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Persephone knows the moment the Wall opens. And just as immediately, she knows that isn’t something that just happens on its own. She knows who has caused it, because there’s only one person she knows of who could have done it. Who else could have performed a miracle like that? But she doesn’t know what happens to him until, in the middle of her search for him—a search turning fearful because of how she can’t find him anywhere, and knows that it’s dangerous for someone like him to be alone in a place like this for too long—she sees someone carrying something familiar.
A lyre. A lyre with a leather strap. Pristine, because he’d always taken care of it even on the worst of days.
She freezes in place, and then she’s walking again, steps quickening, trying to catch up to the woman with the lyre. You’re holding it wrong, she almost says. You’re going to break it. He’d never hold it like that. He always…
Her thoughts start to fall over each other as she realizes the direction they’re going.
“No,” she whispers.
Her voice doesn’t carry. The woman doesn’t stop. Persephone follows behind, squinting at the glow and shuddering at the heat as it continues to build. And she rounds the corner just in time to see the boy’s lyre thrown into the furnace.
The woman leaves immediately. But Persephone gives it the dignity she thinks it deserves. She watches it die, because the boy can’t, and she knows that something in him must have died with the lyre. Can he sense it? Does he know that it’s gone? She rarely saw the two apart; it was always across his back or just near enough that he could reach over and pick it up whenever the mood struck him. What must have happened for them to get his instrument away from him?
Persephone watches as the wood is eaten up by the flames, as the strings curl and pop and melt. The lyre is a pile of ash and soot long before she turns around.
And she sees him standing at the edge of the room, eyes on the furnace, reflecting the fire back at her. He holds clothing in his hands, the dull brown makeup of a worker’s uniform, and Persephone takes a step back without thinking.
“You didn’t,” she says, her voice coming out too loud.
The boy’s eyes lift from the flames and focus on her. He presses his arms further into his sides, head lowering, but his gaze remains fixed on Persephone’s.
How did you know the way to the furnace? she wants to ask him. The boy speaks instead, his voice a little rough.
“What did they burn?”
Persephone closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to see the emptiness in his. Part of him must know exactly what burned, and that part must be what carried him here despite how he shouldn’t know the way. But the Lethe is already doing its work. It seems like it takes faster and faster with each month.
“Something important,” Persephone answers.
The boy hums, nodding like he understands. His brow furrows, and he holds his folded uniform close to his chest. He’s searching for where that understanding could come from, unsettled by how he’s coming up empty. Persephone has seen the same thing happen with so many others. But it feels worse seeing it happen with him.
Persephone steps up to him and touches his shoulder, and he flinches, recoiling automatically with a pained expression. Blood coats the palm of her hand. She reaches up and cups his cheek.
Eyes stinging as she stares into the boy’s, she thinks, I’m so sorry.
Persephone is approaching the factory floor, the same way she’s done every night for months, when she hears a familiar sound.
She has to stop for a moment, propping herself up against the wall with one hand, wobbling on her feet. She focuses hard on the sound and makes sure she’s not imagining it.
She isn’t. Someone is humming.
She steadies herself and walks to the edge of the factory floor. Sitting right in the middle is the boy, staring up at the balcony with his head tilted and his expression thoughtful. As always, the girl is at his side, but her eyes are closed and her head rests against his shoulder. That makes Persephone sigh in relief; she doesn’t remember seeing the girl get much meaningful sleep since she’s gotten here. The boy doesn’t notice the weight consciously, but sits so he can support it. His humming is soft and a bit raspier than Persephone remembers. She can’t find it in her to care if his voice has changed. She’s just reeling over the fact that she’s hearing it at all.
Persephone stands in the light, but it takes the boy some time to notice. His eyes lower from the balcony and find her. He smiles at her, just as he usually does, and this smile feels different to her. More alive.
“Persephone,” he says.
She jumps. “Yes,” she responds, though that’s not much of a response at all. This is the first time that a worker has been the first to speak in a conversation. It’s also the first time one of them hasn’t used an honorific before her name. It catches her off-guard. Confusion curling in the pit of her stomach, Persephone asks, “What are you doing?”
