Work Text:
In the depths of winter, Colin despairs that the humans will never know the extent to which their story has been twisted.
Most of the year, he does not much mind it. It makes little difference whether or not they think kindly of him. He had been dealt a bad hand for a game he had not agreed to play; the murmurings of humans do not cause him any concern. He supposes he should care that they fear him — after all, Colin knows what it is to be afraid. He supposes that he should care that they have made him their villain, but he cannot. To do so, to comprehend the extent of their hatred, would require a level of distress that Colin simply cannot manage. Not when he is already distraught enough over the other things that are outside of his control.
Colin was simply born third, is all. The sky had already been taken. The sea had already been taken. There was no other domain over which he could rule, nor was there the option to not rule at all. In fact, the only choice he has ever had was Penelope, and she did not feel like a choice at all. Penelope is the bone in his body, the marrow in his soul. She is the scar on his chin and the hair that bristles on his arm when she is near. Colin had simply been born third, and Penelope had been born to roam the warmth of his mother’s earth. In many ways, neither of them had been offered a fair deal.
He spends spring and summer with her by his side, begins to dread her absence in the fall, and falls apart entirely in the winter.
“She cannot be with you all the time,” his little sisters remind him. “Her life is not meant to be lived in the underworld.”
“You could finish this all off if you weren’t so damn stubborn,” his older brothers remind him, faint bemusement tracing their mouths. “Kill her and she shall remain with you forever.”
His wife has pleaded the same thing, over and over again, watching as summer fades into fall, as his dread usurps his pride and he begins to fall apart. She begs and argues and wails and ages, her skin growing thinner, her voice becoming deeper, the shade of her hair darkening in his underworld.
“You could stop this,” she reminds him as the days begin to grow colder. “I could stay with you this year. It could be summer forever, you know.”
But he cannot do it. He cannot steal life right from underneath her feet.
It is different for his brothers. They offer their wives the sky and the sea. There are castles perched upon clouds, and palaces with warm, smooth water lapping against their walls. There is beauty everywhere, opportunity everywhere. Colin cannot offer his wife any of that. He can only offer her hell.
Penelope loves the grass beneath her feet. She loves laying in fields of her mother’s sunflowers and snuggling with their stems. She loves dancing, and one does not dance when they are surrounded by the dead.
But more importantly than any of that, Penelope’s soul can be found within stories. Whether they are told through whispers or ink, only a part of her heart belongs to him, he knows. The rest belongs to stories. Stories are the most human thing in the world. Colin cannot think of another species that loves stories as well as humans do. His very existence is a matter of lore to them, lore that Penelope has always admired. If he takes her humanity away from her, he will be taking her away from the stories. The dead do not discuss books. They do not praise Penelope’s writing or wit. Stories are not for the underworld, and therefore Penelope Bridgerton cannot be for the underworld either.
So the leaves shrivel and fall from branches, and the grass that had warmed Penelope’s feet becomes brown and dead. She wraps her fingers around Colin’s arms and pleads with him to keep her, but he has already resigned himself to the winter. He imagines her cheeks flushed pink with joy as she plays in the snow, imagines her wrapped in a blanket by the hearth while she reads a book. Imagines the babies she will cradle to her breast and the men who will admire her unrestrained beauty.
And then he sends her up as the final bit of warmth is sapped from the earth, gone until she returns to him in the spring.
Colin wishes he could return her to a world as vibrant and vivid as she deserves. He cannot even give her that. The trees and the plants and the grass, the fruits that hang from the vine, they all rely on the cycle of life. They rely on him. And when Colin cannot find warmth and life and joy, the world dies around everyone else too. It becomes as brown and lifeless to everyone as it is to him.
The stories say it is her mother, but it is not. Colin is simply too powerful, too connected to living and dying, and his powers are too strong when he misses his wife.
But sometimes he fears that he will become too accustomed to her absence. As if, perhaps, even when she returns to him, he will spend every single day waiting for her to leave once again. The winter passes gracelessly, Colin sunken into the ground with the stones and rocks which make up his castle. He thinks about Penelope murmuring to him that he wasn’t meant to exist in an underground fortress. He thinks of Penelope brushing her lips across the turn of his arm and telling him how he belongs in the sunshine.
“This is not a marriage,” she told him the night before she left.
“Because we must spend time apart? I assure you, my love, plenty of husbands and wives—“
“Because you give me no choice,” Penelope snapped, and stormed away so that she did not say anything she could regret.
The next day, after sending her across the River Styx, he had turned his throne to face away from the door of his throne room, determined to not spend every moment waiting for her to walk back through. It did not work, and Colin has passed the entirety of winter afraid that she will be too angry to return to him when spring comes.
Penelope keeps hold of her anger in ways that Colin cannot. He supposes it comes from her ability to be let down, so he finds it very beautiful. Even when she does not want to, she feels hope, hope which can morph into anger in the meager moments between her breaths. Colin is meant to represent fire and brimstone, blood and bone, yet Penelope somehow stows more anger in her little human body than he can in his ancient one.
He has always loved this. Her anger (and her hope, and the depths of her love, and her ability to feel joy) makes her powerful, makes the weight of her soul match his exactly. She is a marvel. She is his soulmate and he is hers.
But he has learned, somewhere in the midst of these long winter days, that they are both afraid. Penelope fears him forcing her to go back to the world of the living. Colin fears that she will never return when he sends her up. Penelope fears that he will no longer think her beautiful as her body ages. Colin fears that she will no longer find him lovable as she becomes older and sharper, more experienced. Penelope fears that he will never be selfish enough to kill her. Colin fears that he will succumb to his selfishness too soon.
