s no humor in it; rather it’s the shocked, breathless sound of someone who laughs easily at all other times and now has no other response to the horror.

“Zagreus.”

“I’m all right,” he gasps all at once, shoving backwards out of Thanatos’s grasp. “Sorry to call you here for nothing. I was just—I’m fine. Really.”

“You’re lying to me. Right to my face.”

“Than, I’m not going to let—”

“You’re clearly not—"

“I don’t have time to do this right now.” Zagreus turns on his heel, scooping up Coronacht into the aether as he heads for the exit, barely remembering to touch the gleaming violet boon left in the wake of Thanatos’s destruction.

Hey man, seems you had a bad time on the surface lately, bummer to hear that, let me know if you want me to drive them a bit mad for you! Hope this is a good sign you’re back at it again, well anyway…

Dionysus’s voice fades into a distant echo behind them. Thanatos never follows Zagreus on these journeys, not like this, but his eyes are wild still, searching every corner, and his panic still ricochets in Thanatos’s chest. The hallway between rooms is dark as pitch, but he follows the beacon of Zagreus’s flaming feet where they throw weird, refracted light against the walls. Too fast. The prince trips once, grips the wall for steadiness, and continues even faster.

Soon enough they emerge into the warm yellow-green light of another chamber. Quiet, tranquil; a centaur’s heart rests placidly on the lip of an enormous carved fountain. Zagreus lets out a hissing, relieved breath and goes to dunk his entire head into the water at once. It sizzles into steam when his laurels submerge. Thanatos follows at a safer distance, arms crossed.

The prince stays there for a long moment, arms braced on the fountain’s edge, head bowed and dripping back into the holy water. He’s calmer now, his ribs not heaving quite so hard, but his knuckles are white. He shakes out his black hair and speaks to the ripples. “You don’t have to stay and play nursemaid, you know. I’m fine.”

Thanatos says nothing.

Zagreus flinches at the stony silence, then whirls on him with blazing eyes. “Well? What do you want me to say? I have a job to do, Than, and even if I didn’t—well? Say something, or—or leave and let me get back to it.”

“Do you want me to leave?” he asks, voice level.

“Blood and darkness,” Zagreus spits. He sits down hard on the edge of the fountain, shoving the centaur’s heart aside, and grips his hair with both hands. “You’re infuriating, you know that?”

A crack in the anger, bitterly apologetic. Thanatos hesitates, then comes to stand next to him where he sits. “You called me,” he says softly to the top of his head. “I came.”

“Yes, and I’m starting to wish I hadn’t. At least sit down if you’re going to yell at me.”

“I’m not going to yell at you,” Thanatos says, injured, but he sits anyway. Zagreus’s anger has always been flamelike; as quick as it comes, as sharp, it fades just as swiftly again to nothing. The minutes stretch into each other, the silence broken only by the soft lapping of the fountain behind them. Eventually, Thanatos says, “I also threw myself into my work, after.”

Zagreus is quiet at first. “I remember very little of it. It’s all so hazy.”

“You were very young.”

“So were you.”

He had been young, just come into the fullness of his power. Hardly an excuse. “I was humiliated. Hurt. I couldn’t bear to face Mother Nyx. Or your father, or anyone else. So I stayed away as long as I could, speaking to as few people as possible, until I thought…maybe it had been forgotten.”

“Had it?”

“Probably not. But no one ever asked me about it again, and I don’t know if I would have answered if they had.”

Zagreus rests his chin on one hand. “Did it help? Ignoring it. Running.”

Thanatos cuts his eyes at him. Zagreus knows the answer as well as he does, the truth radiantly obvious in the fact that Thanatos sits here at all. “No,” he says at last, just in case Zagreus has chosen to be feckless. “It didn’t.”

“I didn’t think so.”

They sit in companionable silence a few minutes. A handful of green shades drift through a far door, see them perched on the edge of the fountain, and ghost away again. The steady stream of water from the upended stone vase burbles cheerily at their backs.

Eventually, Zagreus says, “Than?”

“Hm.”

“Did it hurt, for you? When King Sisyphus…the chains, I mean.”

“It…ached,” Thanatos says slowly, dredging his memories for painful thorns he’s spent eons burying. “They were very, very cold. But more than that…”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want. If it’s unpleasant.”

