Chapter Text
The last note of Hermes's introduction hung in the smoky air of the bar, and the patrons erupted into the kind of applause that came more from habit than enthusiasm. Times were hard, harder than usual, and even the promise of a story couldn't fill empty bellies or warm cold hands. But stories were what they had, stories and whatever rotgut whiskey they could afford.
Hermes tipped his hat with that knowing smile of his, the one that said he'd seen it all before and would see it all again. The kind of smile that made you wonder if anything ever really changed, if the wheel just kept turning no matter how hard you pushed against it. "That's the way the world is, folks," Hermes said, his voice smooth as honey and twice as golden. "And that's the way it's always been."
A young man in the back corner stood up, his chair scraping against the wooden floor. He had weathered hands and tired eyes, the kind you saw on every worker who'd spent too long hoping for a break that never came. His jacket had patches on the elbows, and his boots had seen better decades. "Begging your pardon, Hermes, sir," the young man said, voice rough but steady. "But that ain't quite true."
The bar went quiet. You didn't contradict Hermes, not when he'd just finished telling the oldest story in the world. The god turned slowly, one eyebrow raised, but there was something in his expression that looked almost like curiosity. "Is that so?" Hermes asked. "You got a different story, friend?" The young man swallowed hard but didn't sit down. "My grandfather told me something before he died. His grandmother told him, and her grandfather told her. Goes back a long way, this story."
"I got time," Hermes said, gesturing expansively. "We all got time. That's about all we got. So tell your tale." The young man, Marcus was his name, stepped forward into the lamplight. "Grandfather said there was a time before the way things are now. Twenty years between when Persephone went down below and when she first came back up. Twenty years of nothing growing, everything dying, everyone starving." A few heads nodded. Everyone knew that story, or some version of it.
"But Grandfather said his kin survived because of a man. Tall fellow, always wore black, had a hat like yours, Hermes, but taller. Top hat, they called it. He'd show up when things got worst, when the frost bit deepest or the sun scorched hardest. He'd have food, bread usually, sometimes apples. He'd give it to whoever needed it most."
Marcus's voice grew stronger as he spoke, like the story itself was lending him courage. "Strange thing was, this man never ate. Not once. People would offer to share what he'd given them, but he'd just smile and say he wasn't hungry. They'd see him day after day, week after week, always giving, never taking."
"Sounds like a saint," someone called out. "Or a fool," another voice added. Marcus shook his head. "After twenty years, when spring finally came and Persephone walked the earth again, they found him under an old oak tree. Dead, but smiling. They buried him there, gave him the best funeral they could manage, which wasn't much. Nobody knew his name. He'd never told anyone."
Hermes had gone very still, his usual showman's energy dimmed to something quieter, more thoughtful. "But here's the thing," Marcus continued. "My grandfather swore he saw that same man, forty years after they buried him. Same black suit, same hat, same smile. Gave him bread during a hard winter when Grandfather was just a boy about to give up. And my grandfather's grandmother, she said her grandfather saw him too, during the first famine."
The bar had forgotten to breathe. "People call him the Benevolent Man now, those who remember the stories. He shows up when times are hardest, gives what he has, asks nothing back. Then he's gone like smoke." Marcus looked around the room, meeting eyes that were hungry for more than food.
"I'm telling you this because winter's been getting longer. Hades is keeping Persephone down below more and more. And last night, I saw him. Standing on the corner of Tenth Street, handing bread to Old Marie." Hermes finally moved, stepping forward with an expression nobody in that bar had ever seen on the god's face before. It might have been concern, or it might have been something older and stranger.
"This man," Hermes said quietly. "He say anything to you?" Marcus shakes his head no. the man had been gone when he had looked back after looking at Old Marie. "The strangest thing was there were no footprints where he had been standing." Marcus finishes. The implications settled over the room like snow.
Chapter Text
The silence in the bar stretched longer than comfortable, longer than natural. Hermes stood motionless, his fedora casting shadows across features that suddenly looked ancient despite their agelessness. When gods went quiet, mortals noticed. "Now that," came a voice like thread being pulled taut, "is impossible."