The boy glances back up at the balcony. “Just…thinking,” he says after a moment.
“About?”
The skin around his eyes tightens. When he turns his gaze on her again, she sees something burning there, something she’s never seen from him before. He opens his mouth, and Persephone finds herself bracing for whatever comes out. But he just closes it again and shrugs like he doesn’t know, despite how it looks quite the opposite.
Persephone walks to his other side and sits beside him.
“She’s alright?” she asks, nodding towards the girl.
The boy straightens and looks down at the girl. He huffs, and Persephone takes a moment to realize it’s a laugh, fond and slightly afraid. “She’s fine,” he says. “I think she’s just tired of me.”
Is that a joke? Though there seems to be some seriousness to his words, because he sighs and stares at his lap, hands resting on his knees.
“Why would that be?”
“She says I need to stop coming out here,” the boy says. This is the most talkative he’s been since he signed his contract. It sets Persephone on edge. Why is this happening? “She tells me that I go here too much. I think she’s worried.”
She always is when it’s you, Persephone almost says, but she catches herself before she does.
Instead she says, “Worried about what?”
“I don’t—there’s…something,” the boy answers with frustration. He lifts a hand and gestures around his eyes, then near his chest. “There’s something here that’s…I don’t understand it. I thought I had it, and then I tried to figure more of it out, and it…”
He trails off. The girl mumbles something in her sleep, shifting and pressing her cheek further into the boy’s arm. He doesn’t seem to notice, just keeps his hand on his chest, eyes going dim.
Persephone drops a hand lightly on his free shoulder. He flinches, and when he looks up at her, something in his face feels different. He’s examining her, taking in each feature of her face, and maybe seeing something else too.
“It’s alright,” she tells him.
The boy shakes his head. That leaves her more troubled than anything else he’s said.
“I’ve noticed,” Hades says, “that you haven’t been working as of late.”
The boy stands on the other side of Hades’s desk. His arms aren’t pinned behind his back, but he can feel the threat from the two women at both of his sides. They’re close enough that he can feel their breath. The third lurks by the door, hand on the doorknob to ensure no one interrupts them. Hades’s door has a lock, so it’s mostly for show. It makes the boy feel trapped. He tries to pretend it doesn’t. He squares his shoulders.
“I’ve worked,” the boy says.
Hades raises an eyebrow. He didn’t expect any kind of response. Honestly, the boy didn’t either, and he averts his eyes immediately, wincing.
“Not enough,” Hades says after a moment. His eyes bore into the boy, and he leans forward in his seat. “There is always more to be done. So why must you walk away?”
There are a few ways in which he could answer, and the majority of them he doesn’t see ending very well. Something draws him away. Flashes of things—he tries to catch them, but he’s never fast enough. They leave him with the impression of words on his tongue, sometimes phantom feelings in his limbs or the beginnings of a headache. He lets his feet carry him and finds himself in a place he doesn’t remember knowing the way to. If he thinks too hard about the song, he’ll lose his way entirely and spend hours trying to navigate the twisting corridors and narrow roads of Hadestown so he can get back to the factory floor.
He goes with the safest option. Which isn’t very safe at all, because none of his options are, but he’ll cross his fingers and hope for the best. Deep down he knows that he won’t get the best even if he fights for it, but he’ll try anyway. He’ll try to get out of this. The girl would want that, right?
The boy lifts his chin and says, “I don’t know.”
Hades goes very still, and as the boy is scrutinized by that steely glare, any kind of defiance leaves him. He bows his head and shuts his eyes. Something about this scene feels terribly familiar to him, and in a moment of panic the boy reaches out. His hand searches blindly for the girl’s (or for something else?), but it isn’t there. Of course it isn’t. She isn’t there. He’s alone.
“Would you like a reminder?” Hades asks him.
The women each take one of the boy’s arms. They pull them tightly behind him, hard enough that he whimpers.
