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“Sister,” he didn’t look up from the guitar he’d been tuning. “Honestly, I thought it would take you sooner.”
“Good to see you too.”
He breathed out and looked up at her. She was… around nineteen, and looked more like him than she had ever chosen to before, even down to the line of her nose, and her eye colour. “Can I guess why you’re here?”
“Of course.”
“You’re offering me a free iPhone?”
“No.”
“You’re… going to give me a puppy from one of your hunting wolves.”
“No. You have your wolves.” Well… he would .
“I’m going to go with… you want me to come back. You want me to return.”
“To godhood, specifically. Yes. That’s why I’m here.”
“I could,” he nodded, letting the words sit in his mouth. “I really could. I could walk back in tomorrow.”
“You could do it right now,” she said. “You’re denying yourself, you’re stopping your apotheosis in its tracks.” She frowned, “You can’t stop it forever, Apollo.”
“I can try, Artie. Existence is temporary. Pan died. Gods fade. Maybe I’m just not denying the inevitable any more.”
He was entirely familiar with his sister’s displeased face. This wasn’t that. Her mouth was downturned and her eyes were big. She opened her mouth, and closed it. More like a goldfish than a human in shock. Her skin greyed.
She didn’t speak, so he didn’t talk. Apollo went back to looking at his guitar. When he looked up again, he was alone.
“Is this a bit?” asked the mailman. “Like you’re just… really dedicated to it or something? Because that’s more my thing.” A salt and pepper curl peaked from below his hat. “God of Trickery. Not really your style, Apollo.”
“Hermes,” he grimaced as genially as possible. “Do you have my mail or…”
“Yes, here.” He passed over a pile of envelopes which Apollo immediately started ripping open.
“Junk, junk. Oh, a card- junk. Why did you invent this, dude?”
“You think I invented junk mail?” He thought for a minute. “Actually, maybe I did. I was… doing a lot of things in the seventies.”
“I seem to remember something about you and a mountain of ambrosia infused-”
“ Shush!” Hermes glared at him. “I’ll send you more junk mail if you keep saying that stuff.” He sighed, “I mean right now, any of us could do anything to you right now.”
“You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”
“We both know why I’m here.” His hair lengthened and shortened in front of him. “Come on, Apollo. Come back.”
“It’s not worth it, Hermes. Why has father sent you?”
“He wants you to come back. To be god of the sun again, of healing, of truth.”
“And the rest.”
He threw up his hands, “And the rest. I’m not just here because father sent me.”
“But he did send you.”
“He did,” his clothes rippled into a chiton, into a suit, into jogging gear with a Berlin Marathon T-Shirt. “But he’s not the only one who wants you to come back. It’s fate, Apollo. You were born a god. You will be a god.”
“I’m not a god now,” Lester closed the door on his brother. “I don’t accept solicitations. Goodbye.”
His junk mail tripled in the next week.
“Your alcohol selection is pathetic,” his brother sniffed the cheapest bottle of tequila he could get from the liquor store which didn’t ask any questions, including, but not limited to: why his ID was for a seventeen year old and he had a full time job instead of finishing high school - which was a conversation digression he severely regretted now. “I mean, this is only half agave.”
“I’m on a budget but I want a decent margarita,” he slumped down on the couch.
Dionysus snapped his fingers and two iced drinks appeared, one in his own hand, one in Apollo’s.
Thunder rumbled outside.
“Oh, calm down, I’m banned from wine and this doesn’t have any wine,” he called out the window.
The thunder stilled. Apollo’s throat tightened. He sipped his drink. It was nice. Way nicer than anything he’d been able to afford recently.
“He must be getting desperate,” he said.
“He is. Be happy they sent me though. They could have sent Heracles,” he rolled his eyes. “No taste in animal fur, that man.”
“None. And you know he’d make it about himself.”
“Exactly!” He clapped his hands, as if in delight, “So be glad it’s me instead.”
“I’m not, but sure.”
“You’re so rude.” He drank his entire drink in one go and immediately replaced it with another drink. “But you’re right. Somewhat. I said he punished you worse than me, but you might have a way out here.”
Thunder rumbled.
Apollo finished his drink, “Don’t get yourself in trouble. I’ll see you around. Thanks for the drink.”
“Not… anytime, but you’re welcome.” Thunder rumbled again and the sky darkened.
Apollo was left with a faint scent of grapes in his room.
“You know where you’ll end up if you go along with this forever,” Athena said as a non sequitur. “Surely you must know you’ll never get Elysium, or even Asphodel.”
