from order, chaos, part one
Jan. 9th, 2011 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jade_sabreSo I am posting this here because, well, I'm fond of it, and you know one day years down the line I'll be being interviewed about the Ariadne novel and I can say, well, you know, I sort of played around with the ideas in the novel in an immature form when I was much younger and writing a fanfic from a fanartist's idea and the interviewer will be confused and I will just keep chatting away merrily like nothing's wrong.
If the font here is too small, you can always hit ctrl and +/= at the same time and that will make the font bigger. You can also read it over at my fanfiction.net page, where there's a handy button for you to change font sizes.
And as always, reviews are welcome.
It had taken a while to claw his way out of the sea of dead people, a difficulty compounded by the fact that no one really wanted to get out of the way and more souls came in by the second. He didn’t know how long he’d spent lying on the cliff once he finally shook off the last desperate hand, too exhausted even to make a mental note to build a wall around the thing that not even super-strong demigods could destroy. Of course, it would have to be a clear wall, so that he could still see what was going on, but the Fates had said Plexiglas wasn’t even a spark in the collective mortal consciousness and oh for Gaia’s sake he was a god, wasn’t he? He could just make it, mortals be damned (and damned and damned again). It might not be as good as anything they came up with, but at least he’d have something.
If he were the type to be frightened, he would worry about how long it took him to unclog his senses of the apathetic lethargy of the dead, but he’d swum the ocean and waited around and lost everything he’d ever wanted and failed to get it back too many times at this point to care. Zeus was still sending dead people to the Underworld? None of them had somehow escaped? No mortal sorcerers had asked another deity to bring anyone back from the dead? Great. Fantastic. Yet another reminder of how really indispensible he was, no, really, Hades, watching the dead swim in circles down a metaphysical toilet matters just as much as ensuring there’s a sky for the sun to move across. Whatever.
All of this was besides the point. The point was that somewhere along the line as he started to think about getting up and putting some weight back into his limbs two souls floated over his head and slipped into the sea and looked familiar, though why mortals should look familiar to him was beyond his grasp. But curiosity got the better of him and he put the effort into the thought of being upright, and then he peered over the edge and watched as the souls—boys, children, one perhaps younger—made a space for themselves, their hair curly, their eyes wide open as if they’d died awake. Souls didn’t really reflect the state in which their bodies had stopped; they reflected what the person had thought of themselves, when they were alive, and they lost their shape as the soul forgot who they’d been. In the deepest depths of the sea of souls they were nothing but goo, formless matter that had once represented a life with hopes and dreams and which now had nothing but existence—because mortal souls were as immortal as a god’s. Mortals simply didn’t have the stamina to last as long.
And why not? he wondered, looking down over the edge, though the easy answer was that Kronos had realized if he didn’t drown them, the souls would overtake Olympus and start a new world order, and maybe he didn’t want Hades ruling but anything was better than the malleability of a mortal soul. Gods, at least, were cast and then left to fill the mold; mortals could be anything, and that made them dangerous.
Of course it was highly doubtful that Zeus had realized this, and again Hades wished he had some—flexibility, in ruling the Underworld. If he could convince the souls to follow him—if they had realized, if anyone had realized, that he was the only one who knew anything about them—things might have been different. But the world was a system, and part of that was the sea of souls, and so he left the dead mortal boys to their slumbering fate, and went to see if anyone had bothered to feed Cerebus in his absence.
They hadn’t; he found the three-headed dog gnawing on what looked like the bones of a Fury, and looked around to call for someone to bring him a steak, but of course no one was there. Pain and Panic were gone, fleeing his wrath, and as he had no particular need for them he pushed them from his mind and ran his hand through his flame, reveling in the warmth. He suspected it would be a long time before he could entirely banish the cold slick feeling of souls from his metaphorical bones, but having his flame back helped.
He left the dog to its gnawing and skimmed the vast river of souls, flying back to his central chamber and summoning up a view of Olympus. It looked fine—but then, they’d had who knew how long to get the place back up and running after his attack. And judging by the fact that Zeus hadn’t sent anyone to make sure he drowned, he could be reasonably sure that he had been written off as a “punished, lesson learned” incident. It was a very Zeus thing to do; when you got right down to it, Zeus really believed all that brotherhood nonsense he spouted off. “I saved everyone for a reason,” he’d say, his deep voice booming echoes of unfelt pain. “Whatever else happens, we’re family.”
Of course, enjoying the benefits of being in the family meant obeying the family’s rules. Look at what happened to Prometheus. Almost as nasty as spending eons amidst a bunch of humans’ disappearing dreams, he thought, checking that the Titan was still safely chained to his rock. The vultures flew away when he approached, settling on Tityos’s stomach, and there was Sisyphus’s boulder making its way up the only hill in all of Tartarus. There was also a giant pit that he normally avoided—speaking of family—but he figured he ought to check, and so he went and stood on its edge and looked down, down, down, striving to see beyond mortal or divine sight despite the fact that the whole point of this prison was that no one, not even a Titan, could see a way out of it. He’d explored its depths once, back when he’d first found himself trapped underground with nothing else to do, but he was always careful to keep the metaphorical light in sight. No other sense could be trusted; sounds echoed off walls with a madman’s design in mind. For now, the pit was silent; if his father sensed his presence, he chose not to make any comments, and it was with an equally silent relief that he left the pit and went to the shore, and discovered Charon waiting for him.
“Oh,” he said. “You.”
The decrepit old…thing, all stringy beard and skin stretched over bone, bowed. “Where would Master like to go today?”
Pure formality, of course, but it was nice to hear someone address him with something like respect. “Oh, the usual tour,” he said, settling himself in the boat, summoning up a martini and leaning back as the boatmaster dipped his oar in the water and pushed away from the shore. Charon seemed happy enough to have him back, not that he had had anyone to ferry in his absence—you only got the ferry if you were going some place nice when you died, and that rarely happened. Generally, the Underworld consisted of Charon, his master, a handful of people and gods suffering eternal torment, and a whole lot of primordial goo in more-or-less distinct soul shapes; and frankly, Hades hated it.
It was Cerebus who told him he had a visitor, although not in the usual way. There wasn’t much to arrange in the Underworld—no paperwork, very few prayers sent directly his way—but he was tidying up the place by hand, because doing it by hand took up time that otherwise would be spent counting the space between seconds until he could search out someone to talk to, when he noticed a sound. He stopped scrubbing ectoplasm and listened, hearing everything happening in his realm until he found the sound that bothered him—Cerebus, chewing contentedly, on what?
He chose not to use Charon, preferring stealth to make his way to the entrance of the Underworld—and what he saw would have taken his breath away. If he’d had breath.
This, he told himself sternly, was why one should never make deals with mortals.
Her hair hung down her back in unwashed clumps; her pale robes were in tatters, her face bruised, her hands bloody from carrying whatever animal Cerebus now devoured as she scratched behind one of his ears. The monster had always liked her.