He shakes his head. “I could feel the mortals calling for me, for my help. They were desperate. Screaming. I couldn’t end their suffering.” He looks down at his palms, touches his fingertips to his thumbs. Empty, unshackled, the nails dark. “There’s such horror in a life that can’t end as it should. A soul stretched out far too long, desperate for death…the body is in agony, and the mind follows.” He jolts, looking to Zagreus. “I mean—”

But Zagreus only leans their shoulders together, threading his pale fingers through Thanatos’s. “Well, I’m not going to argue with you about that.”

“Agh. That was careless of me.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You should,” Thanatos mutters, but lets it go. He runs his thumb over the back of Zagreus’s knuckles. “It’s not an experience I wished to share with you.”

“It wasn’t exactly pleasant on this side, either.” A little pause. “I thought I was dreaming, when I saw you the first time.”

“Dreaming?”

“I’d called for you for so long, even though I knew you couldn’t hear me. Just an exercise in futility. Although I seem to be getting rather good at those lately.” He turns over their linked hands. “And then you were there, looking like some avatar of divine vengeance instead. Of course I had to be dreaming.”

“Zag…”

“Please don’t get that look. You know none of this is your fault, right?”

“My chains. My indifference.”

“Your making sure they stopped, and making sure I got home all right after.” Now he brings Thanatos’s knuckles to his mouth, and a ferocious warmth spreads through his chest. “Your being here now.”

Thanatos sighs out a thin breath through his teeth, but they’ve had this conversation before, and he knows all too well the prince’s fierce stubbornness. “I would have killed them a dozen times over if I could have,” he admits. “When I saw you…I didn’t know if you were alive or dead. I didn’t know which would be worse.”

“I wanted to die,” Zagreus says slowly. Thoughtfully, as if looking at the idea through a mirror rather than straight-on. “I tried to will my heart to stop beating. God of blood…not much good that did me. Sometimes I’d lean into the knives to try to—ah, Than, I’m sorry. You didn’t need to know that.”

Thanatos forces himself to unstiffen with strength of will, but it’s like coaxing flame to cool. “No. It’s better to understand.”

“I don’t know if it helps or hurts that there wasn’t any malice in it. Not really. Just fear and desperation.”

“That’s hardly an excuse,” Thanatos says sharply. Too sharply, if the soothing stroke Zagreus gives his thigh is any indication. His anger rebounds in plaintive echo around the fountain’s chamber. “I mean…ugh.”

“There, there. All’s well that ends well, Achilles tells me.”

Thanatos snorts. “Has this ended well?”

“I’m right here with you. You’re right here with me.” Terrifyingly sincere, even with the smile in his voice, and Thanatos tightens his grip around Zagreus’s fingers. He doesn’t deserve this kindness—can’t ever, really, but the generosity has been offered all the same, and Thanatos loves Zagreus too dearly to let it go. “Isn’t that enough?”

“Yes,” Thanatos says, because it is, and holding onto the hatred does nothing of worth. He lets out a deep, cleansing breath. “Do you need to get back to your run?”

“No. I put the Pact on a timer, trying to push myself. I won’t even make it to Meg.” He lifts his head and Thanatos looks at him; Zagreus is already looking back, eyes steady. “Thank you for talking to me about all this. I know it couldn’t have been easy.”

There is nothing you could ask from me I wouldn’t give. “Of course.”

Zagreus smiles. Softer, now, warmer, with none of the chained horror from before. He lifts his free hand, rests his heated fingers on Thanatos’s jaw; the warmth pools in the skin there and spreads, flame licking at his cheek, his throat, the place in his neck where his pulse beats. Zagreus knows it, too; the smile broadens just enough, and the air between them catches in the slightest, most minute shift of tension.

“Hey, Than.”

“Hi,” he says in the same low tone, and Zagreus’s fingers trace down his jaw to the side of his throat before he leans in the last few inches and kisses him. His mouth is as hot as the rest of him, his lips fitting cleanly against his own. “Zag…”

“Thanks for coming,” he murmurs against his mouth, then kisses him again, eyes falling shut as Thanatos tilts his head for a better angle. “Sorry I wasted your time.”

“Never a waste,” Thanatos manages. “I’ll see you at home, I guess.”

“Might as well take me now. Otherwise I’ll just have to lie here on the floor and wait for the Styx anyway.”

“How graceless.” How tempting.

“Only if you aren’t busy, of course.”

