Work Text:
The paper popped and crackled as the flames consumed it.
“What are you doing?” Percy asked with morbid curiosity.
The fire blazed a dizzying array of purples, blues, reds, oranges, yellows, occasionally flashing an incandescent white that made him screw his eyes closed.
Apollo shrugged. “Mourning? Celebrating? Take your pick.”
“By burning portraits of a person?” Percy pressed, a strange sense of disquiet filling him as he looked at the sketchbooks and canvases strewn about Apollo’s workroom.
He couldn’t remember why he’d come here – something infinitesimal that had still felt essential at the time. Maybe something Estelle has left behind? That she needed for school and which Percy, being a wonderful brother, had offered to fetch from Apollo’s house?
It didn’t seem as important now. The sight of Apollo lit up by burning paper and canvas, the materials going up in flames coloured with the evidence of pigments Apollo had once painted their surfaces with, made Percy squirm.
He shouldn’t be here. And yet, now that he’d seen it, he couldn’t bring himself to depart.
The flames burnt down to a last moment of red, before vanishing and leaving behind only black ash.
Apollo released a breath Percy hasn’t realised he’d been holding, before brushing the ashes off the stone table and into a bronze urn.
“What brings you here?” Apollo asked with a forced brightness as he tore another page off a warped notebook.
“Something,” Percy answered vaguely, staring transfixed as Apollo touched the edge of the page with an incense stick. The god placed the smouldering paper gently on the table, his fingers lingering at its edges as if unwilling to let go.
It reminded Percy of setting fire to a shroud at Camp Half-Blood. Mind full of questions, but heart aching with sorrow, Percy bore witness to what he suspected was Apollo’s version of a funeral.
“Who was he?” Percy asked hoarsely once Apollo had moved onto the linen canvases.
Apollo jerked, startled out of whatever dry-eyed fugue he’d fallen into. “You’re still here,” he said blankly.
Percy looked at him incredulously. “Of course I’m still here. Did you think I’d just leave you here to–”
Percy didn’t even know what he’d be leaving Apollo alone for – just that it would be a terrible idea to do so. It was all he could do to not feel guilt for leaving the god alone to his hollow-eyed despair for the day that had already passed.
He shouldn’t have allowed Apollo’s rumpled clothes, tangled hair, and red eyes convince him to take Estelle back home without more than five minutes spent at the god’s place. The dark pits beneath blue eyes were a sign of sleeplessness indeed, but not one born of drink as Percy had supposed.
“This is a good thing,” Apollo insisted, a shadow of embarrassment hanging over his shoulders.
Then why did it feel like Percy would have been abandoning Apollo to an arduous, agonising quest with nothing but pain and a hollow victory at the end?
“What is it?” Percy tried to modulate his voice, but it emerged as a demand anyway.
“Something I crave,” Apollo shot back before coughing as the acrid smell of burning paint grew especially strong for a moment.
“At least open the window,” Percy cried out.
The closed windows and locked door had almost convinced Percy to return home. Only the memory of Estelle’s desperate eyes had him picking the lock and sneaking into Apollo’s house instead. It seemed a lot more sinister from the inside, with the god burning the remains of someone’s life inside a room with the shutters closed, the only illumination being the fire solemnly cauterising a wound that had never stopped bleeding.
Percy shook his head free of the fanciful thought. The day seemed full of peculiar events and uncanny encounters. “We’ll suffocate on the smoke,” he added, adding what he felt was perhaps the first pragmatic sentiment voiced inside the house that day.
He certainly didn’t want to suffocate to realise an aesthetic.
Suffocating … just like his dream of suffocating on smoke as embers rained down from the creaking ceiling and a wall of heat blocked his way to the door. With the bone-deep knowledge only a dreamer could possess, Percy had known that the grills on the window meant to prevent his daughter from accidentally plunging to her death would now prevent him from escaping that way.
Percy had died and he’d woken up to the most unsettling sensation of deja vu he’d experienced since the time he uncapped the ballpoint pen in his pocket and unsheathed Riptide inside Lupa’s cave.
Apollo’s derisive snort distracted Percy from wondering if someone had wiped a part of his memories.
“You’re the only one here who needs oxygen,” the god sneered.
“The pyre does too,” Percy retorted.
Apollo froze, an expression of naked despair on his face but for a moment. “This isn’t a pyre.”
“Then what is it?”