I don’t know what you’re doing, the girl whispers in the back of his mind. It’s not more important than this.
He understands her clearly as the women beat him. He coughs up blood and forgets how to breathe. It hurts to stand up straight, and maybe that’s the point. His eyes dart to Hades, and the god doesn’t even rise from his chair. He just watches with grim satisfaction, dismisses him, and turns his attention to the documents on his desk before the boy is even out of the room.
The door slams behind him. He makes his way down the staircase, one slow step at a time. The workers on the factory floor glance up at him briefly, know exactly what has happened, and then go back to their tasks. For some reason their collective reaction sets the boy’s blood boiling, but he doesn’t know why. The thought that sparked that anger has been shattered into pieces, beaten out of him in the office of the man who controls him.
Even the girl doesn’t react to him. Not until the bell rings, and even then her worry is subdued. She approaches him, takes his face in her hands, and looks into his eyes meaningfully.
“Don’t you know that this is all we have?” she asks him.
He nods silently. The energy that isn’t going towards fueling the fire in his gut is being used to keep himself upright. He wobbles on his feet. The girl steps closer and moves her hands down to his elbows, supporting him.
“So don’t ruin it.”
The boy’s head lolls to the side before he catches himself. “I—”
The girl interrupts him by knocking their foreheads together. She breathes out shakily. He places both hands on her chest. Then she’s gone, turning on her heel to exit the factory floor.
She’s angry with me, is the only thought in the boy’s mind as he watches her go. He manages to grab the railing of the stairs, and he leans heavily against it. She doesn’t know what I know.
His gaze moves naturally to the balcony, just as his mind moves to the unsettling emptiness where there used to be something important. An emptiness occasionally filled every time he gets one of those flashes, only to gape wider and darker as they disappear.
And what do I know?
The guitar is mounted on the wall of a room Persephone nearly forgot existed. It’s pushed aside. A time capsule of what was. The room is well taken care of, everything in its place, but a layer of dust settles over everything. Hades has not been in this room for a long time, and Persephone doesn’t remember so much as venturing down the hallway this room is in for even longer.
The pressed flowers are from her. It brings a soft smile to her lips; Hades kept each one, preserved them carefully, framed as many as he could and then stored the rest elsewhere when he ran out of room. There are some memorabilia from their early marriage that Persephone barely remembers receiving. She wonders if Hades has a clearer memory of them.
She walks slowly across the room, heels clicking on the dark tiles, and stops in front of the guitar. She hasn’t laid eyes on it in a good while, and simply looking at it sparks the memory of a blurry face from a sunny afternoon centuries ago. Persephone stands there furrowing her brow, trying to see the details of that face, uncomfortable because she knows that it’s something she should be able to put together. The features of that face don’t get any clearer. She pushes the image out of her mind and reaches up with shaking hands to take the guitar down from the wall.
It’s heavier than she expects it to be. She doesn’t recall the boy’s lyre being this heavy, not from the few times she held it. Perhaps she’s imagining the extra weight. She runs a hand over the black wood, takes in a breath. She hopes it’s what he needs.
The girl is not with him this time, and that gives Persephone pause. She’s rarely seen the two of them apart, if they’ve been apart at all, ever since the boy arrived here. She doesn’t know if something has soured between them. She considers letting the boy remain alone, because maybe that’s what he wants, but it’s too late for her to turn around. She’s made too much noise already, and the boy hears her. He looks up.
The first thing she notices, past the fact that he’s not accompanied by the girl, is that he’s a lot closer to the edge of the light. Close enough that he can scoot back into it and hide, if that’s what he needs. The shadows obscure his face a bit, and when he leans out of it, ducking his head and looking up at her, Persephone blanches. He bleeds from his nose and one of his eyes is swollen and ringed with purple. His hair is mussed. He brushes it out of his face unsuccessfully with one hand, and with the other he props himself up.
He wants to speak, but he doesn’t. His lips part. He holds the words back with considerable effort.
“What happened to you?” Persephone asks.
