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Hades is a man both blessed and cursed with a keen sense of time. Was a time, long ago, when he was the one his siblings turned to for knowledge of the harrowing world around them. How long have we been here, brother? one of his sisters would ask, and he would say since the world began, and he would be able to track how long that had been, if in his own measure. The high tide: the low tide—he had always known when each would appear, had carefully counted the shifting in the waves without aid of sun nor moon.
By the time they were freed, he had it down to a science.
Such had kept him sane here in the underworld, his home that had no shifting currents but those he had manufactured. The underworld had no sun nor moon, only his flawless ability to keep track of time, an internal tick-tick that ran in the back of his mind whether he wanted it to or not, led him to keep precise control over when was day and when was night. He always knew when days would change, how one could quickly become a week, a month, and so on and so forth…
And he always knew how quickly his wife would leave him.
It seemed to speed up every year, those six months; he had thought the opposite would happen, that he would be able to savor her time when he had more memories of her to keep his mind’s eye fed in the leanest summers. Instead, it seemed to vanish quicker and quicker; sands in an hourglass, somehow growing ever finer and slipping through his fingers.
He watches her now as he comes into their bedroom, seeking her succor after a long, harsh day. She’s sitting at her vanity, one of his favorite places to observe her; a lucky bit of happenstance. The mirror shows her image in triplicate. He likes to think, in his softest moments, that this mirror is a sort of altar just for him, blessing him with the ability to see the goddess in triplicate. It is a strange thing he has found deep inside him, this desire to do her worship. Sometimes he wonders if the fates are giving him a sort of mysterious blessing in this viewing, an ability to partake in his worship in greater clarity than ever before.
She has never looked anything less than holy.
"Your books balanced?" she says; her tone is biting, not meant at all in earnest. Still, he responds in earnest, because he has never quite figured out how to successfully fall out of love. Persephone can do it right quickly; frighteningly easily she can shift, a seasonal woman in all her moods and affections. He, on the other hand, has always been a dog, faithful beyond sense or reason. He is her dog, and he'd let her kick him in the ribs a dozen times if she would just touch him tenderly afterwards.
"For the day," he says, which is not the right thing to say because she scoff, and he does not give her any more details because such will only displease her. Persephone brushes down her hair and he watches the curls undulate, catalogues each to memories that he will use to keep himself going for the next six months. "Could be more so," he says, carefully, desperate but too prideful to show such, even to the woman who he would show vulnerability to above all others. "Wanted to spend more time with you."
She stills at her vanity; scrubs at her face for a moment which they both pretend is to take off her make-up and not to give them both a moment to measure the temperature of the room. Frosty, he decides, but she must weigh the scales in her mind a bit differently, because she turns slowly towards him with a soft smile on her face and his heart does skip a mighty beat.
It looks like our lady has found some mercy tonight.
"Glad to see you," she says softly. "Miss you mightily when you’re stuffed up in that big office of yours."
And he knows there is more meaning to her words than just missing him because he is in his office, but he does not bring it up and neither does she. He opens an arm in invitation across her pillow. She falls into it, carefully climbing into their too large bed and settling down next to him. Her silky nightdress fills in all the craggy spaces between them, and he finds himself kissing at her shoulder.
If she notices that he breathes in too deep on her shoulder, huffing her scent and begging himself to remember every molecule of her perfume — she does not comment on it.
"You gonna ride up with me tomorrow?" She asks; he winces. He does not want to.
He does not like to see it; the way that everyone else up top lights up at her coming. It’s a mighty hard thing for a man of his station to take: the people happy at their separation, and, more-so, his wife's happiness to see them. He loves his wife. He does not love seeing her happy when he is gone. A man has his pride, and Hades, perhaps, has more than most.
"Or maybe you got more books you gotta pour over?" She says, her voice not quite so nice. So, she has caught his wince. She does not like it; does not see their parting the way he does.
But she isn't the one who has to stay alone.
She isn't the one left under the earth without a thought given to them, without a letter, without a drop of succor to get through the hottest nights of the year. She will have her mother, her friends, her family.
She will not have her husband, but Persephone has proved damnably resistant to needing him in the way that he needs her, and such has always scared him.
"I'll ride," he says, too quick; it is not what he wants but it is what he will do. Even if it hurts.
She relaxes into him and he hates it, hates that she is pleased by his pain and resents it deep down in a pitch-black pile of tar buried deep inside himself. That tar boils and bubbles and twists all around his heart with a fervent, hateful jealousy he cannot describe to her — the idea of having to watch himself be effectively cuckolded by the world above; how it rankles, how it burns.
Still, it almost seems worth it, that torment, when her hand crosses the long divide between them and reaches for his cheek.
But it takes an eternity for tar to bubble backwards, and inside Mr. Hades it still roils and bubbles and burns, even as her lips sooth his outward soul. When her lips touch his own, it takes him a long moment before he can focus upon her, just her being there.
That is the worst thing he has found about his unending knowledge of time: it is not enough.
He is always aware that his time with her is never enough.