Apollo hesitated, before breathing out softly, as if frightened speaking the syllables might render his wish invalid, “A prayer.”
Percy sniffed back the moisture threatening to drip down his runny nose. He couldn’t recall catching a cold that day, but perhaps the smoke had irritated his sinuses.
“To the person whose images you’re–” Percy waved an all-encompassing hand at the remaining half of the face on the canvas as it melted into an unholy abomination even its most ardent admirer would have been hard-pressed to defend.
Apollo didn’t breathe for a long time before he said, “It’s fine. I didn’t make these with him there.”
That just made it worse. Because Pery would have had to be blind to fail to notice the clear progression of time in these images. A man with more white in his hair than red, with crow’s-feet around his eyes, and a mouth surrounded by laughter lines – laughing, crying, frowning; gazing at the observer with love, hate, resentment, sorrow; losing the red in his hair completely until even the snow-white strands fell off to reveal a bald skull speckled with liver spots.
A certain ageless grace entered the face, as if the painter had depended solely on his imagination to paint years the model had never undergone and so had gotten some of the details wrong. Seventy, eighty, ninety – a straight back stooping lower and lower until a cane was a regular prop, and thick, black-rimmed glasses reflected the light off milky blue eyes.
“Why burn them, though?”
Percy couldn’t imagine spending years immortalising someone in paintings long after they were gone, couldn’t imagine the longing that must have gripped Apollo for the god to have returned day after day to the sketchpad and ink out what this man could have looked like if only he’d lived.
Apollo twisted his lips and looked fixedly at the blinds drawn across the already shuttered windows. “It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? To paint a person not as he was but how I wished he could have been?”
“No,” Percy replied tenderly. “No, it’s not ridiculous at all.”
Just sad.
It seemed strange, but Percy had never thought much about the lovers Apollo must have had over the years. His love life had been etched in the history of Greek mythology, but Apollo hadn’t died out with the Greek states. His life had continued, but his lovers had kept on dying.
He had so many demigod children – did he mourn their parents? Percy had the feeling that Poseidon would mourn the day Sally died. Zeus probably didn’t even spare more than a thought for his exes, but clearly Apollo ... did.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he told the god, looking down at his feet.
His first instinct was always to extend sympathy to the demigod for their dead parent, but for the first time since Hermes and Luke’s mother, Percy found himself softening towards a god.
“Who was he?” Percy asked after a moment.
Apollo shrugged again. “It doesn’t matter.”
Percy frowned. “Because you’ve moved over him? Not crying yourself to sleep everyday over someone doesn’t mean they never mattered. It’s okay to mourn.”
Apollo laughed. “I don’t need to mourn,” he dismissed.
Percy leaned against the stone table only to recoil as the hot rock seared a line against his hip. It reminded him of his dream.
“Can we open the windows?” he asked, taking desperate strides towards the wall before wrenching open the blinds.
Bare wall stared back at him.
Percy stumbled back with a horrified cry.
“Are you okay?” Apollo asked warily. “You’re acting ... strange.”
“Windows!” Percy insisted. Windows lest the pyre of memories turn Percy into one too.
Was this what his dreams had been trying to show him? Why he’d found himself spending the day at his mother’s and acceding to every demand Estelle made?
Because he was going to die that day. Die by burning to death in Apollo’s house.
“Even if the house catches on fire, it’s not like I’m going to just leave you here to die!” Apollo said incredulously. “At the very least, I’d dump you on the doorstep to admire the flames.”
Percy coughed. Was it just him or did the air smell smoky?
“That’s ‘cause I’ve been burning things here,” Apollo intoned in the tones of someone wondering whether anyone could really be this unobservant.
At least, however reluctantly, the shroud of grief had lifted off Apollo’s shoulders. The god seemed much too engrossed in Percy’s histrionics to pay all his attention to the dead man and his burning memories.
“I had a bad dream,” Percy explained. He covered his mouth and nose with his sleeve and hoped the god didn’t ask about details. He had no desire to elaborate on his impending death.
Nor about the child he’d imagined in his dreams, the child with Annabeth’s hair and his eyes that would never exist in real life.
“Peter,” Apollo said non apropos of anything.
“Huh?”
Apollo sighed. “His name was Peter. We met in Bristol. Were together for fifty years. Then he died.”
Percy blinked furiously at the empty wall without a single trace of the windows that should have graced an artist’s studio.
