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Persephone was never the perfect obedient child. Always, she pushed the boundaries of what she was given. She walked serenely past the borders of where mother permitted her to wander, strolled off the predetermined paths set out for her, snuck an orange from the grove whose fruit she wasn’t supposed to touch. How was she supposed to simply do what she was told, when there was so much world out there? The scent of grass, the taste of a fresh pear, cool water running over her bare feet, the midday sun on her face. How was she meant to not reach for all of it?
Mother did not punish her for it. There was always a stern look, a request not to do the same thing again because you never know when a hole will open in the ground to swallow you whole, and then the next day, Persephone would do it again.
It was not at her mother’s feet or upon sudden violence from Demeter’s gentle hands that she was taught the price of disobedience, the natural consequences of her actions. Instead, it was the hole that opened beneath her feet and Hades’ greedy hands gripping her hips as the earth repaired itself and left her on the wrong side of the wound. Although, she did not learn her lesson even then.
At first, she was happy. How was she to know the difference between butterflies dancing in her stomach and a bellyful of razors? She had never been in love before. Terror and affection… no one had ever told her that they bled into each other like watercolors, that they weren’t supposed to. And this man, this king, he could have chosen anyone. Yet, he chose her.
He rent the very earth, she and her mother’s domain, just to have her. At his table were laid grandiose feasts, spindly weeds of the underworld stinking of decay in a vase, his seat at the head of the table and hers next to his. The wine wafted sweet aromas and a tang that bloomed on her tongue. When he found out that she loved pomegranates there was always a full platter of them. All those little things he did just for her. The compliments on what a blossom she was, the rarest and most submissive of the earth. He would take her face in his hands, squeeze gently and then let her go, a shadow of the violence he was capable of and a reassurance of how special she was that he caressed instead of hurt. When Zeus commanded them to wed, his fingers danced along her ribs and hips and thighs, eyes appraising so he could pick out her wedding dress. Lucky, lucky Persephone. She got to have this.
It had hurt, because of course it had. That was love, all consuming, all intoxicating, until it wore down every part of her to the marrow. She uprooted herself so that her roots could entangle with his, cracked her chest down the middle to make space for their love. She stopped allowing herself to miss the sun, Hades burned her just as hotly and fiercely. She refused to bloom anymore, unwilling to take up the oxygen that belonged to him, to do anything that might eclipse him. Blood trickled as she cut herself on her own edges, whittled away to better slot them together. Everything she did was in service of him, of their love and that was love. Obedience itself, given freely and without complaint. Over the centuries, she learned very well how to read her husband and knew that it pleased him. She pleased him. What more could she want?
No, it took millennia for Persephone to learn the price of obedience.
It was Hades’ fingers twisted in her hair down to the roots, pulling hard enough to force pathetic whimpers out of her mouth as he dragged her across the palace floor, bloody scratches cutting into her legs. Disobedience was Hades’ fingertips tightening against her jaw hard enough to bruise, her back to a wall and nowhere to look but those vengeful, intense eyes. It was standing beside him as Orpheus looked behind, his face the perfect picture of heartbreak and devastation as Persephone said, “what a shame,” choking on a bitter and incredulous laugh because there was no winning with Hades. The tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice was always going to end as it had. Hades didn’t lose. Persephone learned another lesson every year that her hatred and rage at Hades grew and he came to collect her from the world above, how she made him wait longer for her to cross over to him, and whenever she was in reach, he enfolded her in an iron grip, pressing a hard kiss to the corner of her mouth and rasping, “welcome home” in her ear. She learned the last valuable one as Apollo stood there while she screamed and pleaded for help, Hades closing in. The utter silence from her so-called brother rang louder than her entreaties ever could as Hades pinned her to the ground while she sobbed, singing promises of punishment in her ear.
Persephone fantasized about Hades’ blood hot on her hands, of how his endless chasm eyes would be blanketed with shock upon realizing that he lost. To her. His obedient flower of a wife.
She resolved then to never be obedient again, to never let the flame of her anguish and ire burn down to the wick and sputter out, to keep a ledger of every cut and bruise on her soul and to hold those accountable for eternity if she must.
In the aftermath, it was Mother who wiped the blood off her hands after her rightful throne and her kingdom had been stripped away from her. Athena and the others, throwing her back at her mother like she was a child throwing a tantrum to be hidden away and dealt with in private. The numbness had already settled in, and she made no move to stop her. By now, the blood was dried and flaky, rust-tartarus black-red, several days old.
