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Apollo’s fingers were slipping.
He dug them harder into the rock, using every bit of the little strength he had left. It wasn’t enough. The stone was slippery with his blood and his ichor, reds and golds and oranges, his humanity and his divinity marbled together like watercolors and oil paints.
His form was falling apart, his body somehow both lighter and far, far heavier. There was a brilliant light shining through the places he’d broken skin, his fingertips so bright from all the skin scraped off he could barely see the stone he was clinging to. There was a warmth coming from him too, especially the snakebites Python had left in him, so intense he felt almost feverish. Sweat dripped down his skin, sticking his tangled curls to his forehead and soaking what little scraps were left of his clothes and the bandages he’d been wrapped, though those were already fairly soaked with the blood and the ichor.
He blinked the tears out of his eyes. His vision was blurry, from the tears or from all the times he’d hit his head on the way down or simply from how close he was to Chaos, he couldn’t tell. He didn’t think it mattered.
He could see a girl kneeling on the cliff above him. Her form was as hazy as his own was, but if he focused, he could almost see the way her silver eyes glittered in the light as she stared down at him.
“Disapointing as always, brother,” she said. “I go through all the trouble to save your sorry self in New Rome, and you can’t even do me the decency of coming back to me alive?”
Her hair was in two braids, one of them dangling over the void below. He remembered all the times he’d done those braids for her, having to pull out all the leaves and twigs and whatnot that had gotten stuck and comb out all the tangles with his fingers until her hair was soft in his hands like flower petals. Sometimes she would wear the flower crowns he wove for her, though they both knew it would inevitably be lost to the woods somehow. It had been a long time since she’d worn his flower crowns or let him touch her hair. He would have given anything to do it again.
His vision somehow blurred more, and when he managed to somewhat clear it, the auburn braid was replaced with a handful of loose curls, glossy black almost purple. A crown of vines curled around his head, with clusters of grapes that smelled almost as sweet as seeing his baby brother’s face.
“You’d think, after everything, you’d have the guts to come back to face us all. Don’t you have something you want to say? You have to be alive to say it, y’know.”
His form shifted with every tear that dripped down Apollo’s face. White wings fluttered at his temples, surrounded by dusty blond curls. A silver circlet gleamed from its place on top of spiky black hair. Brown waves framed her face, wide gray eyes peering down at him.
Short blond hair with a lightning strike groove at his temple, electric blue eyes behind glinting bronze glasses.
“Remember.” he begged, again. “Remember what it’s like to be human. You promised. You can’t remember anything if you aren’t anything.”
Apollo’s ears were ringing.
Dark eyes behind her glasses, black frames with rhinestones sparkling in the light. Messy black hair falling around her face. A pout on her lips.
“I told you to come back to me, dummy,” she said, like he was a particularly stubborn strawberry plant that refused to grow no matter what she did.
“I’m trying,” he whispered, his voice trembling like a leaf on one of those strawberry plants, or the little white flowers that bloomed before the fruits ripened. “I’m trying, I promise. I’m not leaving you. You’ll see me again.”
He may have been the god of truth, but he’d always been a liar.
She reached down and flicked him on the nose. He didn’t feel it. “Try harder,” she suggested. “I’m not there to pull you up this time, so you hafta do it yourself.”
Apollo nodded. He knew that. His fingers were still slipping.
She moved her finger to wipe a tear off of his cheek. “I’ll be here waiting for you. We all will. We’ll be waiting for the sun to rise.”
“Wait a little longer,” he begged her. “I’m coming back to you. I promise.”
A liar to his last moments.
His fingers finally slipped from the bloodstained stone. He fell, finally fell, right into the waiting arms of Chaos below him.
Apollo fell, and so the sun set.