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The walls close behind him as Orpheus steps inside of Hadestown. He doesn’t pay that much mind. After all, the stones let him in once, so he knows they will again. He has much more prominent things on his mind. He needs to find Eurydice and take her home.
His lyre knocks against his back as he walks. He would try to hide from the lights as much as he can, because that’s what Hermes told him to do, but nearly every part of Hadestown is illuminated. It’s so bright that for a moment, he wonders if Hades brought the sun down along with Persephone. But the light buzzes in a way that sunshine wouldn’t, and though it’s a warm light objectively—an amber that makes everything around it have a slightly orange tint—it doesn’t feel warm the way the sun does. The warmth that is there comes from somewhere else, something that makes the ground rumble underneath Orpheus’s feet. It’s stifling, edging on unbearable, even after he’s been in the cold for so long.
He thinks it’s nighttime. Or whatever the version of nighttime is down here. The lights remain on. It looks mostly deserted, only a few people here and there that Orpheus thinks he would be able to recognize if only they would look up. Their eyes remain on the ground, and none of them see him. He lingers on the factory floor for longer than he should, searching for someone. He waits to see her step out of the few sections of shadow around him. He turns in a circle, reaches back to check that his lyre is still there, steadying himself when she doesn’t show.
She’s just somewhere else, he tells himself. She’s not here right now, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t here at all.
He isn’t very familiar with this kind of doubt. He’s felt doubt, to be sure, but that doubt is usually turned inward and is more like nervousness than anything. He’s never been doubtful when it relates to Eurydice. Orpheus has always been sure whenever it’s about her.
He doesn’t know what to think about this kind of doubt. It’s small, barely a whisper, but it’s there, and he’s aware of it with a deep sense of discomfort.
It takes him a moment to realize that there are hands on his shoulders.
He turns, trying to get out of their grip, but they only hold him tighter. They predict his moves and adjust. One pair of hands yanks his own behind his back. Another pair drags him by the arms. A third pair wraps around his neck.
In panic, he tries to choke out Eurydice’s name. Maybe she’ll hear him. Maybe she’ll come find him. His voice doesn’t work. He’s pulled out of the light of the factory floor, and he discovers that there’s a lot more darkness here than he first thought. The alley is so dimly lit that he can only make out the outlines of faces, and nothing else.
The three people say something to him, something else to each other. Then they beat him half to death.
Hades doesn’t seem to care that Orpheus’s nose is bleeding, that he’s covered in cuts and bruises, that his clothing is stained with dirt and blood and sweat. He doesn’t even care when someone takes Orpheus’s lyre from him and he reaches out in distress to take it back. She smiles, shakes the lyre from side to side tauntingly. Orpheus grimaces, making a pained noise in the back of his throat. Hades just fixes him with a stony-eyed stare as if none of that is happening.
“Why are you here, boy?” he asks.
Orpheus flinches. He doesn’t expect Hades’s voice to sound the way it does. He remembers it being impossibly deep, but it wasn’t intimidating the way it is now. Up top, he softened its edges for his wife. Down here he has no one to perform for.
Orpheus has no one to perform for either. So with a flatness and firmness he doesn’t recognize, he answers, “I’m here for Eurydice.”
“For Eurydice,” Hades echoes. He thinks about the name for a moment, his eyes never leaving Orpheus’s face. “I don’t believe there’s a Eurydice on the factory floor. Not anymore.”
That makes his knees buckle. Orpheus stumbles. His hands reach for his lyre strap, the way they often do; a habit formed during the walk to Hadestown whenever he lost his footing or missed a step. He finds only empty air. Right—they took it.
The gods gave me that lyre, his mind whispers feebly.
“She’s—she isn’t there?” Orpheus stammers.
“She hasn’t been there for a long time,” Hades tells him. He doesn’t say it with any kind of pleasure. He’s just pragmatic, the statement unadorned and dry. This is the way the world is.
