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None of them expect winter to come so quickly. Orpheus and Eurydice stand on the platform and watch as the train carrying the King and Queen of the Underworld leaves the station. Eurydice can feel herself already slipping into the state of survival she’s used to, calculating what they have and holding it against what they need. She looks up at Orpheus, and the expression on his face makes the worry in her gut spark brighter, though she doesn’t know why.
“He came too soon,” he murmurs, his gaze stuck on the horizon where the train disappeared. “He came for her too soon.”
Eurydice reaches for his hand, and he takes it, eyes darting over to her.
“It’s not supposed to be like this,” Orpheus tells her. He’s almost panicked, like he needs to convince her of it. Eurydice does not need convincing. She knows this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. That’s not the thing she has a hard time facing.
“Well, ‘til someone brings the world back into tune,” Eurydice says, “this is how it is.”
Orpheus looks back at the horizon. He turns over his shoulder, silent, walking away. Eurydice’s hand is still in his, and she catches him, stumbling on her feet as he pulls her along for a moment.
“Hey, where are you going?” she asks, and she hates the frantic note in her voice. The part of her that loves him knows that he wouldn’t leave her forever, that he wouldn’t go so suddenly, but everything else in her is screaming.
Orpheus glances back at her. His eyes are on hers, but his mind is already somewhere else. She knows that look, and she knows that it isn’t a look she wants to see at the onset of what promises to be a cold winter. “I have to finish the song,” he says.
His voice has the same lilt and weight that she remembers from the first time they met. She always thought it was an odd quirk before, and then she learned its significance and saw it more as a sign.
It feels like she’s already lost him.
“Finish it quick,” Eurydice says. “The wind is changing.”
She sees Orpheus less in the bar. He’s gone more often than not. Sometimes not physically—he could be sitting on a stool in the corner, writing down lyrics or plucking the strings of his lyre—but mentally. Mentally, he’s somewhere else. There are periods where he comes back, where the first thing he looks for is Eurydice; she’s always there, and he smiles when he finds her. He tells her about his progress. Eurydice listens and pretends that she isn’t disheartened by how it isn’t going fast enough for her tastes. She pushes forward and makes them talk about their next steps, about provisions, now that winter is truly here. Orpheus spends the time where he’s aware doing the same work he’s always done at the bar, something like guilt making his shoulders bow.
Orpheus tries to help her. He does what he can. But the majority of what he earns working at the bar manifests in his small room above the station. The promise of warmth if he puts in the effort. The promise of food enough for one person, because that’s all that can be spared—if he even gets food at all. Often during the winter, Orpheus goes hungry. And now there are two people sharing a bed, sharing a pillow, sharing a room. Eurydice is happy for those things. Those are things that they can both share, and they do so contendedly. But the one thing they cannot split is the food. There isn’t enough of it. Eurydice goes out and finds it herself.
It’s just as hard as finding food for herself when she was alone. Then it becomes harder, because the plenty they’d become accustomed to during the short few months that Persephone was with them dwindles, and Eurydice can no longer rely on the kindness of others and the last vestiges of the harvest. She has to find food completely from scratch, and then double the amount that she would normally find.
Then she has to add firewood onto that. Because one day she stomps up the stairs to the bedroom she now shares with Orpheus and finds that he isn’t in the bar earning his usual meager wages, but sitting near the window with his lyre and a notebook. And she knows that if he’s not working, the warmth that he’s given in return for his work will go away.
“What are you doing?” she asks him.
“Finishing the song,” he tells her with a faraway look in his eyes. He’s aware enough to notice that she’s spoken and take in the words she’s said, but not much more.
“Okay,” Eurydice says, because after all, didn’t she tell him to do this? But now that she’s facing the reality of needing to provide for not just herself but another person, her next words are more urgent than the first time she said them, when only the hints of winter were setting in. “Just do it quickly.”
Orpheus nods. He takes her hand while she walks past and lifts it, pressing it to his cheek. Eurydice stands there and focuses on the warmth of his skin against her cool palm, trying very hard not to think about just how glassy his eyes are.
Hermes had told her one summer night that Orpheus was the son of a muse. Several things about him made much more sense once she knew that. But there was one thing she didn’t fully understand until this moment. His gift is bigger than himself, Hermes said to her when Orpheus was distracted. There are times where he gets lost in it. Many pray to be blessed by the gods, but it’s another thing entirely to have that blessing.
Orpheus becomes mostly unresponsive to her after that night. He stays up long past when she goes to sleep, and he’s possibly awake through the night. His lyre never leaves his side. Eurydice drops a kiss on his temple or puts a hand on his shoulder, then sets out to scavenge what she can.
Everything she owns is in the well-used rucksack that she’s always had. She refuses to believe that it’s because her instincts are already preparing her to run at a moment’s notice. She refuses to believe that the familiar whispers creeping in are real. Eurydice simply squares her shoulders and searches for firewood and food, because their little room is getting colder with every passing day she doesn’t find something to heat it again, and while Orpheus can seem to live off his music alone, she isn’t so lucky.
