Chapter Text
Lover, tell me if you can
Who’s gonna buy the wedding band?
****
“Hades…”
Persephone’s voice lilts to a gasping falsetto, back arched into a quivering parenthesis. She reaches to palm at her tits, catching a hard nipple between barely-spread fingers.
Hades grasps her by the hip, steadying her. She can feel how close she is in her desperate panting; taut around the two fingers that Hades has buried in her up to the knuckles, tongue caressing the length of her.
The fullness of her own orgasm lingers between her legs - wishes she’d taken a little more time to savour it, but, well, she doesn’t like to be seen blushing. Never has. Hades’ stubborn masculine pride had her flipping her lover onto her back and lavishing her mouth on her before she got her breath back. Take Persephone to the edge and then savour the afterglow together.
Persephone whimpers, grasping at Hades’ short hair. Her arousal tightens and burns, body shuddering. She strains against her, fucking herself into Hades’ face wildly - hands grasping from her own breasts, to Hades’, to gripping the pillow, to raking down Hades’ shoulders, to wringing in the sweaty sheets.
Hades sucks fervently, tongue flicking against her - fingers curling to just where she needs them. Persephone chokes on her own frantic keening.
“Fuck- Hades, I’m gonna…”
Happens before she can announce it; head thrown back with a decadent, gasping moan, flooding over Hades’ tongue. Hades rocks her through her climax; lapping at her clit, fingers pulsing on her sweet spot until she feels Persephone soften beneath her. She falls back into the pillows, haloed by her wild curls, and Hades gently pulls herself away; a delicate kiss to the inside of Persephone’s slick thighs, before enveloping her in her arms.
Persephone furls into her, golden skin hot against Hades’ bare chest. Hades wipes at her mouth with the back of a hand; Persephone’s scent heady on the bed linen and her own breath.
“Happy?” she asks with a softness that had felt so uncharacteristic in her own voice in the days before Persephone.
Persephone gives some contented little mewling noise by way of an answer, head pressed against Hades’ shoulder. A few more half-formed murmurs, slowly taking the shape of coherent words. Until, eventually:
“God, I love you.”
Persephone wraps both arms around Hades, pulling herself as close to her lover as she physically can, entangling their legs in one another. Hades isn’t sure she’ll ever cease to be so taken with how perfectly Persephone seems to fit into her gaps; svelte limbs slotting into the space that Hades leaves in their bed, top of her head nestled under her chin. Petite and lovely in every way that Hades has never been. She’s endlessly charmed by her - endlessly fascinated.
“I love you too,” Hades purrs into her hair, pressing a kiss to her crown.
Hades wants to stay here forever and bask in her. Memorise every fleeting motion, every curve and contour and freckle. Persephone never seems more like hers, than she does in moments like this.
But it’s nearly midnight and duty - or rather, the looming threat of her alarm clock - prevails. Hades, a piece tearing off of her heart with every movement, slowly unravels herself from Persephone’s embrace; sitting on the edge of the bed and dragging both hands down her face, trying to spur herself into more purposeful movement. Doesn’t help that Persephone is staring up at her with big, pleading doe-eyes, a hand on the small of her back.
“Where you goin’?”
“It’s late. Got work in the morning,” Hades says a little guiltily.
“Can wait five more minutes, surely?” Persephone pouts.
She sits up, pulling the sheets over her exposed breasts. Hades, tits to the window, hadn’t even thought about that. Half the time it’s like she forgets that she’s supposed to be a woman. She reaches over to jerk the curtain closed, fumbling around on the floor for wherever she’d discarded her underwear.
Can practically touch all four walls in the bedroom with her arms spread out; just about big enough for a bed and a dresser. Persephone had filled the closet to bursting, and taken over pretty much every available surface with her endless potted plants - not that Hades minds a bit. Injected a bit of colour into the whitewash. Prior to her, Hades’ living space really was just a mattress and a bathroom to her - strictly there to meet her immediate needs, not much attention paid to making it a home. She’d been embarrassed as all hell the first time Seph spent the night.
Worries about Persephone being cooped up in here, sometimes. When they’d agreed to move in together, Hades’ place had won out by virtue of marginally cheaper rent and the luxury of not having roommates; but even if she was sharing it with three other bodies, Persephone’s old apartment felt downright palatial by comparison. Space to spread out - to create. At any rate, more than a shitty fourth-storey walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen had to offer her.
Persephone insists she doesn’t mind; it’s not like she’s stuck here all the time. Hades still feels a bit cruel, making such a force of nature bend to her lifestyle.
“Just too proud to cuddle with me, huh?” Persephone jests, a hand carding through her hair and trying to restore it to some semblance of order.
“Not too proud at all,” Hades counters, pulling her boxer shorts up over her ass as she stands. Chest still exposed - not exactly like she’s working with a whole lot in that department anyway, and not that she minds that one bit. “But I gotta work - don’t want to spend the rest of our lives in this dump.”
“Might be a dump, but it’s our dump.” Persephone shrugs. “Told you before, Hades - I’d live in a goddamn cardboard box if it meant being with you.”