He watched them, the jaded traitor and the tamed beast, looking at the subtle changes time had brought to her face: plumped cheeks still round, if thinner; curves softened, heavier; and if he bothered to look closely, lines trailing from the corners of her eyes and her lips. If he bothered to look closely, he could see her soul, bright and free; he could trace every change in its form, perhaps even see the markings her bondage had left, but he did not bother to look, because while her mortal flesh was easy to ignore, her essence was not. No matter that it was made of the same stuff he’d been swimming in for years. Something about Megara was different, and it did not do to dwell on the differences between mortals.
“Well, well, well,” he said, landing on the ground several paces away from the pair, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. “What have we here?”
Cerebus’s ears flattened against his skulls, though each of his three jaws continued to chew on whatever she had brought; she turned and said, in a voice striving to be as dead as the souls off the shore, “Hades. It’s been a long time.”
Her tone may have been flat, but it was full of a quality the Underworld fundamentally lacked, one he hadn’t heard since a well-aimed fist landed him amongst its denizens, as seductive as her soul, no matter how she meant it to sound. He stopped listening. “Well, you know, down here, we have all the time in the world, so whatever—”
“I’m here to make a deal,” she said, and the Muses couldn’t have sung a sweeter tune.
He stared for a moment, his quick-talking skills momentarily stunned. “You’re here to what?” he said. “I’m probably shooting myself in the foot here, but are you serious?”
“As an earthquake in Athens,” she said.
“Oh, really.” The obvious question came to mind. “And what does Wonderboy think of this?”
“He’s gone.”
“Really.”
They looked at each other then, and her eyes were tired and hard and alive and then she said, “I’m going to get him back.”
“So, wait.” He rubbed his forehead. “You want me to help you get back the guy who singlehandedly stopped my takeover of the cosmos?” He glanced at her from under his hand; she was nodding. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she said, and Gaia help him—Gaia would just as soon laugh in his face—she was serious, leaning forward, daring to look him straight in the face, “you and I have something in common.”
“Oh?” He pushed off the wall and floated closer, until she had to tilt her head up to look at him. Nearness did not affect him; if he’d wanted to, he could have floated straight through her, and she would have been nary the wiser.
Judging from the neutrality of her expression, it didn’t affect her either. “Olympus,” she said. “You have enemies there. So do I.”
“Keep talking.”
“You hate Zeus,” and hate was a mild term compared to the all-consuming pain and bitterness that had haunted his steps for centuries, but he let it pass; she did the best her mortal tongue could do. “I hate Hera. We find Hercules, we hurt Hera, we hurt Zeus. Sound good?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Trust me.”
He laughed, and she took a step backwards, though her determination didn’t waver. He could feel it rolling off her in waves; he could make himself immune to physical sensation, but metaphysical feeling was as powerful as the splash of cold water at high tide. “Look,” he said, “not to burst your bubble of joy or anything, but I just got out of an extremely long bath, so to speak, and I don’t think making a pass at Zeus’s wife is really the way to get back into—”
“You can blame it all on me,” she said. “I won’t tell them who helped me.”
“You’re serious.” She didn’t bother to nod. He took in her appearance once more, and finally said, “Am I the first person you’re asking?”
“No,” she said. “I told Phil I wanted to go after H—him,” and she stumbled, as though nearly saying his name from habit was a sin she didn’t dare commit, “and he told me he didn’t train women because there aren’t any female heroes, though he was nice enough to say that I was the closest he’d ever seen, fat lot of good that did me. Artemis only deals with virgins, and I haven’t been one of those since I was twelve, so she’s out, and I went to talk to the Amazons and they were excited until they found out I wanted to rescue a man, and I nearly died trying to get away and thought, hey, haven’t visited the Underworld in a while, why not go back?” She reached out and scratched one of Cerebus’s heads, right above the nose, and he made the deep giant-three-headed-dog sound equivalent to a happy growl; Hades glared at him. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”
“Oh yeah, you know, eternally dark, and you can’t get rid of the mildew, and what, you’re just going to sell your soul—”
“No,” she said. The word brought a flush to her cheeks, her hands clenching into fists. “We’ll be partners.”
“Partners.” He had to laugh. He’d forgotten how funny mortals could be. “In case you haven’t noticed, I work alone.”
“And how’s that been going for you?”
And it wasn’t even true—he’d had her and Pain and Panic and various allies, though he’d been the one in charge; more servants than allies, yes, but he’d needed people on his side to try to carry it off. (It was supremely unfair that his gathered forces could be single-handedly defeated, but such were the Fates.) But she had seen how he ran his operation, and she’d watched as he fell—well, she hadn’t watched, she’d been dead by then, but it had been all her fault, and now she was mocking him, and he couldn’t just dodge the half-truth with one of his own. “Not great, but—look, I’m the Lord of the Underworld. Solo’s sort of my schtick, you know, no one really wants to work with you, and it’s not like there’s even enough things for two to do, there’s a lot of sitting around doing nothing—”
“So you’re just going to hide here until you figure it’s safe to go out and see if anyone still wants to talk to you?” She rolled her eyes at him. He was certain she was the only being—mortal or immortal—who had ever done so, but it was such an automatic gesture he’d never thought to comment on it. She was Meg. She rolled her eyes at the world, and the world fell to its knees and apologized for presuming her to be an idiot. “Look, I’ll do whatever you want, if you help me. But I don’t own you and you don’t own me. We’re equals.”
Eye-rolling or not, that was going too far. A mortal and a god, equals. “Are you nuts?” He wasn’t going to get involved in that kind of cosmos-rearranging. “Forget it. I’m not your man.”
“No,” she said, with a wry smile, tinged with admittance, and before he could turn his back on her and forget her existence with a wave of his hand, she said, “You’re my god.”
He was doomed and she was damned, but they were standing together in the Underworld and those terms lost their meaning once you’d already sunk as low as you could go. “I’ll think about it,” he said.
She crossed her arms, though she lost some of her composure when Cerebus nosed her, looking for a treat and nearly knocking her off her feet. “Take your time,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Fine,” he said, spreading his arms wide and floating back across the sea, shutting out the slosh of souls and their quiet keening and even the sultry sound of her voice, waiting until she was a speck on the shore (a burning beacon of life), “make yourself at home.”
He didn’t know how she managed to bribe Charon, but one moment he was standing over the whirlpool of souls wringing out a rag, and the next he returned to his central chamber to find her sitting in the corner, a black sheet wrapped around herself while she meticulously ripped apart the tattered shreds of her robe. He watched for a moment, then shrugged and went back to scrubbing the wall. She was silent, but the room echoed with her breathing, and without any other minions to hide the basic paradox of life in the Underworld he found the edges of his temper fraying, his fingers catching fire without a thought. Even if he closed himself to the sound, she was still there, her chest rising and falling with every breath, her fingers tugging on fabric; his rag burned to ash without his noticing, and then he was left without a reason to be in the chamber.