Perhaps he’d done Apollo a disservice. Apollo was better now, but that the god, perpetually golden and young, could have stayed till death with a mortal despite the ravages of age even centuries ago – it boggled Percy’s mind.
But it also settled with a warm certainty in his gut. Of course, Apollo wasn’t so shallow as to abandon the person he loved just because of a few extra wrinkles. The god had fallen for the soul within, so why would he leave?
The dwindling time, the approaching sunset, just made all the time spent together sweeter.
“I’m sorry,” Percy repeated.
“There’s no need,” Apollo reiterated.
Percy shot him a doubtful look, wondering whether this was delusion or self-deception.
And where the difference between the two lay.
Apollo’s lips pressed together, and he rocked back and forth before blurting out, “It really is fine.”
Regret crossed the god’s face the moment after but despite eyes wide like he couldn’t believe his own words, Apollo continued in a rush, “He was a mortal. His soul is functionally immortal just like any other mortal’s. He died an ordinary death in ordinary circumstances, which means he’s still there.”
Apollo slapped a hand over his mouth.
“Have you ... visited him in the Underworld?” Percy groped for the right thing to say blindly.
Apollo shook his head.
“But you know he’s in Asphodel?” Percy guessed.
A pause ... before Apollo shook his head again.
Percy couldn’t explain even to himself why he was pursuing this. A tiny voice at the back of his mind kept insisting that this was cruel, that he was forcing Apollo to pour salt on all the wounds cutting him open, telling him to roll naked over gravel, making him stab himself again and again just to satiate Percy’s curiosity.
But every fibre of his being was too invested. Percy couldn't have abandoned this topic for all the gold in the world. Something within him had pricked up its ears and now refused to be drawn away.
“Then how?” Percy whispered.
Apollo withdrew his hand from his mouth to reveal white teeth digging into his lower lip. Several seconds passed in a fraught silence before Apollo confessed, “I just know. He'll be back.”
Percy blinked furiously to get rid of tears that had no place seeping out of his lachrymal glands. He didn’t know why but this simple faith in a dead lover – it squeezed at Percy’s heart and refused to let him breath.
It shouldn’t.
And yet, it did.
This was a faith the gods didn’t extend even to their own children. He couldn’t remember when Clarisse had told him this. Just that sometime during the year after they’d formed their friendship cum truce, they’d sat in a park with ice cream melting in his mouth and dripping down her wrist, as Clarisse said, “It’s ‘cause we die. No matter what happens, we’ll die. That's why our parents want us to find glory. We do it for their attention. But they push us into danger because danger is how you prove yourself.”
A confusing mixture of anger, regret, understanding, and resentment had shadowed her eyes as she continued in a whisper, “As long as we die heroes, we’ll find Elysium. And if reach the Elysium Fields thrice, we land on the Isles of Blest. And that’s it. As long as the Underworld exists, so will we. What parent doesn’t want that?”
Even at the tender age of whatever he’d been, Percy had spotted the flaws in that argument. Most demigods didn’t live on the Isles of the Blest. You didn’t reach paradise just because you’d gone on a useless quest and died a meaningless death. And even if you did – did that change the fact that Percy didn’t want to die in the first place?
But here Apollo stood, insisting that Peter would make it back to the mortal world – despite dying an ordinary death.
“But he’ll be someone else,” Percy said softly instead of pointing out that he’d never heard of the souls stuck in Asphodel finding enough strength of will to dream of the next day let alone march to the next life.
Apollo’s lips twitched uncomfortably.
This mattered. More than anything else, it mattered. Whatever Apollo said next would change Percy’s life irrevocably and he couldn’t tell himself it was simply because it might finally prove all the unsaid assumptions every demigod striding out of camp on a fruitless quest had clung to with both hands and feet.
“Not really,” Apollo admitted, looking down at his feet. A faint dusting of red covered the god’s cheeks, but for the life of him, Percy couldn’t discern whether it was a blush of embarrassment or a flush of rage.
“Apollo,” Percy started only to trail off.
For the life of him, Percy couldn’t figure out why he wanted to know.
Apollo whirled around only to freeze as the charcoal sketch of a young man hanging from an ivy encrusted wall gazed at him with mischief in his eyes.
“I don’t why I’m telling you this,” the god said, less to Percy and more to the picture. “I suppose it’s just been so long and now that the wait is finally about to end, I can’t help but fear that this time it’ll be different. This time he won’t come back, or he will, and it’ll all be different. That he might have changed, and we can’t just go back to how it was.”
