Fic: Hades/Persephone drabble
Title: A Moment of Clarity in Grief
Word count: 581
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Hades/Persephone, mention of Maria, Nico and Bianca
Summary: Hades grieves for the death of his mistress. Persephone has her own thoughts about this.
Author's Notes: written (very very late) for the pjo_battle prompt ‘Regret: Hades/Persephone’. First drabble ever.
He was grieving. He was grieving for the other woman. She knows she should be indulging in malicious satisfaction, and thanking her father Zeus, and perhaps Nemesis, for this. She wished she could be her usual vindictive self when she shouted at him for being with Maria (the name somehow didn’t taste so bitter and that made her confused and angry), for having two children with her when she had no children of her own by her husband after he’d abducted her to marry him.
The vacant look on these children’s faces as their memories were wiped and her husband’s contorted visage when they were taken away by Alecto the Fury shook her to the core, as if the gaping hole of sorrow in their lives was widening to touch her. Of course it was. He was her husband after all. It just wasn’t affecting her the way she thought it should.
He had been sitting on his throne for hours after Bianca and Nico had been taken away, the hand supporting his head half-covering his face, unmoving. Resentment, jealousy and pain had boiled up in her as she approached him in a few furious strides, wanting to shout at him some more for daring to mourn for that woman in front of her. But the ashen look on his face, as he lifted his head, dowsed the flame of emotion like the unfeeling waters of the Styx. Her heart twisted, and hands reached out to cup his face of their own accord.
He swallowed, looking up at her with liquid obsidian eyes rimmed with red. Zeus, how she pitied him. He was the god of death, yet in the end… in the end there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could have done to save the woman he loved. They were wrong, for death shall always have dominion, for even King of the Underworld could not undo the moment a spirit is torn away from the living, from his heart. Whether Maria ends up in the Fields of Asphodel or even Elysium, she would be faded, distant, and forever lost to him.
Persephone was not foolish. She knew he truly loved Maria. She was more than an ordinary mortal to keep him company while Persephone herself was in the land of the living with her mother. Part of Persephone knows that he loves her too. He would always love her, and after all this time, she loves him too. After all, she was immortal, a fixture in his life. She regrets that he would never grief for her like this, as what is ephemeral is always more precious than what is unchangeable. But he does love her, and if she’s honest with herself, that was enough. That’s why his grief hurt her, why she could not make it easy for herself and triumphantly gloat over the death of his mistress. So, instead, she kisses his cheek with as much tenderness as she could summon, and let her regret settle in his cold embrace.
And that’s when he knew that he hurt her too, with his love and grief for another woman, with his own pain; that deep down, she was grieving with him, for him, and for herself.
‘I’m so sorry, my love.’ He murmurs against her cheek, moisture on his lips like the taste of spring. And as she held him, he knew that though there are endless things he would regret, marrying her will never be one of them.