So he took Charon for a tour of the rivers of Hell, and unclogged a backup where Lethe met the Kokytus and too many souls were caught between wailing and forgetting why they wailed; their keening penetrated every level of his sensory input, and he satisfied himself with blasting fireballs until they all fell silent and resumed drifting along the current towards their unseen destination. He sailed around the Elysian Fields, pulling a few intrepid souls off its shores and back into the water. He made a few wisecracks, but Charon was deaf and hadn’t had a sense of humor even when he could hear. He was bored, but there was nothing else to do; with a sigh, he made himself another rag, and went back to the center of the Underworld.
She’d brought food with her, and he wondered if it was because she’d expected him not to agree right away. It was a strangely familiar sight; he’d repeatedly offered her the most tempting fruits his garden had to offer, and she’d repeatedly refused, preferring to munch on weeks-old bread while he tested the limits of her hunger before allowing her back to the surface. Now she sat in her corner, gnawing on dried meat as she arranged cloth on the floor, using a bone as a needle, and carefully stitching her robe into something new.
He made a half-hearted attempt to scrub at the floor, but they both knew he was watching her; he refused to be the one to break the silence. So instead he summoned up the old chessboard, and looked at the broken pieces that remained, and she said, “What’s your problem, anyway?”
“What, you mean the part where it’s impossible to find any dead people who care about personal hygiene?”
“No.” She glanced up at him, and then back at her work. “I mean your whole problem with Zeus. What’d he do to you?”
And surely she knew the story—although who knew how the mortals chose to tell it; they knew which side their pita was oiled during life, and probably didn’t want to anger the deity who could strike them with lightning at any moment (did they care about their eternal afterlife? Oh, no; at that point, it was beyond their control, right?). But the whole time he’d had her running errands and seducing centaurs for his benefit, she’d never asked. No one had ever asked, and he knew he wasn’t thinking clearly in wanting to answer, but it had been so long since he’d had a conversation with anyone, living or dead, and he’d always talked faster than he could think. (Technically impossible, for a god; he knew all the words ahead of time, but that didn’t mean he bothered to dwell on them.)
“Oh, nothing much, just handed me the Underworld on a spit-shined platter and said, ‘Hey big brother, here you go, enjoy!’ without so much as a hey-you-want-this? I mean, we’d only been out of Dad’s stomach for what, five seconds, and it’s not like we had in say in which of us got swallowed and which of us got exchanged for a rock, and what, do people think I just loved sitting in Dad’s stomach?” He worked his jaw, the sour taste of acid rising from the place where it sat stewing in his core, never-quite gone. “Poseidon’s the one who got too used to the juices—they went to his head, right, but I just wanted some fresh air, but there’s only three kingdoms and Fishboy jumped into the ocean and refused to come out again and next thing you know boom I’m in the underworld surrounded by dead people who’re upset with the new management and I’m not even the one who forced the old boss into an early retirement but they don’t know that, they’re dead! So I’m like, hey, Zeus, can we work out a deal here, switch it up, you spend half the year down here, but next thing you know he’s built Olympus and Hera’ll just have a fit if he asks her to move and—”
“She seems prone to those.” He stopped mid-step—when had he started pacing?—and looked at her wry expression. “Does it run in the family?”
He snorted flame, red and angry, and said, “She spent the entire time whining about it being dark and icky and latched onto Zeusy before she’d stopped dripping acid on the floor. So, she’s never going to come down here, she’s never going to let Zeus out of her sight, he’s a wimp, and meanwhile it’s still dark and there’s not a strong enough air freshener in the world to make this place smell less like dead people.”
“Funny, I always thought it reeked of despair,” she said, still dry. “A little eau de hopelessness to help you start your morning.”
“You’re the one who bathed in the stuff, babe,” and she flinched, and it was an empty sort of pleasure, taking comfort in familiarity rather than in any real enjoyment. Her eyes went back to the cloth in her lap. He stood and looked at her; her soul writhed, pain and sorrow and despair dragging at the possibility of eternal youth, but he was the god of the dead, and he had an appreciation for decay.
She won out, of course; she always recovered from the cruelest of barbs. He’d yet to see anything cut deep enough to break whatever-it-was that set her apart. Her voice was steady as she said, “So, a hostile takeover bid was your only option?”
“You got any better ideas for getting out of here?” He shrugged. “Look, an opportunity presented itself, I merely took advantage of it. Besides, I didn’t wake up all the Titans. Just a couple.” There were a few who were caged and would stay caged, but there was no need to tell a mortal about the fears of a god.
“People still got hurt.”
“Sheesh. You’ve been with Wonderboy too long.”
“You’re probably right,” she said. “Going soft in my old age. Soon I’ll be feeble and feeding feta crumbs to pigeons, just you watch.”
He doubted it. Anyone living with the strength and fortitude to walk into the Underworld as if they owned it (and maybe she did, but that was a disturbing thought best not dwelt on) was neither soft nor feeble, and anyway the thought of Meg ever reaching that stage was impossible. She’d die first (and then what? But he wasn’t dwelling on it). “So what’s your deal this time?” he said, distracting himself.
“Hm?”
“You’re not here bargaining for anyone’s life,” he said, “you’ve got your freedom, so no need to persuade me to give it to you, Wonderboy’s gone—”
“Oh,” she said. She kept her eyes on her work, though it seemed she pulled on her needle with more force than necessary. “Overbearing mother-in-law, homicidal husband, dead children.” She shrugged, and nearly stabbed herself with the needle. “I’m sure you’ve heard it before.”
Probably, not that he’d ever actually bothered to talk to the souls moaning their way through his kingdom. “Children?”
“I said dead,” she said, and there was the pain again, wrapping itself around her soul and doing its best to squeeze the life out of her—but he also saw rage, cool and blue, its fire burning in her eyes when she raised her head to look at him, and he knew that she knew that she would survive, and be the stronger for it. “Are you going to help me or not?”
“Sure,” he said. She didn’t smile, but he knew what she felt; to escape the tide of emotion, he left the room. “Try not to get your mortal dirt on my furniture.”
The Underworld was dark.
It had been the first thing he’d really noticed; he’d barely had time to be blinded by the sun before descending into hell with instructions to “make yourself at home. Maybe you could liven the place up a bit!” Zeus had paused, taking a minute to process his own joke, and then laughed uproariously; that had been the first moment Hades knew he hated his brother.
So he’d wandered around, staring into the rivers and observing how the waters of death muted the light of even the strongest soul and snuffed many of the weaker ones. He’d expanded to fill the entire space, seeking the upper limits, not quite daring to test the lower ones, memorizing his domain’s dimensions in an instant. He hadn’t needed to be anything other than himself. There wasn’t anyone to talk to—not even another god—and with the dark and the wet he almost thought he’d dreamed the rescue and was in fact still slowly dissolving and if he made a quantum leap or two he’d bump into Hera and she’d make a disgruntled snapping noise and send him on his way. If it wasn’t for the brief but perfectly preserved memory of air and infinite space and something akin to freedom, he would have returned to slumbering away his existence.
