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“There is no throne in this world that is not tarnished,” Cronos said. “It is only that, once the tarnishing has occurred, we all rally about and claim it as gold.”
Zeus’s pulse picked up then, though he was still. Very still. “And here I thought the only thing that mattered to you in this world was that throne.”
“Because it was all I had,” Cronos blurted out, as if the words had been tamped down inside him a long while. And the saying of them seemed to exhaust him. He collapsed against his bed, his breath coming harder. But he kept on, looking determined. “I lost everything. The throne was all that remained. And it took me too long to understand that a throne is nothing but a bloody chair. What matters is who sits upon it—and what he does when he is there.”
They held each other’s gaze for what seemed like forever. Zeus knew that these were words his father never would have said if these were not, perhaps, his final moments. But then, he knew that he would not have listened otherwise. And as they gazed at each other without rancor for the first time in more years than he cared to count, Zeus felt as if a thousand more unsaid things passed between them.
“Father,” Zeus began.
The old man lifted a trembling hand. “You have nothing to apologize for, my son,” he said, still holding Zeus’s gaze. “It is the regret of my life that I did not see what I was doing to your mother, so lost in my own misery was I. And that I remained lost for far too long. I want you to know that if I could, I would go back and change what happened. I would change...” He broke off and smiled, faintly, though his eyes were sad. And his voice was fading. “I would change everything.”
And then Zeus found himself doing something he would have sworn he would never, ever do.
He went and sat by his father’s bedside. He took the old man’s hands and looked deep into his eyes. Because he had stood on a beach and told Nina what kind of man he was, and she had loved him anyway. He knew the power of it.
And how could he deny it to his father now? When he knew how it had felt to hear Nina say those words to him?
I am sorry, Mother, he said inside.I have been choosing you for a lifetime. But this is the end of his.
A moment he had been waiting for, thinking he would taint it with revenge. But now he was here, and it was happening, and he couldn’t find the will to do it.
He had chosen bitterness his whole life. What would happen if he chose peace?
If he let himself love his father a little, too?
“Father,” he managed to say, though his voice was raw. “Rest now. I love you.”
And when Cronos’s eyes closed again, there were tears on his creased face.
Zeus did not know how long he sat there, but he thought it no more than a handful of minutes. And then his father breathed his last.
And Zeus did not move.
His heart was racing, his ribs too tight. And he knew that he only had a moment left. He only had a single, solitary moment left. One final moment when he was a son sitting beside his father. One last moment when he was who he had always been. Prince Zeus of Theosia.
Not a good man, perhaps. But he had great plans for his future.
First, however, he would step out of these doors and everything would change.
But then, everything had already changed. He was to be a father. There was a woman who looked at him as if he was worthy of her. She did not need him to save her. She wanted only for him to love her.
“I wish we had done it better,” he said to his father, in this last moment that was only theirs. “I wish we’d changed everything together.”
He set the old man’s hand down. And then he sat back and thought of his mother. His laughing, lovely mother. He was older now than she’d been then. And he had his own child on the way.
So he whispered the words he’d never thought he’d ever utter, not to her. “I forgive you, Mama.”
For leaving him. For, in her way, taking him on as harrowing a journey as his father had.
Because in the end, both of them had been too locked in their own misery to care for their child as they should have. He understood that now.
But he did not intend that history should repeat itself. His child would know exactly how much it was loved. Always.
Zeus gave himself one last moment in his chair. Then he rose and blew out a breath. He looked at his father one last time as a son. Then he turned and opened the door.
He had stepped through it a prince. He would exit a king.
And he swore he would do a better job with the new title than he had with the old.