The boy leans back a little, clears his throat. “Lady Persephone,” he says quietly. The title lands heavily against Persephone’s chest. Why is he suddenly using it? As if realizing what he’s doing, he breaks eye contact and looks off to the side, shoulders rising. “It’s—it’s nothing, really. I’m okay.”
The guitar is heavy in her hands, but it means little to her now. She trots over to his side and drops the guitar on the ground next to her. His gaze follows it, and his eyelid twitches when he sees the way she nearly throws it down. He tries to pull away from her hands, but she keeps him in place by holding him by the shoulder and turning his face back to her.
“Was it him?” she asks, low and pained and resigned all at once.
The boy makes a tiny noise as Persephone’s fingers brush across his cheek. He says nothing, and that’s all the answer she needs. She drops her hands and watches the boy lift one of his own to wipe the blood from his face.
They sit in silence for a while, the boy regulating his breathing while Persephone searches for the correct words to say. Eventually she comes to terms with the fact that there is no good way for her to respond.
“I can talk to him,” she offers. It’s worth very little. He doesn’t listen to her very much anymore. And really, why can’t she do more than that? Why is talking to her husband the most she can afford?
The boy shakes his head. Persephone frowns. His hands shake, even with how desperately he’s trying to hide it, and she knows that one thing will steady them.
There’s hesitation on his face when she gives him the guitar, but his hands move naturally. He holds it like he’s always known how.
“You—” he begins.
“I thought you’d like it,” Persephone explains. How can she tell him that she’s noticed the way his fingers twitched, searching for an instrument but not finding one? How can she tell him that she wishes she could have saved the lyre he’d given so much of himself to, but this guitar is the best thing she can find? “It might help, at least.”
He plays a chord without thinking, his expression of confusion melting into something different. Then he makes a disgusted face, because the guitar is wildly out of tune. He starts fixing that immediately, tuning by ear until he’s satisfied, before he tries the chord again and nods once.
“Will it do?” Persephone asks him, half-teasing.
The boy plucks the strings, and he starts to grin. Persephone takes that as a yes.
She hasn’t seen his process before. She knows that he’s written songs, that he’s arranged pieces and improvised and played for gigs, but she’s never witnessed him composing like this. He has the melody in his head, for the most part; it takes him a moment to find the right notes to play. He’ll hit a wrong note, frown a bit in displeasure, then try another. He’ll settle into a progression that Persephone thinks sounds just fine, then stop in the middle and start over because it doesn’t feel right to him. Once, he ceases playing completely and simply sits there with the guitar in his hands, his eyes on the ground in front of him, before he blinks hard and starts strumming again.
Persephone sits and watches him for a long while. She doesn’t know how much time passes. It takes her far too long to realize that she recognizes what he’s playing.
“What is that?” she asks, even though she knows. The knowledge makes it hard for her to swallow, to speak. Her voice comes out thick. “That song.”
The boy startles. He cocks his head to the side and takes her in for a second, like he’s coming to. “I don’t know,” he admits. His playing slows. “It came to me.”
It came to him. The song that Persephone heard first from the mouth of the god she quarrels with, the man she loves so deeply, is the same one that came to this boy. It’s in an entirely different setting, far beneath the ground and surrounded by fluorescent lights rather than the sun and blue sky that are such a central part of Persephone’s memory of that day. Somehow, that song has been carried to a new person for another purpose.
Can she tell him that? Can she tell him that she knows this song, that her question wasn’t just from curiosity? Does he know already, or is he figuring it out for the first time, learning it all over again?
Staring into his eyes, Persephone finds a depth that she hasn’t seen there in a long time. For a while, the boy stares straight back, head cocked slightly to the side. For a while, he knows.
Then the Lethe takes it away from him again, and with his mouth curving into a frown, he turns his attention back to the guitar.
The boy plays again, starting the familiar melody over. For the first few minutes, it’s what Persephone remembers. The notes are the same, at least. The way he plays them is different. The song starts to bleed into something angrier, and when Persephone glances at the boy’s face, she sees it reflected in his expression. His mind wanders, his hands moving on their own. His irises are dark and flat.