And then he’d discovered the Elysian Fields, set apart and brighter, less stale, though only a mere approximation of what the mortal world was like, and curiosity got the better of him. To explore it properly, he would need physical senses; for physical senses, he needed a physical form. The only sense he’d ever experienced before was pain, acid and suffocation and bile and his sisters’ frightened screams, and so it was with some trepidation that he gave himself a shell, as it were, squeezing himself into a shape that sort of resembled the souls he’d looked at, arms and a clothed lower half and a head and eyes and suddenly where before he had simply been aware of the darkness, now he couldn’t see at all. And he was cold, freezing straight through his skin, and he’d thought to himself fire, and then it was burning in his hands, pleasingly warm.
He didn’t know how Meg could stand it. Sure, when he’d first bought her soul, he’d given her some measure of protection in his realm, but she’d also been caught between heaven and hell at that point and didn’t quite belong to the rules of the mortal world. He had a choice, after all, whether or not he wanted to experience the Underworld as mortals did, and even then he had his fire—over time it had simply become part of him, permanently hot and conveniently lighting his way. She shouldn’t have had heat or illumination—mortal eyes couldn’t see souls the way his did, catching glimpses of murky green reflections and missing the pure light—but she made her way around the central chambers as easily as if she’d been there a thousand times before, her makeshift robes blending in with the stone nearly as well as his did.
(He’d picked his robes in a panic, after a period of time spent staring into the Styx, when he looked up and realized that thousands and thousands of souls had been collecting on the opposite bank without any way of transporting themselves to the other side. He’d needed to be wearing something when he addressed his new subjects, and the only inspiration was the stone around him. They became as much a part of him as the flames and the grey skin—better to blend with your surroundings than stand out; the only place he didn’t seem to belong was Olympus, where Zeus had let Hera decorate with whatever garish color schemes struck her fancy. He preferred muted, dark colors, because they were subtle and because they were hard to find and yet even they were brilliant compared to his surroundings.)
She hadn’t been so comfortable the first time he’d let her stand on the other side of the Styx. He’d never allowed her into the central chambers, but he’d brought her down to the banks of the Styx and then pointed out the souls in the river and watched her face as she saw her fate rushing before her eyes. She’d been young, then, barely a woman, her eyes still red and her nose still dripping from when he’d come to her, sobbing on the bedroom floor as the man she’d saved walked out the door without so much as a thank you kindly.
It had been one of his more brilliant plans, almost an after-thought dropped amongst the alliances and rituals necessary for releasing the Titans and capturing Olympus. He’d heard the violent shrieking prayers of a mortal who would do anything, anything, if he would save the other mortal they loved; he’d decided to investigate, and found a girl with flushed cheeks and kiss-darkened lips standing on a river bank while its god drowned her lover, a forgettable man by any standard but hers. It was, if he cared to admit it, the flush of her cheeks that caught his attention, caused him to step forward and interrupt the drowning for the chance to study her; she looked warm, and when she saw him she met his gaze with fury and demands on her tongue and her essence blazed out at him. Freeing her boyfriend was an easy task, hardly worth a soul—no mere river god wanted to anger the god of the Underworld, so it only took a few words, worth a sacrificial goat, perhaps roasted over a nice bonfire—but she gave it without hesitation, sealed the deal, her mind apparently failing to grasp that the pleasure of having her lover back in her arms would be a brief flash compared to the eternity of servitude that awaited her. Or perhaps she did, but thought it was worth it, rather like her boyfriend thought it would be worth walking out to find something better, because life had to be lived for happiness because you certainly weren’t going to find it in a river of death, not that mortals had ever really figured out what happiness was but hey, he wasn’t going to judge. Well, he would—but everyone ended up in the same place, eventually.
He’d left them there for the time being and mostly forgotten about her, and he didn’t know whether or not she could feel the chains wrapped around her very being but whenever he did bother to check she seemed fine. And then came the day he simply could not convince a bunch of satyrs to leave their forest so that he could settle a few of his centaurs there, and he couldn’t burn the place down because then they’d just complain to Zeus and he’d be punished, one way or another, and he remembered that he had a mortal female at his beck and call. Satyrs liked females. It was a simple equation, though he’d never really bothered to cash in on his souls while they were still living; the dead ones were good for scrubbing the floor of the Underworld, but the living ones were usually too stupid to be of any use in the mortal world. But he remembered that this mortal had seemed less stupid, or at least more aware when she had given away her soul for the sake of someone else, and so he went to her. When he appeared in her kitchen (they’d settled down together, and she was keeping house, and it seemed such a waste, all that brightness in such a cramped and dim setting) she had done a very curious thing:
She had refused to go.
He was so surprised he burned down the house without a second thought and left. She survived, of course; she was protected from his rage even before she learned to duck. It hadn’t taken too long after that freak accident for her boyfriend’s gaze to start to wander; she’d always been more woman than he could handle, and now she was setting the house on fire, and Hades was poised to curl into her bedroom like smoke and whisper in her ear hello, sweetheart, time to pay up.
And so he’d brought her to the Styx and she had stared into the river and it was so deliciously ironic that he couldn’t resist saying, “Hey, doesn’t this look familiar?”
“I hate you,” she’d said.
“Join the club, I hear they’ve got free togas this time of year.” She’d shivered, and he’d leaned down and said, “Cold?” right in her ear, and for the first time he’d had a sense of the natural heat of mortal flesh—
“So I’m your slave,” she’d said, jerking away and giving him what he would eventually learn was the arch expression she used when she was afraid and angry and yet supremely unconcerned with what he might think. “What’s my first gig?”
“Satyrs,” he’d said. “If you could convince them to find…greener pastures, as it were.”
She’d rolled her eyes and said, “Guess I better make myself look pretty, then,” as if she hadn’t been standing right next to a river full of dead souls who would have happily pointed out that looks simply don’t matter when you’re dead, and when your soul belongs to the Lord of the Underworld, you’re basically dead. Everyone knew that but her—or maybe she knew and saw straight through his bluff. Maybe she’d realized she’d survived the fire without a scratch. Maybe she’d thought eternal youth was part of the deal. “You got anything for that?”
“Black, black, and more black,” he’d said. She was straight and to the point and had to obey his every whim, and he was finding that he liked it.
“No thanks,” she’d said, turning her back on him and walking towards the entrance to the Underworld, not that she’d make it there anytime soon without his assistance, “but I’ll try to match.”
The only object of color he had in the entire Underworld was a bottle of never-ending alcohol straight from Dionysus’s presses, mostly usefully for when he was really angry and looking to make a tremendous explosion. Meg always wore purple and her lips were wine-red. It was only coincidence.
//part two//
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Title: From Order, Chaos
Author: Jade Sabre
Summary: When Hades finally frees himself from the river of death, he discovers an unexpected visitor in his abode with revenge on her mind and sorrow in her heart. A Meg/Hades fic, of a sort.
Notes: So I read the summary of the fanart "Megara: She Needs a Gyro" by steevinlove over at DeviantArt, and decided to fic it. Or perhaps its prequel.
