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He’s a little thing, a face amidst layers of blankets, and his feet stick out from the layers and emanate a bright glow. Embers rise from his little toes. The light is so bright that Thanatos averts his eyes.
His mother’s hand falls onto his shoulder. He looks up and sees the softly glinting stars in her hair.
“Keep your eyes open, child,” she tells him. “The little prince needs us now. We can’t afford to let our guard down.”
Thanatos takes a breath and looks up at the prince, held against Nyx’s chest, squirming in the blankets. He can hear a heartbeat, loud in the still air of the underworld. He can see the outline of the tiny feet when he blinks, as if the afterimage has been burned into the inside of his eyelids, as if he’s been marked forever.
“Pledge yourself to him,” Nyx whispers. Her voice is like an embrace, surrounding him from all sides, enveloping him in the certainty of night.
He kneels. The little feet are at eye level where Nyx holds him. Thanatos feels himself start to shy away from the light again and steels himself, straightening his spine, his resolve. Duty and its heaviness on his shoulders feels right. He can bear this pledge easily. He can serve the House and Lord Hades and this little prince. He is a young god himself, but he knows his place.
“I am in your service, Prince,” he says.
The baby coos in his sleep, his face scrunching into the beginning of a cry. His eyes open. One red, one green and almost human. A little hand pokes out of the bundle and reaches for Thanatos. Thanatos gets to his feet and takes a hesitant step back, putting some distance between them. Nyx shifts him to her other arm, holding him close to her chest. The baby settles. Thanatos feels something expand in his chest and hastily swallows it down.
.
“Um. Let’s keep this one a secret, okay?”
Thanatos looks up from the shattered pieces of the vase on the floor, from the flickering fire distorting the dead underworld air at Zagreus’s feet. He’s twisting the end of his tunic. His mismatched eyes are wide.
“Alright,” Thanatos says. They’re almost the same height now, but Thanatos has taken to hovering over the floor a little more, flexing the new muscles of his power. He looks down at Zagreus, down at the flaming laurels in his dark hair, the brightness of it making the room around them seem so much darker. “But you have to clean it up. Before your father sees.”
“Fine, fine.” Zagreus kneels and picks up a broken piece of glass. “I always clean up my messes, by the way. You didn’t have to tell me. I would’ve done it.”
Thanatos rolls his eyes. “You absolutely wouldn’t have.”
“I would! You’re such a liar. I cleaned up the fish scales in the lounge the other day. I clean more than you do.”
“I don’t leave messes in the first place, so yes, you would clean more than me by definition.”
“By definition,” Zagreus repeats in exaggerated tones, waving his hand, then winces. “Ouch! Oh, I cut myself.”
Thanatos smells it before he sees it, the blood, the iron scent of it filling the air between them. He feels his feet hit the ground as he leans in for a closer look. Blood, red and thick and bright, droplets of it pooling to the surface of Zagreus’s palm, reflecting the embers that rise from the laurels in his hair. Something strikes Thanatos then, in his chest, an uneven feeling. If he didn’t know better, he would call it fear.
“Zag,” he says sharply. “What is that? Are you hurt? Are you in pain?”
Zagreus licks his palm, the blood absorbing on his tongue. “It’s fine! Happens sometimes when I’m not careful. Okay, so can you clean this up while I get this looked at? I have to find Mother Nyx. She knows how to patch this up.”
“Wait,” Thanatos says, and without thinking he reaches for Zagreus but stalls at the last moment, swinging his arm back down to his side awkwardly. He watches drops of blood collect along the line of the shallow cut, smells it in the air. They’re almost the same height now, so when Zagreus looks up, he can see himself reflected in the green and red eyes, as lopsided as he feels. His fingers quiver just a little while Zagreus’s remain steady despite the blood. “You bleed?”
Zagreus laughs. It fills the air as easily as the blood does. Thanatos’s chest lightens, a thick knot undoing itself, and he laughs a little too, the sound strange and unfamiliar to his own ears.
“Yeah but I’ll be fine. I won’t die. And even if I was going to die, you wouldn’t take me, right? It’s all up to you anyway, Than.”
Thanatos has never considered this. “You can die?” he asks haltingly.
“I have to get this looked at,” Zagreus says. Then he’s running out of the room. As he moves, a drop of blood plops onto the ground, between the still burning footsteps he leaves behind. Thanatos crouches on the floor and stares at the drop, the thin light around him collecting on the red of it, like a still burning cinder.
He reaches for it, letting it coat the pad of his index finger. It’s still warm.
.
