Work Text:
Winter is tough. Times are hard. Nobody comes to the bar anymore. Eurydice is used to being self-sufficient, but not in conditions like this. Snow drifts almost over her head. Freezing rain. Days on end where the sun does not come out. She mends holes in her coat and slips cardboard into her boots for more insulation.
Then one day, a blessing comes. There’s a crab apple tree tucked back in the woods. Its branches grow gnarled in every direction, searching for sunlight. She feels an odd kinship for the tree. She is searching too. She has passed it before, but never stopped, since the lower branches are already picked bare. Some other hungry soul must have got to the fruit before her.
But today, she glances up into its boughs, and notices mottled red and green fruit hanging up high. Whoever had passed here before must have been unable to get these apples. The astringent fruits will not be pleasant. But they are sustenance.
Before she has much time to think, she throws her satchel on the ground at the tree’s base. She scrambles up it, hand over hand. The bark scrapes her skin and twigs catch in her clothes. She does not slow down. When she reaches the canopy, her arms and legs are shaking. Painfully, she realizes how weak she’s become.
She picks apples one after another, letting them fall to the ground. She winces as each one thumps on the ground, hoping that they do not bruise, and that none roll away. Hopefully the snow will cushion the landing.
She picks with urgency, as if the tree will notice her if she goes too slowly. What will she do with this blessing? She has eaten raw crab apples before, and they are so sour that it’s barely tolerable. Maybe she will cook them down into an applesauce of sorts. She has no sugar, but it will have to do.
When the tree is bare, she drops to the ground and stumbles. The freezing wind blows powdery snow off of the drifts and into her eyes. She pulls her coat tighter around herself, praying that she has not torn any holes in it.
On the way home, the two dozen golf-ball sized fruits rattle around in the bottom of her backpack. She holds the bag to her chest, with her arms wrapped around it, as if someone will try to rip it out of her hands.
She trudges back to the station, back to the little island of warmth in this barren world. Hermes eyes her as she knocks snow out of her boots on the rug just inside the door. Sometimes he looks at her with pity. Sometimes he smiles. He knows about their plight, of course. But he cannot solve their problems for them. Eurydice knows this. She knows he cannot show such favoritism. But sometimes in moments she’s not entirely proud of, she burns with contempt for him. Hermes can do many things. So why can’t he keep them from starving?
She shakes it off with the snow on her shoulders. She can’t pretend to know the ways of the gods. All she can do is keep moving forward.
She tromps upstairs to Orpheus’s room. Even though she has lived here for almost a year now, she still finds herself calling it his instead of theirs. There aren’t many places in this world that have ever been hers.
She hears strumming as she approaches the door. She sighs. The sound of his lyre used to feel like safety to her. He would write poems for her that made her blush, feeling special in a way that nobody had ever made her feel before. They spent that time, her first summer at the station, laying in the sun, entangled in each other’s arms, feeling like this would never end.
But it did. Hades came for his wife too soon, and within a week, it was snowing.
She plops her bag down on the bed. Orpheus is sitting at his desk, alternately scribbling in his little red notebook, strumming his lyre, and humming to himself. He does not look up when she enters.
“Orpheus?” she asks. “I found some apples.” She glances at his notes, trying to understand what it is that he is working towards. She cannot read music, so it is futile.
He hums, and plucks another chord. His back is turned to her. This is normal, these days. Since the winter came, he has slowly been growing more invested in his work. First, he worked on it in his free time. Then it became all evening. Then he started waking up early. It was not too long until he stopped showing up to work in the bar. Eurydice figures that somewhere along the road to the situation they are in now, there must have been a tipping point. Could she have pulled him out of this obsession if she had tried harder? Tried earlier?
Now, he stays up late every night. Some nights, he never comes to bed. Eurydice will wake up to find him asleep at his desk, papers sprawled out under his sleeping body.
His endless work is wearing on him. He’s grown almost as thin as Eurydice, and that’s not just because times are hard. Whenever she tries to coax some soup or oatmeal into him, he turns away and mumbles that he’ll be done with the song soon, so soon, any minute now, and he cannot stop until he does.
She feels helpless in these moments. He’s absolutely lost in this task, and she cannot even blame him for it. If this song can do what he says it can, their hardships will end. The two of them just need to bear it until it is over.
She comes up behind him and wraps her arms around him. For a moment, he pauses and looks at her. He lays his hand over hers and Eurydice feels something like hope.
“Orpheus,” she whispers. Tears prick at the corners of her eyes.
“Eurydice,” he mutters. He strokes his thumb over the back of her hand. She holds eye contact, because these tender moments between them have become rarer than the apples weighing heavy in her backpack.