“Can you forgive me for wanting to try?”
Hades, in the midst of setting out fresh clothes for the morning, looks over her shoulder at Persephone. She’s wriggling her way back into her pyjamas; lacy cotton shorts, a t-shirt that drowns her which Hades is fairly certain was stolen from her.
“Well, can’t say I don’t think it’s sweet,” she smiles airily. “Pretty lady workin’ herself to the bone to spoil me.”
Persephone inches off of the bed and sits cross-legged on the floor by the window, lighting up a smoke. Nobody can smoke a cigarette quite like her - more sensual than she has any right to be. The mere act of watching her breathe can, and often does, drive Hades wild, though. Maybe it’s just her. Intoxicating and otherworldly; compelling enough to make any woman want to lay at her feet and worship.
“Just you wait, lover - we’ll have a big ol’ house somewhere fancy, big ol’ garden for you.” Hades looks to Seph and catches a girlish little smile on her face. “That way I won’t have to trip over that goddamn monstera every time I step through the front door.”
Hades kneels behind her lover; duty-bound by the inevitability of the morning, but too enamoured to care. Persephone - relishing in what would be considered in any terms an uncharacteristic moment of fancy from Hades - grins broadly, offering the filter of her cigarette to her waiting mouth. She takes a drag, puffing smoke from her nose and wrapping her arms around Persephone.
“If you think I won’t still cover every inch of the place in greenery, you’re dead wrong.” Persephone smirks, bringing an arm around her folded knees.
“You’re gonna be able to sit pretty every day of your life,” Hades continues. “Freer than a bird, just you and me and your art.”
Blissful thought. Persephone’s craft was something that Hades couldn’t claim to understand on any particularly deep level, but admiration of it consumed her. Vines seemed to spill into being from her lady’s fingertips onto canvas, more real than life itself. Oil and ink and gouache; pigment, light, shade, planning in graphite and then creating. Plants, mostly - always plants with her.
“You? Thought you’d be too busy making all this money?” Persephone laughs with a puff of smoke.
“Richest folks in the world barely have to lift a finger, Seph.” Hades shrugs as though it’s a given.
“S’pose I could get used to that, then. You all to myself.”
“No more late nights. No more slinging booze and wiping up puke, no more worrying about making the ends meet. Gonna make you a lady of luxury.”
Persephone’s eyes close for a moment, leaning her head back against Hades. That thought ain’t half appealing either - knows how much she hates the bar work, really. It’s a fun idea in principle; Seph likes talking to people, likes rabbiting about liquor and mixing up pretty drinks, but the night shifts are a killer. Flower child in every possible sense, she withers after too long out of the sun - traipsing home in the wee hours of the morning, half-asleep on her feet and drained of her colour.
“What are we gonna do, then?” Persephone asks, nudging the fantasy along. “Once we’ve got all this time and all this cash to splash around?”
“Anything you want, lover.”
Hades rests her chin on Persephone’s shoulder. She clasps her left hand, thumb caressing her ring finger. Works of art themselves, Seph’s hands - slender and delicate, stained every which way with ink and paint, a myriad of pigment clinging under her short nails.
“Gonna buy you a new dress for every day of the year. Nice big diamond for that pretty little finger.”
Persephone takes a long pull of her cig. She sighs weightily; studying her hand as though a piece of it is suddenly missing and she can’t work out why, and then pulling it away from Hades.
“You almost had me there,” she says, dejected. “Seems silly - could buy every other bit of it.”
She trails off, and it’s not hard for Hades to pick up what she’s putting down. Shit. A miserable pang makes its presence known in the pit of Hades’ chest. Too carried away by playing make-believe to think in grim reality. She pulls Persephone a little closer.
“Just wish we could have what normal people get to have,” Persephone continues, spitting out the ‘normal’ like it tastes foul. “Worried that we’re never gonna get to walk in the light like they can. Ain’t fair that I can’t love you in front of other folks - that the two of us have to be some big fuckin’ stupid secret.”
“You told your mama yet?” Hades asks cautiously.
Persephone shakes her head.
“Don’t see the point. She pitched enough of a fit with Hermes and he ain’t even her blood,” Persephone says bitterly. “No sense breaking her heart again.”
That was some story. Seph’s younger brother by a very short margin, Irish twins by any other measure but for the fact that they don’t share a mother. Their dad, by all accounts, had been pretty undiscerning about where he spread his seed, but slick enough of tongue to convince their mama to take in the extra kid when she agreed for some short-lived spell to have him back. Then off he went into the wide blue yonder again, leaving Miss Demeter with a couple of toddlers in his wake. A repeating pattern, Seph had told her - spawned a whole shower of bastards in his lifetime, never paid an awful lot of attention to any of them.
Credit to her - Hades couldn’t say her own ma gave much of a shit about the two kids she bore herself, never mind a spare one sired in some sordid little affair. Held a slightly less favourable opinion of Seph’s mama on account of her kicking Hermes to the curb as soon as the effeminate tendencies of his boyhood blossomed into full-fledged queerness, though.
Persephone continues as she sucks down a gasp of smoke. “What about yours?”
