Fic: Deep Underground [SPN]
For violeteyedcat's prompt: Pluto, reluctance, hierarchy
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As a kid, Sam had hated the story of Persephone-probably, in retrospect, because he over-identified with her. After all, he too spent his life being shuttled between the “normal”, sunlit world and dank motel rooms or midnight runs (supposedly to improve his ability to navigate in the dark, but he suspected other motivations). He and Persephone had both been forced into this kind of half-existence, but she’d had her mother to argue on her behalf; Sam, on the other hand, had never so much as seen a pomegranate, let alone tasted one, and yet he was stuck with Dean playing Cerberus to their father’s Hades.
Or so it had seemed when he was a disgruntled teenager. Looking back, he suspects Dean fought for him in ways he never saw, and that their father filled the role of Zeus more than anything-forced by circumstance to grimly decree that Mary’s death sentenced her bereft family to exile.
Really, Sam’s come to nearly hate Greco-Roman mythology in general, especially given the run-ins he and Dean have had with the remnants of it. But if he had to rank the myths themselves, the Abduction of Persephone would rise fairly close to the top of the bunch: no one dies in some horribly ironic way. Persephone isn’t trapped without hope forever, and her kidnapper turns out to be just about the only god who respects his wife enough to keep it in his pants. Familial love actually achieves something mostly positive.
These days, Dean has taken on the role of Hades, but he’s also Sam’s Demeter, and things are as they are. Every now and then Sam gets his spring, but that’s a gift and more than his due. He ate the pomegranate whole a long time ago.
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A/N: This languished for a long while as I tried to write something about Dean’s perspective on Disney vs. Looney Tunes, and then I was going to make it about him refusing to accept that Pluto wasn’t a planet any more. But then I remembered Pluto = Hades and the rest basically wrote itself.