“I’m not a god, Athena,” he scratched his eye. “I’m at work, actually,” he tried to wheel around her to get to the book trolley to be put back on the shelves, but she blocked him. The annoying thing about not being so powerful any more, of course, was that he couldn’t do anything really back at her for doing this to him. “I won’t be a god again. I will die. I will face Judgement. And if it turns out that I must face punishment for that, which,” he shrugged. “Yeah, that’s going to happen, no doubt. I’ve done terrible things and Hades runs a very punitive system down there.”
“You deserve it,” she said. “Of all the people in the Fields right now, you’ve probably done more than all of them combined.”
“More than all of them combined, tenfold.” He corrected her. “It is what the job is. How many people have I killed? Between my diseases, curing people who went on to murder, choosing not to save people, my prophecies, I don’t think I’ve ever kept count. I spent my first week alive covered in blood.” He leant in closer to her. “How many have you killed? How many plans have you devised with ‘collateral damage’ or ‘minimal risk factors’. You like to blame Ares and Hephaestus for inspiring the worst weapons, but I was God of Knowledge once. I haven’t forgotten. We’re all rotten, sister, and none of us ever face consequences for that. At least not finally.”
“Except you,” her face was pinched. He was pretty sure smiting him would go against the point of all these fucking visits, but he couldn’t be quite sure. “Do you think this redeems you? Do you think you deserve it?”
“I don’t deserve anything. But I wasn’t going to go on as it was. I can’t go back and make things better from before, but at least I can try and not make them worse.”
She was growing taller right in front of him, inch by inch, climbing high above his eyeline. “Be careful what you wish for, Son of Zeus. Our father is waiting for you in his hall.”
Zeus had always been King before Father, someone to rule, and not to love. But he’d swapped out the chitons and the suits today for a really unflattering set of khakis, inexplicably paired with a pilot’s uniform from the 1920s on top. “My son.” It was the warmest he’d sounded to Apollo in centuries. It could have frozen the Phlegethon over into an ice rink.
A bubble of ichor threatened to force itself out of his heart before he forced it into red and white blood cells, holding his godhood at bay. “Father.”
“You have refused all of your siblings thus far to be restored to your rightful place on Olympus.”
“You removed me. I do not wish in three thousand years to be having this conversation again.”
In the Old DaysTM, his father’s beard had been wild and unruly, or sometimes made of clouds. Nowadays it was trimmed neatly, black except for the speckles of white around it. He could see it growing in front of his very eyes. It was slightly unnerving. Zeus noticed him looking though, and stroked it back to its original length. “Which you are aiming to avoid by… not being around after the next seventy or so.”
“If I’m lucky. Might be thirty. Might be tomorrow. Being alive is dangerous. I could get hit by a car while shopping for groceries, or trip and fall down the stairs of this complex one day and break my neck. I could die at any time.” This prospect had once terrified him, even in godhood. Mortals, mostly, knew that they could die at any point and almost certainly would die one day. And they got on with life anyway instead of curling into a foetal position until they wasted away.
He knew this scared his father. Dying was next to Deposement. There was nothing though that it would give it away. Even if his father hadn’t been holding court for the past six millennia, he wasn’t human. There would be no flared nostrils, or sharp intakes of breath. He was perfectly contained, a shell over the shape of where a man should be.
And if he were anyone else, he would have been smote already.
“I made you cookies,” Leto said without turning around in his dingy kitchen.
“Thanks, mom.” He’d had a fairly awful day at work, but he made sure to smile at her, and kiss her cheek. “How’s it going?”
“So-so. I’m getting my condo renovated right now, so I’m staying on Delos with your sister right now, but I wanted to come and see you.”
He bit into the cookie instead of replying. “These are good,” he said through a mouthful of chewy oats and chocolate.
“Don’t speak with your mouth full, dear.”
He swallowed quickly, “Sorry, mom.”
“It’s okay.” She looked at him like she had already picked out the flowers to burn on his pyre with him. “You know, Phoebus,” she began haltingly. “I only want what’s best for you, and you’re grown. If you think that this is best for you, then I will just be here for you, okay? Whatever happens.”
He blinked a few times, and bit off more cookie. “Can you teach me how to make these?” he said once he’d finished off four in a row.
She snapped her fingers and a mixing machine and ingredients appeared on his counter, “I’d love to.”
Jason Grace had asked him to remember what it was to be a human. And by doing this, by refusing godhood, he was breaking that promise. He couldn’t make sure his half-brother’s work was finished without being around to see it done.
But being a god didn’t lend itself very well to being human. Being a person . Being alive for so long meant that you either got burned a million times a day, or you closed yourself off forever. It was hard to feel , and to keep going.
But he owed him, maybe. That much, at least.
He’d think about it. For the time being.