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He’s alone in his room the first time he makes the flower appear.
He’s on the floor, because he couldn’t have seen his bed and landed correctly on it if he tried. His vision was swimming. He was used to seeing different things layered over his vision, used to compensating for them and moving around them so no one knew they were happening (and he’d gotten better at that over the years), but this was something new. Almost-opaque swirls of red and orange and yellow, dark greys and blues mixed with greens and browns. The suggestion of faces, of forms. Walls of iron and concrete. Grass in the wind.
And a flower. A red carnation, right in the middle of his vision sometimes, and other times creeping in around the edges with so much insistence that he couldn’t focus whatsoever.
He usually gets vertigo along with the hallucinations, but he’s not used to it being this bad. He stumbles on his feet. Hermes catches him once, and he sends him up to his room without taking no for an answer. Orpheus has trouble seeing every detail of his expression, but he thinks Hermes knows what this is. That he’s seen it before. The walls spin around him, and he feels like throwing up. He doesn’t, but he gets close. Which is how he ends up on the floor, reaching half-blindly for his lyre in the hopes that playing it will get this out of him.
The melody comes to him fully-formed. The chords too, which surprises him, because even when he’s got a clear idea in his head he’ll still encounter some trial and error on the playing side of things. The images start to fade a little. His shoulders relax.
And then there’s an odd sensation in his lungs. He starts struggling to breathe. He gets the urge to cough. Something is weighing him down.
He stops in the middle of a phrase when he can’t take it anymore and coughs.
Out comes a handful of flower petals.
He freezes and stares at them. They’re red, the same shape as the ones on the flower he’s been seeing constantly. But even in the low light of his room, he can still see something else in his hand. Blood speckled on his palm, presumably from the petals.
He coughs again, and more petals come out. His eyes burn. His throat burns. When he tries to sing again, his voice is hoarse. He sets the petals to the side.
This feels familiar, in a way. He’s terrified of this; he’s never seen something like this happen with any other song he’s played as far as he can remember. But alongside his fear settles something like acceptance. As if he should have expected this.
When he’s sure the petals are all out, he goes over the melody again.
They keep coming.
“So, when you sing this song,” Eurydice says, tone skeptical. “The one you’re working on. Spring will come again?”
“Yes,” Orpheus answers.
“Why don’t you sing it, then?”
That makes him falter. He scrambles for an excuse, a reason to keep this hidden. He knows that the flower should be a sign that the song can do what it’s meant to do, but if it’s good, why does it keep showing up in ways that it shouldn’t? Why does it hurt him? Those are questions he’s always dealt with alone, sitting on the floor in the darkness of his room, gathering up petals or whole flowers and adding them to his steadily growing collection. He can’t reconcile that side of the song with a setting like this.
It’s not ready. He’s not ready. So he decides to stick with the truth. Don’t they say the best lies have some truth to them? “It isn’t finished,” Orpheus says, fidgeting with his hands.
A corner of Eurydice’s mouth quirks up. “Sing it,” she says. When Orpheus doesn’t move, she adds, “You wanna take me home?”
He flushes. “Yes.”
“Sing the song.”
She stands there on the stairs, waiting, and Orpheus knows that he can’t get out of this. There’s no excuse he can use that won’t sound suspicious. And there are too many people looking at him now for him to do that, anyway. Eurydice has issued him a challenge, and Orpheus has never been one to back down from a challenge. The bar knows that. He does whatever someone asks him. Usually he’ll do it even if he doesn’t want to. He didn’t understand until this moment that it was actually possible for him to say no. It’s too late for that, but still, he had the ability.
Orpheus closes his eyes and sends out a short prayer. Then he opens them again and steps past Eurydice.
“La, la la la la la la,” he sings unsteadily.
Please, he pleads at the same time.
The room is already leaning toward him. It nearly makes him flinch, as he’s brought back to the memory of his bedroom and the same feeling of the world listening, before he bites his tongue and does his best to tamp down the reaction. He walks across the tables and holds out his arms to balance. No, not to balance. He’s fine. He’s holding out his arms because he’s caught up in the melody. Not because he feels like he’s about to fall. Not because he’s going to stumble from the pain rising from his gut to his chest and out to his hands.
“La, la la la la la la…”
It flows through his arms consistently, but it centralizes in his wrists. He struggles to keep himself steady. He wants to lower his arms again. His hands are shaking. Still the pain builds. He's lightheaded, and he feels like throwing up. But Eurydice’s eyes don’t leave him—no one’s eyes do, because they never do, not when he’s singing—so he has to keep going.
Has to was not a phrase that fell in the same circle as his music, before. It was never something he had to do. It wasn’t a chore. At least, not in this way. It would hurt sometimes. It would overwhelm him. He would wish it was taken from his shoulders. But the act of singing itself was not something he had to do. It wasn’t something he’d ever wanted to refuse.
