Work Text:
It’s early morning at the mortal side of the Temple of Styx. The sky is a light grey, lit by a sun not yet risen. The ground is covered by newly fallen snow, marred only by a single set of melted footprints.
Thanatos doesn’t leave his own as he follows them. His feet float as always a hand above the ground, leaving no trace. He is empty-handed for once, scythe and gauntlet and various metal armour parts stowed away in the nothing of in-between space. The cold air against his skin makes him feel exposed, but he lets it be. He’s meeting no one here he does not feel safe with.
The footprints lead away from the temple, past a smattering of withered trees and up a hill towards the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. And there, right on that edge and at the end of the trail, sits Zagreus. Haggard-looking, but still breathing, for now.
“You didn’t call on me for the fight this time,” Thanatos says in lieu of a greeting, referencing the chthonic companion still carried unused.
Zagreus jolts and looks back. “What? Than?” After a moment, the surprise drains out of his eyes, and he shrugs tiredly. “Didn’t really need to. Had a good run, so I just won.” He turns away again, looks back towards the sea.
Thanatos considers for a few moments, turns over in his head the few pros and many cons of letting himself touch the ground, and then he does it anyway, sitting down on the cliff’s edge next to Zagreus, and he knows it is the right choice when Zag melts in relief and rests his head on his shoulder.
He looks exhausted. Not so much injured, so he was probably telling the truth about doing well this time, but worn thin and sick.
Thanatos doesn’t know why he’s come here to see him. He has been busy for a while, and now work suddenly let up for a while. He’s missed home. He’s missed this. For how much he tends to overthink everything he does, he’s never thought so hard about coming to Zagreus.
Now, with Zagreus slowly dying on his shoulder, he vaguely regrets it.
It’s not the fact that Zagreus dies that is the problem, that has always felt natural. It’s the fact that he has to be in pain first that hurts.
Thanatos looks away rather than having to watch, following his partner’s gaze out towards the horizon. It’s an unremarkable grey line, slowly growing brighter. “I never understood why you enjoy this so much.”
“The view?”
“Yes.”
Zagreus doesn’t answer immediately. He gets strangely quiet when he’s dying. It feels wrong.
“I know you don’t like it,” he says eventually. “That’s fine. I mean, you don’t have to. It’s just that, to me… the first time I made it here to see the sunrise, it was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. Maybe more than meeting my mother… no, but differently, almost as much. I didn’t even really know what I was looking at, only that I never wanted to be without it. It was like falling in love.”
The sunrise, huh?
When Thanatos is up here on the surface, it is always for people. On battlefields or in houses, of accidents or illness, he’s seen every way this world has for killing people, but quiet sunrises? He rarely stops for those.
The sun rises fast in this part of the world, the grey sky already giving way to brilliant yellows, deepening to blue on one end and brightening to pink on the other before the sun itself bursts forth. When it does, Thanatos has to blink and turn away from the biting rays, his eyes landing on the golden glow falling over Zagreus’s face, catching the glittering sea from the corner of his eye.
Maybe, yes, a little like falling in love. A warmth that was already there, making itself known suddenly and painfully, dyeing everything in new colours.
“I suppose I’ve never considered it before,” he admits.
Zagreus hums in response. He’s almost boneless now, leaning heavily on Thanatos, his nose tucked into the side of Than’s neck and making little sniffing noises, almost like…
“…Are you smelling me?” Thanatos asks.
Immediately, Zagreus pulls away, drawing himself up in a mostly sitting position with a guilty look on his face for some reason. “Sorry. I didn’t, uh…”
“I don’t mind it,” Thanatos says, furrowing his brow and reaching out to pull Zagreus back. “I was just surprised. Do I smell of anything?”
He tries to remember where he was before this, if he could have picked up a smell from anywhere, but he can’t think of anything.
“No, it’s not that,” Zagreus says, shifting awkwardly and not going back to resting on Thanatos like he definitely should. “Or, well, yes but no. it’s strange. You smell different, it’s like my mother used to, and I don’t get why.”
“In what way?” Thanatos asks, confused.
Zagreus is squirming. His head is back to resting on Thanatos’s shoulder and he seems too tired to move again, but he’s clearly uncomfortable. “It’s not that you don’t smell good! You always do! It’s just… different. Weird. It makes me want to taste you.”
“…And your mother smells the same?”
“I said it was weird. And she doesn’t anymore. She did, when I met her up here, but I didn’t think much of it then, was too distracted just by seeing her, and then she came home and the smell went away and I figured it was just… the garden or something. But now you’re here and it’s the same, and I… gods, I want to b– to lick you.”
“Well,” Thanatos says, one hand holding Zagreus’s head lightly pressed against his shoulder, carding his fingers through his hair. “It’s not like I’m stopping you.”
Zagreus hesitates for only a moment. Then he’s pressing an open-mouthed kiss against Thanatos’s throat, moving slowly into lazy licks from his shoulder to his jaw. It’s neither unpleasant nor unfamiliar. It’s old territory, between the two of them, and Than closes his eyes against the rising sunlight, loses himself to the sensation and spares only a thought to keeping the Styx at bay, drawing the moment out.
Until something sharp scrapes against his throat and he jolts back, pushing Zagreus away.