Orpheus is silent for a while, dropping his gaze, unsure what to say next. Something in him says that Hades has to be wrong, that Eurydice is still in Hadestown somewhere, but he can’t explain how he knows. He just knows that somehow, he’ll find her. He has to.
He takes a shuddering breath and looks back up at Hades. So what do I do now?
Hades seems to understand what he’s asking, even if he doesn’t say it aloud. Wordlessly, he pushes a piece of paper towards Orpheus.
Orpheus looks down at it. “What’s that?” he asks.
“You don’t think I would simply let you leave,” Hades says, like Orpheus should have known.
His blood runs cold. He doesn’t take his eyes off the paper. “I thought—”
What did he think? Staring at the paper, trying to read the words, Orpheus isn’t really sure how to finish the thought. In every possible variation of this walk, he found Eurydice and took her home. He never considered not even getting there. His mind hadn’t allowed him to plan for a reality where he didn’t reach her.
“Can I…” Orpheus debates asking the question for a moment. He swallows. “Can I look for her? If I—sign that?”
Hades examines him closely. Orpheus shivers. “Look for her?” Hades repeats. “Your first priority is your work.” Orpheus flinches at the hardness in his tone. “But your second…I suppose your second could be looking for her. If that’s what you decide matters.”
Something about his wording doesn’t feel right, but Orpheus latches onto what he can: that he has the chance to find her. That’s all he needs. He’ll sign whatever Hades hands him, he’ll do whatever Hades wants him to do, if it means he can see Eurydice again. Orpheus tugs at the bandanna around his neck and nods.
“You agree to leave everything behind? To exchange your life for a better purpose?”
Brow furrowing, Orpheus says, “Yes.”
Hades thinks a better purpose is work. But Orpheus knows that his better purpose is Eurydice. He holds onto that as he signs his name and is taken to the River Lethe. He knows exactly what drinking from the Lethe will do to him, but he could never forget Eurydice. He can forget everything else—the station and bar, Hermes teaching him how to play and how to sing, even his own name—but he can never forget Eurydice.
So he drinks.
Wait for me, he wants to tell her. It won’t be much longer now. I’ll find you. I promise.
There’s a new worker on the factory floor. The bell has not rung to start working again, and the girl is early the way she always is. She can never sleep much now, if at all, so she’s often the first up. The girl watches the newcomer curiously. His back is to her. He stands in a dark corner and struggles to strip off his old clothing to replace it with the workers’ uniform. He’s gotten the overalls halfway on and is trying to get off his shirt when the girl walks over.
She winces when she sees what’s underneath the shirt—two matching wounds on both of his shoulders, blood sticking to the fabric. Parts of his shirt are stuck inside the gashes. If she wasn’t thinking about those injuries, she would likely be wondering where he could have gotten them from, why they match so closely.
“Do you need help?” she asks.
She has no idea why she says it. It’s unusual to ask if someone needs help down here. They have an unspoken rule. The most someone is brave enough to do is cover for someone else during a shift or save a spot beside them, if they’re feeling particularly generous. Anything else is already overextending. Help is not something easily afforded.
But the boy looks up, catches her eye, and something sparks in his own. He stares at her for a long moment. “It’s you,” he whispers.
An answer springs to her lips fully formed, and she isn’t sure how she knows the words. “It’s me,” she says. Something about this boy—perhaps his eyes, dark and wide and so incredibly open—feels familiar to her. She can’t explain the feeling. She just knows that it must be what carried her over to his side. She shifts uncomfortably on her feet after she doesn’t get any response. “And who am I?”
The boy’s eyes trace her face, like he’s becoming familiar with every detail. His expression is almost confident. Like he knows something she doesn’t. But his voice wavers. “I…” He swallows and looks away, panicked. “I—don’t know.”
The girl stares at him. His brown hair falls into his eyes, and she can see his hands shaking if she pays close attention. This surprises her. She hasn’t felt the need to pay any kind of attention, let alone the close kind, to someone in a long time.
