‘I don’t want to leave it all to you,’ he says, already lighting up at the idea. ‘But I can work on treaties, liaise with Olympus and Oceanus, sort the paperwork …’
‘You don’t have to take all the bad things.’
He blinks. ‘I am very much givingyouall the bad things.’
I laugh. ‘Wow, perhaps we did a better job marrying each other than I thought. So, effectively, I’m taking the people and you’re taking anything that involves a quill and ink?’
‘That certainly works for me.’
‘I don’t want to be pushing you behind the scenes.’
‘Please, it’s both our names I’ll be signing at the bottom of those documents. And at the end of each week we can still sit in our respective thrones – I doubt anyone will see one of us as more powerful than the other.’
‘Okay – if you’re happy then I’m happy. We’ll let the court know which of us they should go to for each thing tomorrow. But if we do this then you’ll have more time to yourself. You can create again.’
‘I do … miss spending so much time in my studios,’ he confesses.
‘Then let’s make it work,’ I say. ‘You may as well get something out of this marriage.’
At this he raises an eyebrow.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ he says.
I am tempted to throw something at him. ‘Stop saying that.’
‘I do care about this realm,’ he says. ‘I really do. I didn’t for solong but … I couldn’t do anything and it wore on me. The reason I dislike the humans … the court … it’s too much. The people and the noise and the things they talk about? It’s all I can do to zone out just so I don’t make a scene. I’m sorry.’
‘Hades, you don’t have to apologize,’ I say. ‘You didn’t ask for all this.’But I did.
‘Persephone,’ he says. ‘I … Gods, I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. I’ve never told anyone.’
‘That’s because you’ve never had anyone as wonderful as me in your life,’ I joke, his sudden seriousness making me uncomfortable.
He refuses to be baited and continues. ‘Kronos killed his father for his cruelty. We imprisoned Kronos for his. I always assumed our children would come along and destroy our generation too. And indeed, here you are, the child of Zeus plotting his eventual downfall, in reputation if not in death.’
‘Ahh, yes, wellmy generationis far more interested in …’ I trail off because he’s not laughing, not joking, not cutting me off with the expectedScrew you, we’re practically the same age.‘You’re not like Zeus,’ I say instead.
‘Maybe. But I’ve done cruel things, Persephone. Undoubtedly cruel things.’ Hades swallows. ‘The truth is, I can’t go near the humans because I’m trying to forget them.’
‘I know. The war was hard for –’
‘I was captured in the war,’ Hades says, not managing to meet my eyes. ‘Towards the end. You said you’d heard stories, right? About how I wouldn’t pick up a sword and, let me guess, wouldn’t hurt the people I sparred with? About how I was a coward who wouldn’t devote himself to war?’
Those were the stories I’d heard, yes.
‘Everyone who fought in that thing is traumatized. But it’s not just that for me. In training I was forced to run laps for drawing in the sand, put on night watch for crying at the thought of killing someone. I … I was never cut out for it. I don’t think I was the only one – other people were just better at hiding it. They’d scream at me to “be a man”, like women hadn’t been fighting since the war began, like other men – boys, fuck, we werekids, all of us.’ He breaks off, whichever point he’d been making lost as he stares into the distance, apparently reckoning with all this even now. It’s to the vacant air he speaks when he says: ‘We were all kids waking up hyperventilating and screaming for parents we never even knew.’
He turns back to me, finally meeting my eyes with a startling intensity. ‘I didn’t have the emotional constitution for fighting, and I had the helm of darkness so they used to send me to spy instead. One day I got caught. The Titans knew they’d lost and my capture was their last source of satisfaction – one of Kronos’s chosen, even. They made the most of it. I would have done anything for the pain to stop and I did plenty: begged, bargained, any humiliating thing they asked of me. And then it was like a switch flipped. I knew I had to kill to get out or I’d die in there.’
He’s crying. Tears are welling, falling, trailing down his face, and he doesn’t wipe them away.
‘When I reunited with the Olympians they’d heard of the massacre – how I’d found the Titan base and decimated it – and suddenly there were all these rumours about how I really was the king of the Underworld and my touch was death. They didn’t even know I’d been captured so they stuck me at the front of the battalion. I couldn’t face the thought of stickingmy sword in another person – and I mean that literally. I couldn’t even pick the damn thing up. The thought made me shake and I couldn’t breathe and … and so I conjured the illusion of the army of undead. The Titans saw an army twenty times the size of theirs. They ran.
‘Everyone said it was over but it wasn’t for me. I thought,Okay, finally I can come down here and just drink and forget. But I got here and they’d – Fates, the Muses had crafted this palace just like the acropolis of Olympus, and they’d stuck the swords of the fallen all over the palace to honour my legacy. Every time I see it I feel sick. And then there were all the mortal souls … I did so many terrible things, but all my nightmares are about me and what I went through. I can stumble through the memories of mortals who slaughtered and killed, but the ones who were hurt send me to my knees. How is that possible? How can I be more haunted by what happened to me than my own horrific actions? I’m exactly as bad as Zeus, Persephone. I’m just as selfish and cruel.’
I’m not sure what to say, not sure I can say anything that will be enough, and before I’ve even decided to I’m clutching his hands in mine.