The Fates materialized from the corners of the room where smoke and shadow congregated. They moved as they always did, three women who were somehow one being, their presence making the air feel crowded with possibilities and inevitabilities. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos arranged themselves near the bar's center, their eyes fixed on Marcus with an intensity that made him step backward. "We see every thread," Lachesis said, her fingers moving as though working an invisible loom. "Every life, every death, every moment between."
"We were there for the first famine," Clotho added, her voice younger but no less certain. "We measured out those hungry years."
"And we cut the threads when they ended," Atropos finished, her tone carrying the finality of scissors through silk. "There was no man in black. No benefactor. No one called Benevolent." Marcus looked between the Fates and Hermes, his weathered face pale. "But my grandfather—"
"Your grandfather believed what he was told," Hermes said, but his voice lacked its usual performance quality. He was thinking, visibly calculating, and that was more unsettling than the Fates' denial. "Stories can grow in the telling, friend. Memory's a tricky thing, even for those of us who traffic in tales."
"But I saw him," Marcus insisted. "Last night. Clear as I see you now."
"Saw who?" a woman's voice cut through the debate, sharp and skeptical. Eurydice stood near the back, having slipped in during Marcus's tale. She had that look she always wore, the one that said she trusted nothing she couldn't hold in her hands, the one that came from too many disappointments and not enough meals. Her dark eyes scanned the room, landing on Marcus with something between pity and contempt.
"Some ghost story?" she continued, moving closer. "Some fairy tale to make us feel better about starving?"
"It ain't a story," Marcus said, voice tight. "It's the truth."
"Truth," Eurydice laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Truth is we're on our own. Truth is nobody gives something for nothing. Truth is—" She stopped mid-sentence, her expression shifting so suddenly that several people leaned forward to see what had changed. Color drained from her face, and her hand went to her throat as if checking that she could still breathe. "What did you say he wore?" Her voice had gone quiet, careful.
"Black suit," Marcus said. "Top hat. Tall. Reddish brown hair when you could see it under the hat. Green eyes." Eurydice reached for the nearest chair, gripping its back hard enough that her knuckles went white. "And he gives food. Bread usually."
"You know him," Hermes said, and it wasn't a question. She didn't answer immediately, her gaze going distant, looking at something only she could see. When she spoke, her voice carried the weight of confession. "Three winters ago. I was... it was bad. Worse than usual. I hadn't eaten in days, maybe a week. I was sitting in an alley off Market Street, trying to decide if it was worth getting up again."
The bar had forgotten the Fates, forgotten Hermes, forgotten everything except Eurydice's words. "Someone sat down next to me. I didn't hear him coming, didn't see him approach. He was just there. Had a loaf of bread, fresh and warm like it had just come from an oven, which made no sense because every bakery had closed hours before. He broke it in half, offered it to me." She paused, swallowing hard. "I asked him what he wanted for it. Because everyone wants something, right? That's how the world works."
"What did he say?" someone whispered. Eurydice's laugh came out broken. "He said, 'Nothing. I'm not hungry.' Just like your grandfather's story, Marcus. I took the bread. I was too hungry not to. It was the best thing I'd ever tasted, still warm, perfect. I looked down for maybe five seconds to tear another piece off, and when I looked up..."
"He was gone," Marcus finished. "No footprints," Eurydice said. "Not in the snow. Not anywhere. Like he'd never existed. I thought... I told myself I'd imagined it, that I was so hungry I'd hallucinated. But the bread was real. It kept me alive for three days." The Fates had drawn close together, conferring in whispers that sounded like wind through wheat fields. Their agitation was palpable, visible in the way their hands moved in sharp, agitated patterns.
"This thread," Clotho said, her voice uncertain in a way that made mortals and god alike uncomfortable. "We cannot find it."
"Cannot trace it back," Lachesis agreed. "Cannot see where it should have been cut," Atropos added, and her hand moved to her hip where her scissors hung, an unconscious gesture of disturbance.