She's mad at him on the way up; part of it, he suspects, is her withdrawal. She doesn’t get quite so drunk out of her mind upon the occasion of seeing her mother, at least for the first day she's with the old woman. That sort of consideration isn’t made for him, but evidently old mother Demeter is made of sterner stuff. She presses her hand to her head and looks at him with a look of disgust, not bothering to hide one bit of her wrath.
"Can't you make them run this thing quieter?"
"Don't think so, lover," he says. "Only way these things ride."
And a sensible woman would have planned for it, he thinks. It isn’t as if this is her first trip on the train. She makes a mighty sour pinched face and buries her head further into his arm, avoiding the hateful cathode rays he’s installed to help light her way between worlds. In response, he slides one arm over her head, sheltering her, and it is only partly out of habit.
He memorizes every inch of her as he does. Even in these times, when she is sour and hung-over and all around in as poor a mood as a smacked ass, she is still his wife and she is still beloved and he is still, still so miserably aware of how little time they have left together.
She grumbles nonsensically into his cheek and he offers her a sympathetic mmm, trying to leave her in as good a mood as he can. That's what their relationship has come to, sometimes: piety, sacrifice.
Though such, he notes, are often on his end. Don't see his wife much coming early nor staying late; always him who bends the knee, who raises the flag.
But it's hard not to forgive her for it when she huffs thanks into his shoulder as he passes her a bit of water.
He would come running through a desert barefoot to offer her a sip of water and that thought, as always, frightens him.
Even though he is a man who spends six months alone every year, he's never quite known who he is without her; an irony, him playing priest to her divinity when he has lived longer than her, grew to adulthood when she was still knee-high to the summer barley.
But she has made him a better person, and even when he resents her, he knows how vital she is to the core of him.
"Gonna be a long six months," she murmurs, kisses at his jaw. He leans into it, memorizes the slight stickiness of her lip-gloss as she kisses at his cheek, then his lips.
He has never loved her more. That is no less true today than it ever has been.
He kisses her with a desperate verve, willing all the broken pieces of himself to knit together under her hands, and she molds him together for a moment.
But it doesn't last; when the sunlight brightens against the windowpane, she steps off his shoulder, stretching her arms. Spring has sprung again; he feels the heat on his back.
Doesn't make it easier.
He manages to keep it together for the last, most horrible moments of their trip: helps her with her bags, kisses her one last time. She presses a flower into his hands, then smiles; there is no goodbye.
Never is.
Then she turns, and his heart breaks, and she somehow cannot hear it. She bounds down the steps with a joyful skip, waving hello to her brother, Hermes; to her mother, Demeter. Neither of them notice him leaning against the wall for a long moment, but his wife turns around and gives him a wink as they start off towards Demeter’s home out in the country and such recognition makes the whole bittersweet symphony of this whole miserable trip almost worth it.
But on the ride back, he is all too aware that the train car is silent but for the noise of the wheels on the tracks, all too aware of the emptiness that lies between his chest.
He tries to sag down in his chair, to nap. He is very tired, and every moment he is not awake means a moment that passes that he does not need to be aware of; when he awakens, he will be closer to her in time if not in distance.
But he cannot sleep; the train rocks back and forth, and the noise is too loud, and he is too, too aware of the woman who isn't there, whose absence already feels like a knife square between his ribs.
He does not sleep as he gets home, pouring through his books instead in the vain hope that the numbers may occupy him for some trivial amount of time. He balances his books again, and then again. Does inventory. Observes the workers, and invents new machines, new assembly lines, new methods and madnesses and everything he can and he is still—still! —six months away from her.
It is not pleasant.
Now Mr. Hades knows that his wife does suffer in her own ways during the summer months; he knows she must suffer sort of withdrawal from her drugs and her booze, her little pecunaries, her little secrets that he can keep but her mother will not accept...but he wonders if she, too, suffers in all the ways he does. If she, too, notices the bed that is too empty, the lover whose name he wants to call whenever he thinks of something worth saying, only to find no one but an empty chair, an empty table.
A miserable, empty bed.
He places a hand on her vanity, stares at himself in triplicate in her mirror. Finds none of the holiness he has witnessed in watching her in this space. In him there is no holiness, only an insatiable desperation magnified, amplified.
When he eats, the food tastes worse; not only because when she is gone, there is no one to keep up their gardens, his provisions reduced to that which he imports. Doesn’t matter if he wastes money importing the finest filet mignon or the loveliest of lobsters. Everything without her tastes like hard-tack.
He often loses weight when she is gone. He wonders if she notices. She does not mention it. He cannot see such depression evident in her, but his wife has always been more of a chimera, made of more shades than he himself has ever been.
That is the difference between a goddess and her priest; the goddess has many forms, the priest only one.
He misses her. And the missing her hurts, so much. Even so many years later, it hurts so damned much.
He dreams of her, too, which is almost worse. She is there in his dreams, so close that he can reach out, that he can touch her, that he can hear her say Lover I will not leave you but he will wake up and he will be alone and he will be alone for months and he wakes up with a shout of grief in his throat and tears in his eyes because he wants so damn much and it will never, ever be enough.
And he just has to live with that. No one else will ever understand it, this strange and miserable grief. There is no one who could ever understand it, save his wife.