“Do you have lyrics in mind?” she asks him.
He pauses. “Some.”
“Can I hear them?”
The boy takes a deep breath. He considers it, looking down at the guitar. He shakes his head. “Not yet,” he says.
Persephone leaves it. She nods and lets his humming fill her ears and tilts her head back to take in the Wall. Is it higher now? It seems they’re always building it up, making it thicker or fixing the cracks. Perhaps they’ve added more layers to the top. It stings to think that she hadn’t even noticed until now. She’s been trying to pay more attention. If not for herself, then for the workers. For two of them in particular.
The noise stops suddenly. Startled, Persephone looks down and sees the boy gripping the stem of the guitar hard enough that his knuckles are turning white. He looks like he wants to cast it aside, but when he takes off the strap and puts it down, he does it gently. His reverence for music is in his blood; even a contract with Hades can’t erase that. The boy rests his elbows on his knees and drops his head into his hands, letting out all of his breath in an aggravated sigh.
“It’s not right,” he mutters into his hands.
Persephone smiles. She isn’t sure why. “You have time,” she assures him.
The boy shrinks in on himself. “No,” is all he says. The smile fades from Persephone’s face.
The girl asks him why it matters to him so much. Why he has to finish it. Her expression is stormy and she grits her teeth. But when she takes hold of his hands, it feels like the tension in her is from concern more than anything.
“This keeps us safe,” she tells him. “It keeps us alive.”
But not living, something in the boy argues, and he doesn’t know what that means. He keeps his mouth shut. He doesn’t think the girl will like hearing that. He squeezes her hand. She returns the gesture, staring down at their intertwined fingers.
“He’s already warned you once,” the girl says.
He can’t stop his body from freezing up. Is his stomach still throbbing, or is he just imagining the feeling? The boy waits for his joints to unlock again, then says, “I know.”
The girl examines his face closely. “But you’re going to keep writing it.”
The boy takes a breath. He nods.
The girl lets go of his hands, stepping back. Hugging herself, she asks, “What’s wrong with being careful? What will he do to you if you don’t listen to him?”
Heat flares in his gut. “It doesn’t matter what he’ll do,” the boy snaps. The girl flinches away from him, looking hurt, but the boy doesn’t care. He just wants her to understand. “Don’t you see?”
She stares at him like she’s seeing him for the first time. Lowering her gaze to the floor, she murmurs, “No.” Her eyelids flicker shut. The boy feels suddenly cold. Like his heart was beating, but now it’s stopped. The girl shivers, as if feeling the same thing. “No, I don’t think I do.”
What will he do to you if you don’t listen to him? is a question the girl doesn’t want to get answered. It’s something she intends to break through whatever is going on with the boy to have him acting this way—something that will make him come to his senses and realize that he needs to keep his head low and do what he’s told so he can go on working.
Even when the boy doesn’t listen at first, she thinks that maybe he does later. He gets a little more withdrawn for a while, follows her more closely. When she’s beside him while he’s playing that guitar—she has no idea why he’s been given it, and the sight of it makes her pale a little, because it makes everything feel more real—she’ll nudge him to tell him to slow down or take a break, and he’ll obey. He pauses when she speaks, takes in each of her words. He notices when the strings of the guitar become slick with his blood (only because the girl notices, but she still considers it progress), and he sets it aside for a while.
He’s back to playing it much too soon for her liking. But she’s alright with it, as long as he keeps things as they are. Just so long as he plays secretly and hands off the guitar to Persephone at the end of those sessions, the girl thinks it will be okay.
He can’t keep the routine the same for very long, though. He starts lagging behind when they’re working. He starts leaving again. It seems more out of his control than he’d like to admit; he’s a bit of a drifter anyway, even before whatever this is started happening, but not even he seems that comfortable discovering how far he’s gone or where his subconscious has taken him.