Hermes removed his fedora, running a hand through his hair in a gesture so human it reminded everyone that gods could be troubled too. "I know every story," he said, speaking more to himself than the room. "Every legend, every myth, every tale told in taverns and temples. It's what I do. It's what I am. But this..."
He looked at Marcus, then at Eurydice, then at the Fates. "This story I never heard. This man who should have died during the first famine, if he lived at all. This benevolent stranger who appears and disappears like smoke, leaving no trace that even the Fates can find."
"So what is he?" Marcus asked. "That," Hermes said, settling his fedora back on his head with deliberate care, "is a very good question. And the fact that I don't have an answer..." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Well, that might be the most interesting thing to happen in a very long time." Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the bar's windows. Winter was coming, same as it always did.
But this time, the cold seemed to carry something else with it, something that felt like anticipation, like the moment before a story begins in earnest. Somewhere in the city, a man in a black suit and top hat walked streets that knew his footsteps even if the snow didn't remember them.
Chapter Text
The train arrived on a Tuesday, though in truth, the days of the week mattered less than the simple fact of her return. Persephone stepped onto the platform, and the world remembered how to breathe. It happened the way it always did, gradual yet immediate. The gray that had settled over everything like a burial shroud began to lift. Ice cracked and retreated. Buds that had waited, patient and stubborn, finally unfurled. Within hours, the temperature would climb twenty degrees. Within a day, flowers would push through soil that had been frozen solid. It was the closest thing to magic that mortals ever witnessed, and they witnessed it every year without ever quite believing it was real.
Hermes found her in the garden behind the bar, where spring was already asserting itself with aggressive optimism. Crocuses had appeared as if summoned, purple and gold against the dark earth. She was kneeling beside them, her fingers brushing petals with the gentle attention of someone greeting old friends. "Welcome back," he said, tipping his fedora.
She looked up, and her smile was genuine but tired. Six months in Hadestown left marks that even divinity couldn't fully erase. "It's good to be back. Though the cold lingered longer this year."
"About that." Hermes settled onto a nearby bench, his casual posture at odds with the careful way he watched her. "I need to ask you something strange."
"Strange coming from you means exceptionally strange."
"Fair point." He leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Have you ever heard of someone called the Benevolent Man?" Persephone's brow furrowed as she rose, brushing dirt from her dress. "No. Should I have?"
"Probably not. It's a story that apparently exists in the margins, the places between what gets remembered officially and what people whisper about when the lights are low." He described what Marcus and Eurydice had shared, watching her face for any flicker of recognition. "Tall man, black suit, top hat. Gives food to the starving during the worst times. Appears and disappears without trace. According to the legends, he's been doing this since the first famine, when you were taken to the Underworld."
She was quiet for a long moment, her expression shifting through several emotions too quickly to name. When she finally spoke, her voice had gone soft, distant. "What color hair?" The question surprised him. "Reddish brown, apparently. Why?"
Persephone walked to the garden's edge, where new grass was already pushing through. She didn't look at Hermes when she continued. "The very first time I came back. Do you remember?"
"Of course."
"You weren't there when the train arrived. No one was. The station was empty, which seemed wrong because I'd expected... I don't know. Something. Someone. After twenty years, I thought there would be people waiting to see if the world would really change." Hermes stood, moving closer. "But someone was there."
"One person." She turned to face him, and her eyes held something haunted. "A man in a black suit and top hat. He was standing on the platform like he'd been waiting specifically for me. I remember thinking how odd that was, that anyone could have known the exact moment I'd return."
"What did he say?" The question hung between them while Persephone gathered the memory, pulling it from wherever she'd stored it for all these years. "He welcomed me back. His voice was... kind. Warm. He said he was happy I'd returned because he hadn't known how much longer he could hold on. I asked what he meant, but he just smiled. It was the strangest smile, Hermes. Relieved and sad at the same time, like someone who'd just finished a race they'd never expected to complete."