It was clear after she finished that Mother had no idea what to do with her. These hurts were not ones that could be so easily patched by a mother’s love, even that of one that blanketed the world in ice when her daughter was taken. If only she had listened to Mother… she’d seen instantly what had taken Persephone millenia to realize.
“The garden, please.” Persephone whispered. Without a word, Mother supported most of Persephone’s weight and shuffled them both out to the garden. “Alone.” Mother hesitated. “Please.” Her voice broke and Mother pressed a featherlight kiss to her forehead before leaving, like the whisper of wheat stalks against her calves when she used to run through her Mother’s fields.
Persephone stumbled to a bed of flowers, sinking to her knees, falling more like. Grit and dirt dug into her knees as the best kind of pain she had experienced in so long. It soiled a periwinkle dress that used to be her favorite before Hades, but now hung off her frame in swathes of bright fabric. She plunged her hands into the dirt, savoring the earth between them. Until she noticed the patch of flowers in front of her. Asphodels.
A handsome bouquet of white, pink, and yellow spikes with six petals, a handful of open blooms nestled at the bottom of a pyramid. Flowers that blanketed the barren ground of the Underworld, her specially-crafted gift for Hades on their first anniversary. A sign of her stupidity, her naivety, her weakness.
She bent her body in half, screaming, curling her fingers into the ground, the Goddess of Spring back in her domain. The asphodels drooped. They browned. They died under her indomitable will. Goddess of rot more like.
There was a time she grew the first sunflowers and thought it romantic that they would seek to face the sun. She watched as daffodils sprung out of the earth year after year and smiled at their resilience. Once, she would have grown roses without thorns on them and never thought to flood the nightshade flower with poison. Once, she never would have asked the kadupal flowers to bloom only under the cover of night and wilt before dawn. That was all before.
She had changed, a rot that now cradled her heart in its poisonous prison. To untangle and root it out would take many more millennia of her life, no doubt taking what was left of her tenderness with it. What use was there in that? She gained her fire, her ledger, her blame, and her wrath. She had crowned herself queen. One day, she would be queen again.
No one else cared about what happened to that carefree, mischievous child of Spring and Earth, so why should she?
It’s daring and bold, to have the gall to face off against her in her own home, her kingdom. By the very woman who might have killed and tortured Calliope, who still had her blood on her hands as the Chorus passed down their judgment. But Persephone won’t be cowed. She’s heard it a million times before.
That is until Grace sings, “You know there’s someone else that I speak for…” and then there’s Calliope’s image hovering over them both. Watchful and whimsical and with none of the rancor that stained the end of their relationship. “Do you hear that?”
“Calliope.” The name is punched out of her, uncontrolled.
“If she had something to say, would you turn her away?”
“Please don’t do this…”
The grief is cresting now, catching up to the anger and the tsunami, building up. Calliope, Calliope, Calliope. Calliope with a twin flame burning in her own chest, who loved her on Persephone’s own terms because she wouldn’t accept anything else. Calliope, who might have shown Persephone her own taste of what love was supposed to feel like before they both turned and wrecked the foundation of them into rubble.
Every good thing Persephone has ever had since him, she couldn’t hold on to. She didn’t know how. No matter how hard she tried, it slipped out of her grasp. She was a quick-learner in spite, hate, of grudges. Gentleness, compromise, companionship, all things bled and twisted out of her. That same rot, infecting everything she touched and deemed dear. There was no stopping it. Her.
Grace is still singing. Words that land as hard as a punch or kick, all the worse for the sincere honesty and compassion laced through them. “You ate a bad seed, that’s not on me. Rotten too long, blossomed all wrong—”
Persephone overflows, “We change shape, in time, you’ll see we all rot away into who we will be. Your youth wasn’t stolen like it was from me.”
“Let me help you.” Grace is reaching out. The way Calliope once did.
Persephone whirls around. “Don’t touch me!” Touch is the last thing she wants: violent, loving, compassionate, hateful, soothing, apathetic, comforting, it doesn’t matter. “I don’t need help from any of you!” When she needed help, they weren’t there. They rejected her, they left her to suffer. She would never need help again. The confession spills out of her before she can stop it. Curse the powers of a muse. “I was alone when you-know-who kidnapped and crushed all my dreams ‘til a muse… I just want Calliope back.”
The words are true. She does. She wants her back and to apologize for every acidic word she’s ever spit at her, to say she’ll be better and actually be better, to bring back a shadow of the Persephone who wanted to love and was willing to try. Calliope is dead, she can’t do any of that. Worse, she doesn’t know how.