That I have furthered bastardized the already bastard mythology of the film, I freely admit; I have taken the pieces I needed, acknowledged that this is an AU of Disney's AU, and put things together as I thought they might fit. My apologies to any and all fans of Greek mythology and history in general; I include myself in this apology. I also apologize to Rick Riordan, because I borrowed one of his ideas, and his meticulously researched and perfectly presented works shouldn't wallow in the mud I've made of the primordial waters.
I also shouldn't be allowed to write author's notes again, ever.
Dedication: To my dear Ariel, who showed me the picture in the first place, who not only indulges but encourages my love of all things Disney, and who is pretty much one of the strongest, sweetest people I've ever met, even when she's being sassy. Merry Christmas, dear. 3
Disclaimer: I do not own the specific iteration of the Herculean myth from which I borrowed the characters you find in this fic.
from order, chaos
It had taken a while to claw his way out of the sea of dead people, a difficulty compounded by the fact that no one really wanted to get out of the way and more souls came in by the second. He didn’t know how long he’d spent lying on the cliff once he finally shook off the last desperate hand, too exhausted even to make a mental note to build a wall around the thing that not even super-strong demigods could destroy. Of course, it would have to be a clear wall, so that he could still see what was going on, but the Fates had said Plexiglas wasn’t even a spark in the collective mortal consciousness and oh for Gaia’s sake he was a god, wasn’t he? He could just make it, mortals be damned (and damned and damned again). It might not be as good as anything they came up with, but at least he’d have something.
If he were the type to be frightened, he would worry about how long it took him to unclog his senses of the apathetic lethargy of the dead, but he’d swum the ocean and waited around and lost everything he’d ever wanted and failed to get it back too many times at this point to care. Zeus was still sending dead people to the Underworld? None of them had somehow escaped? No mortal sorcerers had asked another deity to bring anyone back from the dead? Great. Fantastic. Yet another reminder of how really indispensible he was, no, really, Hades, watching the dead swim in circles down a metaphysical toilet matters just as much as ensuring there’s a sky for the sun to move across. Whatever.
All of this was besides the point. The point was that somewhere along the line as he started to think about getting up and putting some weight back into his limbs two souls floated over his head and slipped into the sea and looked familiar, though why mortals should look familiar to him was beyond his grasp. But curiosity got the better of him and he put the effort into the thought of being upright, and then he peered over the edge and watched as the souls—boys, children, one perhaps younger—made a space for themselves, their hair curly, their eyes wide open as if they’d died awake. Souls didn’t really reflect the state in which their bodies had stopped; they reflected what the person had thought of themselves, when they were alive, and they lost their shape as the soul forgot who they’d been. In the deepest depths of the sea of souls they were nothing but goo, formless matter that had once represented a life with hopes and dreams and which now had nothing but existence—because mortal souls were as immortal as a god’s. Mortals simply didn’t have the stamina to last as long.
And why not? he wondered, looking down over the edge, though the easy answer was that Kronos had realized if he didn’t drown them, the souls would overtake Olympus and start a new world order, and maybe he didn’t want Hades ruling but anything was better than the malleability of a mortal soul. Gods, at least, were cast and then left to fill the mold; mortals could be anything, and that made them dangerous.
Of course it was highly doubtful that Zeus had realized this, and again Hades wished he had some—flexibility, in ruling the Underworld. If he could convince the souls to follow him—if they had realized, if anyone had realized, that he was the only one who knew anything about them—things might have been different. But the world was a system, and part of that was the sea of souls, and so he left the dead mortal boys to their slumbering fate, and went to see if anyone had bothered to feed Cerebus in his absence.
They hadn’t; he found the three-headed dog gnawing on what looked like the bones of a Fury, and looked around to call for someone to bring him a steak, but of course no one was there. Pain and Panic were gone, fleeing his wrath, and as he had no particular need for them he pushed them from his mind and ran his hand through his flame, reveling in the warmth. He suspected it would be a long time before he could entirely banish the cold slick feeling of souls from his metaphorical bones, but having his flame back helped.
He left the dog to its gnawing and skimmed the vast river of souls, flying back to his central chamber and summoning up a view of Olympus. It looked fine—but then, they’d had who knew how long to get the place back up and running after his attack. And judging by the fact that Zeus hadn’t sent anyone to make sure he drowned, he could be reasonably sure that he had been written off as a “punished, lesson learned” incident. It was a very Zeus thing to do; when you got right down to it, Zeus really believed all that brotherhood nonsense he spouted off. “I saved everyone for a reason,” he’d say, his deep voice booming echoes of unfelt pain. “Whatever else happens, we’re family.”
Of course, enjoying the benefits of being in the family meant obeying the family’s rules. Look at what happened to Prometheus. Almost as nasty as spending eons amidst a bunch of humans’ disappearing dreams, he thought, checking that the Titan was still safely chained to his rock. The vultures flew away when he approached, settling on Tityos’s stomach, and there was Sisyphus’s boulder making its way up the only hill in all of Tartarus. There was also a giant pit that he normally avoided—speaking of family—but he figured he ought to check, and so he went and stood on its edge and looked down, down, down, striving to see beyond mortal or divine sight despite the fact that the whole point of this prison was that no one, not even a Titan, could see a way out of it. He’d explored its depths once, back when he’d first found himself trapped underground with nothing else to do, but he was always careful to keep the metaphorical light in sight. No other sense could be trusted; sounds echoed off walls with a madman’s design in mind. For now, the pit was silent; if his father sensed his presence, he chose not to make any comments, and it was with an equally silent relief that he left the pit and went to the shore, and discovered Charon waiting for him.
“Oh,” he said. “You.”
The decrepit old…thing, all stringy beard and skin stretched over bone, bowed. “Where would Master like to go today?”
Pure formality, of course, but it was nice to hear someone address him with something like respect. “Oh, the usual tour,” he said, settling himself in the boat, summoning up a martini and leaning back as the boatmaster dipped his oar in the water and pushed away from the shore. Charon seemed happy enough to have him back, not that he had had anyone to ferry in his absence—you only got the ferry if you were going some place nice when you died, and that rarely happened. Generally, the Underworld consisted of Charon, his master, a handful of people and gods suffering eternal torment, and a whole lot of primordial goo in more-or-less distinct soul shapes; and frankly, Hades hated it.
It was Cerebus who told him he had a visitor, although not in the usual way. There wasn’t much to arrange in the Underworld—no paperwork, very few prayers sent directly his way—but he was tidying up the place by hand, because doing it by hand took up time that otherwise would be spent counting the space between seconds until he could search out someone to talk to, when he noticed a sound. He stopped scrubbing ectoplasm and listened, hearing everything happening in his realm until he found the sound that bothered him—Cerebus, chewing contentedly, on what?
He chose not to use Charon, preferring stealth to make his way to the entrance of the Underworld—and what he saw would have taken his breath away. If he’d had breath.