A bird called from somewhere nearby, one of the early returners sensing spring's arrival. "I thought he was just another mortal affected by the years of winter, being dramatic about the cold finally ending. I thanked him and walked into town. Everything was dead then, you understand. The trees were bare, the ground frozen. I had to concentrate to make anything change, to wake it all up."
She wrapped her arms around herself despite the warming air. "A few hours later, I heard the bells. A funeral. People were gathering at the old cemetery on the hill, so I went. I thought I should pay respects, acknowledge the cost of my absence. When I got there, I saw him."
"The man from the station."
"In a pine coffin. He looked... Hermes, he looked like he'd been starving for years. His face was gaunt, skin stretched over bones. But there was still that smile, faint but present. They'd laid him out with his hands folded, still wearing that black suit." Hermes felt something cold settle in his chest, and it had nothing to do with the departing winter. "You're certain it was the same man."
"Completely. I asked an old woman standing nearby how long he'd been dead. She said they'd found him that morning leaning against an oak tree, looking up at the first buds with that smile on his face. They found him at dawn." The implications crystallized in the air between them like frost that refused to melt.
"Your train arrived mid-morning," Hermes said slowly. "At ten o'clock. I remember checking the station clock, thinking how mundane it was to mark time after so long in a place where time moves differently." Persephone's eyes met his, and in them, he saw reflected his own confusion, his own unsettled certainty that something fundamental had shifted in the world's order. "He was dead before he met me, Hermes. He'd been dead for hours. But he was there, solid and real, waiting to welcome me home. And then he... what? Returned to being dead?"
Neither of them had an answer. The garden continued its resurrection around them, indifferent to mysteries and impossibilities, concerned only with the ancient business of spring.
Chapter Text
The old cemetery sprawled across the hill's crest like a collection of broken teeth, headstones jutting from earth that had witnessed too many endings. Hermes and Persephone walked the worn path in silence, spring's arrival muted here where death kept its permanent residence. "It was near the eastern edge," Persephone said, her voice quiet in the way voices become when surrounded by the dead. "I remember the oak standing apart from the others."
They found it twenty minutes later, though "found" seemed inadequate for what happened when they rounded the bend and the tree revealed itself.
From the road, it had appeared modest, just another oak among the cemetery's collection. Distance, Hermes realized, had been merciful. Up close, the tree defied simple categorization. Its trunk stretched fifteen feet across, bark deeply furrowed with age, branches spreading in a canopy so vast it could shelter a hundred mourners from rain. The roots broke through soil and stone alike, creating a rippled landscape around its base that spoke of centuries of patient, inexorable growth.
"How old?" Persephone breathed. Hermes placed his palm against the bark, feeling the slow pulse of life that mortal senses couldn't detect. "Thousand years at minimum. Maybe older." He looked up into the branches where new leaves were just beginning to unfurl, responding to Persephone's return. "This was already ancient when the first humans settled these lands."
"But the story says they buried him here after the first famine. That was only..." She trailed off, doing mathematics that didn't quite work. The grave itself was modest, marked by a simple stone partially obscured by the oak's massive roots. They had to navigate carefully through the wooden veins breaking through earth to reach it. Someone had placed it deliberately close to the trunk, as if seeking the tree's protection or permission.
Persephone knelt first, brushing away dirt and last autumn's leaves that had gathered in the stone's weathered crevices. The marker was granite, gray as storm clouds, worn smooth by decades of rain and wind and the casual erosion of time's passage. "The name's gone," she said softly.
Hermes crouched beside her, running his fingers over where letters had once been carved. The surface was too smooth, the erosion too complete. A mortal might think it simply old, but he'd seen ancient monuments that preserved their inscriptions for millennia. This felt deliberate, as if the name had been gently, purposefully worn away. But below, where the inscription should have been equally degraded, the words stood clear and sharp: Though he has pasted, he wanders still doing what he thinks is right.