“Even if he hasn’t changed, haven’t you?” Percy whispered.
A stricken expression crossed Apollo’s face.
Percy regretted his words, but it was too late to swallow them back down. He had the feeling that if Peter didn’t come back, or worse, came back and rejected Apollo for not being the person he’d fallen in love with, Apollo would never recover.
The thought might haunt Percy’s dreams until he died.
“I ... s-suppose,” Apollo stuttered. “But ... I’m better now, right?”
At Percy’s silence, Apollo twisted towards him and pleaded, “Right?”
“Of course,” Percy agreed after a moment. But what did Percy’s opinion matter when Peter had fallen for the god Apollo used to be? Though he doubted the god had ever shown Apollo the Vengeful to the mortal if their relationship had lasted any length of time.
Apollo nodded, looking more like he was trying to assure himself than agreeing with Percy. “He’ll like me. He always has before. No matter what I did.”
Was that because Apollo acted the way he thought Peter would want him to or because the change had been gradual enough the mortal had boiled alive in the pot quite before he’d realised it?
“It’s not like that,” Apollo snapped.
Percy swallowed. “Like what?”
Apollo had heard his thoughts. Percy hated it, but what could he do? Just because Apollo tried to pretend it was an ability he’d lost along with his mortality, didn’t mean that the stray thought wouldn’t drift along the air to Apollo’s ears.
But how could he know whether it was Percy’s fault or Apollo plucking the thought right out of his head?
Apollo clutched at the sketch, unable to hold still. The paper tore in his grip, but the god paid it no mind. His eyes pored over the features etched with loving faithfulness on paper as he said in a hoarse voice, “He always comes back. No matter what, he always comes back.”
Percy frowned despite himself. “You mean – from death? He comes back as a ghost?”
Apollo choked on a chuckle. “No. Gods, I'd love to see that.”
The mirth disappeared as soon as it had arrived. “No,” Apollo said solemnly. “He reincarnates. Fifty glorious years where he’s mine, all mine – and then gone. Dead. And I must keep going on, wondering whether this time is it. Whether the glitch in the system will be fixed and this time, he’ll just stay dead.”
The outlines of the story sketched themselves in Percy’s mind. “Why don’t you turn him then?” Percy asked blankly.
Apollo turned towards him with hollowed eyes. “He doesn’t want me to.”
Since when have you cared about that?
But no, just because the constellations and the flora on Earth were proof of how terribly cruel a god’s love could be, Percy wouldn’t just dismiss the one thing Apollo had apparently never done.
Disregard what this one lover wanted to do with his life.
“Well, he always comes back, doesn’t he?” Percy tried instead. “That’s something, right? That he’ll always love you, never mind whether he remembers you or not.”
Apollo stared at him with his body inclined away from Percy in discomfort. “That’s creepy,” the god protested. “Like I follow him around, keeping tabs on his soul, and whenever he comes around, I instantly jump on him and refuse to let him go until Thanatos himself forces me to.”
That’s not what I suggested at all, Percy yelped inside his head. But that the suggestion had entered Apollo’s mind at all said a lot.
Apollo shook his head. “I don’t know how. But he always finds me when he turns twenty-one.”
The god’s lips stretched into a bittersweet smile he seemed unaware of. “He always finds me. Just as he always leaves me too. Fifty years where he’s mine – and a hundred and fifty during which all I can do is wait.”
Percy didn’t quite know what to make of that. A lover who would always return – but one who’d never stay.
Was the joy of reuniting worth the pain of parting?
Or were both muted by the presence of the other, made bearable because the other existed to temper them? Neither paroxysms of joy nor lamentations of sorrow. Nothing to transport you to the heights of bliss, but nothing to throw you into the depths of despair either.
“Why burn the pictures today?” Percy asked, subdued.
Apollo relaxed his grip and smoothed out the creases on the sheet of paper in his hands. But despite his best efforts, the rip stretching across the young man’s neck in a caricature of a beheading refused to disappear.
Apollo’s smile widened in an imitation of happiness that sent a frisson of apprehension through Percy.
“He’ll come back. Tonight. Or maybe tomorrow. But this is it. Today's the day.”
If he came back at all.
“How will he know where you are?” Percy asked instead of voicing his real thoughts. Perhaps, if he hinted at operational difficulties, the lack of Peter wouldn’t throw Apollo into despair? Because the god appeared one blow away from cracking into a million pieces.
