Work Text:
What was is it you always said?
We're connected by a thread
If we ever get far apart
I'll still feel the pull of you
Despite his own better judgement, Thanatos finds himself in Elysium, worrying. He has far more productive things to do, mainly his job, than putter around the underworld as he waits for the tell-tale flair of energy that signals Zagreus’ arrival.
Zagreus should have made it through to the fields already—if there are any benefits to the ridiculous Pact, it’s punctuality. Zagreus has been getting faster and faster, ever-stronger with each ill-fated, blood-stained path through to the surface.
For a brief, shuddering moment, he’s afraid he’s missed Zagreus entirely. He mistimed his visit, and Zagreus has come and gone; perhaps, even, for the last time.
No. Now is not the time to think like that.
Look at him, turning a fool for the bull-headed prince. But then, Aphrodite can make fools of all the gods, if she so chooses. He adjusts his grip on his scythe, batting away an errant Brightsword, eyes closing as he seeks out the bright trail of death that cleaves its way through the Underworld.
Ah. There. In Asphodel, that bright flare that signals Zagreus’ position inside the labyrinthine chambers. He tips his head and draws the threads of the universe tight around him, slipping between the forgotten ways between life and death until he can step through that airless space to the place he desires to be.
Heat. Searing heat that scorches the soles of his feet before he touches down onto the batholithic islet. He dislikes Asphodel these days, but he’s curious as to what could have held up Zagreus for this long, for his energy to be so still when he should be speeding along. For that brief second, all he knows is the scorching heat and the absence of the swarming dead, and then, song.
He knows this song; he heard it while waiting for Zagreus to show back up at home, a song so plaintive that the entire House had stilled. It was as if the underworld was holding its breath as it threaded itself through the ears of the hall's inhabitants, dead and immortal alike.
He’d never thought anyone would hear Orpheus ever again, but Zagreus had done it, and this was the song that he’d brought back to their melancholic musician.
“Than?”
He looks towards the sound of his name, and there, propped up against a wall is Zagreus, Varatha loose in a worryingly limp hand. Thanatos grimaces despite himself, and does his best not to rush up the stairs to the landing.
He must not succeed at schooling either his movement or his face, because Zagreus makes a face back at him, one that bares red-slicked teeth and a trickle of blood down his temple.
“That bad, huh?” Zagreus mutters.
“I’ve seen worse,” Thanatos says dryly. He’s not exactly lying—he has seen worse.
Worse is just generally milling about on Charon’s dock, scaring the lot of peaceful deaths he’s escorting through to the ferryman. “What did you do, trip face-first into the Furies and toss your spear in the Phlegethon?”
“Something like that,” Zagreus manages, words thick with the blood that must be filling his mouth. His clothes are in soot-covered tatters, and his skin hasn’t fared much better. Blood scents the air, overpowering all else.
He kneels before the prince, taking Zagreus’ chin between his fingers. Zagreus blinks back at him, a crooked grin easing away the brief moment of surprise in his bicolored eyes. Thanatos ignores the way his stomach flips to ask, “What happened?”
“Took a bad gamble,” Zagreus mumbles, eyes fluttering shut. “...stupid…”
He can feel Ares lurking, the lord of violent deaths waiting to receive his dues for the boons he’s granted Zagreus. He can sense his colleague’s gifts the same way he can sense Zagreus’ journeys; he has a brief, flaring moment where he wants to zip his way up to Olympus and sink his fist into Ares’ jaw.
“So you just sat down to die?”
“That’s what I said!” a woman says.
Thanatos looks up, meeting the gaze of a nymph’s shade as she leans over the wall.
“I, hello,” he says uneasily. It takes a lot to unnerve Death, but arguably, he’s distracted at the moment.
“Are you gonna keep him from dying on my stairs?” the shade asks, face pinched with consternation.
“...Pardon me?”
“Be nice to Than,” Zagreus says, head lolling back with a thud as he looks up at the woman. “We like him.”
“Uh-huh. Ain’t a we here, Mister Prince.”
“And I’m not dying,” Zag adds, closing his eyes. “I’m enjoying myself.”
“As you bleed out,” Thanatos mutters. He can feel the dampness on the soles of his feet as he stands. There’s no real telling how long Zagreus had been resting and bleeding there on the landing, but the consistency of the blood on his feet tells him it hasn’t been extraordinarily long. “Excuse me, are you the Lady Eurydice?”