“Wha…?” Zagreus is almost gone now, struggling to breathe and to focus his eyes. Should have gone a while ago, if not for Thanatos keeping him here.
Bewildered, Thanatos takes Zagreus’s jaw in one hand and pushes his upper lip back with a thumb to expose his teeth.
His canines have grown, long, sharp and mildly curved, almost like snake fangs. Vicious-looking and definitely new.
“…Your teeth.”
“Wha?” Zagreus repeats, raising his hand to feel them. “Huh?”
He’s clearly too close to death to make sense of anything, but Thanatos’s mind is going a mile a minute. Several things that haven’t been making sense are starting to slot into place.
“Zagreus,” he says. “Bite me.”
“What? No,” Zagreus says with surprising energy.
“You want to, don’t you? It wasn’t licking me you were craving,” Thanatos guesses.
By Zagreus’s reaction, the guess was right on the money.
“I wasn’t going to. I’m not… Why.”
“I have a theory. I’m very curious to see if I’m right.”
“But it’ll hurt you.”
Thanatos sighs. It can be weirdly hard at times to make Zagreus do anything he has decided to deny himself, even if everyone involved wants it. “You don’t mind killing Meg repeatedly, but you won’t even bite me when I’m asking you to?”
“S’different,” Zagreus says, but he’s giving in.
Thanatos holds his bare arm out right in front of him, just to make the temptation stronger, and is rewarded with Zagreus licking his lips and flickering his gaze back and forth between the arm and literally anything else.
“Zag, if I don’t find out if I’m right, it will bother me forever. Just this once.”
“Alright,” Zagreus whispers, and bites.
It hurts, of course. Getting bitten will do that, and Thanatos has to focus actively on keeping his defences down. It’s too easy to make himself impervious.
Then there’s a sudden and alarming drain on his energy.
The shock makes him dig his fingers into Zagreus’s shoulder, nearly makes him pull away entirely, but he manages to stop himself, to calm down and forcefully slow his racing heart – which is silly, really. His heart never beat before he met Zagreus anyway. The drain is sudden, but not dangerous, no worse than staying out in the sun for too long. He has more than enough energy to spare.
Zagreus hasn’t noticed anything. He’s biting down with his eyes closed, drinking Thanatos’s blood with something approaching reverence. Already, he’s looking less pale.
After a minute or so, Thanatos tries, “Zag? Is that enough?”
Zagreus’s eyes shoot open, and he lets go instantly, jumping to his feet to put distance between them. Then he looks down at himself, utterly bewildered by how easily he did it.
He isn’t dying anymore, isn’t even close. Any scratches on his body have been washed away, and he’s as bright and heathy as he’s ever been, even climbing out of the Styx.
Thanatos gives a thought to the holes in his arm, healing them with a quick effort of will.
“What in the world…?” Zagreus says.
“I suspected.” Thanatos smiles, standing up to hover as usual. “You might be a chthonic god, but you are a god of life as well. It was always strange to me that you should be barred absolutely from the world of the living. It makes more sense then, that as the god of blood, you are able to take the life force of others when your own fails you.”
“You mean I took your… are you okay!?”
Thanatos laughs. “I’m harder to hurt than that. At most I’ll need a power nap. And after everything you’ve given me, I wouldn’t mind either way. Consider it a gift, my life and my blood both.”
“You don’t even have blood,” Zagreus mutters. “You’re a proper god. You have ichor.”
“Two kinds of the same thing, or they’re similar enough it doesn’t matter. It might be interesting to see what you can do with mortal blood.”
Zagreus grimaces. “I don’t want to just, what, attack people? I really don’t want to take anyone’s blood without permission.”
“Then don’t. Play around until this wears off, then come home again.”
It’s quiet for a long moment. Zagreus looks at himself, looks up at the sun climbing higher in the sky with wonder in his eyes, like it’s finally sinking in that he’s free. That he is no longer bound to the underworld. That he can just go, if only for a time.
He grabs Thanatos and pulls him down for a kiss, and Than goes willingly, happily.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” it eventually turns into, their arms around each other and Zagreus not quite sobbing into Thanatos’s neck. His teeth are back to normal. Presumably he doesn’t need them anymore.
“I’m only sorry we didn’t figure it out earlier,” Thanatos assures him.
“I didn’t think– I thought I’d never…”
“I think you’d almost convinced yourself you were content, that you were fine being stuck, as long as you had your mother, as long as you had us to keep you company.”
“I think I might have, yes.” He pulls back, an unbreakable light in his eyes. “I’ve been trying not to think too much about what I can’t have, but now…”
Thanatos can’t help but match his smile, letting his heart do as it wills in his chest. “Then go. No need to waste the time you have.”
Zagreus kisses him one last time, and says, “I love you. I’ll see you when I come back again.”
Then he’s gone, running up the hill into the world.
Thanatos watches him go, and notices with some surprise it doesn’t hurt.
He almost expected it to, expected a return of the old pain that came the first time he realized Zagreus was trying to run away, the fear that he’s losing him, but there’s nothing. At some point in the intervening time, he’s grown confident that Zagreus will always come home to him. He has no reason to fear the wait.
He yawns, already tired from work, and now this. Maybe he’ll find some dark corner of Chaos to curl up in and sleep. If nothing else, it will make time pass faster until Zagreus comes home.