“You’re worried,” a voice says.
Eurydice looks up. She’s sitting at an empty table in the bar, though that isn’t much of a distinction because all of the tables are empty this time of year. She doesn’t know where everyone else has gone—so many smiling faces that she remembers dancing and drinking with, faces that teased Orpheus and made his entire face flush red and faces that cheered when they caught Eurydice kiss him and Orpheus leaned in and touched his forehead to hers. Winter came, and they left. She supposes she should be used to that by now.
Hermes has stayed, though. To be fair, he’s the one who runs the station and therefore runs the bar, but she takes comfort in the fact that there’s at least one familiar face here. At least one person who stuck around. She has precious few that she can assign that label to.
The god is watching her now, standing on the other side of the bar. She has never seen him out of the silver suit he wears, but now his suit jacket has been removed and hung over the top of a chair, revealing the shirt and vest underneath. It makes him feel more like a man. Orpheus has always treated him as such, in a way, giving him reverence more equal to a father than a god, but now Eurydice understands it.
“It’s that obvious?” Eurydice asks him with a tiny, humorless laugh.
Hermes just gives her a look. Eurydice tries to smile. Her gaze drifts to the door, thinking of the path up the stairs, the path that she’s taken every day only to find that nothing changes. She goes out and she scrapes together almost nothing and she comes back to see her love upstairs with an instrument in his hands and obsessive concentration in his eyes. He’s stopped acknowledging her when she walks in. Eurydice has stopped acknowledging him, too. She just drops her rucksack on the worn floorboards, curls up on the mattress, pulls the blankets around herself, and gives in to sleep.
She couldn’t sleep tonight, though. Or maybe it was last night. It could be morning right now. She can’t tell. All she knows is that at some point, she rose from bed and didn’t even bother to put on her boots or jacket, just walked through the unforgiving cold down the stairs and entered the locked bar using Orpheus’s spare key.
Hermes walks closer, pulls a chair down from where it sits on top of the table, sits down near her. “You can be worried, girl,” he says. His voice is comforting, and that’s saying a lot, because it takes a lot these days for Eurydice to feel even the slightest bit comforted. “You’re hungry. You’re cold.”
“And Orpheus…” Eurydice trails off.
Hermes simply nods, because he knows.
Silence falls between them, but it isn’t a terrible silence. Eurydice has to wonder what it must have been like to grow up with someone like this around—someone who simply sits next to you and communicates without words that they understand and will always understand. Someone who feels familiar in a way that makes some of the weight lift from her shoulders, if only for a moment. How different would she have been if she were in Orpheus’s place?
Then Hermes says, “If you call out to him, he’ll come.”
She glances over at him. There’s a look on his face that she can’t identify. It seems almost pleading. Perhaps hopeful. She doesn’t know why this situation would warrant either of those things from someone like him.
“He will?” Eurydice asks, because she wants desperately to believe it.
“He will,” Hermes repeats, with a firmness that suggests he’s convincing himself of it just as much as she is. Which is…slightly concerning, if she thinks too hard about it, but she decides not to.
Hermes rises from the chair. He picks it up, turns it over, and sets it upside down on top of the table, the way it had been before. He walks away without another word, and Eurydice watches him with her head propped up by her hands.
If you call out to him, he’ll come.
And another voice chimes in: I’m gonna hold you forever.
She understood the vows underneath that. I’ll always be at your side. I won’t let you go. Say my name, and there I’ll be. But it has taken much longer for her to commit those promises to heart and memory.
Sitting alone in the bar, Eurydice allows herself to believe them.
In the middle of a storm as she makes her way back to the station, three almost-familiar people ambush her.
They take her rucksack. They have to rip it out of her hands, and if she held onto it any tighter the seams would rip, but they manage to take it from her. They almost take the red carnation in her pocket, too, but she twists away from them and does her best to keep it from falling out. It’s wilting, starting to rot, but it’s the only thing she has left, and it’s the only gift she can remember receiving.
They reach for her coat, and as they’re pulling it off her shoulders she takes Hermes’s advice.
“Orpheus!” she shouts, voice raw as she fights to keep the coat. “Orpheus!”
His name is carried off into the wind. She knows it’s nonsensical to think he would hear her considering how terrible the storm is, how the rain is drowning her voice out, but she still feels a pang in her heart when she doesn’t receive a response.
Shelter us, she thinks. She sinks to the ground, her belongings gone entirely. The rain is soaking her to the bone. If she stays out in it much longer, she’ll be dead, but she can’t bring herself to get up and walk. She curls up into a ball, flinching as cold drops of rain hit her face. You said you would shelter us. You said you would harbor me. Where are you? Orpheus, where are you now?
The only answer is the pounding of the rain against the ground and the crack of thunder over her head.