Work Text:
Black night holding its breath
Are we alive?
Black eyes, falling fast into them
Tobacco and opium
Flicker, match, light
***
It’s late. Hades knows good and goddamn well that it’s late; dark even before she left the office, darker still once she pulled into the driveway. Guilt trails a grimy finger up the length of her spine, cruel mistress that she is.
Persephone is in the bedroom - sitting on the floor at the window, feet curled under her with her sketchbook on her lap and a cigarette dangling from the corner of her lips. She twiddles a mechanical pencil between her fingers contemplatively; makes a mark, pulls back, analyses it, takes a drag, puts lead back to paper and repeats. Cerberus is at her side, jowls twitching as he snores - a big, doughy puddle of cane corso, head on his immense paws, curled up all polite like the lapdog he most certainly is not.
Persephone had bought him for her, after swearing up and down that she didn’t want a dog for years; deaf to any of Hades’ bargaining and pouting. Spent a week walking around looking pleased as all hell with herself for reasons she wouldn’t explain - and then plopped Cerberus into Hades’ arms on the morning of her fiftieth birthday. A wriggling little mass of energy and loose skin with a bow around his neck, silky pitch-black but for a spit of white in the centre of his chest. Mangled a few tears out of Hades, not one especially given to weeping; lips all over Persephone’s, giggling like a little girl.
Hades stands in the doorway and observes her wife. There’s a reassuringly full glass at her side, just out of arm’s reach.
“You finally decided to grace me with your presence?” Persephone drawls without lifting her head, flipping a page of her sketchbook. Bitter and abrasive, sandpaper on skin.
She reaches for her glass; evidently not her first, Hades notes that in the subtle unravelling of her speech. She’s hazarding a guess at vodka-soda, maybe vodka-tonic. One way or the other, vodka makes her nasty.
“I had work to do, lover.”
Hades steps into the room; sits down on the edge of the bed, reaches to loosen her tie. The dog seems happier to see her than her wife - Cerberus springs to his feet as nimbly as his big old bones will allow, plodding to her side and resting his head on her thigh, stub of tail wagging with a quick, repeated thud against the floor. They make some pair, Hades thinks as she scratches behind his ear. Intimidating in their heyday - now greying around the muzzle and depressingly desperate for affection.
“What do you want?”
Persephone still hasn't looked up from her damn drawing. Something unpleasant coils itself into a tight, heavy mass in the pit of Hades’ stomach.
“So, I can’t work overtime, but I also can’t sit in the same room as you without some ulterior motive?” Hades says with some facsimile of a laugh. “Seems I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, huh?”
“Don’t talk like a fucking dickhead, Hades - I’m not in the mood.”
Hades doesn’t move - she barely even flinches, just trying to compute it. She had braced herself for anger. Seph could throw a legendary fit when the urge struck her, and Hades has found herself at the sharp end of several, on nights such as these. This, though, is interesting. Something just south of despondent. Quiet, icy, resigned. Calculated, maybe? Poison in the prettiest of bottles, this woman.
When they’d met, sometime around the ass end of the eighties, Persephone - a college student, freshly twenty-one - was a waitress in a lesbian bar that Hades - twenty-five, working in construction - used to frequent. Ways and Means, a grim little basement speakeasy situation that she didn’t actually care all that much for. Persephone kept her hanging around, though.
Hades remembered walking into the place with a dick-swinging bravado probably not owed to her, buzzed head and leather jacket. But Persephone had humoured her, sweet-talked her just so and laughed as Hades batted other women that came her way off like flies. Eyes only for one, and she was behind the beer taps with hands covered in ink and beads in her tawny-blonde hair.
It took longer than Hades would deign to admit, plucking up the courage. Too many late nights and too much money spent on fancy cocktails that she’d order just to listen to Persephone talk about them. Really, they all tasted like either syrup or paint thinner to her. But she loved the way that Persephone would sing like a canary about ageing and infusions and which botanicals contributed what to the aroma of the gin.
Eventually though, she summoned the guts to linger around until closing time and ask the question she’d spent months sat on:
“Come home with me?”
Persephone humoured her again - wasn’t that the theme back then - and asked Hades to walk her back to her apartment. Up to her door, then from there to her room.
Her little boudoir was paradisal and bohemian and overrun with houseplants, the smell of incense and weed hanging thick and velvety in the air. She was a junior at SVA, she’d explained as she kicked dirty clothes out of sight and hastily scooped up the ashtray and loose paper and scattered pens from her unmade bed. Majoring in illustration, flora being her subject of choice.