“That’s me. And I know you already.”
“Obviously.”
“Now that we’re all acquainted,” Zagreus drawls. His knee knocks up against Thanatos’ ankle. “Than, what are you doing here?”
Thanatos resists the dual urge to sigh and scream, preferably at the same time.
Zagreus tries his patience at the best of times, pulling him taut like strings on a lyre and making him quiver. The notes that he produces aren’t pleasant; they’re sharp and nearly cruel at times. He isn’t an instrument that people want to play, yet Zagreus insists.
He’s had to accept that he needs to work on his sharp tongue and temper around the prince just as he’s had to accept that one day, Zagreus will be gone.
(Which makes the work meaningless.)
“Lady Eurydice, I’ve heard of your deft hand in the kitchen,” Thanatos says, letting his gloved fingers brush the top of Zagreus’ head, an idle motion that it would have been wiser to stifle.
It’s warm. The fire-bright leaves of Zagreus’ laurel curl against his wrist, up his arm, like the barest brush of fingertips. Zagreus tips his head against the touch like Cerberus nosing for another scratch when Hades isn’t looking.
“Well, thank you. I know where you’re going, but I’m fresh out of anything that could do a whole lot of helpin’, just the usual—”
“Do you use nectar?” Thanatos cuts in.
“I do cook with it, yes,” Eurydice says. She shifts her elbows on the wall, eyeing Thanatos’ fingers with a sly smile, understanding lighting her eyes. “Mm-hmm. I see, well. I could have somethin’ special ready in a metaphorical heartbeat.”
He ignores the knowing gleam in her eye and chooses to instead kneel beside the prince, careful to choose the side without armor so their pauldrons don’t clash. He holds out a hand. “I know you’ve got something,” he says expectantly.
“Ah,” Zagreus protests. “I was…”
His voice dies a bit and Thanatos has the sinking suspicion that Zagreus was just about to admit to saving them for him. It’s something he’s not really all that ready to think about, even though he knows it’s the case.
A fool, he’s such a gods’ damned fool. Both of them, together—somewhere, the Lady Aphrodite must be laughing at the thread pulled tight between them, waiting to see if it snaps or if it ties them together, forever, unfraying.
Zagreus makes a noise behind his teeth and nods his chin down. “On my hip, I can’t get it one handed,” he says. “The bleeding’s easing, but the arm’s still shot. I’m going to need to pop it back into socket before I get a move on. Stupid bombers…”
“I’ll help with that,” Thanatos promises as he leans forward to reach for the coin purse that had materialized at Zagreus’ hip.
He tries not to look at the torn open flesh or the mottling of bruises, or think about the warm pass of Zagreus’ breath against the side of his neck, or the shimmering purple butterfly pinned to the inside of his chiton, pressed flush to skin.
Worry and longing rise up in him like a tide, but now is not the time.
(It never truly is the time; it never will be.)
He unties the coin pouch, then tosses it up to Eurydice. “Use what you need,” he tells her. “And don’t you complain.”
“I wasn’t,” Zagreus mutters.
“I’ll have somethin’ up in a tick,” Eurydice promises. “You two sit tight—and watch the blood, Your Royal Highness, it’s a pain to get out of the rocks.”
“Got it, got it.”
With a hum and a nod, they’re left alone on the landing, the nymph’s voice picking up again.
Thanatos shifts, settling to sit beside Zagreus. He squares his shoulders up against the roughly-hewn stone, tipping his head back against it. The heat of Asphodel seeps up through the rocks and into his skin, causing sweat to prickle at the back of his neck.
All there is is the sound of Eurydice’s singing, the crackling of the nearby brazier, and the wet rasp of Zagreus’ breath. The relative silence between them is almost as suffocating as the heat.
He feels like he needs to say something, anything, but all he can think of is the same thing as always: to ask Zagreus why? Why is he so careless? To ask if he realizes that if he stopped this, he’d be safe and whole at home, worrying no one. But he remembers Zagreus’ face, the quietness of his voice, the way his body language had shifted when he’d seen him last, and begged him to come home.
“I wasn’t just going to give up and die,” Zagreus murmurs when the silence between them grows too heavy for him. “When I have the choice, I come here to rest, especially if I’m beat up a bit. Eurydice doesn’t mind. She gets company and I get…well, peace.”