This, he told himself sternly, was why one should never make deals with mortals.
Her hair hung down her back in unwashed clumps; her pale robes were in tatters, her face bruised, her hands bloody from carrying whatever animal Cerebus now devoured as she scratched behind one of his ears. The monster had always liked her.
He watched them, the jaded traitor and the tamed beast, looking at the subtle changes time had brought to her face: plumped cheeks still round, if thinner; curves softened, heavier; and if he bothered to look closely, lines trailing from the corners of her eyes and her lips. If he bothered to look closely, he could see her soul, bright and free; he could trace every change in its form, perhaps even see the markings her bondage had left, but he did not bother to look, because while her mortal flesh was easy to ignore, her essence was not. No matter that it was made of the same stuff he’d been swimming in for years. Something about Megara was different, and it did not do to dwell on the differences between mortals.
“Well, well, well,” he said, landing on the ground several paces away from the pair, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. “What have we here?”
Cerebus’s ears flattened against his skulls, though each of his three jaws continued to chew on whatever she had brought; she turned and said, in a voice striving to be as dead as the souls off the shore, “Hades. It’s been a long time.”
Her tone may have been flat, but it was full of a quality the Underworld fundamentally lacked, one he hadn’t heard since a well-aimed fist landed him amongst its denizens, as seductive as her soul, no matter how she meant it to sound. He stopped listening. “Well, you know, down here, we have all the time in the world, so whatever—”
“I’m here to make a deal,” she said, and the Muses couldn’t have sung a sweeter tune.
He stared for a moment, his quick-talking skills momentarily stunned. “You’re here to what?” he said. “I’m probably shooting myself in the foot here, but are you serious?”
“As an earthquake in Athens,” she said.
“Oh, really.” The obvious question came to mind. “And what does Wonderboy think of this?”
“He’s gone.”
“Really.”
They looked at each other then, and her eyes were tired and hard and alive and then she said, “I’m going to get him back.”
“So, wait.” He rubbed his forehead. “You want me to help you get back the guy who singlehandedly stopped my takeover of the cosmos?” He glanced at her from under his hand; she was nodding. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she said, and Gaia help him—Gaia would just as soon laugh in his face—she was serious, leaning forward, daring to look him straight in the face, “you and I have something in common.”
“Oh?” He pushed off the wall and floated closer, until she had to tilt her head up to look at him. Nearness did not affect him; if he’d wanted to, he could have floated straight through her, and she would have been nary the wiser.
Judging from the neutrality of her expression, it didn’t affect her either. “Olympus,” she said. “You have enemies there. So do I.”
“Keep talking.”
“You hate Zeus,” and hate was a mild term compared to the all-consuming pain and bitterness that had haunted his steps for centuries, but he let it pass; she did the best her mortal tongue could do. “I hate Hera. We find Hercules, we hurt Hera, we hurt Zeus. Sound good?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Trust me.”
He laughed, and she took a step backwards, though her determination didn’t waver. He could feel it rolling off her in waves; he could make himself immune to physical sensation, but metaphysical feeling was as powerful as the splash of cold water at high tide. “Look,” he said, “not to burst your bubble of joy or anything, but I just got out of an extremely long bath, so to speak, and I don’t think making a pass at Zeus’s wife is really the way to get back into—”
“You can blame it all on me,” she said. “I won’t tell them who helped me.”
“You’re serious.” She didn’t bother to nod. He took in her appearance once more, and finally said, “Am I the first person you’re asking?”
“No,” she said. “I told Phil I wanted to go after H—him,” and she stumbled, as though nearly saying his name from habit was a sin she didn’t dare commit, “and he told me he didn’t train women because there aren’t any female heroes, though he was nice enough to say that I was the closest he’d ever seen, fat lot of good that did me. Artemis only deals with virgins, and I haven’t been one of those since I was twelve, so she’s out, and I went to talk to the Amazons and they were excited until they found out I wanted to rescue a man, and I nearly died trying to get away and thought, hey, haven’t visited the Underworld in a while, why not go back?” She reached out and scratched one of Cerebus’s heads, right above the nose, and he made the deep giant-three-headed-dog sound equivalent to a happy growl; Hades glared at him. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”
“Oh yeah, you know, eternally dark, and you can’t get rid of the mildew, and what, you’re just going to sell your soul—”
“No,” she said. The word brought a flush to her cheeks, her hands clenching into fists. “We’ll be partners.”
“Partners.” He had to laugh. He’d forgotten how funny mortals could be. “In case you haven’t noticed, I work alone.”
“And how’s that been going for you?”
And it wasn’t even true—he’d had her and Pain and Panic and various allies, though he’d been the one in charge; more servants than allies, yes, but he’d needed people on his side to try to carry it off. (It was supremely unfair that his gathered forces could be single-handedly defeated, but such were the Fates.) But she had seen how he ran his operation, and she’d watched as he fell—well, she hadn’t watched, she’d been dead by then, but it had been all her fault, and now she was mocking him, and he couldn’t just dodge the half-truth with one of his own. “Not great, but—look, I’m the Lord of the Underworld. Solo’s sort of my schtick, you know, no one really wants to work with you, and it’s not like there’s even enough things for two to do, there’s a lot of sitting around doing nothing—”
“So you’re just going to hide here until you figure it’s safe to go out and see if anyone still wants to talk to you?” She rolled her eyes at him. He was certain she was the only being—mortal or immortal—who had ever done so, but it was such an automatic gesture he’d never thought to comment on it. She was Meg. She rolled her eyes at the world, and the world fell to its knees and apologized for presuming her to be an idiot. “Look, I’ll do whatever you want, if you help me. But I don’t own you and you don’t own me. We’re equals.”
Eye-rolling or not, that was going too far. A mortal and a god, equals. “Are you nuts?” He wasn’t going to get involved in that kind of cosmos-rearranging. “Forget it. I’m not your man.”
“No,” she said, with a wry smile, tinged with admittance, and before he could turn his back on her and forget her existence with a wave of his hand, she said, “You’re my god.”
He was doomed and she was damned, but they were standing together in the Underworld and those terms lost their meaning once you’d already sunk as low as you could go. “I’ll think about it,” he said.
She crossed her arms, though she lost some of her composure when Cerebus nosed her, looking for a treat and nearly knocking her off her feet. “Take your time,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Fine,” he said, spreading his arms wide and floating back across the sea, shutting out the slosh of souls and their quiet keening and even the sultry sound of her voice, waiting until she was a speck on the shore (a burning beacon of life), “make yourself at home.”
He didn’t know how she managed to bribe Charon, but one moment he was standing over the whirlpool of souls wringing out a rag, and the next he returned to his central chamber to find her sitting in the corner, a black sheet wrapped around herself while she meticulously ripped apart the tattered shreds of her robe. He watched for a moment, then shrugged and went back to scrubbing the wall. She was silent, but the room echoed with her breathing, and without any other minions to hide the basic paradox of life in the Underworld he found the edges of his temper fraying, his fingers catching fire without a thought. Even if he closed himself to the sound, she was still there, her chest rising and falling with every breath, her fingers tugging on fabric; his rag burned to ash without his noticing, and then he was left without a reason to be in the chamber.
