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Medusa measured the centuries by when she fed and the small eternities between each taste. Small eternities of gnawing, like her body was so ravenous it was trying to consume itself. The hunger was her constant companion. It spoke in a language of never enoughs, of heat and violence, it made her forget she was a girl once, that Medusa-–the myth, the monster, the one who leaves constellations of bite marks on once-living flesh–-used to mean nothing more than her name.
Tonight, Medusa wasn’t sure what she meant, hoping her intentions would come into focus with each step toward the scent of blood. She caught the first hint of it the moment she left the Reliquary, and knew it belonged to an Idol by the time she reached the edge of the forest. There was a richness to it, a velvet ribbon curling through the air and tugging her to some intoxicating conclusion. Lady Athena was gone, Medusa’s services obsolete, but it was hard to shake a centuries-old routine and Medusa found herself guided by stomach and curiosity to put herself where she didn’t belong.
She pressed into the woods, hunter’s instinct cloaking her in silence as she navigated over tree roots, like veins on the forest floor, and kept to where starlight couldn’t reach her. Following the path of bent brambles and trampled leaves stained with drops of blood like trail markers, Medusa came upon a woman stumbling barefoot in nothing more than shorts and a shirt. Moonlight caught her disheveled black hair, and Medusa could tell by the familiar notes of flavor in her blood’s aroma, it was the muse.
Since the trial, she’d only seen Grace in passing, unclear on where they stood with each other. Of course, Grace either tolerated her, or didn't think of her at all.
And Medusa might’ve bided longer, seen all the threads that led from this terrible choice to even worse ends, but the blood rendered her heady and she was nothing if not entirely predictable.
“Lost, little girl?” Medusa called, her voice echoing and being absorbed by the night. If Grace heard her she didn’t show it, kept to her slurred pace as she blundered between trees.
And it was delicious, the moment of clarity, of key sliding into lock. Medusa had seen this before, the way the other Idols lost themselves as they took on new bodies. Many times had Lady Athena sent her to shadow Idols as they found their footing, and now there was a small cruelty smiling in her, knowing Grace was slipping just like the rest of them.
Medusa could’ve retreated to the solemn quiet of the Reliquary, left Grace to the woods, but the primitive thing that was both drawn to and terrified of fire goaded her forward.
She grabbed Grace’s arm, flinching from the sudden heat under her fingers, and Grace startled just the same, snapping around to see her.
Medusa looked into the woman who did in a week what she couldn’t manage in a millenia, Grace’s wild eyes in a frenzied aimlessness, pupils like flies trapped in jars. They flashed with staccato pulses of gold, like the muse was trying to find a note to latch onto, a melody that could sing her to safety, but there was only the discordant buzz of white-noise wind and creaking branches. Medusa had watched Idols come and go, from a distance, but to be breaths away from someone else’s undoing? There was a bitter satisfaction in witnessing it in a person instead of a mirror.
Grace thrashed uselessly in her grip, and Medusa couldn’t deny the bite of joy she took in having a reason to subdue her. For her own good, naturally.
Grace was not herself, and Medusa already had her gaze. She’d seen it so many times, the way struggling bent to slackening, tension fleeing the muscles, the slow surrender, a superficial picture of relief. Grace was sinking, limbs too heavy to keep her upright, and Medusa sank with her, guiding her to the ground with an arm snaked behind her back, like laying her down to sleep. There was a merciless awareness of where skin brushed skin, and touching Grace was touching something violently alive, inferno as she was. Medusa’s world had so long been a blizzard, and Grace, impossible Grace, was a raging bonfire at the heart of it.
Despite the way her body gave to paralysis, a rabbit heartbeat hammered in Grace’s chest and Medusa felt each maddening pulse like blows to her stomach. Medusa swallowed the saliva pooling in her mouth.
“What has our pretty muse in such an ugly mood?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.
Grace wasn’t listening, she was straining against her own skin, a muffled moan of frustration dying in her throat as she weakly turned her head.
Medusa laid her fingers on Grace’s chin, tried not to shiver from some perverse heat, and tilted her back into place with ease.
“Poor thing.”
And it would’ve been so simple. To tear into her, to make the mouth that produces music produce blood instead. To break something fragile. She couldn’t help but have a reverence for those she killed, and there wasn’t anything holy about butchery but that didn’t stop Medusa from finding religion in it, the core tenant being this will ruin you.
How against her nature, to follow the scent of blood like a string of fate, to find a cornucopia of quivering flesh, and to stay her hunger. But tonight, instead of feeding fires she was feeding delusions, the delusions of a monster trying to shape itself like man, trying to bite its own tongue and taste blood instead of venom.
Grace squeezed her eyes shut.
This was the part where Medusa could console her, could explain everything in cloying clarity, induce actual relaxation, but she had all this resentment and nowhere to put it and Grace was an open mouth and all Medusa had to do was pour. So she waited. Sat with Grace and the hunger, and kept herself from indulging either.