“…You are irritatingly transparent.”

“Hah. So are you.”

—

After that, it all goes soft. Sweet as honey and just as thick, moments sticking to each other and sliding into the next with no break, no breath between. Zagreus’s room; Zagreus’s arms around his neck, loosening the catches of his armor, fingertips sliding hot and holy over the bared skin beneath. Zagreus’s mouth like fire on his mouth, on his throat, his stomach. A slow-gold drag of clothes from shoulders and waists in haphazard leaf-like falls: red, black, gold, red again. The susurrant hush of linen over skin; the gentle clatter of bronze and bone.

Whispers against lips, too precious for the greater air: come here, yes, yes, more there, please let me.

His heartbeat plucks like the strings of a lyre. Black hair twists in his hands; mismatched eyes turn up to him in heady laughter. The prince demands his attention in every part, and he yields it willingly, overcome and glad to be so. Zagreus has always swept over them all, immense and inescapable as a forest fire; Thanatos is satisfied to be offal in the char if it means Zagreus will keep looking at him with such heat.

Can I? Ah, please, please—

He loves to kiss Zagreus. A perfect fit, not because they were made that way but because they have reshaped themselves to be so, fitting around each other’s angles and edges and wounded places until there is no emptiness left. Zagreus hums into his mouth and his toes curl; he finds his lip with his teeth in answer and Zagreus shudders in his arms. Yes, yes, now.

The kisses yield to open-mouthed gasps, the roving hands to a sudden, bruising clutch. Such an ancient rhythm to unmake him so quickly. He finishes first, or perhaps Zagreus does, the warm flame-yellow of his heels surging to suffuse the entire room a soft gold. Then—an easing for them both, caught breaths loosened once more, and Zagreus sliding at last to lie next to him, his nose tucked beneath Thanatos’s ear. He leans into the heat.

How long? It doesn’t matter. A handful of hours, maybe; a lifetime. It’s all stretched into the rest anyway, each moment here strung in beading gold light down the inexorable line that binds them together.

Not enough. No. Soft laughter. Never.

Stay.

All right. A little longer.

—

coda:

Zagreus shoulders Stygius with an enormous sigh of relief, wiping sweat from his eyes. This chamber had been immensely difficult to find—designed to be so, he suspects, by both his father and Daedalus—and he’d abandoned more than one recent run when he’d come across the stairs to Asphodel all too soon. But here he stands in Tartarus’s grey-green gloom, kicking aside broken tiles on a little forgotten balcony overlooking a much larger chamber, his quarry discovered at last.

The shades below him are faint in Ixion’s weak light, translucent and watery at the edges, but he can still make out the thin gold chains at their wrists, at their necks: the mark of his father’s power binding them even now. The courtyard they stand in is small, littered with broken pillars. A bed of coals spreads on one side like a field of red stars, bounded by iron, and on the other stands a broad brass brazier, its fire licking high and hot.

One shade kneels at the bed of coals, stretching out bare, ghostly hands to lift a blazing coal from its depths. At the same moment the other shade, the taller one, reaches into the heart of the fire on the other side and plucks out an ember there; they pass each other without speaking and drop the coals into the opposite hearths. They return without pause and choose another; and again, and again, and again. A futile fuel, the balance never tipped in one’s favor over the other.

Zagreus leans on the balcony and watches. It’s a quiet corner of Tartarus, all things told. Occasionally he can hear the shrieks of the damned floating in from the deeper streets, and occasionally the shades below him cry out at the scorching heat, but other than that there isn’t much but the crackling of fire and the ring of hard black coal dropped to brass.

He’s not sure why he came here.

Meg had been the first to tell him that the mortal shades had at last been allotted their eternal punishment. Than had as well, later, with that same pained tightness in his eyes whenever he spoke of Oetylus. Even his father had pulled him aside after he’d returned from a tempestuous surface battle and a short trip into a deep lake. That had been embarrassing enough; Hades watching him with almost a hint of real concern in his eyes had been even worse, especially when they none of them would tell him where to look to find the shades outside of deep in Tartarus. His mother had been the one at the end of it to whisper landmarks into his ear and shove him in the direction of the courtyard.