Thanatos keeps himself up, hovering over the grass in the garden that’s been blocked off since the queen left. There are footprints, black and burnt on the cursed or enchanted, undead grass, leading directly to the corner of the garden under the pomegranate trees where Zagreus lays flat on his back, his hands folded neatly on his chest.
“You better get out of here before Lord Hades returns,” Thanatos says.
Zagreus doesn’t even look up. “I’m relaxing,” he says, his voice clipped.
Thanatos was already aware of the fight, the remnants of it lingering in the air as Lord Hades stormed into his room, scattering shades that milled about looking to hear snippets, the thick tension in the air disrupting the normally easy and still quiet of the House. But Zagreus’s white knuckles and thinly disguised anger are as tangible as the smell of pomegranates in the air. He lowers himself a little, but keeps his feet from touching the grass. This area is forbidden. But his pull to Zagreus outweighs his fear of being caught here.
“You don’t look relaxed,” he says.
Zagreus opens his eyes. “I am. Relaxed. I’m very relaxed right now. You should try it. Lay down with me.”
Something bubbles up into Thanatos’s throat, the words yes and of course but he swallows it down. “I think not.”
“Fine, have it your way.” He closes his eyes again. “I don’t know how many more of these fights I have in me. I don’t even know why I’m here. He hates me and I hate him. Fuck this place.”
Thanatos listens for the familiar heartbeat and hears it, a thud thud thud against Zagreus’s chest, urgent and full of fire. “You should both find common ground before you destroy this place.”
“I wish I could destroy it.” Zagreus kicks at the ground. More grass burns, the smell rising into the air. “Lay down, Than,” he adds in a softer tone.
Thanatos is drifting down before he knows it, laying on his back, feeling the facsimile of the earth beneath him, real enough for the queen to fool herself into thinking it could be the surface. He remembers the day they walled off the garden, and then the day they closed the doors for good. He isn’t sure how much time has passed but he feels different, older, and Zagreus definitely is too.
“If it weren’t for you, I would’ve made a run for it long ago,” Zagreus says suddenly.
Thanatos turns sharply, feeling the grass tickle his cheek. Zagreus is already looking at him with his eerie gaze, two different eyes. “What? And go where, Zag?”
“Maybe Elysium,” he says. “I hear it’s nice there. I hate this House. I hate my father. I want to break something, come on.”
Thanatos reaches and grabs Zagreus’s wrist as he makes to stand up. “Wait, you’re going to get me into so much trouble. Anyway, you asked me to lay here and here I am. Don’t get up just yet.”
Zagreus’s body is tense, coiled, Thanatos feels the tension in his wrist, the pulse pounding, the blood rushing through the big vein just under his thumb. He lets his thumb drift over the vein, feeling it move. His chest seizes at the feeling.
“If it weren’t for you, I would be gone,” Zagreus says, his voice a whisper that carries so easily in the thin air of the underworld, falls so readily into Thanatos’s ears.
Thanatos doesn’t say anything but he keeps his eyes on Zagreus’s mismatched ones, the color in his cheek, the way the grass moves as he breathes steadily in and out, in and out. He always sounds so certain, but Thanatos is older and is supposed to be more sure, more solid. When he touches Zagreus, when he feels the echoes of his heartbeat under his hand, slipping under the pad of his thumb as it settles on his wrist, he isn’t sure of anything at all.
Something passes between them, a flash of emotion hidden between the flicker of beats of Zagreus’s pulse. Thanatos quickly lets go of his wrist and lays back on the grass.
“At least we’re here together.” The words sit between them. A held breath. A quickening of the heartbeat beside him. It takes a moment for Thanatos to realize it was him who spoke those words.
.
Zagreus is gone.
Thanatos finds himself on the surface, his throat raw with words swallowed down. The winter breeze pushes against his face roughly. The sun feels like a sword hanging over his head. Nyx’s words still linger in his ears, her cut off sentence when he disappeared before she could even finish speaking, “Child, the prince has left the House—”
Thanatos plants his feet firmly on the grass and watches it die, blades wilting. He reaches down to touch the grass but it all crumbles to dust, drifting away on the breeze, choking him. Through the dimensions that separate them, he reaches across with his senses to find a hint of Zagreus somewhere out there but he can’t feel anything.
