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Calliope is used to Persephone on the edges of things. A cautionary tale for late night drinks and the bluer days of late autumn, when the city parks are full of crows fighting over the night’s scraps amongst raw and jagged trees, their final leaves are just the shed skins of their livelier, younger selves. A fragile song through tiny bones.
(Do you remember? Do you know?
She killed—
—we dare not forget.)
King killer. Throneless. Alone. Eleusis unraveled, unable to rise or fall. To Calliope, Persephone is one of Apollo’s deepest, saddest lines and an inkblot on Athena’s new desk. She is the shadow Hermes never crosses. And she is the fire Calliope remembers when Clio’s death catches her by the throat.
Persephone had been warm rage then. Fire in a granary as Clio reached through bars to grab at Calliope’s hand. They’d both heard the breath Persephone sucked in before Clio’s captor fell to his knees, crying and begging while she held him by the hair and Apollo burnt out the man’s eyes in the last show of light he allowed himself for decades. Persephone kept the man alive, and then she shucked him like corn when Apollo was done with him, Spring, Death and Sunlight in furious accord.
Clio died in Calliope’s arms and while Apollo looked away from them, tears still drying to steam on his skin, Persephone met Calliope’s eyes and said that no one would forget. Persephone was a C-Minor chord, diminished but still splendid, and Calliope tasted burnt honey and felt the sound of her.
When Olympus was too small, and Apollo too tired, and Calliope too angry, it was Persephone who made sense.
Now, a drink in hand and Persephone’s eyes on her, Calliope wants to be reckless.
“Are you going to finish that drink, or are you just going to stare at me?” Persephone reaches across the bar, tugging the glass from Calliope’s slack grip. When she grins, it is profoundly unfriendly. “I bite.”
“I’ve heard.” Calliope leans forward. “But I’d want dinner first.”
Half a laugh for that. Persephone raises the glass, the whiskey trapping light from the stage, and downs it before Calliope can do more than shiver.
“What do you want, Muse? I admit, your presence is doing wonders for tonight’s entertainment, but you don’t normally grace my door.”
“I want…” Calliope swallows. Keeping her jaw firm and her shoulders back, she looks up at
Persephone the way Anmarie Dalmais looked at Michel in the side doorways of the Palais Garnier when she told him that yes, she was here to audition and no, he was not going to stop her. Just another singer with dreams of the Paris Opera, years before she met Christophe on the set of Orfeo and her whole life changed again. She needs her old energy now, looking at the Queen of the Underworld.
“You want…”
“I want to know how you manage, without Olympus,” Calliope says, and the air shifts when she does, the raw want of the worlds nearly enough for it to spill out as song, the space between them washing over in gold. Calliope sucks in a breath and tries again. “I want to do what you do, Persephone. I can’t just sit there, while so many of us vanish or forget or just wait to die. You’re part of the Chorus, but it doesn’t—you’re not—”
She wishes, sometimes, that she had more of Clio in her. That she could shape words into rhetoric as well as rhyme, and argue the way the other muse had always done, with arguments that twisted and reshaped themselves and final words that rang so that anyone listening remembered only their power. On bad nights, she imagines the broken filaments of Clio’s eidolon snagging on her own, absorbed through Calliope’s skin from the night she died, her sister’s rage bubbling up and horrified that she is left only with song when before had every word-shape at her disposal.
“The answer, Muse,” Persephone says. “Is spite. With me, it usually is.”
“You’re more than that.”
“And you,” Persephone says, almost quizzical as she looks Calliope full in the face. “Really are angry, aren’t you? Interesting.”
Calliope wants to break the bar. She wants to shriek. Find just the right note to crack the whole room’s glassware. “You see me,” she says, instead.
Another huff of laughter. Persephone pulls a decanter from the shelf behind her and pours more whiskey.
“I’m sure one of your artist friends has a threadbare couch to sleep on.”
Calliope snatches the glass from Persephone mid pour. Feels the alcohol splash and evaporate over her hand even as she tosses what she can back as fast as possible. It burns, closer to Irish firewater when she expected smoke and sweetness, and her eyes smart with it.
Persephone watches her cough, saying nothing.
When Calliope can speak again, it comes out rough. “You see me,” she repeats. “And I see you.”
“You—”
“I didn’t always,” Calliope rushes on, all while Persephone looks at her full of skepticism and spite, even as her mouth softens. Persephone is flushed, and Calliope takes her hands. “I didn’t see you always, because none of us did, and it’s easy to be insular when you’re one of three, and always a new song or story or—what I’m saying is, I see you now, and I think you’re only one of us who can live in this new world.
“It’s been a new world for hundreds of years.”
“Exactly.” Calliope’s grin hurts her face. She looks up at Persephone with whiskey roiling in her gut and magic close to her skin. “Just think about what you could show them. What we could show them.”
“Fire words,” says Persephone, who tugs one hand free only to gently grip Calliope’s jaw. “I’m not a human artist for you to inspire, Calliope.”
Calliope swallows. “I’m very persuasive.”
“As I’m starting to recall.”
Muse and Goddess stare at each other, while around them, the Underworld bustles and throbs, the musicians caught in the best night of their lives, even as the whites start to show around their eyes and fingers begin to bleed.
Calliope bits her lip, and something bright and perfect settles when she sees Persephone’s eyes tracking the movement. She bites down harder, lets herself shiver under the other woman’s fingers.
“I’ve been so lost,” she says.
Persephone smirks, running her thumb over Calliope’s bruised lower lip. “That old story. You know the Underworld’s only a bad end.”
“Oh hush,” Calliope says, reaching up to catch her hand in Persephone’s collar. “I don’t mind lost. Lost is fine. Lost is on the way to somewhere else.”
“And this,” Persephone says, low, fingers sliding from Calliope’s jaw to the hollow of her throat. “Is your somewhere else?” she presses down, smirking as Calliope swallows. “Someone else?”
“If you like.” Calliope tilts her head to press a soft, exploratory kiss to the underside of Persephone’s jaw. “I’m going to make some changes.”