She wants to brush his hair out of his eyes and take his trembling hands in hers.
That makes her stand up a little straighter. She clears her throat. “Do you need help?” she asks him again.
The boy flinches at the question, startled by her tone of voice. But his shoulders lower. He trusts her enough to let his guard down, for some odd reason. The girl can’t deny that something similar is happening to her, too.
“...Yes,” he says.
The girl takes his hand without thinking, pulling them both over to find a place to sit. There are no benches in sight, so they have to make do with the floor itself. When they come to a stop, the boy stands there in silence, eyes locked on his hand in hers. The girl barely even notices. She places her hands carefully on his shoulders, avoiding the injuries, and gingerly presses down, prompting him to sit. He does so without any kind of complaint, and the girl sits behind him.
It feels like second nature. Her body moves naturally into position, propping her up on her knees so she can see better, and the boy doesn’t react to her touch, like he’s expecting it. He lets out a pained hiss when she starts picking parts of his shirt out of the wounds, balling his hands into fists, but that’s all.
She keeps most of what she owns on her person. It’s not that she doesn’t exactly trust anyone not to steal what she has if she leaves it unsupervised, but…well. Maybe she really doesn’t trust them. Trust isn’t something you can afford in a place like this. And she owns so little that she might as well take it with her wherever she goes.
So she pulls out a cloth meant for wiping her own sweat from one pouch at her hip, a tiny container of salve and antibiotics from another, and sacrifices some of her water to wet the cloth and scrub away the dried blood.
She uses more of the salve than she should. It’s only enough for one person, and she’ll never know when she’s going to need it. There’s not nearly enough to share, because the point is that you don’t. You keep it to yourself. The medicine is not something they can afford much of down here, same as everything else they have. They get enough to survive, and not anything more.
But she gives almost all of her medicine to the boy. Because who is she to deny him something like this?
The injuries are deep enough that the girl nearly says something. She washes away the last of the blood and looks for the bandages that she knows she should keep to wrap her own hands once they start blistering, and she bites her lip. The boy hasn’t said a word the entire time she’s been cleaning his wounds. The girl decides to keep her questions to herself. She uses up all of her bandages on the boy.
“You’re alright now,” she tells him, packing her things away.
The boy takes in a slow, quivering breath. “Thank you,” he says. She hasn’t been told something like that in a long while, and the phrase sounds foreign to her. He’ll likely forget it in time, but it warms her all the same. The girl stands and holds out a hand, again not knowing why she’s offering him a kindness like that, and he takes it and pulls himself up. He stumbles on his feet, his other hand landing against her chest, right where her heart would be.
She finds that the touch doesn’t feel entirely wrong. In fact, it takes her several seconds to even notice it. It’s only when the boy looks down at it and pulls away with a mix of embarrassment, fear, and reluctance that she becomes fully aware of it. In its absence she feels cold; is she always this cold, and only just now realizing it?
“The bell’s going to ring soon,” she says, wrapping her arms around herself. “Be ready for it.”
The boy nods slowly. He turns his attention to the clothing in his hands. He separates a red bandanna from everything else, considers it, and shoves it in the pocket of his overalls. The fabric is a little faded, but it’s still too vibrant against the dark browns and greys of his uniform.
“They’re going to take that away,” she blurts, something like panic in her voice.
The boy shrugs. “Maybe,” he responds, and the girl is taken aback enough by his reaction that she doesn’t say anything more. The bell rings, the rest of the workers appear out of the shadows, and the girl stands staring at the boy for a second too long as everyone else gets to work.
The next morning—or, what counts as morning on the factory floor—the boy drifts over to her again. Or she drifts over to him. Maybe both. One way or the other, they’re next to each other before the bell rings, standing in silence.
Then the girl asks the question that’s been on her mind since their first meeting. “Earlier,” she begins, “when you saw me…it was like you knew me from somewhere. And I—” She stops herself there, continues on as if the pause never happened while ignoring the questioning look in the boy’s eyes. “Did you? Know me, I mean?”
