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Hades said, "Once upon a time there was a war." His face was all twisted up, dark and tired, lines carved into a rockface by the wind and the weather.
I shrugged, hands in the pockets of my long grey sweater, "Once upon a time there was a universe. What are you going to do about that?" There was something fuzzy in my head. Everything was a little blurry and I was pretty drunk. I rocked back and forth on my feet, put out my hand against his wrist to steady myself.
I thought probably he was drunk too, and twisted my fingers through his. his rings were thick and gold, heavy and warm from his flesh. "Keep dreaming of victory," he sighed. There was very little warmth in his voice. He smelled like woodsmoke and rosemary.
Orpheus sees me in the sunshine. "Persephone," he calls, throwing a long golden arm up to beckon me.
I am sitting at the window in my favourite cafe, picking apart a blueberry scone. The sun is hot on my golden hair and I am looking at the reflection of the girl in the window: she does not look pale and drawn and wan, she looks beautiful and sweet and alive. It is not an accurate reflection, I am thinking.
I has been a long time since Isaw him, this boy with the guitar slung over his back, dark liner smudged about his eyes. He has been playing at something of which he has no knowledge, but there is something lovely about that - something delicate.
I've never been able to protect anyone but I slide to my feet, pulling my coat around me. "Hey," I say, smiling as wide as I can remember how. I think I put on lipstick this morning; I wonder if my mouth is too red. I have a sunshine wardrobe and one for the dark but sometimes they get confused.
His eyes are dark blue, bright against his dark hair. He smiles back but there's an edge, something bitter in the smooth curve of his mouth. He pulls his dark sleeves down past his knuckles, threading through all the people to my side. "Hey," he murmurs back, putting his guitar down beside him.
I kiss his cheek and sit down. "How are you?"
He shakes his head. "I--"
Need your help, I hear.
"I can't," I say. "There's - you have the wrong girl."
My scone is crumbs, now.
Orpheus' fingers twitch on the formica table. His eyelashes are too long as he looks away. "I don't know where else to go."
I think, I too was once in love, but.
Look how that ended up.
I was fifteen, okay? It sounds better - it sounds less awful - if you remember that. I wasn't a smart fifteen. I was a drunk fifteen, I was rebellious and I hated everyone and I dyed my hair black, slashed holes in my shirts and when my mother stared at me like she didn't know who I was it just made me angrier.
I was fifteen and I had a really fucking good fake and an impressive self-destruct drive and I was in love with the idea of being someone who'd die in a furious shootout, the kind of girl who'd feature in a Warhol film, the girl that bad boys remembered fondly as the one that got away. I'm sure now that my mother had regular heart attacks but I didn't care, of course I didn't.
I was fifteen years old. I was beautiful and I wanted to die and there's really nothing more seductive, more dangerous than that. I will never be as powerful as I was then.
Or as helpless.
He told me I was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen and kissed me to the first Pixies track I'd ever heard and like. What was I to do with that?
Orpheus' fingernails are bitten down to the quick, all callous and red hangnail. He does not look like he has been sleeping but there are a number of reasons for that; he could be one of my people.
They're not mine.
And he's not.
He pushes his hair out of his eyes and says, "I need to get her back."
"Eurydice," I remember. A tall girl; short skirt, grey eyes, sweet smile. Her mouth had been very red but they all are, the first time. She'd been flushed and breathless and tripping over her own spike heels.
I always worry about them but I'm not fifteen anymore; all I do is worry.
"Yes," he says. It sounds like all I have in the world.
The first time I met him was underground. He was playing, spotlight on his blue-black hair, fingers light on the strings of his beautiful guitar. He'd looked tired, out of place, but that didn't matter because listening to him was like swallowing the sun. It shone out of him, out of the music and the slight curve of his lips.
I'd wrapped my fingers around my drink and stopped to watch. I didn't swallow whatever was on my tongue; I didn't have to.
I say, "She's down deep, now."