The letters looked freshly chiseled, edges crisp and clean despite the stone's obvious age. Hermes traced them with his fingertip, half expecting them to be warm. "That's not possible," Persephone whispered. "The entire marker is weathered except—"
"Except the part that matters." Hermes sat back on his heels, studying the paradox. "Someone wanted the name forgotten but the truth preserved."
"Or the name forgot itself." The thought sent a chill through him that spring's warmth couldn't touch. Names had power. Names anchored beings to reality, to memory, to the stories that gave them substance. A name that could erase itself suggested something far stranger than simple mortality.
Persephone shifted her attention to the flowers scattered across the grave. Hermes had noticed them peripherally—wildflowers in white and yellow, the kind that grew freely in fields and along roadsides. They looked fresh, as if someone had left them that morning. She reached out to touch a white blossom, then froze.
"Hermes." The single word carried enough weight that he leaned closer, following her gaze. What he'd taken for cut flowers scattered atop the grave were actually growing from it. Stems emerged directly from the soil, roots anchored deep, leaves spreading in careful arrangement. But that wasn't what had stopped Persephone's hand. The flowers were ancient.
He could see it now, the way the petals held themselves with impossible delicacy, how the stems bent just slightly under the weight of years they shouldn't have survived. These weren't this season's blooms. They weren't even this century's. Yet they remained perfect, untouched by decay, growing from earth that held only bones and memory. "I can feel them," Persephone said, her voice distant. "They're connected to me, to my domain, but they're old, Hermes. Older than they should be. Older than—" She pressed her palm flat against the ground. "They started growing the day he was buried."
"And never died."
"And never died," she confirmed. "Through every winter, every time I descended and the world froze, these flowers remained. I should sense that. I should know every plant that defies the seasons. But I never felt them until now." Hermes examined the death date carved below the inscription. The numerals were worn nearly smooth, the year completely gone, leaving only the suggestion of numbers that had once meant something. No birth date at all, just the weathered evidence of an ending. Or what should have been an ending.
The oak tree creaked above them, branches shifting in wind that carried the scent of warming earth and new growth. Hermes looked up into the canopy, then back at the grave with its impossible flowers and its self-erasing name and its too-clear inscription. "He was buried here," he said slowly, working through the implications. "But the tree was already ancient. The flowers began growing immediately and never stopped. His name vanished but the message remained. And according to Marcus and Eurydice and now you, he keeps appearing during the harshest times to help people, unchanged, then disappearing without trace."
Persephone met his eyes, her expression troubled. "The Fates said they had no record of him."
"The Fates," Hermes replied quietly, "record every mortal thread from birth to death. But what do you call someone who died before he was born? Or someone who's been dying continuously for centuries without ever finishing the job?" Neither of them had an answer. The flowers continued their impossible growth, beautiful and wrong, while the oak kept its ancient vigil over a grave that might not hold what graves were meant to hold. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled despite the clear sky.
Chapter Text
The giggle came before the movement, high and bright as wind chimes, entirely out of place in the cemetery's solemn air. Persephone's head snapped up, following the sound to the oak's massive trunk. A figure leaned out from the bark itself, emerging as if the wood were water and she merely breaking the surface. Not through a hollow or opening, but from the solid heartwood, her form materializing where only tree should exist.
She was a wood nymph, that much was immediately clear from the faint green tinge to her skin and the way her hair seemed to blend seamlessly with the oak's canopy above. But everything else about her defied easy classification. Hermes found himself standing without conscious decision, helping Persephone to her feet. They both stared.
The nymph looked young—her face unlined, her movements carrying the fluid grace of youth, her smile wide and unguarded. Yet her eyes held something that made Hermes feel suddenly, uncomfortably juvenile. He'd walked the earth since before humans learned to forge bronze. He'd guided souls when death was still a new concept to mortal minds. But this nymph regarded him with the patient amusement of someone watching a child discover fire for the first time.
It was impossible. Nymphs were tied to their trees, yes, but they were still younger than the Olympians. They'd come into being when the world settled into its current shape, when Zeus claimed the sky and Poseidon the seas and Hades the realm below. This one should have shown him deference, or at least acknowledgment of his divine status. Instead, she giggled again, the sound making the oak's branches shake with something that might have been laughter.