“When we are married,” Penelope used to say, a contented gleam in her eyes. She had grand plans for their marriage; thought he would finally agree to bring her into the underworld year round. When he sent her back to his mother’s earth for the first time, she had looked at him with such betrayal, he had nearly changed his mind.
“When I am dead,” she says now, as if she is waiting for it in the same way she was waiting for them to marry. As if her life’s true beginning is predicated by both events in equal measure.
(He had just wanted her to be sure. He still wants her to be sure.)
Colin has always struggled to keep track of time. For Penelope, he knows, it feels like everything is rushing forward, potentially leaving her behind when too much time has come and gone. But Gods do not feel time the way mortals do. He eats for pleasure, not sustenance. He sleeps only because he enjoys resting his form next to hers. Penelope does not understand, truly, how little time she has had to enjoy her life on the earth. She does not understand that each day of winter is more excruciating to him than the last, only because they all bleed together. They never end. The wanting her never ends either, but Penelope must know that. He has told her. He had certainly told her before he had sent her back across the River Styx the first time, but it was many years ago, and perhaps… perhaps she had forgotten? Perhaps she does not know that the strength of his devotion bears more weight with every passing year?
Penelope cannot walk upon the earth and not know how desperately he needs her with him. The thought is untenable.
Colin does not often leave the underworld now, the way he did before he loved Penelope. Back then, he had been searching for something. The sight of him isn’t necessarily startling, but he does make people feel uneasy, as if they can sense that death is in their midst. Penelope never seems to feel that way. She had once told him that she loved him from the moment she met him, and Colin had believed her. Even from the first moment they met, she looked upon him as a friend, not something to run from.
He could have someone fetch her for him, he supposes. But then he would have to wait. He does not want to wait. For the first time all winter, it feels like the hint of a flower has pressed against the ice that circles around him, reminding him of how beautiful spring can be.
All he has to do is tell her, and perhaps winter will be over for both of them.
It is almost amusing, how his body can simply find her. Colin is an eternal being, he has powers beyond those which mortals can comprehend, yet even he is awestruck by the pull he has towards Penelope. He knows where she is at any given moment, even when she is on the earth and he is trapped in the underworld without her.
She is beautiful in winter. A brown, woven shawl curled around her arms for warmth, hair slipping down one shoulder as she leans forward to pick witch hazel to place in her basket. It is too dark to be gathering flowers and herbs, but Penelope likes to write when it is light out, preferring to complete her chores in the evening.
He watches for only a breath as her fingers brush across the stems of the plant. Then her body stiffens, her head tilting to the side, and she turns slowly to look at him.
In the past, Colin might have asked how Penelope knew he was there. But this strange connection no longer surprises him. Sometimes he believes that their souls are only in balance with the weight of the other’s to center them.
Her lantern swings in her hand, and for a moment Colin is thrown into the sharp relief of light while Penelope loiters in the dark. She allows herself the opportunity to drink in his form without granting him the generosity of the same.
“Pen,” he whispers, and it is so silly, how the lord of the underworld sounds like a scared child when faced with his own wife.
(It does not do for them to be apart. It is not right.)
She makes a quiet noise of desperation, then tosses her lantern to the side and rushes to him, reaching out far before she is close enough. When she is in his arms, she tucks her cold little nose into his cloak, inhaling the scent of him as she allows his body to warm hers.
“You’re early,” she murmurs, choked voice muffled by his chest. Colin places his hand on the back of her head and strokes downwards, marveling at how much of her is able to fit in his palm alone.
“I missed you,” he admits, and pulls her tighter against him while she peppers kisses across his shirt. She follows a path upwards until her smiling, tear-tracked face is tilted towards him. Penelope is pale in the moonlight and just as needy as him.
“I missed you,” she says, before leaning upwards on her toes to kiss him.
And with a heavy thud, the weight of their souls settles back into balance.
They kiss in the snow for a long time, wrapped up in his cloak. He wonders if he should remind her that her heartbeat will stop after they do this, but ultimately decides not to. Instead, he savors his last few moments with it, allowing himself the pleasure of memorizing how it had once felt knocking around in her body.
He has loved her heartbeat for so many years now. He will mourn it, even if he no longer has to mourn her.
“Come,” he says, and takes her by the hand so that he can lead her over to the fallen lantern. The flame is still alive inside of the glass; he raises it higher, determined to take in her face. “Let me look at you.”
“Colin,” she complains, but does not argue further. She always does this when they return to each other, and he always insists upon looking at her for a long time, marveling at the ways she has changed while they were separated.
He often fantasizes about what she does when they are apart. Penelope has spent her days on this earth, plucking flowers from the ground, dancing on the grass, starting fires in her mother’s hearth. She has spent her life walking these shores, the sand softening the soles of her feet, water from his brother’s ocean lapping against her toes, her face freckling beneath the sun. She has told stories until her voice grew hoarse and worked her loom until her hands grew weary. There are wrinkles near her brow from hours of squinting, a burn on her hand from cooking, cuts across her arms from the brambles in these woods.
If he allows her to keep her life, she could have white hair someday soon. He would love to see her with white hair. She might have those wrinkles at the sides of her eyes from smiling, and those lovely spots darkening her hands, if he waits long enough. He could love her through her entire mortal life, watch her continue to live these winters above, to drink warm cups of chocolate and shiver in the snow and tell stories until the day she dies.
But their souls are not meant to be apart. He knows that now. He can see that she was right all along.
He was not giving her a choice. He will allow her one now.
Colin gently stoops down to pick up her basket for her, then entwines their fingers between their bodies and leans forward to give her one last kiss. And when he opens his eyes to look at her, she is smiling, somewhat bemused, as though she can already tell that he is about to change everything.
So Colin smiles. And he does.
“Are you ready, my love?”