The girl looks up one shift in time to see the boy disappear into the shadows of a corridor they aren’t allowed in. Then her gaze is pulled upward.
Hades is standing on the balcony. And he’s just seen exactly what she has.
The girl considers shouting, trying to catch the boy’s attention and get him back into the huddle of workers. Perhaps it isn’t too late for him. They can avoid a reprimand if he uses this window and returns to her. We can do something else, if that’s what you want, she’ll say to persuade him. We can go on our own and do it together. Is that what’s wrong? The type of work?
Before she can open her mouth, three figures peel away from the wall and follow after the boy. The girl can’t stop her hands from stuttering. The pickaxe in them crashes to the ground instead of stone, and she glances down at it with a mix of confusion and panic before turning back to the dark corridor. Her head lifts, and she jumps when she sees Hades watching her.
Please, she thinks, eyes wide.
If he hears it, he chooses to ignore it. He begins making his way down the staircase. The girl finds it harder and harder to breathe with each step he takes.
He hasn’t even made it all the way to the factory floor when the boy is herded back. Dragged might be a more appropriate word. He looks like he’s been pushed down, and his head lolls dangerously, as if he’s struggling to stay conscious. He stumbles as he walks.
The workers automatically clear space in the middle of the factory floor. Hades fills it. The boy is forced to his knees in front of him.
“So we don’t forget,” Hades says. He doesn’t even have to raise his voice. For once, every piece of machinery is silent. The workers don’t say a word. They all hear him.
The three women each produce whips from the folds of their clothing. One of them takes hold of the boy’s skull and pushes down hard, forcing him to bend.
“No,” the girl blurts. She covers her mouth, but no one turns to look at her. They don’t even notice that she’s spoken. They just watch and do nothing.
And so does she. She flinches every time one of the whips cracks against the boy’s back. She imagines she’s feeling it. But she does nothing. She wants to rush forward, to grab him and take him away, or to throw herself over him and take the lashes herself. She doesn’t—because what if they do the same thing to her, and what if neither of them are able to work?
She does nothing.
You knew this would happen, she thinks in the boy’s direction. You knew that he’d make an example of you, so why would you do it? She has no idea how it couldn’t matter to him. Hades is taking away his ability to do his job, perhaps even to walk if he decides to go that far, and he wouldn’t have done that if the boy had just kept his mouth shut. If the boy had done what he was supposed to do and stayed in line, this wouldn’t be happening. The girl balls her hands into fists at her sides, unsure if she’s afraid for him or seething at him. Why do this, and why keep doing it?
The boy looks up at her somewhere in the middle of the demonstration. His back has been sliced to ribbons, and the muscles in his face twitch with each new lash. He cries, but doesn’t cry out. His eyes lock on hers, gaze intense and unwavering.
Who will do it if I don’t? he asks.
She wonders if he’s heard her thoughts, if she’s heard his. Maybe they have. It feels like they can read each other easily, though as of late the girl has felt like she can’t begin to know what the boy could be thinking. This hits her clearly.
I don’t know, she admits. She hasn’t encountered any other worker in Hadestown like him. He’s the only one she knows who would do this.
Persephone understands what’s happening as soon as she hears the crushing silence on the factory floor.
Or, she thinks she does, until she takes her husband’s guitar in one hand, runs down the stairs, and catches a glimpse of what’s happening through the crowd. She expects some kind of event, something to do with the boy. She does not expect to see him bent double with three women in grey laying down lashes on the bare skin of his back. She cries out and drops the guitar where she’s standing, pushing her way to the front.
“What are you doing?” she demands, grabbing one of Hades’s arms roughly.
The lashes stop. A similar silence falls, broken only by the boy’s labored breaths and Persephone’s crackling rage. Hades turns to her, opens his mouth to answer.
Another sound comes in place of his voice.
It’s the boy. Singing.
He’s quiet, but not feeble. The notes don’t shake. With his back bloodied and his eyes glassy, he sits back, turns his face to the ceiling, and sings the seven-note melody he’s been rehearsing for countless nights beside Persephone. Her grip tightens on Hades’s arm, and she sobs once.