So he took Charon for a tour of the rivers of Hell, and unclogged a backup where Lethe met the Kokytus and too many souls were caught between wailing and forgetting why they wailed; their keening penetrated every level of his sensory input, and he satisfied himself with blasting fireballs until they all fell silent and resumed drifting along the current towards their unseen destination. He sailed around the Elysian Fields, pulling a few intrepid souls off its shores and back into the water. He made a few wisecracks, but Charon was deaf and hadn’t had a sense of humor even when he could hear. He was bored, but there was nothing else to do; with a sigh, he made himself another rag, and went back to the center of the Underworld.
She’d brought food with her, and he wondered if it was because she’d expected him not to agree right away. It was a strangely familiar sight; he’d repeatedly offered her the most tempting fruits his garden had to offer, and she’d repeatedly refused, preferring to munch on weeks-old bread while he tested the limits of her hunger before allowing her back to the surface. Now she sat in her corner, gnawing on dried meat as she arranged cloth on the floor, using a bone as a needle, and carefully stitching her robe into something new.
He made a half-hearted attempt to scrub at the floor, but they both knew he was watching her; he refused to be the one to break the silence. So instead he summoned up the old chessboard, and looked at the broken pieces that remained, and she said, “What’s your problem, anyway?”
“What, you mean the part where it’s impossible to find any dead people who care about personal hygiene?”
“No.” She glanced up at him, and then back at her work. “I mean your whole problem with Zeus. What’d he do to you?”
And surely she knew the story—although who knew how the mortals chose to tell it; they knew which side their pita was oiled during life, and probably didn’t want to anger the deity who could strike them with lightning at any moment (did they care about their eternal afterlife? Oh, no; at that point, it was beyond their control, right?). But the whole time he’d had her running errands and seducing centaurs for his benefit, she’d never asked. No one had ever asked, and he knew he wasn’t thinking clearly in wanting to answer, but it had been so long since he’d had a conversation with anyone, living or dead, and he’d always talked faster than he could think. (Technically impossible, for a god; he knew all the words ahead of time, but that didn’t mean he bothered to dwell on them.)
“Oh, nothing much, just handed me the Underworld on a spit-shined platter and said, ‘Hey big brother, here you go, enjoy!’ without so much as a hey-you-want-this? I mean, we’d only been out of Dad’s stomach for what, five seconds, and it’s not like we had in say in which of us got swallowed and which of us got exchanged for a rock, and what, do people think I just loved sitting in Dad’s stomach?” He worked his jaw, the sour taste of acid rising from the place where it sat stewing in his core, never-quite gone. “Poseidon’s the one who got too used to the juices—they went to his head, right, but I just wanted some fresh air, but there’s only three kingdoms and Fishboy jumped into the ocean and refused to come out again and next thing you know boom I’m in the underworld surrounded by dead people who’re upset with the new management and I’m not even the one who forced the old boss into an early retirement but they don’t know that, they’re dead! So I’m like, hey, Zeus, can we work out a deal here, switch it up, you spend half the year down here, but next thing you know he’s built Olympus and Hera’ll just have a fit if he asks her to move and—”
“She seems prone to those.” He stopped mid-step—when had he started pacing?—and looked at her wry expression. “Does it run in the family?”
He snorted flame, red and angry, and said, “She spent the entire time whining about it being dark and icky and latched onto Zeusy before she’d stopped dripping acid on the floor. So, she’s never going to come down here, she’s never going to let Zeus out of her sight, he’s a wimp, and meanwhile it’s still dark and there’s not a strong enough air freshener in the world to make this place smell less like dead people.”
“Funny, I always thought it reeked of despair,” she said, still dry. “A little eau de hopelessness to help you start your morning.”
“You’re the one who bathed in the stuff, babe,” and she flinched, and it was an empty sort of pleasure, taking comfort in familiarity rather than in any real enjoyment. Her eyes went back to the cloth in her lap. He stood and looked at her; her soul writhed, pain and sorrow and despair dragging at the possibility of eternal youth, but he was the god of the dead, and he had an appreciation for decay.
She won out, of course; she always recovered from the cruelest of barbs. He’d yet to see anything cut deep enough to break whatever-it-was that set her apart. Her voice was steady as she said, “So, a hostile takeover bid was your only option?”
“You got any better ideas for getting out of here?” He shrugged. “Look, an opportunity presented itself, I merely took advantage of it. Besides, I didn’t wake up all the Titans. Just a couple.” There were a few who were caged and would stay caged, but there was no need to tell a mortal about the fears of a god.
“People still got hurt.”
“Sheesh. You’ve been with Wonderboy too long.”
“You’re probably right,” she said. “Going soft in my old age. Soon I’ll be feeble and feeding feta crumbs to pigeons, just you watch.”
He doubted it. Anyone living with the strength and fortitude to walk into the Underworld as if they owned it (and maybe she did, but that was a disturbing thought best not dwelt on) was neither soft nor feeble, and anyway the thought of Meg ever reaching that stage was impossible. She’d die first (and then what? But he wasn’t dwelling on it). “So what’s your deal this time?” he said, distracting himself.
“Hm?”
“You’re not here bargaining for anyone’s life,” he said, “you’ve got your freedom, so no need to persuade me to give it to you, Wonderboy’s gone—”
“Oh,” she said. She kept her eyes on her work, though it seemed she pulled on her needle with more force than necessary. “Overbearing mother-in-law, homicidal husband, dead children.” She shrugged, and nearly stabbed herself with the needle. “I’m sure you’ve heard it before.”
Probably, not that he’d ever actually bothered to talk to the souls moaning their way through his kingdom. “Children?”
“I said dead,” she said, and there was the pain again, wrapping itself around her soul and doing its best to squeeze the life out of her—but he also saw rage, cool and blue, its fire burning in her eyes when she raised her head to look at him, and he knew that she knew that she would survive, and be the stronger for it. “Are you going to help me or not?”
“Sure,” he said. She didn’t smile, but he knew what she felt; to escape the tide of emotion, he left the room. “Try not to get your mortal dirt on my furniture.”
The Underworld was dark.
It had been the first thing he’d really noticed; he’d barely had time to be blinded by the sun before descending into hell with instructions to “make yourself at home. Maybe you could liven the place up a bit!” Zeus had paused, taking a minute to process his own joke, and then laughed uproariously; that had been the first moment Hades knew he hated his brother.
So he’d wandered around, staring into the rivers and observing how the waters of death muted the light of even the strongest soul and snuffed many of the weaker ones. He’d expanded to fill the entire space, seeking the upper limits, not quite daring to test the lower ones, memorizing his domain’s dimensions in an instant. He hadn’t needed to be anything other than himself. There wasn’t anyone to talk to—not even another god—and with the dark and the wet he almost thought he’d dreamed the rescue and was in fact still slowly dissolving and if he made a quantum leap or two he’d bump into Hera and she’d make a disgruntled snapping noise and send him on his way. If it wasn’t for the brief but perfectly preserved memory of air and infinite space and something akin to freedom, he would have returned to slumbering away his existence.