Hades had been too overwhelmed by the greenery, so fascinated and so enamoured by this glimpse into her, the simple intimacy of being in her space, that she almost forgot what she came for. In fact, it took Persephone wheeling around to face her - stripped down to her sparse, lacy underwear no less - and all but instructing her to stop trying to be a fucking gentleman and fuck her to get the deed done.
All of it feels like a lifetime ago now.
“What were you doing, out so late?”
Persephone takes a pull of her cigarette, smoke dwindling out of her flaring nostrils.
Hades starts to explain - a mid-morning client meeting had overrun and left her with a backlog of crap to sift through in the afternoon. Accounts fucked something up, some pencil-pusher under her tried to fix it and ultimately made it worse, Hades had to waste a whole mess of time unravelling and reorganising the whole disaster. Afternoon spilled into evening. Traffic was hellacious coming home.
Hades, savvy head for numbers and stubborn refusal to let anyone mess her around, had grown a career out of not a whole lot. Site lackey to overseer to foreman before she was thirty, snapped up by a ritzy property development firm not long after that; climbed that proverbial ladder like she had something gnashing at her heels. Now she found herself about five years from retirement in an all-devouring executive position with said firm - never quite sure how she got here.
Persephone’s schedule looked different. ‘Artist’ was a pretty nebulous mantle. She worked whenever she pleased, from wherever she pleased, free as a damn bird - tethered only by where she could set down an easel. Didn’t understand that Hades’ job demanded that she shove her nose to the grindstone every so often, and didn’t try to.
But that wasn’t the whole truth of it, was it? Hades found herself dancing around the fact that she could have upped the pace and been back home at a reasonable hour but didn’t, because she didn't want to deal with precisely this line of questioning from Persephone when she got there. Even if she knew that every minute wasted at her desk was only going to make it worse.
Persephone’s face shifts. Clearly she isn’t buying a word of it.
“You have a phone.”
Hades doesn’t have it in her to try and defend that one. She sits, dumb, for a few moments; watches the odd wave of emotion that crosses over Persephone’s face in alarming succession, trying to steel herself for whatever one is about to be thrown her way.
“What’s the point,” Persephone continues after just enough silence to start making Hades squirm. “In me sitting around waiting for you if you won’t even call and tell me that you won’t be home until the middle of the goddamn night? Or did you not want to tell me? Hmm?”
A big, dirty, unspoken something is now sitting between them, out in the open where it doesn’t belong. Fuck. The hair on the back of Hades’ neck prickles, her hands suddenly fitful between her knees.
Six months ago, Hades was half-convinced she’d put a bullet right between the eyes of their marriage. A momentary lapse in judgement, just long enough to pull the godforsaken trigger. Some company social or another, couldn’t even remember the occasion.
Sure as shit remembered her, though. Eurydice. Secretary with the legal department, just barely scratching the surface of her twenties. Hades had less than no real interest in her - she was nice , feisty and funny on the few occasions that they’d met, but not in any uniquely compelling way.
But she’d argued with Persephone about god-knows-what on the drive over, and now her wife was tanked up and giving her a berth wide enough to start rumours. Hades was utterly wrecked, too - tired of nursing her drinks so her head was clear enough to make excuses for Persephone’s bad behaviour.
As she knocked back her fifth Old Fashioned - all of them doubles - and ordered a sixth while the burn still lingered in her throat, Hades felt something shift within her. Pushed up against the point of Persephone’s cold shoulder and somehow sick with the weight of missing her even though she was in the same damn room, she found herself overcome with a desperate need to get her attention. Vindictive bitch, holding her hand to a burning candle just to feel something. And Eurydice was right there, in a blue slip dress with a glass of rosé, beside her at the bar. Pretty little flame to wound herself with.
It wasn’t anything substantial; standing closer to her than could be considered professional, a hand on her waist, a flirtatious lilt in her voice. Undoing the top button of her shirt right when she knew Persephone was watching. Just wanted her to notice.
Eurydice certainly didn’t seem to mind - smiling, laughing along with her, pandering to an old woman’s whisky-soaked foible. Hades barely laid a hand on the girl. Well, she was shitfaced enough that she didn’t really remember what she had done, but she was pretty sure that wouldn’t have overstepped her wedding vows.
Pretty sure.