Hades stands there in a trance, mouth hanging open like he wants to interrupt but can’t form the words. Persephone lets go of him and shoves people out of her way. She swipes the guitar up from the ground.
She nudges the boy’s arm and hands the guitar to him. His hands take it before the rest of him catches up. He looks up at her and his eyes begin to clear. He starts putting on the strap, and Persephone tries to wrench his hands down.
“It will hurt if you do that,” she tells him.
The boy shrugs as if to say, What won’t?
If I could just do something more than this, Persephone thinks, then nothing would. This wouldn’t have happened. Conditions wouldn’t be this bad. Her relationship with Hades would feel less strained. The boy wouldn’t be struggling to stand, and Persephone wouldn’t be holding him by the shoulders to keep him upright. Persephone catches the glint in the boy’s eyes, and tears run down her cheeks to match his. Why couldn’t she have done something more? Why only now is she able to make a change? And why is that change something that she just handed off to another person?
The boy goes very still when the strap hits the skin on his back, but he doesn’t take it off, even at Persephone’s questioning look. He nods at her. Persephone nods back. She steps next to Hades and sees him staring at her in betrayal.
“That was mine,” he growls.
“His now,” Persephone says. She lifts her chin and stares at the boy. He’s gained more of his footing now, adrenaline kicking in and helping him stand. “He’s made it his.”
The song does two things at once. The part without words, the part that Persephone can recognize, awakens something in the workers. And it awakens something in the gods, Hades standing there overwhelmed by the feeling and unable to move while Persephone bends nearly double at the memories washing over her. The differences in the song lead to differences in the way it affects them—she’s aware of the love ingrained in the melody, and she sees it again as if for the first time, but she’s also leaning towards the boy, hanging onto each note like she needs to hear his voice just to breathe. That’s something new.
Then the part with words snaps her out of it. It’s the part that the boy has never shown her the lyrics to. She wonders, hearing the way he sings them, whether he’s planned them or is simply going the way the wind takes him, following where his heart says to go. They’re questions, pleas, but most of all accusations.
And the workers are listening.
Hades realizes what’s happening too late. It takes him longer than Persephone to break out of the first part of the song and lock onto the sentiments spilling out of the boy’s chest. The boy’s sorrow is inflicted on all of them, making every person on the factory floor weep. Tears fall from Hades’s eyes, but he blinks through them, trying to shake off his stupor.
“Stop,” he bellows, crossing in front of the boy. He gestures for silence with one sweeping hand. The workers falter for a moment, but the boy’s voice remains strong, and they gain back their confidence. “Stop!”
When they ignore him, Hades takes a step back. Persephone can count the amount of times she’s seen her husband afraid on one hand; she feels like this time can count for three. His expression is stricken. Hades despises not being in control, because he can’t predict the outcome. The boy is the most unpredictable outcome that he’s ever faced.
When Hades made him sign a contract, how much of that was a hunger to tame what couldn’t be tamed?
The boy stops singing, and the workers stop with him, but it’s only because they choose to. Hades has no part in it. He moves sluggishly, stuck in the remnants of the beginning melody. His fingers twitch like he’s imagining grabbing the guitar and yanking it away. They don’t obey him and instead stay at his sides; he looks down at them furiously.
It’s only then that the boy falters. His knees wobble. He nearly collapses from pain, and the girl pushes her way to the front of the crowd so she can catch him. They sink to the ground together, the girl’s hands trembling as they hover in the air just above his back. She keeps whispering frantic questions to him, wincing with each breath that he takes and the way it makes the strap pull at his bleeding skin. Are you okay, what was that, what do we do now, talk to me, please talk to me, tell me what to do—
The boy doesn’t say a word. He lifts his head and stares directly at Hades, and for the first time in as long as Persephone can remember, the god flinches. He takes another step back, trying to escape that stare, but the boy keeps his eyes locked on him. Because he knows.
Orpheus remembers.