And then he’d discovered the Elysian Fields, set apart and brighter, less stale, though only a mere approximation of what the mortal world was like, and curiosity got the better of him. To explore it properly, he would need physical senses; for physical senses, he needed a physical form. The only sense he’d ever experienced before was pain, acid and suffocation and bile and his sisters’ frightened screams, and so it was with some trepidation that he gave himself a shell, as it were, squeezing himself into a shape that sort of resembled the souls he’d looked at, arms and a clothed lower half and a head and eyes and suddenly where before he had simply been aware of the darkness, now he couldn’t see at all. And he was cold, freezing straight through his skin, and he’d thought to himself fire, and then it was burning in his hands, pleasingly warm.
He didn’t know how Meg could stand it. Sure, when he’d first bought her soul, he’d given her some measure of protection in his realm, but she’d also been caught between heaven and hell at that point and didn’t quite belong to the rules of the mortal world. He had a choice, after all, whether or not he wanted to experience the Underworld as mortals did, and even then he had his fire—over time it had simply become part of him, permanently hot and conveniently lighting his way. She shouldn’t have had heat or illumination—mortal eyes couldn’t see souls the way his did, catching glimpses of murky green reflections and missing the pure light—but she made her way around the central chambers as easily as if she’d been there a thousand times before, her makeshift robes blending in with the stone nearly as well as his did.
(He’d picked his robes in a panic, after a period of time spent staring into the Styx, when he looked up and realized that thousands and thousands of souls had been collecting on the opposite bank without any way of transporting themselves to the other side. He’d needed to be wearing something when he addressed his new subjects, and the only inspiration was the stone around him. They became as much a part of him as the flames and the grey skin—better to blend with your surroundings than stand out; the only place he didn’t seem to belong was Olympus, where Zeus had let Hera decorate with whatever garish color schemes struck her fancy. He preferred muted, dark colors, because they were subtle and because they were hard to find and yet even they were brilliant compared to his surroundings.)
She hadn’t been so comfortable the first time he’d let her stand on the other side of the Styx. He’d never allowed her into the central chambers, but he’d brought her down to the banks of the Styx and then pointed out the souls in the river and watched her face as she saw her fate rushing before her eyes. She’d been young, then, barely a woman, her eyes still red and her nose still dripping from when he’d come to her, sobbing on the bedroom floor as the man she’d saved walked out the door without so much as a thank you kindly.
It had been one of his more brilliant plans, almost an after-thought dropped amongst the alliances and rituals necessary for releasing the Titans and capturing Olympus. He’d heard the violent shrieking prayers of a mortal who would do anything, anything, if he would save the other mortal they loved; he’d decided to investigate, and found a girl with flushed cheeks and kiss-darkened lips standing on a river bank while its god drowned her lover, a forgettable man by any standard but hers. It was, if he cared to admit it, the flush of her cheeks that caught his attention, caused him to step forward and interrupt the drowning for the chance to study her; she looked warm, and when she saw him she met his gaze with fury and demands on her tongue and her essence blazed out at him. Freeing her boyfriend was an easy task, hardly worth a soul—no mere river god wanted to anger the god of the Underworld, so it only took a few words, worth a sacrificial goat, perhaps roasted over a nice bonfire—but she gave it without hesitation, sealed the deal, her mind apparently failing to grasp that the pleasure of having her lover back in her arms would be a brief flash compared to the eternity of servitude that awaited her. Or perhaps she did, but thought it was worth it, rather like her boyfriend thought it would be worth walking out to find something better, because life had to be lived for happiness because you certainly weren’t going to find it in a river of death, not that mortals had ever really figured out what happiness was but hey, he wasn’t going to judge. Well, he would—but everyone ended up in the same place, eventually.
He’d left them there for the time being and mostly forgotten about her, and he didn’t know whether or not she could feel the chains wrapped around her very being but whenever he did bother to check she seemed fine. And then came the day he simply could not convince a bunch of satyrs to leave their forest so that he could settle a few of his centaurs there, and he couldn’t burn the place down because then they’d just complain to Zeus and he’d be punished, one way or another, and he remembered that he had a mortal female at his beck and call. Satyrs liked females. It was a simple equation, though he’d never really bothered to cash in on his souls while they were still living; the dead ones were good for scrubbing the floor of the Underworld, but the living ones were usually too stupid to be of any use in the mortal world. But he remembered that this mortal had seemed less stupid, or at least more aware when she had given away her soul for the sake of someone else, and so he went to her. When he appeared in her kitchen (they’d settled down together, and she was keeping house, and it seemed such a waste, all that brightness in such a cramped and dim setting) she had done a very curious thing:
She had refused to go.
He was so surprised he burned down the house without a second thought and left. She survived, of course; she was protected from his rage even before she learned to duck. It hadn’t taken too long after that freak accident for her boyfriend’s gaze to start to wander; she’d always been more woman than he could handle, and now she was setting the house on fire, and Hades was poised to curl into her bedroom like smoke and whisper in her ear hello, sweetheart, time to pay up.
And so he’d brought her to the Styx and she had stared into the river and it was so deliciously ironic that he couldn’t resist saying, “Hey, doesn’t this look familiar?”
“I hate you,” she’d said.
“Join the club, I hear they’ve got free togas this time of year.” She’d shivered, and he’d leaned down and said, “Cold?” right in her ear, and for the first time he’d had a sense of the natural heat of mortal flesh—
“So I’m your slave,” she’d said, jerking away and giving him what he would eventually learn was the arch expression she used when she was afraid and angry and yet supremely unconcerned with what he might think. “What’s my first gig?”
“Satyrs,” he’d said. “If you could convince them to find…greener pastures, as it were.”
She’d rolled her eyes and said, “Guess I better make myself look pretty, then,” as if she hadn’t been standing right next to a river full of dead souls who would have happily pointed out that looks simply don’t matter when you’re dead, and when your soul belongs to the Lord of the Underworld, you’re basically dead. Everyone knew that but her—or maybe she knew and saw straight through his bluff. Maybe she’d realized she’d survived the fire without a scratch. Maybe she’d thought eternal youth was part of the deal. “You got anything for that?”
“Black, black, and more black,” he’d said. She was straight and to the point and had to obey his every whim, and he was finding that he liked it.
“No thanks,” she’d said, turning her back on him and walking towards the entrance to the Underworld, not that she’d make it there anytime soon without his assistance, “but I’ll try to match.”
The only object of color he had in the entire Underworld was a bottle of never-ending alcohol straight from Dionysus’s presses, mostly usefully for when he was really angry and looking to make a tremendous explosion. Meg always wore purple and her lips were wine-red. It was only coincidence.
//part two//
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Date: 2011-01-10 06:09 am (UTC)