“La, la la la la la la…”
It hurts. At least it isn’t the other place this time, he reassures himself. At least it isn’t there.
“La, la la la la la,” he finishes.
When the flower appears, slipping into his hands and taking a part of him with it, it makes him fall to one knee. His wrists bleed. He stares down at the flower, and all he feels is tired relief. Relief, and dread. He felt more of himself go with it this time. And all of this, for a single flower. For one performance of the chorus. How much will it take when he’s finished the whole song?
Orpheus flinches as Eurydice steps closer and plucks the flower from his hands. She holds it up so it catches the light, and he winces, because he knows she sees the blood on the petals. It’s the same shade of red, but putting it to the light makes it harder to hide. She can tell it’s slick. Her voice is hesitant as she speaks.
“How’d you do that?” she asks. In awe or in fear?
He glances down at his bleeding wrists. He props his chin on his hands, trying to keep the blood out of sight. “I don’t know,” he says. Eurydice turns the flower this way and that. He feels sick. He wants to get out of here. “The song’s not finished, though.”
“Even so, it can do this?”
He shuts his eyes for a moment, holds his wrists to his apron. “I know,” he murmurs.
Eurydice turns, cradling the flower. She’s smiling, staring down at the petals. “You have to finish it,” she tells him.
He flinches again, but she’s already turned back around, holding the flower up again.
He isn’t thinking straight when Hermes asks him about where he got the melody. He assumes he tells the truth, because he can’t lie when he’s not paying close attention. There’s a moment of clarity where Hermes speaks of the love of Hades and Persephone, and Orpheus catches Eurydice’s gaze. He smiles slightly at her. He thinks he understands the gods. At least somewhat.
“I remember now,” he tells Hermes. “But that was long ago.”
“Tell it again, though,” Hermes says, holding out his lyre.
The quiet joy leaves him. His smile fades. Orpheus stares at the lyre for a moment. He thinks about saying no. His mind goes to the flowers stacked on his desk, each of them starting to rot slowly but surely. Beside them lies a pile of individual petals, mixed with blood. Luckily, the blood blends in if someone peeks inside his room and doesn’t look too closely, but he knows it’s there, and he feels it whenever he coughs the petals up. Whatever happens when he sings the song this time—because it never goes the same way twice in a row—he’ll have to pretend it doesn’t. No one knows that the flower manifests in other parts of him, not just his hands.
Hands shaking, he takes the lyre and slings its strap over his head. Dozens of pairs of eyes fix on him. Including those of Eurydice. In an attempt to forget Hermes watching him, Orpheus glances over and finds the girl waiting with an arm slung casually over the back of her chair. She locks eyes with him and raises an eyebrow. He ducks his head, brushing a hand over the strings of the lyre. Not enough to produce a sound that carries, but enough to ground himself. His fingers know what to do, even if his mind doesn’t want to do it, even if his body is already bracing for what’s to come.
Play, he orders himself.
He does.
“King of shadows, king of shades…,” he begins, almost quieter than his lyre. He focuses hard on the chords even though he knows them by heart. It takes his attention off of what he knows will happen next.
He’s alright for a while, and he nearly convinces himself that maybe this time, the flower was merciful. It decided not to show up at all, to spare him in front of so many people. He gets through the verses of the story fine, albeit a little shaky from his nervousness.
“...And with them the cycle of the seed and the sickle, and the lives of the people, and the birds in their flight…”
He trails off at the end of the last phrase and lifts his face to the ceiling, his shoulders tense.
Please don’t make me go on, he prays, hoping Hermes will hear it.
He can’t see Hermes’s face. He doesn’t know if his prayer was heard at all. If it was, the god doesn’t acknowledge it.
“Singing…,” Hermes prompts. Orpheus turns to look at him. He must not be able to hide his fear as well as he thought, because Hermes’s expression becomes worried for a moment. Orpheus takes a deep breath, turning back around.
“La, la la la la la la…”
Almost immediately, he feels itching in his throat. The familiar weight in his chest. Not there. Please not there, he thinks. The flower doesn’t listen. The petals continue to materialize in his lungs. He hates this feeling the most out of all of the ways the flower manifests. He’s gotten better at forcing his way through it, but he hasn’t had to keep the petals down for so long, and if he doesn’t find a way to get them out soon they’re going to fill his lungs entirely.
“Down below and up above,” Hermes says. His voice moves. He’s walking behind Orpheus, putting a hand on his shoulder before stepping away. It’s a steadying hand, but not the kind of steadying that Orpheus needs. Hermes’s touch is mildly concerned and nothing more. He doesn’t know the extent of the song.
Perhaps that’s Orpheus’s fault. He should have told him.
It takes effort to breathe in this time, to ignore how little space he has to do so. “La, la la la la la la,” Orpheus sings.