The taste of white zinfandel; the stickiness of something forbidden on her lips. An unfamiliar hand at her collar, hesitant but not exactly resisting.
Isn't sure at all - doesn’t want to be sure.
Persephone reacted about as expected. Sobbed, screamed, threw shit. Drank a whole lot, burned through cigarettes like they were going out of fashion. Threatened to walk out and take the dog with her, rinse Hades for everything she was worth and more in court. Refused to listen to her assertions that it meant nothing.
“-you brought me down to it, Seph. Black yourself out, make a scene, leave me to pick up the pieces whenever you damn well feel like it - what else am I supposed to do? You can’t even try to pretend that you still fucking like me, and I’m just meant to sit here and take it?”
Eurydice quit before the month was out.
“-fuckin’ wish I was blacked out. No, I saw what you did - I fuckin’ remember, and I can’t stand looking at you. She’s a kid, Hades. You’re her boss, you’re old enough to be her mother. It ain’t right - it’s fuckin’ creepy.”
Hades felt the sting of it everywhere. In each and every curse and insult; in the maudlin silence that permeated the gaps between Persephone’s eruptions. In the sheer goddamn loneliness of sleeping on her own. Filthy and idiotic and fucking wounded, even though the blame for it all lay squarely at her own feet. She’d considered leaving herself, just to spare Persephone the heartache of delivering the killing blow.
But then the wound started to scab over. Persephone let her back into their bed, albeit with her legs snapped closed for long enough that Hades really started to suffer under the weight of the punishment. They never really talked about it. Just let things slip back to normalcy with a newfound rot festering just beneath the surface.
Hades made a real concerted effort to pay more attention to her. Bought her gifts, cooked for her, planned vacations, tried.
Didn’t stop the seeds of doubt she and her stupidity had planted in Persephone’s mind from sprouting through the soil, though. Didn’t stop her inventing new bits of skirt in the office for Hades to interfere with.
She'd never been jealous like this before. Impulsive, belligerent, messy, loud, uncouth, shit with money, never on time - sure, all of it and more. But not jealous. No, never that. Hades had done that to her.
“Lover-“
“Shut up,” Persephone snaps before she can say much more. Her tone is a handful of ice dropped down Hades’ back. She’s put her sketchbook down now, and she sits facing Hades with her elbows on her splayed knees and the last vestige of her cigarette smouldering. “Hades, you can’t do this to me.”
Her honey-brown eyes are moist, and Hades can tell by the look in them that she’s back in the trenches of that shitty, awful memory.
“I didn’t do anything, I-“ Hades stops herself, shuddering at her own raised voice.
Part of her, the part that’s her father’s fucking daughter, wishes she didn’t stop. It wants to grab Persephone by the shoulders and try to shake some goddamn sense into her. Wants to scream until she’s blue that she should know by now that everything Hades does is for them. For her. Apart from that, but really Persephone had brought that on herself - because she keeps making the same mistake again and again and again, every time she puts a bottle to her lips and lets her mind make Hades the enemy. God fucking forbid Hades make one misstep - one - that justifies the reputation that Persephone had built up for her.
The part that wins out, though, is the one that has her sit on her hands and chew on the unpleasant feeling, letting its bitterness saturate her tongue until she comes to understand it. She likes that sector of her genetic makeup a whole lot better.
“It was a long day,” she anneals. “I’m juggling too much right now, and time got away from me. That’s all. Still, should’ve called you.”
Persephone huffs, swallowing back about a quarter of the contents of her glass. Cerberus stands up, goes to her side and nudges her free arm with his cinderblock of a head. She strokes her hand down his back, and he starts snuffling at her face. Doesn’t say anything for a good long while. Hades respects the silence. Eventually, though:
“Decided I wanted to fight with you when you weren’t home by seven.” Persephone turns her eyes to the floor - struggling to make the confession if she’s looking at her wife. “Got myself mad at you, kept getting madder.”
Hades’ knuckles wring white at her sides. She doesn’t like one bit of that statement. Doesn’t like the idea of Seph sitting and mulling over the best words to cut her with.
“I worry,” Persephone continues. “That you’re not coming back to me. Found someone else younger, prettier. You work with enough of ‘em.”
It would be easy, but categorically wrong, to lull herself into thinking that all of this - any of this - is her wife’s fault.
“That might be so, but I don’t want any of them. And I’m sure they don’t want me all that much either.” Hades says with as much softness as she can summon. Then she pauses - thinks about her next words very carefully indeed. “How much have you had to drink, lover?”
