fic: the making of (persephone, background persephone/hades)

[fluffyfrolicker]

the making of | greek mythology | persephone (+ hades) | for the multigen-fic narrative bingo | square alliteration please let us pretend this counts as alliteration



at the end of all the stories, after all the happy endings, there is a place where all things go to die.

this is where she resides.

hades is, yes, certainly.
among other things that he is,

(out of rock and darkness and something similar to being cold)

he is what is called false advertising.

persephone made sure of that.

persephone, though --
she is not false.

- what creates itself can never be false.

and boy, was persephone

(out of fruit and desire and something similar to fire)

not false.

the first time she came down into death (bare feet, warm toes slowly feeling the cold rocks around them, not enough air in her lungs) she was young.

she is not young anymore.

blood runs in rosy rivers here,
and sand sifts through slits in all her soft dresses,
and grey is the color of most things in the dark.

it is always dark here.

she learns that later.

(before that: she cries in her room, soft and suffocating, and when she steps out again, she has intent so much it seeps from her eyelashes.)

she walks to him, and slits his throat with a silver dagger.

she stares at their red silhouettes in the water.
he laughs.
she laughs.
he doesn't die.

for a while, this.

and then not.

she'd grow to hate repetitions
if they weren't almost all she has.

(out of the rivers of red and the dark of the rocks and the memory of the sun on her skin)

(out of the sighs of their last breaths, and the first ever sounds of newborns, and with her hands always steady)

(into a myth, into a goddess, persephone makes herself -

into a woman.