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Orpheus is unsure as he turns to walk out of Hadestown. All of the confidence he possessed when rallying the workers and reminding the gods of the love they felt so long ago leaves him again. He takes a steadying breath and turns, trying to make out the path in the darkness.
You know the way, he reminds himself.
He holds the image of Eurydice in his mind—the last look she had given him, holding his hands in hers. She’d smiled despite the dirt on her face and the blood on his. She’d leaned in and kissed his cheek, pulled back, nodded once.
He thinks of her. He stands there and lets himself become familiar with the emptiness surrounding him. He starts walking.
A moment passes. Then he hears footsteps behind him. Footsteps he would recognize anywhere.
When he feels nothing but crushing relief, Orpheus wonders if he’d already started to doubt that she would be behind him.
He keeps walking.
He focuses on the sound of her footsteps on the pavement. He shifts his lyre on his back, wincing as its strap brushes against the raw skin and blisters on his shoulder, and he listens hard to hear the quiet echo of the movement as it makes room for the person behind him.
It’s cold. After the suffocating warmth of Hadestown, it’s unbearably cold.
And she is in a worker’s uniform. Her arms are bare. She doesn’t have a jacket. He can’t even build a fire. He didn’t pack anything before he began walking, simply brought the lyre because he always reached for it. He has nothing to give her, nothing to help with the cold.
She must be freezing.
He starts to turn.
He stops himself with a sharp gasp, snapping his head forward again. The footsteps behind him falter.
He stands there for a long moment, eyes shut, listening for the sound of her breathing. She shifts, boots scraping against the ground. She’s silent.
Orpheus opens his eyes and sees nothing but darkness in front of him.
He keeps walking.
He doesn’t know how much time passes before he realizes he can’t hear her anymore.
He just knows that it makes him stop again. He strains his ears. He wants to hear her footsteps again, pausing just after his while she waits for him to keep going. He takes another few steps. Stops. A few more. Stops again.
“Eurydice,” he says. His voice comes out quieter than he intends it.
The air feels different. When her name drifts behind him, it doesn’t sound like it bounces off of someone else. It sounds like it meets empty space.
Say something.
Silence.
His knees buckle. Orpheus stumbles and tries to steady himself, hands reaching instinctively for the strap of his lyre. He moves it again. He tries putting it on the other shoulder despite how the weight feels off that way, despite how that shoulder is almost as bloody as the other one, because he knows it makes more noise and he wants to see if he was just imagining the emptiness behind him.
He wasn’t imagining it.
The sound he makes is soft and terrified and hurts him to get out. He nearly chokes on it. He lifts his head and stares above him—at the sky? Or the ceiling, perhaps? He doesn’t know which, and it’s too dark to tell. His eyes burn.
He keeps walking.
Eventually he can’t even hear the echo of his own footsteps.
It disorients him, and the line he’s walking in becomes less straight. He drifts closer to the railroad tracks, then away again, trying to keep himself steady.
He wonders if Eurydice can see him through all this darkness. If she saw how their path had changed. What if she hadn’t? What if she’d lost sight of him? What if she was still walking, and lost her way?
He thinks about turning around.
He keeps walking.
Soon exhaustion catches up with him, and he sits beside the railroad tracks, curled in a ball.
Exhaustion had not been much of a problem, when he was walking in the other direction. He was still tired, of course, but it didn’t matter. He needed to get to Hadestown. To Eurydice. He might have stopped to rest for a little while, but only for a little while. He was afraid that if he sat for too long, he wouldn’t get up again. His legs shook and his eyes started to close and his walking turned to stumbling, but none of that mattered.
The walk back is much harder.
He imagines Eurydice behind him, curled up the same way he is. Then he imagines her passed out and shivering, waiting for him to help.
He goes very stiff and stares straight forward.
She’s alright, he tells himself. She’s behind me, and she’s alright.
She would say something if she wasn’t.
Orpheus takes a deep breath, wondering if Eurydice is doing the same.
Say something.
Silence.
Orpheus gets up. He waits, just in case he’ll hear someone shifting behind him. He doesn’t.
He keeps walking.
He sings as he walks. The same simple melody that had haunted him for months, the one that had brought the world back into tune.
Eurydice knows it. He knows that she does. She was who helped him write it, in the end. She’s the reason he finished it.
He leaves an opening after he sings, because maybe he’ll hear her voice join in. He longs to hear her voice again. How long has it been since he last heard it? He can’t remember how long the walk was the first time he made it. Is it longer, this time? It feels longer. So much longer.
She doesn’t fill the silence. Orpheus tries to pretend he isn’t feeling the panic that continues to creep further up his back with each passing hour, and he finishes the melody in Eurydice’s place.
He keeps walking.
It feels colder than before.
Is it because she isn’t behind him?
Say something. Please.
Silence.
He keeps walking.
Is she even there anymore?
He almost turns around. His body is halfway there before he stops it.
He keeps walking.
He lets his guard down for one moment, and that is a mistake.
Orpheus sees light, bright sunlight, and he laughs in relief. The laugh is hoarse; he’d stopped speaking almost entirely somewhere along the way, though he couldn’t remember where that was. His voice sounds foreign to his own ears.
That doesn’t matter. He’s made it. They’ve made it.
For the first time, he lets himself believe that this wasn’t a trick. Maybe it was just a test, like Hermes said. His shoulders lower. His body relaxes. Warmth begins to seep back into his bones, and he smiles. He wonders if Eurydice is feeling the same.
If she’s there.
She’s there. She must be.