This would all be easier if he had even the faintest idea of how he felt about any of it. The fear is the worst, he supposes, sometimes, when a wringer’s chains drop around his neck from behind, or when a harsh winter wind scrapes across his neck as he broaches the surface, and all he can remember is the way the wooden shack smelled when the sun set. Then: anger, perhaps, when he thinks of the inescapable agony and his own body’s stubborn refusal to die. A tinge of grief, if he reflects on it long enough. Not that he’s made much of a habit of reflecting.

But he’s never held on well to fear. Nor to anger either, even when Than scowls at the subject and makes dire proclamations about the vengeance of the Erinyes.

Pity, maybe. He’s fairly sure he pities them. And maybe he oughtn’t, as the god wronged—he’s seen enough of the Olympians’ stormy pride to guess their particular brand of retaliation—but it’s a pitiable thing, watching them slog back and forth in endless, hopeless torment. 

The shade of the old woman lets out a weak, fluttering sob. The son’s shade watches her implacably until she recovers herself and kneels once more at the brazier. Their faces have not yet begun to fade. He wonders if they will, as most shades do, or if they will linger like Sisyphus, minds bound along with their souls to their sentence. How many times will he have to return here to be sure? How many times will he remember?

The flap of a muscled wing breaks the quiet. In a flash of blue skin and pink lips, Megaera alights on the balcony beside him.

She straightens from her landing crouch, her voice low and even. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Meg, but I’ve rather made it my profession to get into places I’m not supposed to be.”

Meg scowls, but doesn’t argue. She’s in full armor, her hands fisted on her hips, her whip coiled at her waist. She comes to stand beside him with lithe grace, dangerous as the hunting cats he’s chanced upon on the surface, and her eyes are hard as she rests her elbows on the railing and looks down at the shades below them. They watch them toil awhile in silence, and then Meg shakes her head. “It’s not enough.”

“It certainly looks plenty torturous to me.”

“Zag,” she says in warning. “Don’t make them one of your projects. Not this time.”

He crosses his arms, the argument already rising to his tongue, but—somehow he’s not sure if it’s genuine or just his natural contrariness, and he doesn’t feel like arguing with Meg anyway. “Shouldn’t that be my call?” he grumbles instead, leaning his folded arms on the railing next to her. “It was me they bothered going after.”

“They bound a god. You.”

“That’s hardly new. You know that better than anyone.”

“Against your will,” Meg snaps, and hisses a sigh at his cheeky grin. “Idiot. It doesn’t matter what you want here. Or me, or anyone. Precedence has to be set. No mortal can do something like this and escape punishment.”

Zagreus bumps her shoulder with his. A companionable gesture, despite that her shoulder sits two inches higher than his own like this. “You sound like Than.”

“Well. Than’s right.”

She falls quiet, and so does he. There isn’t much he can say regardless. Don’t be cruel, he’d like to tell her, and perhaps they’ll change, as Sisyphus has, but—cruelty is part of her nature and her office, a part he’d no more remove than Thanatos’s comfortable silences or his own predilection to strike sparks at each step. And as for changing—nothing for that but time, and that is one thing they all have in abundance. Besides, even if the shades do find themselves altered over the years to something gentler than they were, he can offer no one’s forgiveness but his own. That he learned with Than and Sisyphus, and he understands that better now. Still, he looks forward to being given the chance.

There. That feels right. The hope.

“Hey,” he says, nudging her again. “I think I’m off. Chambers to ransack, my father to kill—you know how it goes.”

She smiles, faintly, without looking at him. “Go on. Get out of here.”

“I’ll see you around?”

“Sure, Zag.”

All right, then. He pulls Stygius free, takes a deep breath until the not-air of the Underworld fills his lungs. He rolls his shoulders, feeling the give and stretch of muscle, the pleasant burn of early exertion. He’ll hope, then, and let the rest fall where it will. A province of mortals, perhaps, but there’s enough red to his blood he thinks the Fates will excuse it.

He sets his back to the shades and strides down the hallway once more. Hell lies spread in all its deathly glory before him, ready to be conquered, and his eagerness rises with every quick step. His mother’s pom blossom hangs at his waist; Mort is safely tucked into his chiton, just above his heart. The Furies wait for him, and Lernie and Theseus and his father; and even, perhaps, a long-promised donkey at the surface, if Than’s whispers can be believed. The snow, too, he thinks, and a cold river running between tall trees, and a brilliant sunrise sky filled edge to edge with stars.

Zagreus breaks into a run, flame licking at his heels.

—

end.