He sighs. "I can't let her be there alone."
The first time, I had been alone.
My mouth tasted like the two pills I'd had before I came and the two I’d had pressed into my tongue by the rough pads of his fingers. He asked my name and I told him; Persephone curling out from my mouth like a promise, pressed up against the shell of his ear.
I didn't know anything about him. He was tall and handsome and tired and he talked like there was something between us, some secret story that both of us knew bits of and if we talked long enough we'd assemble it and it would be the meaning of the universe, forty-two. I was wearing a thrift-store dress that was mostly holes. My skin had gotten pale.
I felt young with him but that made it beautiful. Like I had this whole world to stretch my mind through, like he was going to keep me safe.
I don't know my father. It's classic, okay.
The club was his. Of course it was. Is.
We didn't fuck in the back room; I checked my hair in the mirror by his desk and he ran his huge broad hand along the slope of my spine and murmured that I was beautiful. We sat out on the fire escape and smoked, nicotine coiling through my cells. His lips parted, exhaling whiteness like little clouds of pesticide dispersing bright and deadly across the fields of corn.
I burned my wrist on the end of my cigarette. It took me a moment too long to feign surprise but he stroked his thumb along the line of bone and pressed down like he didn't care.
I say, "You lost, Orpheus."
He shakes his head. "Please-" His eyes are the pleading dark.
"You doubted," I say, gently. "And what makes you think I have power there, anyway?" The fruit, candied and too sweet, is sitting heavily in my stomach. It reminds me of every bad decision I’ve ever made.
I don't even know how I found it.
I wasn't supposed to. Nobody's supposed to - it finds you.
Sometimes you just - you make a mistake.
You walk through a hidden door and end up in a whole new world.
Suck my clit, Alice in Wonderland.
Sometimes your mistakes are somebody else's big grand plan.
Orpheus said, "please." The notes of his song rung through his voice, rung through my chest. He was sixteen, maybe. Sixteen, and in love, and I don't know how either of them found their way down here but they shouldn't have.
It called Eurydice, I know. She has the eyes of a girl who was called.
He must have followed her. I had never seen anyone follow someone down before.
I touched his wrist, his unblemished wrist with its strong guitarist's muscle. I have always been easy for beautiful boys with beautiful pleading eyes. My mother calls me sweetheart with this sad note in her voice. I think she misses me.
"Okay," I said. "Okay."
(There are, I suppose, alternate universes where I said no. Maybe he is happier there. Maybe he can blame me.)
They called him the king of the underworld. I gleamed on his arm, sunlight in my hair; the best jewelery you've ever seen. He brought me a diamond crown, black diamonds that shone like fire under the disco ball lights.
We took drugs together and I collected bruises, track marks that I hid with huge bracelets and shredded long-sleeved shirts. My mother left a hundred messages on my phone and I threw it away, let the battery wind down and chucked it in the backpack of my least favourite dealer.
"You're mine," he murmured, late at night, early in the morning; I twisted my face into his shoulder and thought it love.
"Please," I said.
He looked at me with those dark end of the world eyes. "Are you sure? You know what it will be like, for her."
I remembered how the sunlight had stabbed my eyes, how Hecate's arms caught me carefully, like I was something fragile.
(I was, you know.
Truces only come along so often.)
Orpheus' eyes were rocks on my shoulders, dragging me to the bottom of the ocean. I could feel the seaweed wrapping around my throat. I snuck a breath. "Yes."
He smelled like smoke and I don't know what I smelled like, expensive perfume and champagne, probably, with absinthe dabbed at my wrists. I woke up in silk sheets to the moon rising; I ate little, growing thinner and paler by the day.
It was so easy, all of it; like a dream.
I had spent fifteen years trying to get to that dream. I did not want to wake up.
Was it any wonder it hurt like it did, to wake?
Orpheus stood in front of us, sunlight gleaming in the blue of his eyes, as though he had caught it there for us. His fingertips rested on the strings of his guitar, sunlight and longing rippling through the chords and into my throat, humming there steady and dangerous, like hope.