He hasn’t heard a single sound from her in so long—not her boots on the pavement, not her breathing, not even a yelp if she lost her footing or the utterance of his name if she couldn’t keep up. But he remembers the sound of her voice, at least. Or, he thinks he does. Enough time has passed that he has to acknowledge he could be forgetting it, and the thought scares him.
He wants to check if she really is behind him. That she hadn’t been taken away when he wasn’t looking. That she hadn’t gotten lost. That she was alive and breathing and following him back into the sun.
In the second that he steps partly into the sunlight, feeling it against his skin—
He turns around.
And there she is.
She looks into his eyes, he looks into hers, and Eurydice smiles. They’ve walked so far and gotten all this way, and Orpheus has just sent her back, and yet she smiles at him. She stands with her arms limp at her sides, and tears run down her face.
“It’s you,” Orpheus breathes.
Eurydice nods. “It’s me,” she says. She takes a shuddering breath, but her gaze never once leaves him. Her face doesn’t hold any anger towards him. She reaches out with one hand, beginning to close the space between them. “Orpheus,” she whispers.
A sob climbs out of his chest, and Orpheus reaches back to her. “Eurydice.”
The ground opens up beneath her, swallowing her in an instant, and Eurydice screams as she’s dragged down. Orpheus tries to catch her hand, frantic and desperate because maybe he can catch her before it’s too late maybe he can save her still maybe maybe maybe please—but the space between his hand and hers is just slightly too wide, and he can’t get to her in time.
He sinks to his knees at the edge of the hole, sobbing so hard he can’t catch his breath. His lyre is heavy on his back. He leans forward, curled around the rapidly growing emptiness in his stomach, and he reaches with one hand into the darkness.
Around him, birds are singing. Their songs are an imitation of his own; he notices that even with the grief overtaking his thoughts. The birds sing and he can smell fresh flowers and the sunlight is warm but not blazing. He succeeded. He brought spring back to the world.
It doesn’t mean anything to him now.
She caught a glimpse of this before she was taken back, his mind whispers. Orpheus bends so far forwards that his head goes past his knees, forehead pressing into the dirt. She saw spring. And then she had to lose it. She lost this life all over again.
He has to shut everything out for a while so he can get his breathing back under control. It doesn’t work. His chest rises and falls spastically.
“Eurydice,” he says again. He can’t hear his own voice. He only knows that he says it because of the feeling in his throat.
It’s dark when he hears another voice.
“‘Aight?” it asks him, wobbling and strained. Orpheus looks up sluggishly and his eyes land on Hermes. The god’s hands are on his knees, and something spasms in his face at the numbness in Orpheus’s eyes.
Orpheus turns back to the hole. He’s aching all over, and he’s getting cold from the nighttime chill. It doesn’t matter to him anymore.
In the end, Hermes has to hook underneath his armpits, drag him to his feet, and practically carry him back to the station.
For fifteen weeks, Orpheus remains in his tiny room above the station. He listens to the trains coming through, hears the hum as they shake the walls. It always reminds him of other walls, of another kind of sound. He has to look away from the window whenever he thinks of that.
Hermes comes up to visit him every few days. He brings food, he brings talk. He knows that Orpheus’s favorite part about working in the bar—other than getting to sing—was overhearing stories from the travelers that passed through. Orpheus sits on his bed with his chin on his knees and listens, but not much more. He responds with a one-word answer or a hum when Hermes asks a question. He waits for Hermes to give up on him.
His lyre leans against the chair in the corner of the room. He hasn’t so much as touched the wood since he took it off after Hermes brought him back to the station. His blood has stained the strap. The strings probably need tuning, by now.
He leaves it alone.
It has been twenty-five weeks since he lost Eurydice.
This is the week that he finally gets down to the station. He shuffles into the bar and he knows that Hermes is glad to see him; he lights up, greets him, and then gives him something to do with his hands because he knows that’s what Orpheus wants.
Orpheus brought his lyre with him, and it sits against the wall in what was its usual spot. It felt odd putting the strap over his head after not playing it for so long. He sat for a solid hour in his room tuning the strings and making sure it sounded right. He played the first thing that came to mind. The melody was changed from what it once was—it had a mournful tinge to it that he didn’t remember hearing before.
He sat on his bed. He cried for a while, though it wasn’t with the same intensity as before. Then he wiped his eyes, dried his face, slung the lyre over his back, and went downstairs.
He cleans tables the way he always used to, and he does it with familiarity. He’s glad to find that at least that hasn’t changed. His hands move on their own. Perhaps he cleans each table with a little more ferocity than is needed, but he doesn’t mind it. This is something to do.
People chatter around him, soft and warm. He allows the pleasant hum to be the only thing that fills his head as he works. He follows the same routine he’s always had—finishing with the tables, then sweeping the floor, then picking up empty cups, then going to the back to retrieve clean rags.
Hermes walks past him, one hand resting on his arm as he passes. Orpheus looks up and manages a smile. It’s gotten easier to do that as the weeks have gone by. It’s not with the same brightness, but it’s there.
And then a new voice comes. It cuts through the steady conversation of the other people in the bar and makes everyone go quiet for a moment.
“Anybody got a match?”
Orpheus’s head snaps up. He locks eyes with a girl in a dark coat.
I know you.
Then Hermes passes in between them, and everything shifts. He can’t place what exactly is different about the scene around him, but he can feel deep within his gut that something has changed. There had been a name on his tongue before—a name he thought he knew well. He can no longer recall what it is.
Orpheus looks down. A box of matches has been pressed into his hand.
“Go on,” Hermes tells him.
The girl waits for an answer. Orpheus takes a step towards her.