A dark look crossed Apollo’s face before the god forcefully dispelled it. “He prays to me,” Apollo dismissed. “He doesn’t need to know where I am because the moment he prays, I'll know where he is.”
Which seemed another nail in the coffin of Peter’s lack of sense, because at this point, Percy couldn’t even blame Apollo’s obsession. If Peter called for Apollo every two hundred years like clockwork, then Percy was forced to conclude that Peter truly desired Apollo back in his life.
“Well, there you have it, then,” Percy said in resignation. “Your love’s going to send you a prayer and all your fears about the guy not doing so will be crushed. After all, how’s a mortal going to know what you’ve been up to the past one-fifty years?”
And if he wants to leave?
Apollo’s voice sank through the barriers of skin and bone to nestle somewhere at the core of Percy’s mind.
Percy grimaced. “We’ll get to that if we have to. Thought honestly? If he hasn’t left in however many years it’s been, he’s not going to do so now.”
Apollo swallowed, cheeks pale and eyes wide with anxiety.
Percy released a shaky breath. “I'll stay here with you,” he promised. “As long as you need.”
Though if the need transcended a day and a night and threatened to occupy entire weeks, Percy reserved the right to change his mind.
Apollo’s lips twitched in a grateful, spastic smile before he collapsed onto the ground.
Percy took another wary look at the embers of the dying out fire and made sure to keep it in his sight when he settled down cross-legged on the floor.
He couldn’t believe himself. Apollo had transitioned from quest-giver to reluctant ally to fragile demigod to interloper to grudgingly accepted co-babysitter during the years, but despite how often the god looked after Estelle, Percy had never expected this.
Never expected that he could sit on the cool wooden floor of the god’s studio and resolve to support Apollo as they waited to usher in the next day and the next incarnation of this oft-dismissed, never forgotten, always there but never permanent, lover.
***
Time eluded him.
Despite his best efforts, Percy found himself fidgeting. He'd glance up at the empty walls in search of a clock, only to sight the motionless statue of Apollo and settle down for too few heartbeats. Then his stiff neck would protest the enforced stillness and Percy would twist to crane his neck at the curtains revealing only the outlines of fake windows.
Then Percy would clench his hands together and tell himself that the moon had yet to reach its zenith.
But his eyes would drift towards the scattered paraphernalia of a dead man’s life, and for a few heart-stopping moments, Percy would be enthralled by the face that grew more familiar with each passing moment.
Like the panning of a slow-motion camera, Percy’s eyes traced the lines and the hints of a dimple and the mole at the curve of a muscular shoulder and failed to convince himself he hadn’t seen this man before.
He’d tear his eyes away from the paper and canvas, glimpse Apollo’s grim countenance, and blanch.
And repeat the entire process.
Again, and again until the muscles around his eyes protested the overtime forced upon them.
“I’m going to the kitchen,” Percy blurted out. “Do you want something?”
Apollo stared out into the void with pale blue eyes, unaware of or unconcerned by Percy’s presence or question.
Percy swallowed down the scream building up in his throat and scrambled to his feet. “I’ll bring you back some water,” he mumbled before hurrying out of the room.
The headache radiated from behind his forehead to the back of his neck before he was even halfway to the kitchen. Percy blinked furiously to drive away the bright spots in his vision and determinedly took another step.
He collided with the wall of the corridor.
Time stuttered and when Percy next came to, it was to find himself leaning against the walls, his knees folded underneath himself. Mind blank except for a sense of urgency, Percy crawled forward.
He swayed, but the threat of the flames at his back made it impossible to stop. So, tears dripping down his cheeks and teeth bared in a grimace, Percy placed one palm on the ground, and then another in front of it. The stitch in his side almost convinced him to pause, but as if in response, heat blasted his back.
Percy gritted his teeth and dragged his knee forward.
He didn’t know when he crossed the threshold into the kitchen – only that the smooth wood of the floor gave way to tiles that dug unforgivingly into his bones.
The dark lines between the tiles threatened to cut his palms yet something gritty kept his flesh intact if scratched. The word for the substance hovered just out of reach, the surprise at the material fighting with its inescapable banality.
Percy’s head swam and he couldn’t even blame the cabinet that knocked against his skull for it. Arms shaky and fingers bleeding from digging his nails into smooth wood that refused to adjust into obliging handholds, Percy dragged himself into a standing position – following the remnants of water with senses blind to anything but the scent of healing liquid.