“I see.”
“Also the food,” Zagreus says with far too much enthusiasm for his battered body. He coughs, then chokes on the blood in his mouth.
Thanatos slips a hand between the wall and Zagreus’ back, urging him forward. “If you choke to death because you got excited over food, Zagreus, I swear—I will bribe Hypnos to read it every time you return home, loudly.”
Zagreus’ shoulders heave against Thanatos’ palm, sturdy and warm. It takes Thanatos a moment to realize he’s not choking, but laughing.
Zagreus turns and looks up at Thanatos, still managing to look roguish and charming even with blood and spit dripping from his chin. “You would,” he says, voice rough.
“Just keep your head down,” Thanatos snaps, unprepared for the warmth that floods to his cheeks.
Zagreus, for once in his life, obeys without complaint.
Eurydice’s song floats between them, the warmth from Zagreus’ back somehow more searing than even the overflowing Phlegethon. It burns itself into Thanatos’ hand, sparking like embers against his skin, leaving a mark that will never be washed away.
He can understand, a little, why Zagreus likes this little corner of Asphodel. It’s calm, a little alcove where the Fates have woven a place apart for the ever-singing Eurydice. Perhaps they felt for her, that they cut her thread and tugged its frayed edges from her husband’s fingers. Perhaps she made it herself in defiance of her fate. There are just some things that are beyond knowing here.
Zagreus pulls his knees up and rests his forehead against them, his feet kicking lazy sparks across the uneven ground.
They don’t talk—what is there to say? What can Thanatos even do in this sort of situation?
It isn’t as if he can tell Zagreus about the slow disaster unfurling in his heart. He can’t, he can’t.
Zagreus is leaving, and every time, he gets closer and closer to that goal. Sometimes, like now, he stumbles and it breaks Thanatos’ fragile heart because despite it all, somehow… he’s still rooting for Zagreus.
He wants him to stay. He wants to know that when he returns from work, Zagreus will be in his chambers or in the lounge. He wants to scold him for sneaking treats to Cerberus while Hades isn’t looking. He wants to come home and find Zagreus, always, safe and bright and shining. He never wants to repeat the shock of coming to the hall, finding the lounge in ruins, the master furious, mother regretful, and Zagreus gone.
To Zagreus, this is only a spot of bad luck and poor judgement that keeps him from his goal. He doesn’t want to die here, not necessarily. Thanatos doesn’t want him to die, either. He tries not to think about how many times Zagreus has perished in his quest; it makes him sick at heart to think about, the same way it makes him ache to think of Zagreus battling Hades.
He wants Zagreus to stay, but he doesn’t want Zagreus to think he wants him to fail, either. It’s just… It’s just…
Thanatos is afraid that if Zagreus leaves, it will be worse than death—when Zagreus dies, he returns home, always, and forever. But once that cycle is broken, what will be born in its place?
He doesn’t know; he doesn’t understand. He almost doesn’t want to. It’s too much, too large, too all-encompassing to even think about. All he knows is his palm on Zagreus’ back and the places where their elbows and knees knock.
He wishes Zagreus could understand, could know, could tell him about this thing curling inside of him, like smoke in clear air.
“What I said before… I overstepped when I told you you didn’t know how good you had it,” Thanatos says finally. “I just never wanted you to get hurt.”
“I know,” Zagreus replies. “I know, Than.”
He wants to ask so many things. How does he know? And why, why, why do this to him? Why throw his heart into chaos, why toe across the line they’d drawn between them?
Why now, if ever?
He wants to shake the answers from Zagreus, make him tell. But he can’t just crack open his own ribs and spill his heart into Zagreus’ hands.
He’s seen mortals die because of broken hearts. He’s seen gods warp and change because of them—the goddess Demeter, who cast aside her cornucopia of wheat for endless grieving winter. Lord Hades, who used to be far less bitter, far less caustic, though no less duty-bound.
As Death, he must stand firm, immutable, and bear witness with a stoic heart. Handing it to someone… can he really just do that?
He’s only barely just begun to understand what stirs inside his chest, it’s too young, too fragile, too warped and ugly to show just yet.
He looks at Zagreus, taking in the sight of the prince’s profile, the darkening crust of blood drying on his brow, on his lips and skin. The way color is slowly suffusing his skin once again, Zagreus’ godly nature taking root amongst the injuries. His breath is still wet with blood, the internal injuries slower than the scratches and slices to heal.