The boy takes her in for a moment. “I said that?” he asks.
“You don’t—”
The girl cuts off, and the boy just looks straight at her. His expression is unnerving.
“That…feels right, I think,” the boy says after a long while. He sounds just as disturbed at the fact that he doesn’t remember as she is. He’s staring hard at the ground, like he can will the memory to come back. “But—”
There’s a pressing tightness in the girl’s chest. Did she forget this quickly too? Did she just not notice, because no one was there to remind her she’d forgotten?
“I remember you,” the boy says quickly. He’s grasping at whatever he has, she can tell by the desperation in his voice. He grabs her hand. It feels like they’ve done this before; her body can recall it even if her mind can’t, and she gives the boy’s hand a squeeze. “I remember you sitting behind me and wrapping me up. And…”
He trails off, leaving behind an alarm that fizzles in the air between them. He squeezes her hand back, swaying on his feet.
“It’s okay,” the girl says, because she doesn’t know what else to say.
Shutting his eyes tightly, the boy says, “It’s not.”
The girl frowns. She opens her mouth to say something.
Then the bell rings, and when the boy doesn’t move a millimeter, she pulls him into the circle to hide his hesitation, just in case they’re being watched.
They both end in Hadestown, but they get there in different ways.
The girl had a ticket, the way most of the workers did. She took the train and emerged from it squinting at the bright lights, her hands rising to her ears to block the buzzing all around her. She tried to find her footing through the steam covering the ground. Persephone stood at a distance, watching her, and the girl looked straight back, her eyes flickering with guilt.
The boy did not have a ticket. The boy walked. The walls opened for him and let him inside, which was a miracle in and of itself, but that didn’t matter to him. Only one thing did, and that was why he kept walking. He could barely stay on his feet. His shirt was bloody. The lyre on his back was stolen from him and destroyed, carried off to feed the furnace while he reached for it with desperate hands.
What they have in common is the way they react to Persephone. While the other workers lose themselves with a quickness that can bring her to her knees, the boy and the girl don’t. They retain something from their life before Hadestown, and that something is what makes them gravitate towards their Lady of the Underground. When Persephone walks on the factory floor at night to make an attempt at family with the workers, when she takes strolls to avoid her husband’s bed, the boy and girl are often there. They appear without fail, sitting in front of her or following after her. The boy especially has a knack for finding her, and he listens to her the most intently. The girl is a little less interested, but she goes wherever the boy does, always right on his heels.
It hurts, because Persephone knows exactly who this girl and boy used to be even if they don’t. She knows the reason why they’re joined at the hip, reaching for each other whenever they have the chance and sitting beside each other during breaks and understanding each other without words, is because they did the same thing when they still had names and lives.
But Persephone also enjoys the company. She likes pretending that she isn’t speaking with two people who have lost most of their memories of their life above, but the versions of them that she laughed and danced with in a bar or walked with in a field during the summer.
She likes having an audience. And the boy and girl like to listen.
They’re already waiting for her one night on the factory floor. They sit huddled together just inside the circle of light, exchanging a few words here and there, but remaining mostly silent. Their shoulders touch, and the boy traces the lines on the girl’s palm. The girl keeps an eye out for Persephone to appear.
Persephone stands in the darkness, listening. This scene is similar to the one she would often see up top, and she got used to hearing a soft, melodic humming underneath the buzz of chatter or cutting through the easy lapse of conversation.
The boy doesn’t sing anymore. Not that she’s heard. It slips another shard of glass into her heart every time she strains her ears for the sound. In signing the contract, in forgetting his life before, he forgot how to sing.
Persephone lets out a breath and steps into the light, and the girl sits up a little straighter and nudges the boy. The boy looks up, his eyes lock on Persephone, and he smiles. It’s a soft smile, subdued and a little cautious. Not the unguarded beaming that Persephone wishes she could see again. The boy’s eyes have gotten a little dimmer with each day that has passed, his excitement a little fainter. Persephone has started counting the days more consistently now that the boy and girl are here. She marks the time through the way they change, though those changes are ones she wishes wouldn’t happen.
