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She doesn’t glance back–—avoiding Kore—as she marches from the room. Hades passes invisible guards on her way, the wraiths that hover around her realm and serve as watchers.
“Keep him safe.” She commands them, stepping from the throne room and into the corridor that leads to the east wing of her palace.
* * *
Thanatos followsher with a moue twisting his mouth. Hades, smiling at his pouty mood, wonders when Thanatos will finally choose to grow from this juvenile state of existence and into a full-bodied god. Though, as she casts a sideways glance at her youthful charge, Hades knows she’ll miss him when he’s grown. As the last of her young children, Thanatos is her favorite.
“Out with it,” Hades says, while she flips through a summary of Tantalus' screamed complaints. Same old, same old, the idiot begs for release from his agonizing hunger. She writes a reminder in the margins to up his thirst, noting he’s not as desperate this month as he was the month prior—that won’t do.
“I thought you said you weren’t gonna bring home a man,” Thanatos mumbles. He kicks his feet against the black marble floor. Leaving a scuff Hades would normally reprimand him for, but she allows him his frustration. As the apple of her eye, he feels his position being threatened.
“It was him or war.” Hades sees no reason to keep the truth from him. She’s always spoken to her surrogate children as if they are equals, the way she once wished her parents would speak to her. As a person, not a burden.
“War isn’t so bad, is it?” Thanatos asks, and that startles a laugh out of her throat.
“I mean, war is good for business down here, I suppose,” Hades says, still chuckling.
“I don’t like him,” Thanatos continues, as if Hades hadn’t spoken. His gray eyes peek through the bars of Sisyphus' door. “He’s halfway up the hill,” Thanatos sighs, bored of watching people pay for their mortal and immortal sins.
“You haven’t met him yet,” Hades says. Thanatos moves away from the door and Hades takes his place, peeking inside to check that Sisyphus is struggling. Of all her mortal prisoners, he’s the one she despises the most—for fooling her and her adopted son into living a longer life than the Fates originally intended. No god enjoys being made into a mockery; Hades wanted to make Sisyphus' punishment harsher, but Thanatos chose the boulder. The least she could do was give Thanatos back a bit of his pride by choosing an appropriate punishment. Sometimes, Hades wishes she chose Sisyphus' eternal fate. Hades would’ve called ravens to peck out Sisyphus' eyes and serpents to bite his arteries in the mornings, rotting Sisyphus' skin with poisons. By evening, she’d summon wolves to devour the delicate parts of him while Sisyphus remained breathing. Every single day. That is a just punishment for a man who made her child feel as if he was lesser.
As she stares at Sisyphus, imagining his torment, Thanatos' response comes.
“I don’t have to meet him to know he’s not good enough for you.”
Hades turns toward him, finding Thanatos' jaw jutted out defiantly, and her heart constricts with maternal love. Though he is not hers by birth, Thanatos is hers by raising—as is his elusive twin Hypnos. They are two of the children she’s brought into her realm to raise. The unwanted. The castoffs. The children who remind Hades of herself, when she was that child for her parents. The eldest daughter who wasn’t pretty enough or good enough. The one who filled her paranoid father with fear of his usurping. The daughter they tossed into these dark dungeons as punishment while Kronos ruled the heavens, before he sucked her down into his gut to torment her further. Hades takes the children that remind her of herself. The unloved. The mistreated. She gives them the home no one gave her.
That’s why Thanatos loves her more than his birth mother. That is why he looks at her with a defiance that’s full of his love, telling her—his true mother—that this unknown god is not good enough for her.
She holds out an arm to him. Though he is larger now than the tiny tot who waddled after her centuries before, Thanatos runs to Hades with the same fervor. For now, Hades remains taller than him. Hades presses her nose into the silver-white shade of his hair. He smells like the sweet memory of a dream—the scent of a painless death. She grins against him. “I will never love you any less, Thanatos.”
“You say that...” He chokes over the syllables, voice thick with emotions neither of them is willing to name. “You say that now, but what if you have a real baby? A baby you can love more than me because it’s yours andhis?”
Hades swallows, thinking of all the opportunities her womb had to know life and all of the times it remained barren—a garden that cannot grow no matter how much love and light Hades gives. There will be no child, of that Hades is certain. The Fates, always weaving their damned tapestries, never saw fit to weave Hades a biological child.
“I promise you, Thanatos, I will never love any of my children less than another. You all, whether my womb’s fruit or not, are the pieces of an unending circle in my soul.”
“Will you love him more than us?” Thanatos glances up at her, his gray eyes large with emotion. The whites of his eyes are pink from all the tears he’s yet to release. Hades smooths a fingertip across his eyebrow, her expression softening.
“If I love him, Thanatos, I will love him differently. It will be the kind of love that I cannot give to you, but it doesn’t mean that I love him more.” She presses a quick kiss to his hair. “Now, come along, there are sinners I need to check on.”
Thanatos groans, “Why do we have to do this? It’s not like the punishments change.”
Childhood emotions are fickle, flitting from one end of the spectrum to the other. Hades, dealing with this stage for centuries, got over the whiplash long ago.
“I like to know that they’re still working.” She jots down a note to build a new wing for milder punishments; mortals with lesser sins spend less time in torment, but they come to her in droves. “I’m not lazy like my brothers. I need to make sure that things are running well in my realm.”
Thanatos helps her for a few more hours without complaint until, it seems, he’s ready for another tantrum.
“Ugh, there’s no way that new guy will fall in love with you. He’ll never see you with the way you work.” Thanatos flops onto a stone bench at the end of the long hall, the one Hydra typically occupies. Thanatos pinches his mouth when he meets Hades' unimpressed gaze. “Seriously, I don’t know why I was worried. The only thing you love more than us is work. Mister No-Name God will never top that.”
Hades laughs. Perhaps her surrogate son has a point. She doubts she’ll see much of Kore. Her schedule didn’t allow much room for romance before Zeus' decree; Hades isn’t about to change for a husband she didn’t want—no matter how delectable she finds him.
“Do you think I should have dinner with him tonight?” Sarcasm bleeds into her question.
Thanatos' deepening scowl serves as his answer and Hades releases another laugh that bounces through the cellblock.
She wonders if her father can hear her laughter. Hades wants Kronos to hear; she hopes her joy intensifies his punishment.