He hums along, lips parting once to silently mouth the words. Good riddance, the song says. Something nasty, dark, and jealous fills his mouth, steals his tongue.
“Is that what you think of us? What you thought when you left?”
“What? No!” Zagreus shouts. He pauses when Thanatos levels a look at him. “Well, about Father, yes… But not you, or Nyx, or Meg, or any of the others…”
He sighs, slowly, a rattling exhale as he shifts, teeth pink with blood as he bites down on his healing lips in thought.
“I just want to be free, Than,” he whispers, gesturing out towards the magma lakes with his uninjured hand. “To find the truth, to come and go, to find Mother and understand. I don’t want this pact that Father’s given me, but I’ll take it and I’ll make it mine. I hope you can understand, one day.”
“I hope you, too, will understand why I…”
“What, Than?”
Thanatos sighs and lets his hand slide from Zagreus’s back, catching the line of his arm as he moves. “I don’t know, Zag. What do you want me to say?”
“I’m trying my best to make it up to you, you know?” Zagreus says quietly.
Thanatos sighs. He watches the flames of Zagreus’ feet flicker, casting strange patterns on the uneven ground. He tries to think of something to say, anything that can keep the hurt from his voice, that can mask the sheer size of his longing.
“I know you are,” he says finally. “But it doesn’t erase what happened.”
Until Zagreus left, Thanatos didn’t realize he could feel pain so keenly, that want could be seeped into his bones, that he could be afraid. He’s aware of these things now, and there’s no going back from it.
“I don’t want you to be angry with me forever, Than,” Zagreus says quietly. He reaches up and runs a hand through his hair, looking up at the ceiling of the cavern.
“I found this place for a reason,” he says. “I want to do something for her, for Orpheus. I don’t want them to be separated forever; she was angry, hurt, when I first mentioned him. I was brought here to help, but I also think I needed to learn something.”
He turns, locking eyes with Thanatos. His gaze burns bright, his face serious. “Forever is, well, it’s a long time. No one should be angry for that long. Especially not you.”
“That’s a roundabout way to ask me if I’m still cross with you,” Thanatos mutters, turning away from Zagreus’ piercing gaze.
Zagreus laughs, nudging his knee against Thanatos’. “Well, since you sacrificed my batch of nectar this time, I figured I’d just go for asking this time.”
Thanatos bites down on his urge to snap at Zagreus, to lash out against him and push him away from the dangerous weaknesses in his heart. Zagreus, each time they speak, gets closer and closer to the truth of it:
He’s not angry, not any more, not in a way that truly matters.
Anger has left him with a hollowness inside of him that is only filled when Zagreus is around, alive and well and whole. It leaves him aching when Zagreus is gone, more and more space inside of him filled with this feeling, until it spreads throughout his entire immortal soul. It fills him and pulls him onward, an emptiness that seeks to be filled, until he finds himself craving the pull of Zagreus’ orbit, seeking out the white-hot trail of destruction Zagreus leaves in his wake.
Truly, the Fates have connected them somehow, and that connection vibrates in the emptiness between them, drawing Thanatos ever-closer to facing the reality of what that connection means.
He stands, smoothing out the front of his chiton in what he hopes shows as nonchalance. “I’m going to see if Lady Eurydice is finished. I’m tired of watching you bleed.”
“But I’m not bleeding anymore!” Zagreus complains.
Thanatos ignores him, floating upwards over the walls, towards the nymph.
She breaks off her song, raising an eyebrow as she stirs her pot. “May I help you?”
“Just checking,” Thanatos murmurs. “I have places to be, but I’d feel better if I knew he was settled before I left.”
“He’s in good hands,” Eurydice promises. “Haven’t let him down before. So you can scoot along.”
“Tsch.”
Eurydice huffs a small laugh. “You don’t have to look like sour wine there; if you want to stay, just say it.”
Thanatos studies the shade, face impassive even as Eurydice breaks out into peals of laughter. It’s a look that usually makes mortals start to cry, but it seems he can’t threaten those already dead. Or maybe he just can’t threaten her now that she’s seen him with Zagreus.
“I see how it is,” she says, wagging a finger at Thanatos. “You can get the honors then.”