“Too much,” Persephone says with a mirthless laugh. “Overthought myself into a big ol’ mess, figured it might help.”
Hades just nods.
Tried to get to the bottom of it, once upon a time. Well, more like demanded Persephone explain herself, in that horrible contralto snarl that made her flinch, empty decanter in her hand and Persephone flopped on the sofa incapable of holding her own head up.
Because she’s depressed, Persephone had barked in between sobs and mouthfuls of the scotch that had caused the fucking argument in the first place. Because people thought she was more fun like this - because she can't find the drive to do anything else. Because Hades is never there, and she’s lonely. Because it fills a space. Because it’s a fucking Tuesday.
Hades, being Hades, had tangled herself up in the ‘never there’ comment, and that started a whole different row. I’m never here so I can keep you in expensive clothes and expensive fucking booze that you drink like it’s water, and don’t you fucking forget it.
Persephone got drunk. Hades got angry. Got angry, and then did stupid shit; shouted, slammed doors, smashed glass, stood pawing at fucking interns that she had no interest in just because she knew it would smart under Persephone’s skin. Granted, Persephone could be just as spiteful and rotten as her given enough of the right stuff. But Hades didn’t need fuel to catch aflame.
Throw a damp towel over it before the spark ignites to something horrible.
“Don’t matter now. I’m here.”
All that damnable fragility on her face. Hades can feel it tearing her heart right into pieces. She can’t apologise in as many words, because it’s never been in her nature. But Persephone must know that she’s sorry, right? After all these years?
Persephone rises to her feet - an entirely unreadable, entirely blank look on her face. She flops herself into Hades’ lap, her breathing heavy - arms serpentine and constricting around her neck, body quaking.
“Lover, what are you…?” She drops off, no real planned trajectory for that question. Hades isn’t quite sure if her wife is trying to embrace her or strangle her, and she doesn’t care either way.
“Just hold me,” she says. Small, whispered, verging on pathetic with her face burrowed against Hades’ shoulder. “Please.”
Hades concedes to her without a second of thought, one hand reaching to her waist and the other entrenching itself in her hair. Has to reach her butt these days, if it were straightened out. Miles upon miles of resplendent dark blonde; warm brown at the roots, filigreed with little threads of silver by her temples.
She’s all lithe limb and sharp bone, her weight on Hades’ lap feels like nothing. Hades is a lot of woman by any measure - about six-one in her bare feet, broad shoulders and imposing angles, albeit softening around the midsection in her age. Persephone had always liked that about her; liked being able to curl up real small and let Hades envelop her. Liked the safety and solidity of her.
“I love you.”
Persephone replies with a handful of muffled syllables that seem to match the cadence of ‘I love you too’.
She turns her face to Hades, planting a kiss on her waiting mouth. Gentle at first - chaste, almost bashful. Hades catches her lower lip between both of hers, pulling her closer. She has liquor and cigarettes on her breath - vodka-tonic. And as much as Hades can’t help but squirm at the taste, she loves her. Persephone trails a hand up the back of Hades’ neck, entwining it in her short hair. Hades can feel her softening. Feels right. Feels natural, her wife in her arms.
For all their faults and all the shit, Hades still loved her enough that she’d married her twice.
First time was the product of what could only be described as a moment of insanity from Hades, albeit spurred along by a flight of fancy and an evening’s daydreaming by her love. Back in ninety-one, when they were both young and broke. Late one Saturday night on the stage in a gay club; officiated, in a very loose sense of the word, by Persephone’s little brother, in full drag. Not legal - not a marriage, in any terms that actually meant anything. More about the performance, the sheer thrill. A quiet little fuck-you to the system.
Hermes was more feather boa and cocaine than person back in those days - really, he’d just wittered through whatever of a conventional set of marriage vows he could pull from memory, gotten them confused with Whitney Houston lyrics somewhere along the way. Made a few crass jokes about scissoring, and then popped the cork on a bottle of cheap champagne as Hades kissed her bride.
All the quiet ridiculousness of it - Persephone in a costume-shop veil, a bouquet of carnations filched from a vase on the bar. Hades wearing jeans, for christ’s sake. They’d both had a hard enough time keeping a straight face through the whole silly song and dance.
But it was something. It was theirs. Among all the closeted half-truths and secrecy and bullshit that came along with their lives at that point; at least they had that night. The knowledge that once, just once, a room of people bore witness to their love.