As she walks, the boy and girl get to their feet, following behind her. Persephone takes the same route that she usually does, feet carrying her across the factory floor, through the open corridors, snaking around until she’s back where she started. Everything leads back to work here, it seems. But she’d rather be here than at the outskirts. She can forget about the Wall much more easily when she can see only the top of it.
When she returns to the factory floor, she sighs and stops. The boy and girl stop just after her, and when she turns around, they’re both looking at her with matching expressions. Waiting for her to say something. They never speak first, no matter how many times she’s told them they can. Maybe that’s part of the contract too. Should she simply be glad they can even speak at all?
“What do you miss?” she asks them.
They blink at her in unison. “What?” the girl asks.
“From up above,” Persephone clarifies. “What do you miss from your old life?” She retrieves her flask from her dress, waiting for an answer. When she gets none, she provides them things of her own. “Spring flowers,” she sighs. “Autumn leaves.” Then, closing her eyes for a moment and pretending the heat she feels is from something else, she says, “The sky.”
Silence. She opens her eyes and glances over at them, and she sees them both searching for something and coming up empty. When she sees the boy reach out for the girl, the same ritual that they go through every time one of them is unsure of themselves, Persephone answers her question for them: What each of them misses most is already here, right beside them.
She wonders if she can remind them of the other things they might miss.
Persephone takes a swig from her flask, corks it, and holds it out to the boy.
The boy looks down at it. The confusion on his face—the wide eyes and raised eyebrows and slightly pursed lips—is a confusion that Persephone has seen on him before. It aches in the pit of her chest for her to think about how much she’s seen him like this, how she’s able to recognize it immediately from just how many summers she’s watched him grow up and grow into his voice, and know that he remembers none of it and likely never will.
And his voice is smaller than she recalls it to be. It always is now, but it still catches her off-guard every time they talk to each other. True, the boy was more confident when he was singing, but his speaking voice was still more substantial than it is now. “What is it?” he asks her, his head downturned but eyes flicking up to Persephone’s face.
Persephone shakes the flask gently so he can hear the sound of liquid inside. “The closest thing to summertime we’ve got,” she tells him. She reaches down and takes his wrist, and he almost pulls away before something else in him overrides that and lets Persephone lift his hand and turn it so his palm is up. She gives him the flask.
The girl stands on tiptoes behind the boy, peering over his shoulder. They both understand what’s inside the flask in the same moment. The boy stiffens, and the girl drifts closer to him, reaching subconsciously for the hand that still hangs at his side. Hesitantly, the boy lifts the flask, uncorks the stopper, and takes a sniff. It’s ironic, considering how much time he’s spent around liquor before this, but he doesn’t know that. Persephone simply has to watch and pretend she doesn’t remember him in a bar as he wrinkles his nose at the flask’s contents and looks back up at her like he isn’t sure what she wants him to do with it. The girl leans forward, and the boy passes the flask to her without looking. She has a similar reaction, narrowing her eyes before giving the flask straight back.
What Persephone drinks is stronger stuff than what they serve at the bar up top. The boy was never the most interested in those things anyway, though she saw him get drunk once or twice. It was fun to sing with him then. The girl never seemed to care one way or the other about drinking; she drank because it was given to her, and that was all.
The fact that this liquor wasn’t made for the mortal soul isn’t the only thing that gives them pause. It’s being offered to them by Persephone herself, and that isn’t something they can just ignore.
The boy looks at her questioningly. “Why?” he asks.
“It’s my job to provide for you,” Persephone tells him. Too much care creeps into her voice, residue from her memories of him up top. She amends it by adding, “For all of you.”
“No,” the boy says. “Why is it the closest thing to summertime we’ve got?”