Part of him wants to write to her, to ask as he has always longed to ask: do you miss me? Do you think of me, lover? Does your heart burn, do you grieve?
But he does not. Partially because he knows Hermes, ever a gossip, will read his note, and he does not wish Hermes to know of his besotted shame. Hermes has never married and so far as he can tell has never had a love affair last longer than the time it takes him to make a sandwich. The man has always been mercurial; too much like his jovian father. His brothers, if they had got word of it, would mock him for his moroseness.
Perhaps his sisters, too. They were all hard in their own ways. Demeter, he thinks, herself no less prone to grief, would still mock him for such. She has yet to send her daughter a single letter in her months that she spends in Hades’ world down below, and Hades knows that he cannot bear to be less stern publicly than the weakest of his sisters.
So he does not ask, no matter how badly he wants to.
Instead, he tries to keep himself busy. He terrorizes the workers, being far more involved on the floor than he ever has been. He makes sure they are at the maximum of productivity; buys out new contracts and new molds and builds new lines and tries to surround himself with the noise of his factories.
But it is not enough.
It is never enough.
He closes his eyes, listening to the symphony he has built: the whirl of metal, the pounding of stone. It is a beautiful song but it is not enough to drown out her absence, the silence echoing in his home, in his office, in all the places that she should be but isn't.
He manages to make it three months before the wound festers to the point that he feels like he is drowning in his own depression. The air becomes smog, day by day, without her; he is struggling to breathe, is always struggling in the horrible haze that is life in her absence. He worries. He paces.
He is going insane for want of her.
There is no word for the absence of her; something worse than longing, more torturous than loneliness. He has known loneliness. He has known torture. He has known total absence of light, of clean air.
And this, somehow, is worse.
No material comforts bring relief to him. It does not matter what it is; he has had the finest steak, the most elegant of wines. He has had the highest thread count sheets and speakers that can bring to life even the lowest of sounds.
But all are without joy without her; he has left the records unplayed, the bed unslept in. There has yet to be a summer that does not tell him just how dangerous his love is, how weakened his immune system is by this woman. He cannot even take another person to his bed; what could another person offer him? There is no one but her; there never has been since she has breathed a single breathe into his lungs, and he is deeply, deeply aware of that and how much it terrifies him that she could shut him out any moment she wished to.
To leave him to this.
Forever.
He breaks into her whiskey at that thought, an angry terror that drives him to want something, anything else to work on. He tightens his grip on the glass, tries to focus himself on anything that is not her: a new assembly line, a new mill, a new dress for her — diamonds perhaps, head to toe, so she could sparkle — dammit.
He growls and is tempted to throw the tumbler at the wall, watch it fall into glittering, broken sparkles; at least cutting himself on that would occupy himself for twenty precious minutes or such.
How many months has it been? He groans, the answer coming to him instantly; too damn long and not yet long enough. There will be months more to go. And it does break a man's heart so.
He is too lost in his thoughts to hear the door open until it is too late, another sign of how she's ruining him, making him soft — and he whirls around to yell at Hermes, to tell him to leave any correspondence on his desk unless it's from his wife, which it wouldn't be, because Persephone hasn't shown the damn inclination to drop him a note for literally their entire marriage—
And when he turns, his words drop away like sand into the hourglass; it is not Hermes at the door.
"You're stealing my drink," his wife says, as if she is normally here in July. She gently pulls it out of his hand without the slightest bit of resistance, and he raises an eyebrow, seemingly to prove he isn't frozen, if only just. His mouth must be slightly parted, for she swirls her finger through her whiskey and gently presses it to his mouth.
"Ain't nice to take a lady's liquor without asking permission," she purrs, anointing his lips in her most holy of rituals. Our lady, she is so much feast and famine, and he gawps like a big, ugly fish and she smiles because it entertains her, damn it.
"You're —"
"Mmmm-hmmmm," she murmurs. "I missed ya."
"Missed ya too," he mumbles, so rarely caught flat-footed but caught so very much off-guard here. "So—"
"They can endure a hard snap, I think," she says; she tosses her light coat — flowers, everywhere, he notes on this coat, one she’s bought, not one of the countless ones he has bought her — and he cannot quite grasp that she is here, in his room.
So close to his bed.
He sags onto the bed and she follows him, gently puts the liquor to his lips. He drinks. It is better for her presence. She follows it with a kiss that is properly scorching, so much he is surprised that the alcohol does not catch spark and burn him wholly to embers.
"How long—?" He asks, but she just smiles, takes a long sip out of her glass.
"You gonna apologize for stealing my liquor?" She asks again; her finger pushes him back and he falls back himself onto the softness of their bed, reduced only to holding on as she sets the pace. He notices she does not answer the question; he pretends it bothers him less than it does.
"Think it's you that's the thief in the night," he drawls. "Not that I mind."
No, he thinks. He definitely does not mind.
"Well, why don't we try to make it up to one another?" Her smile falters; a rare vulnerability. "I know, things ain't been the best—"
"Come here," he says; tugging at her. Maybe it ain't been the best.
But there is still time, for once.
And in a relationship like theirs, what do they have more precious than time?