“In harmony and rhythm…”
He isn’t sure how he manages to get through the end. He works to keep his shoulders from collapsing with relief when it’s done. Hermes keeps speaking, but Orpheus finds a gap and takes his chance. He sets down the guitar and ducks out of the bar mostly unnoticed, light-headed, unable to breathe because if he does, the itching in his throat will make him cough. He acts like he’s searching for cleaning supplies in the closet in the back hallway—never mind how that makes no sense, considering he cleaned everything recently and it wouldn’t need to happen so soon. He shuts himself inside and fumbles blindly for the red rag in the pocket of his apron.
It hurts to get the petals out. He thought they would be soft enough that they wouldn’t, near the beginning of his songwriting process. He’s learned otherwise over the past weeks. The petals scrape against his trachea like little knives, and there’s a moment in the middle of his hacking where he can’t remember how to properly breathe. His back knocks against the wall and he presses both hands to his face, hunching around the rag.
He pulls the rag away from his mouth when the worst has passed and feels the blood drain from his face. He stares at the petals cupped in his hands. There are more of them this time.
You have to finish it, Eurydice’s words echo back to him. She was more elated than urgent when she said them. For Orpheus, he feels the opposite. He’s acquainted with urgency first and foremost. The obligation. The recognition that completing the song will meet a need that must be taken care of as quickly as possible. The elation, he hasn’t really come to grips with. He’s forgotten what that feels like. Surely he’ll know it again, when the song is done. Surely he’ll remember what it’s like to be filled with nothing but joy over his music. Surely.
He’ll finish the song. He’ll get back to what he enjoys again. As long as he still has his hands. He can deal with the other things—with the petals in his lungs, with the pain, with the blood. He can deal with the hallucinations, even if they’re getting stronger and more frequent. He’s lived with some of these things for as long as he can remember. He can live with them for a little longer. He has to.
It turns out that he doesn’t still have his hands.
He notices it when he brings Eurydice up to his room for the first time. His hands have been going numb more frequently than he’s used to (and before, he would just wait out those periods, just as he would get through everything else that came with his gift), and they stay numb for longer. There are pins and needles in his fingers. When he takes Eurydice’s hand, it hurts him, and he has to fight the natural urge to pull away.
It’s fine, he thinks. It’s fine.
Eurydice turns in a circle in the middle of his room. He realizes right before her eyes land on the desk that he hasn’t cleared the flowers away. She pauses. Her eyes move just to the right of the pile, and Orpheus kicks himself again. Because he also forgot to clear away the rags stained with blood, a collection that’s grown just as steadily as the flowers.
“This is—I’ve needed to clean this up for a while now,” he says nervously, stepping in front of her and gathering up the rags. His hands are clumsy. He’s not used to them not listening to him like this. He accidentally drops the rags on the floor and stares down at them like he doesn’t know how they got there. Eurydice hums and bends down to help pick them up.
“What is this?” she asks.
“Nothing.” The answer is automatic. Ready and waiting. He always has it ready.
She puts her hand over his, keeping it in place on the floor. “Orpheus.”
He looks down at the rags. Back up at Eurydice.
“You said I should finish the song,” he tells her, halting and a little afraid. She leans back slightly. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”
“For how long?”
He doesn’t know. At least a few months. Possibly more. He shrugs.
Eurydice lets go of his hand and watches him pick up the rest of the rags. She gives him the ones she gathered, and Orpheus surveys every possible hiding spot in the room for a moment before setting them back on the desk. Eurydice steps over to the flowers and holds up one in each hand, comparing them, and Orpheus ducks his head and reaches for the lyre left on his bed.
And he drops it.
He yelps as it crashes to the ground, sinking to his knees and picking it up again. He rests it in his lap and runs his fingers over the wood, across the strings, making sure it’s not damaged. His hands shake. He lets go of the lyre and stares at them. They didn’t have a tight enough hold on the lyre; he couldn’t control them. And when he manages to get the strap over his head, something he’d never had to think about before but struggles with now, it hurts to play. The pins-and-needles feeling in his fingers intensifies. Nausea rises in his stomach.
He can’t play.
Panic overtakes him. He sits completely still on the edge of the bed, and he knows Eurydice is staring at him and wondering what’s wrong, why he’s stopped, why he’s gone quiet. He squeezes his eyes shut. Tries to pluck the strings again. He’s barely able to brush his fingertips against them without wanting to pull away.
“Orpheus?” Eurydice asks softly.
He opens his eyes and looks up at her. She’s taken more of the flowers in her hands and has started laying them out based on level of decay. His gaze falls to the floor where they’re lined up, and he takes a deep breath.
He’ll have to play anyway. Till he vomits, till his fingers bleed, till his lungs fill completely with flower petals. Till he collapses.
He doesn’t matter. Eurydice matters. The song matters.
He’ll finish the song. For Eurydice, at least. He’ll finish it for her.
You have to finish it.