But leaning over the kitchen sink only dug the lip of the basin into his stomach. Percy tried not to throw up. The headache drilling nails into his temples didn't help matters.
Was it perhaps a sign that he was suffering a catastrophic brain bleed? He should find Apollo. Apollo would heal it.
The pain ratcheted up at the very thought of the god.
Was this what a migraine felt like? Because Percy understood closing all blinds, pulling the covers over his head, and taking a few sleeping pills to knock himself out if yes.
As it was, he was tempted to ask Apollo to knock him out. He would ask – if he could summon enough strength to walk to the studio.
The water from the faucet sparkled like light from a brazier off the curved edge of an iron sica.
The smell of the potpourri hanging from the ceiling transported Percy into another place, another time, another gleam, and another fragrance.
Perseus knelt in front of the table, avoiding looking at the statue of Venus for as long as possible.
Gaining access to the sacellum hadn’t been particularly difficult though the man who’d opened the doors to guide him through the house encircling it hadn’t seemed very pleased to be disturbed this late at night.
But Perseus had no other recourse. Through necessity, Perseus could only propitiate Aphrodite during New Moon nights, when neither Diana nor Apollo could stand witness.
With hands that had long lost their shakiness, Perseus opened the leather satchel he’d brought with himself.
The faintest whiff of dried flowers wafted from the insides before oil and metal overpowered it.
Perseus pulled out the sica by its wooden handle, once more transported to the moment he’d dodged its black blade and stabbed its wielder instead. But the blade, wiped clean of blood and dust and then oiled to a silvery shine, bore no resemblance to the blood drenched sword he’d wrenched from a dead hand.
He placed the weapon from Tapae on the table before emptying the bag of flowers he’d carried from Rome.
Perseus sighed. And lowered his head.
For a moment, he thought about praying. About dedicating his offerings to the goddess and pleading for her aid. About confessing his deepest desires and begging for her help. But he’d already received his blessings.
Was he not already victorious in battle and successful in love? To ask for more – would it not be the height of arrogance?
He'd never believed, stumbling away from the Iron Gates, back drenched in blood from the arrow in it and reeling as much from the pain as the loss of the legions, that he would one day return to Tapae. And yet, though it seemed unlikely, Tettius Julianus had allowed him back in one of the legions that would cross the Danube and storm Tapae. Percy had won.
And Apollo … if Perseus didn’t hold Venus’s favour, how could a god possibly have watched him retreat and healed him instead of turning away in disgust?
That Perseus wanted more was a sign of his greed.
Perseus waited till a count of hundred before placing his palms on the floor in preparation to get up.
And froze.
Something was watching him.
Now, Perseus wasn’t a stranger to unseen observers. His lover was not the only one to send him glances from the corners of his eyes – just the most blatant of them all.
But there was nothing remotely admiring or even suspicious or envious about this gaze. It inspected him, dissected him and found him wanting – but too curious to dispose of quite yet.
Perseus snuck a glance up just long enough to spot iridescent folds of fabric draped over shapely hips before he forcefully dragged his eyes down to the floor.
“My lady,” Perseus murmured with a bow.
The goddess remained silent though a certain tepidity entered her countenance. Perseus kept his head lowered and allowed the goddess to inspect him to her satisfaction.
It wouldn’t do to anger Venus, after all. She was the goddess of love, but also of war. It seemed fitting, for what Perseus intended to propose would be nothing but waging war for the rest of his existence.
For the sake of love.
“You have been a very steadfast devotee of mine,” Venus noted. “All your wins, you dedicate to me. A portion of your spoils you always donate to my temple. Every meal, you sacrifice the choicest portions to me. You must want something desperately.”
“You are a goddess worthy of this and more,” Perseus flattered.
Venus laughed. “Look at me boy.”
She sounded amused, but so did Apollo – right before he cursed someone.
It meant nothing for his continued safety when his imminent duress might be the source of the goddess’s amusement. But it didn’t do to disobey a god. Even his lover seldom took recalcitrance well, though his punishment was indubitably miles more pleasant than what Venus would concoct.
Especially since the underlying motive to Perseus’s devotion was nothing as innocent as faith in a goddess. Though really, who truly believed in the gods from nothing but faith? You prayed for boons and offered sacrifices in payment – it was a transaction as old as Rome. Older even, though the bargains struck by Rome currently superseded any struck by another kingdom.