Grace’s voice rings out on stage, conceding defeat. A white flag.
The flame is enticed, the rot throbs, but inside what truly resonates is hollowness. There is no victory in her triumph. She wasn’t the one who always had to win, to push everyone under his thumb and confide them to the shadows. That isn’t who she wants to be. Is that who she’s becoming?
That isn’t who she wants to be.
In the after, there is a softness that permeates everything. Has it always been there? Persephone had been unable for so long to see anything but hard edges, the ridges and jagged, broken parts that would rip her open. She’d missed them once. She wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
A world of softness, then, is new in a startling and disorienting way. An odd experience for an immortal being. But it’s there in how Grace caresses her face, leaves soft goodbye kisses against her lips, holds Persephone like she’s both precious and unbreakable. Grace naps on her apartment’s couch with her socks still on, leaves books on the end table knowing she’ll be back, forgets to wash her favorite coffee mug most visits. All of it, imbued with… softness. Tenderness. All things that Persephone once had. Yes, there was a time she practiced these things too. Things she can learn again, that she is relearning.
Other things are different too. Apollo stands in front of her and apologizes for doing nothing when she needed him most, looks her in the eye when he does it and does not ask for forgiveness. She couldn’t give it to him even if he asked for it. Not for this. But it’s a step, an admittance of wrong. Aphrodite has taken to glancing brushes against her arms if Persephone is willing to have them and they remind her so much of her own mother that she can’t find it within herself to turn away. She shares a drink with Pan for the first time in centuries and has to fight the instinct to laugh at a sly joke he makes. Hermes is simply around more, glances at her less out of the corner of their eyes as if waiting for an explosion.
It’s…nice. She supposes. Different. She still doesn’t quite know what to do about all of it. Or how to handle it.
Except, that’s another thing. Grace never asks her to file her edges down, to blunt the sharp parts of herself that have been molded and weathered over the years. The only thing she asks is that Persephone takes care not to cut Grace on those edges, or herself. There is no making herself smaller, of dulling her emotions, of splitting herself open and inviting Grace instead. They exist both together and apart. By choice.
She’s never quite had anything like this. As much as it pains her to admit, not even with Calliope. For all the passion and love, because yes it was love, between them, they both burned too bright and hot not to burn the other. Unwilling to recognize that was what they were doing, letting the rot wind around them both, unveiling the mangled pieces of themselves and hoping the other was caught in the collateral damage. In the end, Calliope leaving was the kindest thing she ever did for both of them.
With Grace, with the overeager Freddie folded in with the Idols, with her family seeming to remember that they actually are a family, the same things she used to wound herself on now have blunted edges. Most days, Persephone has the urge to just be, rather than to inflict a semblance of the same hurt that had been visited upon herself. Once more, she allows herself to remember how a garden grows: with care, time, and nurturing.
The rot is still there, all wound up in her heartstrings until they are one and the same. It would be too much for them to go. Not that she can say that she wants it gone completely. But something in her is fearful of the rot spreading, of becoming the venom once more, of their assured destruction. The rot, at its core, was planted there by Hades.
She’d shared that fear with Grace once lazy night, tangled up together and half-certain that the other woman was already asleep. A wrong assumption, as it turned out. Grace had stirred, eyes heavy and hazy with sleep by peeling her head from Persephone’s shoulder to lock their gazes.
Somber and quiet, Grace said, “There’s two kinds of rot, isn’t there? Inside and out. The one that destroys you and the other that remakes you, reveals what was there under the surface all along. Just don’t let the first one win, Seph, okay? You’ve faced and overcome so much on your own. You’re strong. You don’t ruin things. You’re the last one standing when everyone else has given up.You love with your whole heart.” A gentle pressure over her chest, over her heart, as Grace placed her hand there. “Now, how could this be rotten?”
Persephone had been unable to do anything but cry silent tears, Grace gathering her in her arms. Maybe the Goddess of Spring wasn’t as far gone as she had always suspected. Maybe she peeled back all the new, vulnerable bits of first life to reveal the hearty parts that could withstand the most bitter winter.
Don’t let the rot destroy her, don’t let it win, Grace had said. Let it peel her back layer by layer until she bloomed again, unashamed in all her scarred glory. Yes. That’s something she can do. If there’s anything the Goddess of Spring knows how to do, it’s flourish. At least, she used to. Somewhere along the way, she curled herself up into a bud to keep herself safe and protected.
It's past time now, to unfurl her petals bit by bit until she can feel the sunlight on her face once more. To revel in the warmth and light. It’s time.