A chorus of whispered hisses filled her ears as she raked her gaze across Grace’s body. She told herself she was looking for something to distract her from the thirst, but, infuriatingly, there wasn’t a part of Grace that Medusa didn’t crave. There were tears in Grace’s shirt like windows to her skin from where brambles had sliced her. And what a thin layer of skin it was. Beads of sweat dotted her collarbone like a necklace, and at so close a distance, Grace’s blood wasn’t singing so much as it was screaming in a horrible harmony.
And this was her curse. To be so painfully aware of every ounce of life in others that she herself would never possess. It bred hate, it bred rot. Immortality had shown her so much of the world, and she had loved so little of it. Because loving was made for softer things. For muses, perhaps. Perhaps Grace would take her own curse in stride, would walk from herself to pretty Calliope and not look back, would laugh with the Idols as these growing pains faded to memory and the notion that she used to be anything other than a muse was rendered absurd–-but in this moment, it was just Medusa and Grace and this patch of woods, and Grace was bleeding and pliant for her alone.
Medusa wasn’t sure how much time had passed before Grace’s heart rate slowed and her eyes opened, a tightness in them along with newfound focus, her gaze burning through Medusa. Grace’s jaw tensed, throat flexed, and Medusa was convinced by the imploring hardness in her expression that Grace was enough herself to not run into another thicket. So she let the venom seep out of her, let the spell wear off so Grace could speak.
“Medusa,” Grace cautioned, a tremor of unease in her tone. And it was just one word but god did it rile her, because they were back at the Viper’s Nest and Grace was still talking to her the way you would an animal, and if she were an animal there’d be no talking at all.
She took that feeling and tried to wedge it somewhere between her ribs and her regret, to irritate her heart into beating more bile than blood, to coax her lungs into drinking more sulfur than air. If she was lucky, she would choke on that rage before it told her it was really shame.
Grace shifted under her, trying to inch out of Medusa’s grip without arousing her attention, as if Medusa couldn’t feel it like a searing iron dragged against her body.
And Medusa tried to remember why she came here in the first place, if the version of herself ten minutes ago had this in mind, had anything in mind other than this masochism, this need to fall deeper into what she knew and hated herself to be. They were ugly feelings. And of course they’d be ugly, they were hers.
It brought Medusa back, the sudden chill as Grace pulled out of her grip, stumbling to her feet, dirt and scrapes climbing up her bare legs. Grace was glaring with suspicion, present enough for Medusa to become conscious of herself, because now Grace would remember this. No longer some dazed thing she could play with but an Idol who was braver than she would ever be. Grace looked ready to run, and the world held its breath.
“You really should be more careful, these woods can be dangerous at night,” Medusa drawled, which did nothing to help, but she always had a way of widening wounds.
“Clearly.”
Medusa wouldn’t be surprised if Grace picked up a branch and tried swinging it at her.
“If I was going to eat you, lovely, don’t you think I would’ve by now?” Medusa asked, as if her thirst was driven by logic, as if she wasn’t still considering it.
“Then, you were following me. Why?”
And the spiteful part of her said it was because Grace was swallowing more grief than she’d earned, that she didn’t deserve the right to choke on it. A quieter part said she was just finding more ways to torture herself. She settled on neither, bounced her words off of mirrors until what came out was just a reflection and couldn’t be traced back to any real sentiment.
“Well who do you think they’d blame if something happened to you, dear?”
And Grace just stared, sighed, like the whole thing was ridiculous and she barely had enough energy to carry the weight of exhaustion, let alone whatever excuses Medusa killed and dropped at her feet.
“Did you have to-–god, you couldn’t’ve just shaken me?”
“I did,” Medusa said with curiosity, slowly rising as to not frighten Grace off.
And now it was Grace’s embarrassment being laid bare, her failing to mask the surprise, confirming she hadn’t been fully herself. Medusa wondered when she first came back to herself. Wondered if anyone else had seen her like this. Again, she found herself salivating.
“I’m leaving,” Grace said, like she was testing the words. And it was disarmingly endearing, the way she seemed to straddle the line between guarded and self-conscious only for it to come out as that flavor of awkward that was so inherently Grace.
Medusa raised an expectant brow.
“And, um, thanks, I guess.”
“Mm, you’re welcome, I guess.”
And the urgency crashed into her as the bubble popped, as Grace moved to leave. How unfair it was, for Medusa to be the predator and at the same time be the prey of this thirst, to need to get close enough to crawl out of her own body and into Grace’s, to shed her skin and her curse and the centuries of a hunger with no end, to find the warm hearth of Grace’s gut and be reborn into something resembling a person.
She felt every agonizing inch of frigid distance, and knew this was the closest she could get if she ever wanted to come back from it.
So she rooted herself in dead leaves and dirt. Watched as Grace trudged off toward the distant murmurings of the city, slow enough to pick up the pieces of herself that she lost along the way. Watched her disappear into the woods, taking her fire with her. It was in this absence that Medusa felt what was missing so acutely, a cold breeze brushed against her and echoes of touch burned under her skin like brands.
She waited for the thirst to ebb, for it to go with Grace, but the night grew dark enough to engulf her and the gnawing only deepened, and she wanted to laugh, because of course the world wasn’t done with her. Wouldn’t relent.
With a slow breath, she roused a dormant animalistic determination. Medusa stalked into town and went after the first thing with a pulse.