Nervous but resolute, Perseus raised his head and looked at the goddess.
She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Perseus flushed and lost time. He couldn’t even determine what it was that pushed his mind out of his body and draped him in a haze. Just that the blood burnt his veins, sweat pooled in his palms, and a steady warmth threatened to ignite in his gut.
Venus was ... he couldn’t tell. On the surface, he supposed she sported the golden curls of Apollo and eyes that shifted between blue and green in a confusing kaleidoscope. But the curve to her cheeks reminded him of the girl at the eatery below his tenement who always offered him an extra piece of bread, the curl of her lips brough to mind his mother’s smiles, and the enigmatic jut of her chin plummeted him straight into the memory of the first centurion he’d served under.
Venus was simultaneously everyone he’d ever thought beautiful and simultaneously no one at all. A sum of the parts that threatened to disintegrate his mortal mind for the crime of witnessing divinity.
“Now,” Venus purred, “tell me what you desire.”
The metal bands of her armour rubbed against each other as Venus leaned forward in interest. The heat running rampant throughout Perseus’s body ratcheted up a notch as he caught a glimpse of her collarbone.
You.
Perseus shook his head – except his body refused to listen to his demands and merely stared slack-jawed at the vision of perfection in front of him.
Venus withdrew a bit, a moue of disappointment on her face. “I suppose I should have known. The way you lust after my lover’s brother, you must lose all mental functions the moment you see a god.”
“Or maybe it’s because you look like him,” Perseus blurted out.
Venus paused, expressionless as if ruminating over whether to take offence, before she laughed. “How faithful. I look like your lover? At least you aren’t the sort to harbour betrayal in your heart. Yet.”
“Never,” Perseus promised fervently.
“Is that your boon?” Venus mocked. “For me to freeze your affection for eternity? So you will never betray your lover?”
What would be the point? If he couldn’t hold faith without divine intervention, then his love wasn’t worth divine intercession.
“No,” Perseus admitted. “I’d rather ... have another. If you would agree to grant my wish.”
Perseus had the impression of being a dog that had performed a particularly amusing trick. Except the trick hadn’t been especially entertaining, only diverting in the sense that it had been mildly unexpected.
“Speak, lest your wish is to bore me to tears,” Venus prompted.
Perseus closed his eyes. And pushed out in a rush, “I would love him as long as he lives! If I were to be given this opportunity.”
The aura of wrath surrounding Venus could not be understated – it threatened to immolate Perseus where he knelt, and he was certain it wasn’t even deliberate.
“Even when you’re dead?” the goddess challenged coldly.
“Even when I’m dead,” Perseus concurred, aware of being tested. If this were him demanding immortality, he knew a swift death would be the immediate reprisal.
But that wasn’t what he desired. He’d rather live out an ordinary life and die of old age, surrounded by Apollo’s children, then be united with his friends and family in Elysium.
But he doubted he’d get it. Apollo’s lovers rarely led such happy, fulfilling lives. And love though he would to claim for perpetuity that he’d brought happiness to the life of a god saddened by Greece – he doubted he’d succeed.
No … Perseus would have to settle for something much more prosaic.
“Perhaps an animal that can hold him?” he suggested hopefully. “Or a bird that can fly with him.”
“But animals and birds die,” Venus pointed out, a note of confusion in her voice.
Yes, that was the rub, wasn’t it?
“Ah,” Venus realised, distinctly unenthused. “You wish to be a creature much like my doves or Apollo’s swans. Fonts of affection that are nonetheless not human.”
“My humanity is mortal,” Perseus admitted. “I know that cannot be changed.”
He wasn’t one of the greats, who’d be deified after death. And while he might convince Apollo to put him in the stars, looking down on an Earth that he could no longer interact with didn’t hold much attraction.
Which left … a plant? Perseus wouldn’t die a pleasant death in bed but a painful one in battle. And if that were the case, wouldn’t Apollo turn him into a plant to carry along too? A laurel on his head, cypress smoke in his scent, and hyacinths by his bedside.
What would Perseus be? Something to sniff occasionally?
It might be the arrogance talking, but Perseus refused to be just one more plant. He was more.
“So it isn’t all about him,” Venus concluded in satisfaction.
Perseus jumped, his heart jackrabbiting. He’d known, of course, that the goddess would be able to hear his thoughts – he supposed he’d simply hoped she wouldn’t bother.
She’d bothered.