She produces a bowl and starts scooping porridge into it. “Pom porridge, coming up! I put a little extra nectar in it to really put an oomph to it. Should keep his endurance way up until he reaches a place where he can heal.”
“It won’t heal him?”
“Listen hon,” Eurydice sighs; “ I tried to tell you earlier, but... there are limits to what I can do here. Now, I can do my best by him as a thanks for all the gifts he’s given me, for the conversation and company, but…”
“No, I… I understand. Thank you.”
Eurydice nods and smiles. “Good, then go feed your prince there,” she says, pressing the bowl into Thanatos’ hands. “I think he’s about to pop his own shoulder back into socket out of boredom—”
“He’s not my—what?!”
Thanatos spins, and sure enough, he’s met with the sight of Zagreus reaching behind his head with his injured arm.
“Idiot!” Thanatos hisses as Eurydice laughs, covering the loud pop that echoes through the cavern.
“Blood and—that hurt!”
“Serves him right,” Thanatos mutters, setting his path for the wayward prince. “Hey, idiot, didn’t I say I’d help you with that?”
Zagreus turns, grinning with blood-stained teeth and a bruising jaw. “Than! I didn’t want to trouble you further,” he says. “I’d planned on doing it myself anyway, Achilles taught me how to pop it back in ages ago. Is that for me?”
“Only if you sit down and rest a little more,” Thanatos chides, eyeing Zagreus’ shoulder carefully.
“I don’t think I’ve ever sat still for this long,” Zagreus complains.
“Sit, or I’ll eat this myself.”
Zagreus laughs, shaking his head as he does so. “All right, all right. I see how it is here,” he says, dutifully lowering himself back onto the ground.
Do you really, Zagreus?
There’s no way Zagreus can see the war inside of his heart—a battle between his lord, his work, and Zagreus. He’s already muddied the line between duty and personal feelings, and it wears him thin inside. But he misses this, the way they can so effortlessly go back and forth, volleying taunts and teases like breathing.
“I may eat it anyway,” Thanatos says archly, “Since I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with all the blasted nectar you’ve been tossing at me.”
“Hey now!” Zagreus protests, reaching for the bowl of porridge. “Ask for your own!”
Thanatos snorts and passes the bowl to Zagreus. He sits down beside the other, smile slowly fading as Zagreus eats.
The need to speak presses up against his lips, the need to confess, to say he wants this always, whatever this is between them. To ask if Zagreus even knows what it is that Thanatos feels, to beg him to show Thanatos the worth in this ceaseless cycle.
Instead, when he opens his mouth, what comes out is:
“Mother laughed at me.”
He wants to kick himself the second he says it, to draw up his cloak and just disappear. Of all the things to say, he chose the stupidest one. But Zagreus’ attention is on him, one brow raised as he swallows his mouthful of porridge.
“Nyx did? At what? Why?”
Thanatos sighs and looks up at the cavernous ceiling; shadows dance as the magma roils around them. “When I was angry with you, I also needed to speak with her about work. Instead of what I meant to say, I asked her what I was supposed to do with all those bottles of nectar. Quite indignantly. I think I may have interrupted her. Mother thought I had succumbed to madness from overwork. It was embarrassing.”
Zagreus’ laughter echoes loud through the cavern, flecks of pomegranate spraying from his lips as he does so.
And oh, Thanatos thinks. That’s it. There, right there, that’s it. That’s what he’s been searching for, the word for the feeling tearing him apart, the thing he so desperately wants to say. The reason for the anger and the sorrow and the tearing in his heart, the reason for that drawn taut string, the thing that ties them together.
He loves Zagreus.
He loves him, he loves him, gods, he adores him. But, oh—Zagreus is going to leave, and this will be all he has to remember him by, won’t it? Bottles of nectar, the memory of blood, and the smell of pomegranates.
(Was this what it was like for Hades? Will it ruin him the way it ruined his master?)
He loves him, and that will have to be enough.
“Zagreus, that is disgusting,” he sighs, fondness overflowing within him. He reaches out and presses his thumb to a seed stuck on Zagreus’ blood-speckled chin and wipes it off.
He stands and presses his thumb to his lips, popping the seed between his teeth.
Blood and pomegranates and the wide-eyed, astonished stare that meets his wry grin. “I’ll be seeing you around, Zagreus.”
It will be enough.