She does not say anything. She holds him, rocking subtly side to side, she knows to treasure this moment, because it will not be long before his eyes glaze over and divine inspiration pulls him away from her.
“Do you want something to eat?” she asks.
“Soon, I’m almost done. I just need to- to figure out this passage. Then I’ll be done,” Orpheus says.
Eurydice knows that it isn’t true.
“...Okay,” she whispers. She presses a kiss to the top of his head. Orpheus blinks several times, and she can see his eyes going glassy again as he’s pulled back to his song. She lets him go.
She grabs her satchel and leaves the room. When she goes back downstairs, the bar is empty. It’s cold down there. The fireplace is barely burning. She sits on the floor in front of it, and covers her face with her hands. Tears roll silently down her face. She feels like she is being torn apart.
Orpheus has gone from an equal to someone she must care for. His work is important, critically so. It could end these horribly lean times they live in. But she is alone. Devastatingly so. And even though she’s been alone many times, it feels sharper this time. Stabbing.
She hugs her knees to her chest and tries to ignore the yawning void in her stomach.
When she finally picks herself up off the ground, it’s because she can’t stop thinking about the crab apples in her backpack. They loom tantalizingly, her bag slung over the corner of one of the chairs. She envisions biting into one raw, desperate like an animal. But she knows that they aren’t good that way. She needs to have some patience.
She pulls a saucepan from the cabinets in the bar’s little kitchen. Peeling the apples is more effort than it’s worth, and she knows there are nutrients hidden in their skins. So she just chops them up as is. Most of the apples are bruised, at least a little. She puts them in anyway. She can’t afford to waste anything.
One apple is so soft Eurydice almost puts her thumb through it. She should definitely not eat that one. She puts it aside for now. She scrapes the rest of the apples into the saucepan. She can’t help but pop one little chunk in her mouth. The sour, bitter flavor explodes in her mouth, making it go dry. These are barely tolerable raw. They will not be much better cooked. But they are food. That’s what she needs, and that’s what Orpheus needs.
She adds some water and boils the apples down, making a rustic sort of applesauce. Steam drifts up from the saucepan. While it boils, her mind drifts. She thinks of the remaining crab apple. It’s a small thing.
She stares at it.
It stares back.
She’s always been hungry. She’s always held on to what she has, as hard as possible. And now there is something in front of her that will go to waste if someone does not take advantage of it. When was the last time they had fruit?
She feels insane and bestial. She knows she shouldn’t.
She’s always been hungry.
Before she knows what she’s doing, she snatches up the apple and bites into it. It is soft and vinegary, in a way that makes her instinctually want to reject it. But there is a stronger instinct in her head. The instinct to grab on and never let go. To fight for her life.
She swallows. It goes down like concrete.
It is sweeter than it should be. Something in her mind tells her that this is not a good sign. But before she can doubt herself, she takes another quick bite, swallowing quickly to avoid the foul taste.
She scrapes the core with her teeth, trying to eke out any last vestiges of nutrition. It’s when she finds herself crunching down on the seeds that she stops. She feels like an animal.
She drops the remainder of the woody core back onto the counter. The taste of the fruit coats the inside of her mouth, thick and sour. It tastes like rot.
She doesn’t feel any better after she does it. But otherwise it would have just been thrown away, so it’s a necessary evil.
When the applesauce is done, she pours it into two metal bowls. She scrapes the saucepan out as thoroughly as she can. The warmth seeps through the bowls, into her hands. She carries them back upstairs, to the room they share.
Orpheus is still working. He’s doing lyrics now, mumbling under his breath. She plonks one of the bowls on the desk beside his notebook.
“Orpheus,” she murmurs. “Food.”
Luckily, she doesn’t have to convince him this time. He blinks dreamily at her and takes the bowl. He brings the spoon to his mouth and his eyes widen. She can’t blame him. It’s quite tart. The shock seems to bring him back to the world, a bit. His gaze clears a little.
“Wow, that’s- What is this, Eurydice?” He asks.
“Crab apples,” she replies. She doesn’t mention that she already told him.
“It’s good,” he smiles. She sits on the bed with her bowl. They eat in silence. Eurydice thinks that maybe she should take this chance to talk to him, to actually talk for the first time in a while, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know what to say.
She’s tired. She doesn’t know how much longer the two of them can go on like this.
When she finishes, she puts her bowl on the desk to be dealt with later. She notices that Orpheus has also finished his bowl. That isn’t always a given with him, recently.
It’s only the afternoon, but she can barely keep her eyes open. “Orpheus, I’m gonna go to sleep,” she mumbles. He hums in acknowledgement, already turning back to his work. She takes off her coat and lays down, bone tired.
She falls asleep to the strumming of his lyre, thinking about what it used to mean to her. Thinking of summer.