“You wish to constantly be on his mind, don’t you?’ Venus purred, a savage delight on her face. “To never let him move on, to never be just a plant he can ignore.”
“N-no,” Perseus stuttered. He’d be happy if Apollo moved on after his death. Happy … and sad.
But he’d never prohibit it. Never make it impossible for his love to find – another love.
With horror, Perseus recognised the kernel of truth hidden beneath the flotsam of nonsense comprising Venus’s words.
Venus smiled. “I’ll help you,” she promised.
All of a sudden, Perseus distrusted the goddess. Wariness transformed into mistrust and he wished nothing but to withdraw his request. She was about to twist it, he knew.
With the cold realisation of someone who had committed a colossal mistake, Perseus realised his selfish, only somewhat selfless gesture was about to be used to ruin Apollo’s life.
“I will help you,” Venus reiterated. “But I am a goddess of war too. How boring would it be if you didn’t have to fight for your beloved’s attention?”
The goddess vanished.
Perseus stared at the table, mind whirring within a shell barely keeping out the hollow nothingness encroaching on him.
With every blink, the brown of the table serving as an altar shifted into grey. Veins of black and mottled grey danced across white countertops. The reddish gold of the brazier brightened until a yellow-white cast painted the marble sink.
Percy blinked back to a stream of water pouring over his hands and down the drain.
It could have been worse. Venus could have tied Perseus to his rotting skeleton and let him accompany Apollo that way. Certainly, Hades didn’t seem to care much about missing souls provided they suffered above ground. Hadn’t Apollo cursed one of his own Sybils similarly?
It could be a lot worse.
His head still ached. He didn’t remember any of the past lives he must have lived, but perhaps those memories were just waiting in the wings to ambush him.
A ghost had settled imperfectly within his body and now haunted him with the scent of dried roses and weapon polishing oil.
Percy bent over and let the water drench his head and trickle down the back of his neck and into his shirt.
Slowly, as if even the water struggled to understand the source of his pain, blue relief swept away the cobwebs of an imperfect reincarnation.
Now that the headache plaguing him had disappeared, Percy grew conscious of a grave mistake.
Apollo was a god.
Percy could have just prayed to him to come eradicate the demigod’s headache.
***
“Well, it’s time,” Apollo said, voice shaking with mingled apprehension and anticipation. “He’ll call soon.”
Yes, because Percy had always called the moment memories of Apollo slipped through the sieve shielding his mind from the past. New parents, new friends, new children. New house, new age. New body, new name.
Apollo was the one constant he would always have. Gods didn’t die, after all. And Venus had ensured their bond would never be broken, that his vow to be unlike Apollo’s other lovers and return to the god even after death would prove fruitful.
Apollo would be there. So how could Percy do anything but call?
Especially when his last memory was of struggling to breathe through the blood pooling in his lungs as Apollo watched on with the blank nothingness of a man beaten too often to get up again?
Percy swallowed. And glanced at the god keeping vigil for his returning lover.
The thought ran through his head again.
Was the joy of reuniting worth the pain of parting?
Apollo blew his nose into a handkerchief he vanished just as rapidly, before turning to Percy nervously. “You can’t tell I’ve been crying, right?” he pressed. “He doesn’t like it if he thinks I’ve been upset.”
The god’s nose hadn’t blushed red, nor had his eyelids swollen from the spate of tears. And yet, despite nothing physically incriminating about him, an air of fragility hung around Apollo.
“Apollo,” Percy said. Before stopping.
He couldn’t quite think of what to say. Couldn't even be sure saying the god’s name had been anything but a cry for his attention.
“Yes?” Apollo asked, urgency making the letters run together into near incomprehensibility.
“Apollo,” Percy repeated.
“Do you mind it, if I say your name just because it’s yours?” Perseus asked sleepily.
Apollo laughed. “How could I be upset you like calling my name just because it’s my name?”
That moment had slipped out of their fingers centuries past, under the leaves of a tree long since dead. But the memory sparked a faint, pained recognition in Apollo's scrunched up mouth.
“Apollo,” Percy stated.
The god’s eyes widened as realisation battled against pessimism before wrenching a narrow win.
“It’s you?” he breathed out.
Percy nodded.
“Oh,” Apollo sighed, his shoulders relaxing. “I'm glad,” he confessed.
Percy offered him a tremulous smile.
He still didn’t know the answer to his question. But he rather thought he could spend the next fifty years trying to find out.