They’d done it properly, of course, as soon as the law permitted it. The full nine yards of pomp and circumstance, in a big old mansion upstate with a big old garden. Seph in a white dress, families present, more floral arrangements than one could shake a stick at. Felt good, after all these years, finally being able to call her wife her wife.
They’ve aged. Grown into imperfect people under the weight of the world. Seph drinks too much, submits too easily to her vices and her insecurity. Hades works too much. Doesn’t talk about her feelings, doesn’t talk about anything half the time, unless it’s spilling out of her in a rage. Doesn’t think. She’s petty and vindictive and desperate in her own stupid, idiosyncratic ways. Half-sure she had always been that way but well, she’d never met herself back then. Persephone had, and it sure seemed like she’d detected a change in the tide.
And it hurts - god, it fucking hurts. Frankly, Hades would sooner rip her own heart out of her chest with her bare hands than let Persephone suffer any more on her account. Wishes she could change it all in an instant; take back everything that brought them here, fix whatever broke however many years ago.
All she can do, though, is try.
“Time is it?” Persephone murmurs into Hades’ shoulder. Hades consults her watch.
“Almost eleven.”
“Shit.” Persephone fumbles her way out of her embrace, uneasy on her feet. “I need to sleep. Wait, no - shower, then sleep.”
”Why the sudden rush?”
“Got a meeting tomorrow morning with- god, I don’t know. What’s-her-fuckin-face - the one that runs that gallery on East Twelfth. Miserable bitch, big tattoo of a knife between her tits.”
She gestures fervently at Hades, searching for a name that she should know her wife doesn’t have a prayer of knowing. Hades raises both hands, pleading her innocence.
“I don’t know why you expect me to be looking-“
“It’s huge, Hades. It’s ugly as shit. You can’t not look at it.” Persephone says emphatically. She pulls a peculiar face, like she’s trying to look at the space between her own eyebrows, leafing through her mental rolodex of names. “Mar - Mal- Mela-” She snaps her fingers in sudden revelation. “Melpomene. She wants me to send her some stuff for a new exhib in the fall. I need to go check out the space and talk over specifics. Don’t know why she’s asking me, usually she goes for mopey garbage.”
“What time?”
“Nine am,” Persephone groans, her lip curling. “You’d think she’s never met me.”
“I'll take you,” Hades offers - well, more states as fact - before she can really think about it.
Persephone looks at her with half-thawed, wide-eyed confusion. A smile piques on her lips - a breathy, surprised sort of laugh.
“Won’t that mess with your precious schedule?”
Hades can feel her scanning for any hint of insincerity. Caught her there, Hades will give her that. But she’s not relenting. Persephone likes her best where she can see her, and as much as she can’t make it a habit, Hades will cave to her unsung demand for now.
“I’ll say I’m working from home.” Hades says, watching Persephone think on the offer with knitted brows.
“Okay,” she smiles gently. Still doesn’t seem sure that she entirely trusts it - seeing is believing to Hades’ wife. But looks like she’s at least happy to go along with it all.
Persephone kisses her cheek and then walks into the en-suite, peeling her clothes off as she goes. Plisse trousers and a draped, satiny green blouse - every bit a Grecian goddess, the body beneath cut from marble. Hades gets halfway to unbuttoning her shirt - and then Cerberus starts pawing at the door, whining to be let out to use the bathroom.
He trots down the stairs a few paces ahead of Hades, glancing over his shoulder as if to check she’s still there. The hallway is all ornate bannister and mahogany - Hades’ personal inclination towards the old and the grandiose. Persephone’s fingerprints seem to be everywhere, though. Potted ivy on every windowsill, vases of cut flowers on any surface that will accommodate them, frames and paintings cluttering the walls - breaking up the darkness with all of her vivacity.
Photos everywhere. Persephone in her graduation gown, looking at the camera while Hades looks at her. Hades on their honeymoon, candid taken from the side, smiling at nothing in particular. Cerberus on the front steps, six months old - tongue lolling, his tail a blur. Persephone in her mother’s garden, barefoot and beaming.
A dog-eared, fuzzy Polaroid. Some approximation of a waltz, foreheads pressed together. Hades gazing at her lover as though she had personally put the sun in the sky. A crumpled yard of white tulle pinned into Persephone’s hair, a bouquet of red carnations in her hand.
Things were good once. They would be good again.
Try and keep trying.
***
Please let me hold you close
Here in the breathing dark.
Don't close your eyes.