He's gone. The mismatched eyes. The fiery feet. The lopsided smile. Thanatos, normally silent and content with silence, suddenly has so much to say that the words tear out of his throat, a shout of everything garbled together into a strangled sort of scream, eaten immediately by the winter wind, leaving him breathless. He recognizes the emotion he’s seen on Lord Hades so many times, anger, or something like it. It eats at his skin and digs into it, the same way his nails dig into his palms and create little half moon marks that fade as soon as he unclenches his fists. Nothing lasts, not even this. Not childhood, whatever that means to them. Not the hush peace of the House. Not the bond between him and the prince, the thing that has drawn him to Zagreus through time and space, the thing that now sinks into his chest and hammers away in there, almost like a heartbeat.
.
He made a promise. A pledge. But does Zagreus need his help anymore?
The prince is covered in blood, his famous sword dripping onto the hazy, hot stone floor of Asphodel. His feet are as bright as the magma that surrounds them. Thanatos keeps himself off the ground, the heat licking at his skin, his face impassive despite the knot in his chest that tightens when he meets Zagreus’s eyes.
“Thanks for the assist,” Zagreus says. He’s panting. His cheeks are flushed. He runs a bloody hand through his hair. “Are you here to call me off? I’m not stopping until I get out of here.”
Thanatos suddenly remembers the bright little feet poking out of the bundle his mother held close to her chest. “Zag,” he says, unable to keep the pleading note from his voice, unable to care, “please come home.”
Zagreus shakes his head. Drops of blood fly from his hair. “I can’t.”
“Then I’ll help you,” he says without hesitation.
Zagreus blinks, shocked. “Oh,” he says. “Are you sure? Won’t you get into a ton of trouble?”
He takes a step closer, closer to where Thanatos hovers over the ground, always at a distance, but always close enough.
Thanatos lowers himself just a little. Zagreus is taller than him now, but he can maintain the illusion by staying in the air. He has to stay in the air. He has to keep his distance.
“Than?” Zagreus waits for a response, impatient, feet shifting on the ground, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.
Thanatos isn’t sure how long it’s been since they were both young, or whatever young means to gods like them, but it feels like an immeasurable amount of time, he feels like an immeasurably different person and yet exactly the same. He is still serving at the pleasure of Lord Hades and, by extension, his son. He is still wincing at the sight of Zagreus’s blood on the floor. He is reaching, reaching into the space between them now in the sulfuric heat of Asphodel, to hand him the beating heart of a centaur.
Zagreus takes it. Their hands touch during the exchange. Time folds like a thin piece of paper, so thin he can see through it to the beginning, before Zagreus, and now. Now, during or after or whatever this is between them. Always reaching out to try and close the distance, never quite getting there.
“So you’ll help me?” Zagreus asks. He looks at him from underneath dark lashes, hesitantly, as if he’s afraid of the answer.
“Yes,” again, the word pops out of Thanatos without resistance, as easily as shifting across a room, or stealing a centaur heart from the pile of goods Charon always has on his boat. “You know,” he adds, turning his face away, allowing his hair to fall like a curtain, hiding his expression, “I pledged myself to your service when you were born.”
Zagreus says, “Service to the House.”
“I don’t remember making that distinction.”
He can see Zagreus’s lips part from the corner of his eye, but no words come out.
“I’ll always be here to help you,” he says quietly. It feels like confession. Like he should be whispering. Like the vaguely shimmering walls of Asphodel could carry his words to Lord Hades and ruin everything.
Zagreus’s fingers twitch, his hand lifting, reaching toward him. Thanatos’s body suddenly lurches forward of its own accord, and before he can crash into Zagreus, before Zagreus’s reach can reach its logical conclusion, he disappears in a flash of green light.
.
Zagreus always finds him by the balcony of the west hall, staring down into the churning river Styx, watching souls mingle in the blood red waters that sustain the House.
“You ran off before I could say thank you,” he says.
He’s clean now, no more blood, no cuts, no sword, no evidence of his escape. It could be just another day, another version of himself where he isn’t trying to run and Thanatos isn’t trying to pretend to be okay with it all.
“You’re welcome,” Thanatos says, keeping his eyes on the river below.
Zagreus nudges himself into his line of sight, leaning back against the stone balcony, his laurels flickering, his eyes catching the light. He’s too bright. Thanatos thinks of moths and how they drift too close to the fire, thinks of the shining moment of achievement they might feel right before they burn.
He reaches anyway. Zagreus reaches too. Their hands meet, fingertips touching, then slipping over knuckles, his thumb touching the pulse on the always too warm wrist.
“Are we good?” Zagreus whispers.
Thanatos presses his thumb down onto Zagreus’s pulse, feeling it quicken, feeling the heat sink into his own hand. There’s a knot in his chest. Fluttering in his belly. A sense that he is always just a little behind. He focuses on the pulse. He tries to ignore the heat. “Yeah. We’re good.”