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Part of the regalia, for Pentheus, was the royal attire.
It seemed that to him this attire was not so bad in that criterion.
Dionysus gave Pentheus a onceover, patting the linen of his long, feminine gown at the waist, then adorned him with artificial locks of hair in plaits and a wig to cover his cropped hair. Pentheus closed his eyes as Dionysus stepped closer to place an ivy headpiece on his hair, then reopened them. He looked the most beautiful draped in regal fawnsilk.
“And lastly,” Dionysus said, offering him a tall fennel staff wound with ivy and crested with pinecone, “this is your thyrsus.”
Pentheus regarded it with heavy indifference but accepted it quickly enough, tightening his white-knuckled grip around it. He tested its weight with a single swing; the purple ribbons tied below the pinecone fluttered through the air before settling elegantly.
Pentheus planted the thyrsus on the ground in front of him. “Would I seem more like a proper Bacchant if I held the staff with this hand”--he shifted the staff between his palms--“or this?”
Dionysus took the thyrsus from him and returned it to his right hand, folding Pentheus’s fingers around it. “This one.” He then tucked a curl that had come astray behind his ear.
Color rose to Pentheus’s cheeks. “Do I look good?” he asked. “Perhaps I resemble my mother, or my aunts.”
Dionysus deigned to give him the hint of a smile. “You look very much like your mother.” He held up a large hand mirror. Pentheus’s pupils blew wide at the sight of his reflection staring back. “Don’t you think so too?”
Pentheus let out a strangled noise before dissolving into soft giggles. “Yes. A little.”
Dionysus let slip a real smile in response to that. “What an impressive change of heart,” he murmured, setting the mirror aside.
“How should I go there?” Pentheus said, the flush in his cheeks beginning to fade. “Perhaps I ought to bring crowbars and uproot the very essence of the mountain.”
“Easy now. You wouldn’t want to damage the groves.”
Pentheus hummed, absently toying with the pleats of his flowing gown. “Of course. You’re right. Brute strength is no way to master women. I will hide in the firs.”
Dionysus’s eyes raked over his face, now all the more dainty with none of the firmness, from his jaw, to his deep-set eyes, his handsome features, and his perfectly coiffed hair. “That’s ideal,” he murmured. He lowered his gaze to meet Pentheus’s own. “You’ll find all the safety you deserve there.”
Dionysus peeled away from Pentheus, leaving him to secretly glance at his reflection in the mirror. He gathered up his own wine-dark cloak, savoring the glances Pentheus cast toward him too. The possibilities swirling in his mind here onward were endless, but the outcome was set in stone. “I shall lead you to the Maenads,” he said, “and you will be brought back by someone else.”
“Yes,” Pentheus said quickly, “my mother.”
Dionysus nearly laughed aloud. Aunt Agave and her son were similar not only in appearance, but irony besides. “A paragon.”
“She is,” Pentheus said. “What a luxury it would be to return home with her.”
Dionysus snapped the cloak once before swiftly whipping it around him and pinning it over his shoulder. “You deserve it,” he said rather indulgently.
Pentheus nodded with his shoulders haughtily set. “I do.”
“Come then, let us depart.”
Pentheus stole one final glance at himself before starting forward, the pleats of his gown hanging loose, waist outlined by a gold girdle, and luscious locks scraped back into a bun. He looked just as lovely as any daughter of Cadmus.
He stepped in stride with Dionysus. “I wonder what awaits me.” His eyes slowly glazed over. “Perhaps they feast, or mate among the pines...”
“Regardless, you’ll consider me the truest of your friends when I march you right there--to behold the women driven to holy frenzy, yet untouched in their beauty.”
Dionysus perhaps would’ve loved this cousin of his if fortune had willed another life. Had they grown under one roof, Dionysus might have clung to his leg and rode Pentheus with his chubby arms around his shoulders and legs haphazardly draped around his waist. But Pentheus hadn’t ever had the chance to play with Dionysus’s feet in the cot, or Dionysus to gambol around him laughing with milk-smeared lips. Only one of them had lain snug and plump in his mother’s arms.
Now Pentheus nodded, vaguely unfamiliar without the thick, dark bread and the Theban menswear. He licked his lips, a strange expression flickering across his face. “Well, stranger, your guidance is not without my appreciation.”
Dionysus led the fool in women’s garb to Cithaeron.
At last, after Aunt Agave fell upon her son believing him to be a wild, snorting beast, ripping flesh from bone and mangling him with keen fingernails until his heart was in her hands and blood had darkened the earth beneath, she marched back to the palace with the trophy that was his head. Dionysus watched, moved by nothing but the profound sense that Agave’s son had deserved it.