That startles her. In the boy’s eyes is a spark—a spark not unlike the one she remembers. It’s more subdued, but it’s there. Persephone tilts her head. For a moment, the boy holds her gaze, daring her to answer. Then he locks down again, like he’s coming back to himself. Aware of their situation and his place in it. He looks away.
“I don’t know,” Persephone answers him. Because really, she doesn’t.
Maybe she could do something to change it. Maybe in another world, she’s brave enough. Maybe she could rally people together and stand up and do something to fix what’s broken.
But she’s stuck. It’s infuriating, but she’s stuck. And she doesn’t know how to get herself out.
Persephone turns her attention to the girl and sees an emotion in her that she recognizes. The girl watches the boy’s face intently, trying to catch his gaze, lifting her hand to graze his shoulder. Silently asking him a question. Persephone caught a similar look when she was being taken back to Hadestown, just before she lost sight of them.
Neither of them even know how close they are to remembering.
“Drink,” Persephone says, motioning to the flask.
The boy considers it. He takes a small sip, winces, hands it to the girl. When the girl has done the same and given it back, he stares at the flask with wide eyes, an eerie expression on his face. He doesn’t look up for a very long time.
And as always, the girl’s eyes are only for the boy, like a sunflower drawn to light.
The boy is fine for the first shift. He’s next to the girl, the way he always is. He does what he’s supposed to. There’s an air about him that feels off; the girl disregards that for a while. Something has changed, but he’s still working, and that’s what matters.
When the bell signals their break, he starts leaving her side. He puts more distance between them, though it isn’t of his own accord. He just wanders, and the girl finds him in a dark corner, staring nearly straight up, his eyes on the Wall. The bell rings, the girl grabs his hand and hurries back to work, the boy lets her tug him along.
The next day he’s gone entirely, and this time the girl doesn’t follow after him. She worries that if she leaves her work for too long, someone will notice, someone will punish her. And she shouldn’t want to leave anyway; he shouldn’t want to leave. This provides for them. Perhaps only enough for survival, but it gives them what they need. It takes care of them. She loves it. How can she not, when it keeps her alive?
The boy drifts in once when the rest of them are working, but doesn’t join them. The girl stares at him, willing him to feel her gaze and look back at her. He doesn’t. He watches the workers as they swing their pickaxes and hammers, then lifts his head and turns in a circle.
He stops when his eyes land on the balcony looming over them. His shoulders rise to his ears, and he freezes.
All the girl can think is that he’s lucky Hades isn’t overseeing them. Otherwise, the boy wouldn’t be standing. He’d be made an example of, he’d be beaten and mocked and maybe the few comforts afforded to him would be taken away to teach him a lesson.
She wants to call for him and get his attention, but she doesn’t know of a name to use. There’s one on her tongue for a moment, so brief that she loses it before she can even make out its shape. And they don’t have any kind of nickname for each other. So, raising her voice and hoping it can be heard over the sound of machinery, the girl shouts, “Hey!”
The boy recognizes her voice immediately, but it takes him a second to find her. He turns back to her sluggishly, like he’s coming out of a haze.
“You need to get back to it,” she tells him, and she hopes that he knows it’s not an order, but a plea.
The boy’s head tilts. She sees something in his eyes as he looks into hers, a kind of hunger that feels familiar in a way that doesn’t make sense. The girl’s brow furrows.
The bell rings before the boy can take a step, though the girl assumes that he probably wouldn’t have done that anyway. She drops everything and walks over to him, grabbing him by the arms.
“I don’t know what you’re doing,” she says. Their foreheads press together. “But—you can’t. Okay? It’s not more important than this. I promise.”
The boy smiles at her. “I’m working on something,” he tells her. He’s pretending that he hasn’t heard everything else she’s said, and he doesn’t seem the slightest bit ashamed about it.
The working that he speaks about definitely isn’t the kind that matters to the girl. So she huffs in frustration and asks, “And what is that, exactly?”
The boy’s eyes glint. They’re suddenly, feverishly intense, and the girl flinches back.
“A song,” he grins.