"You can't turn around," Hades said, his arm around my shoulders. "She has to do it on her own."
I remembered my wobbly knees, the way my eyes had burned on the way out.
She smiled, raw and nervous. I could see the jittery spark already going in the back of her eyes.
"Good luck," I said, softly. I did not know who I was saying it to.
The smell of woodsmoke wreathed us. I raised my hand like goodbye but I knew it was really see you in a minute. I did not see him for a long, long time.
"Let her out." Hecate was furious, incandescent, a dark-haired woman with more vibrancy to her than I’d seen in years underground. "Her mother's furious, Hades."
I swayed on my feet, looking back and forth between the two of them. The drink in my hand was like a lifeline. I closed my fingers around the stem and thought about my mother's low-pitched voice, about gunfire in the streets.
Hades' frown was a thunderstorm, lightning snapping in the black of his eyes. I had never seen him so angry. "She's mine, Hecate."
"How much have you had?" she asked. Her eyes met mine, slate-grey, flat.
"Um," I said. My mouth hurt. "Hecate?" My heels clicked across the ground. I was pacing, I think. It was hard to know what to do.
"She's not hooked," he said, like he was trying to convince someone. I don't think her - maybe it was me, maybe it was him. "I wouldn't do that to her."
"Because she's Demeter's?" Hecate snapped. "But you'd do it to all the others."
"Fuck, Hecate," he said. "That's not what this is. It helps them."
He looked at me, then, with those huge dark eyes. He knew he had lost, I think.
Nobody was surprised when Eurydice came back, shaking in her heels with her hair falling limp around her face. "He turned around," she said. "I couldn't do it, after that." Her voice was low, resigned. Her nails were black against the railing of the staircase: black iron, winding and ornate, like a fairytale where everyone dies by the end.
"I’m sorry," I said. I put my hand on her wrist, as gentle as I could manage.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath of the stale, alcohol-laden air. "Me too."
I took pills for the walk out. I shouldn't have.
It was my undoing.
I had to come back, after that.
"You turned around," I say. I can see my own reflection in his sharp eyes; I look translucent, washed out, thanks to his proximity. I am getting worse and worse at managing this double act.
"Fuck," he swears. "Fuck, I - I thought she'd fallen."
"I’m sorry," I say. "People aren't - kind - when there is a war on." I get up. Standing is a strange effort; my muscles have forgotten how to behave. My knees do not buckle but it is a close thing.
There are callouses on his fingertips when he catches my wrist, the prints of them heavy on my fragile paper-thin skin. "Don’t leave."
The sun is in his eyes, on his hair.
I sit back down. His ankle brushes mine. It is very, very warm.
It has been a while since I was in the sunlight. I do not have to be underground for a long while, yet.
He says, "You and the boy." His eyelashes are dark, catching the stage lights in them.
Orpheus is not on stage. He won't be, not for a long time.
It is all bare dark wood, now. Bare wood and suspicious stains and the lights running all over everything, too bright for this world.
I catch Eurydice’s eye. She is in the crowd, a pale slip of a girl; she waves, conducting an invisible orchestra in a mourning dirge.
I say, "You have no power in the daylight." My voice is sharper than I mean it to be, but we have lived with each other a long time. We will live with each other a long time.
There is something in his eyes that I cannot read. "All right," he says.
There is a janitor's closet in the back of the club. It’s small and dimly lit and there is a tiny, rectangular window in the top left corner.
Before I left, he pressed a packet into my pocket, murmured don't open it till later.
The light here is weak, thin. It spills the yellow of weak tea across my fingers as I fumble it out of my pocket. Grape seeds.
His handwriting on the back is thin, all loose loops. I know you'll help.
"Oh, Orpheus," I whisper. The smell of his aftershave is still in the fall of my hair. I lick my lips. They taste like summer.