"You're..." Persephone started, then stopped, seeming to lose the words. The nymph didn't answer. She simply leaned further out, her torso now fully visible while her lower half remained merged with the trunk. Her hair tumbled down in cascades that shifted between brown bark and green leaves and something else, something that caught light in ways wood never should. She tilted her head, studying them both with those impossibly ancient eyes set in that impossibly young face.
Hermes tried to speak, found his silver tongue momentarily tarnished. "The tree," he managed. "You're the oak's spirit." Another giggle, this one shorter, more playful. The nymph's smile widened. She raised one hand, pressing a finger to her lips in a gesture that somehow felt both childish and knowing. "How long?" Persephone asked, her voice stronger now. "How long have you been here?"
The nymph's expression shifted to something fond, something soft. She glanced down at the grave below, at the flowers that never died, at the inscription that refused to weather. Then she looked back at them and her smile turned bittersweet. For a moment, Hermes thought she might speak. Her lips parted, and he leaned forward instinctively, desperate for whatever impossible truth she might share.
Instead, she winked. The gesture was so unexpected, so deliberately impish, that Hermes actually laughed—a short, startled bark of sound that echoed off the surrounding headstones. Beside him, Persephone made a noise halfway between amusement and frustration. "Wait," Persephone said, taking a step closer. "Please. We need to understand. The man buried here, the one in the black suit—"
But the nymph was already retreating. She pulled back into the trunk with the same fluid grace she'd emerged with, her form becoming translucent, then transparent, then simply gone. The oak's bark showed no seam, no opening, no evidence anyone had been there at all. Except for the fading echo of that giggle, hanging in the air like morning mist.
Persephone pressed her hand against the trunk where the nymph had been. "She's still there. I can feel her. But she's not... she won't come back out." Hermes joined her, placing both palms flat against the ancient bark. The oak's heartbeat pulsed slow and strong beneath his hands, and deeper still, he sensed the nymph's presence. She was part of the tree, woven so thoroughly into its essence that separating them would mean killing both.
But there was something else. A second presence, fainter, like an echo of an echo. Human in its resonance but wrong in its persistence, as if someone had pressed their soul into the roots and forgotten to leave. "Did you feel that?" he asked quietly. "Yes." Persephone's voice had gone very soft. "He's here too. Not his body, but... something. A memory? An imprint?"
"Or a promise," Hermes suggested. "The inscription says he wanders still. Maybe part of him stayed while the rest went walking." They stood there for a long moment, hands against the oak, feeling the strange dual presence within. The nymph's consciousness brushed against theirs, amused and affectionate but firm in her silence. The other presence didn't acknowledge them at all, focused elsewhere, attention turned toward something they couldn't perceive.
Above them, the oak's branches rustled despite the still air. "She knew him," Persephone said finally. "The way she looked at the grave, that expression—she knew him well."
"More than knew," Hermes agreed. "She's guarding him. Or guarding whatever he left behind." Another giggle drifted from the trunk, softer now, almost inaudible. It might have been agreement. It might have been something else entirely.
Persephone stepped back, her hand trailing down the bark. "A nymph older than Olympus, bound to a tree that predates human civilization, guarding a man who died but won't stay dead."
"And flowers that won't die," Hermes added, glancing down at the impossible blooms. "And a name that erased itself." The thunder rumbled again, closer now, though the sky remained stubbornly clear. Somewhere in the city below, Hermes knew, people were waking to spring's arrival. They'd celebrate Persephone's return with festivals and offerings, grateful for winter's end, oblivious to the mysteries unfolding in this quiet cemetery.
He looked at the grave one more time, at the inscription that remained sharp while everything else weathered away. Though he has pasted, he wanders still doing what he thinks is right. A man who died to bring spring back. A nymph who remembered when gods were young. A mystery that the Fates themselves couldn't unravel. Hermes had the distinct feeling they'd barely scratched the surface.