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Something cracks when they strike him the first time. He doubles over in pain, blood in his mouth, but they don’t stop. He can’t breathe for a while, or else the pain below his lungs increases tenfold.
He tries to say something. The pain forces any of the resentment in his mind into a box, shoving it out of sight in favor of self-preservation. I’ll work, he wants to say. To scream, really, desperate to get out of this. I’ll work like you want me to. I’ll work harder, even. Just stop. Let me go.
He coughs up blood instead.
When they stop holding him up, he can’t stand on his own. He crashes to the ground. The floor is stone, just like so many other things in Hadestown. His forehead knocks against it. The shoulder he lands on aches, and his abdomen shrieks.
He lies there curled with his hands still behind his back for a while. Hades is silent. The women in grey are silent. The boy takes in tiny, tentative breaths, testing the waters. If he does it in small bursts, it still hurts worse than anything he remembers feeling, but it’s not bad enough that he can’t breathe at all.
You can’t work like this, the girl’s voice whispers. He knows her well enough now that he can predict exactly what she’d say. If she were in front of him now, the corners of her eyes would crinkle with worry, with anger, and she would reach like she wanted to help him but hesitate before she got all the way there.
I can do more important things, he would tell her. If she were here with him.
Nothing is more important than work, she would say back. The boy shuts his eyes, swallows back the mix of blood and bile in his throat. He falls into routine, though this argument is imaginary.
You sound like him, he’d tell her.
The girl would recoil at that, disgusted because that’s a low blow, especially for him.
That’s not how I mean it, she would say. And he knows that. The girl wants him to focus only on work because it helps them survive, and that’s just a fact of their existence. But at this point in the argument, the boy usually gets annoyed—annoyed in a way that he isn’t used to—and he snaps at her without meaning to, because doesn’t she see?
“Get up.” Hades’s voice breaks through his vision of the girl wrapping her arms around herself and turning away from him.
The boy doesn’t move for a moment, and that must be a moment too long for Hades’s liking. One of the women steps forward, props her heeled boot on the boy’s chest, rolls him onto his back, and presses down hard on his stomach.
He can’t even cry out. The pressure steals the air from him. He just stares up at the ceiling with his mouth open, choking on the sound he can’t get past his lips.
But he does what he’s told. He lifts himself to his knees and elbows. Then to his feet. He can’t stand up all the way, so he walks hunched over his abdomen, or else he thinks he’ll collapse again.
When he looks underneath the bandages around his middle, the skin is marbled with brown and purple. He still isn’t able to take full breaths, but that makes even the short ones he’s managing with stop for a second. The boy looks up and locks eyes with the girl, who sits across from him.
She winces, but she says nothing. Her reaction is one of empathy. The same thing happened to her. Perhaps not on the same level, but she’s at least had the experience.
The song, the boy reminds himself, wrapping himself up again. He pulls them too tight. He convinces himself the tightness makes the pain less, rather than more. He almost convinces himself. Almost.
“Do you get it now?” the girl asks, fearful as he sits back and hisses through his teeth at the jolt it sends through him. She’s staring at him, leaning forward on her knees, trying to catch his eye.
He doesn’t let her. And he doesn’t answer her.
The song, he repeats silently. You’re doing this for the song.
After Persephone gives him the guitar, the boy accidentally reopens the wounds on his shoulders. He can’t remember where they’re from, and he was starting to forget that he’s supposed to leave them alone to heal until the strap of the guitar digs into his skin and sends another kind of burning up his spine.
He stops for the first time in a very long while. He lifts the strap, and where his fingers touch it, the leather is slick. The bandages haven’t been changed in as long as he can remember—which isn’t very far, but the statement stands. There was already some blood seeping through, dried and brown, but now there’s a new wetness. It mixes with a wooziness that he thinks has always been there since the beating in Hades’s office, but is amplified now as he connects it with the fresh red.
“Oh,” he says to himself, slightly awed. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten he could bleed. He knew that well. It felt like bleeding was all he’d done for…how long has he been down here? He can’t keep count of the days. The workers run on shifts, not daylight.
But the boy had been consumed by other things. His shoulders were almost completely disregarded in favor of thinking about his tight stomach, or his sore throat, or his shredded fingertips.
They’ll continue to be disregarded, though. In fact, he’ll toss everything else with them. He needs to finish what he started.
If he lets go of the song for too long, he starts to lose it again. He starts feeling himself sinking, retreating back into whatever passes for safe here. Quiet smiles, placid expressions, lowered heads, grateful words, hesitant honorifics.
He can’t lose the song. He doesn’t want to lose himself, but above all he can’t lose the song.
There are spots in his vision all the time now. He’d known something was wrong—more wrong than it should be—when the bruises didn’t go away, when they got worse instead of better. When he felt like his heart was pounding out of his chest. When he was cold all the time despite the perpetual heat around him. When his hands were forever clammy, fingers slipping on the guitar stem.
Part of that might be because the strings are covered in his blood.
But the song needs to get out, in some way. It hurts to keep it in. It itches if he leaves it unfinished. And he has to know how it ends; he has to have it ready.
So he keeps breathing around the uncomfortable space around his lungs. He keeps playing. He hums until his voice is hoarse. He coughs, his hands come away slicker and stickier and redder than they were before, and he keeps going.
It’s harder to walk than he thought. He can stand up a little straighter now, at least. But each step makes him want to double over again.
When the boy faints for the first time, Persephone is there.
He doesn’t know how long he’s gone. From the expression on the goddess’s face, deathly afraid and a little ill, he thinks it must have been longer than either of them would have liked.
She’s taken his head into her lap, pillowing it with her dress. When he sits up he has to take a moment propped on his elbows, just so the walls stop spinning. He looks back at Persephone’s dress. Flinches at the stain.
“You hit your head,” she explains, strained. “When you went down.”
He stares at her lap. He gets himself up a little further, reaches blindly for the guitar. Persephone must have taken it off in the time he was out. In some currently unreachable part of himself, he’s glad that the guitar didn’t get crushed in the fall.
“Okay,” he finally says, already plucking the strings again. His fingers are going numb now. Or maybe he’s aggravated the wounds enough that the pain is blocking itself out. Maybe there’s too much to register.
“You should tell—” Persephone fumbles over what she’s about to say, twists her hands in her lap. “You should tell her.” She doesn’t need to specify who she’s talking about.
The boy continues playing. “Okay,” he repeats with a shrug.
Persephone stares at him. She doesn’t speak, but her eyes are sharp. It makes the boy shut his own.