Pot calling the kettle black. Hades’ relationship with her folks is hardly the picture of health.
She’d never exactly thought of herself as closeted. Nope, wore her lesbianism right out on her sleeve without ever really trying to. Always seemed it just took one look at her to figure it out, even when she was a kid - othered from being a little girl for reasons that didn’t make sense to her until later. Or that was how it seemed, in the calm before the stupid manufactured storm.
Turns out it just meant she had no plausible deniability to her name when the chips were down. Having it put to words had changed everything for the worse.
“Hasn’t had a whole lot to say to me since Zeus snitched on me,” Hades shrugs. “Don't think Pa knows. Not like he’s getting out of jail in this lifetime anyhow.”
Salt rubbing itself into a wound that really should be healed by now. The ache of missing her ma in spite of herself; the blistering desire to kick seventeen shades of shit out of her brother. Nothing much for her father but resentment.
Hades squirms, and hopes Persephone doesn’t notice. She knows what she needs to - that Hades’ daddy is locked up for damned good reason, that her mama’s already thin supply of love dried out once she learned that her daughter was a dyke. Won’t talk about the nuts and bolts of it all. Doesn’t need to.
Persephone interlocks her hands with Hades’. Her attention is on her ring finger now, tracing the space between her first and second knuckle.
“Wish you could call me your wife.” Seph thinks out loud, pressing a kiss to the back of Hades’ hand.“Wish I could call you mine.”
Hades clings to her like she’s worried she’s going to slip away from her. Entrenches her face in golden curls, breathing in jasmine and orchid.
Isn’t sure what she did right to deserve this woman - all her beauty, all her softness. All she is sure about is that she wants to hold her here forever.
“One day, lover. One day.”
*****
It’s a quarter to eleven on a Saturday morning, and Hades is who-the-fuck-knows-where. If the answer to that question is ‘the office’, Persephone is going to throttle her with her damn laptop charger.
She could’ve sworn that was the whole point of this dumb enterprise, having more time together. A promise from their youth that she’d placed little stake in, but that Hades had stuck to like some kind of holy tenet. At least when she was spending her days lording it over her little worker-bees on construction sites, weekends were sacred.
That’s a bygone age, though - bureaucracy seems to have its sticky fingers all over the woman, always consumed in paperwork and emails and endless goddamn meetings. Leaving the house early, coming home late, always tied up with some stupid nebulous something and swearing up and down that it was vital. Wants to resent her, sometimes - usually it’s some task, but Persephone will admit that it’s easy to do with a hangover.
Getting too goddamn old for this, she thinks as she creaks down the stairs; her head pounding, eyes slitted against the summer morning’s light. Needs to stop using opening nights as an excuse to drink like a sorority sister, trying to keep pace with the little sophomore-year nymphs that congregate around her. It’s sweet, really - worshipped like a messiah by a cohort of nature-girls flocking straight from SVA and Parsons to feed at her hand. Learned well enough that she was about the only capital-a Artist in the East Village that would give them the time of day. Bunch of asocial fucks - seems like Persephone is the only one left from her graduating year not preoccupied with their own melancholia and solitude.
But then the cute lil art-school dryads have all got endless pits of their daddies’ money and nothing better to burn it on than drink and drugs, don’t they? Maybe it’s not Seph’s contemporaries being sticks in the mud, but her own recklessness, that leaves her the only one hanging with such a challenging crew.
Started out well - cute little talk about the new series she was exhibiting, whole lot of free wine. Tried to keep it sophisticated, but then Hermes rocked up, and he’s always brought out the worst, most self-indulgent side of her.
Persephone’s body is a temple and she will accept any and all tributes left at her altar. As such, she overdid it and kept overdoing it until she regained sentience on a beanbag in somebody’s fucking loft in Soho around midnight. No telling where Hermes had ended up, but he was someone else’s problem.
And then she’d remembered that she promised Hades that she’d behave like a civilised human being as she stepped out the door. Maybe too little too late, but she made a mighty valiant effort to undo some of the damage on her trek back home.
Well, more like she flopped around drunker than a goddamn skunk on the Subway, trying to navigate a falafel wrap into her mouth. Food, water, and fresh air didn’t do shit, so she just concentrated real hard on the walk from the station to the front door on willing herself sober. Got home just after one with tzatziki and cheap weed on her breath.
Hades had been pretty tolerant as Persephone slobbered kisses all over her face and asserted in a voice too slurred to be taken seriously that she hadn’t had that much to drink. Went over quite well, all things considered; falling asleep in her lover’s arms, head pleasantly swimming.
And then she woke up to Hades’ side of the bed empty. Checked her study already - that was usually where she slept when Persephone overcooked it and was liable to puke on the sheets - and she’s not there either. Which seems like a nasty little hint that, for all her indulging her last night, Hades is pissed with her. It would be a pleasant little numbing agent on Seph’s anxiety if her memories of it all weren’t quite so fuzzy. Easy to believe the worst - it would be far the first time she’d been an ass after a drink or five too many.
Hates this shit. Needs to stop doing it. Forty-whatever year old adult, Sephie - start acting like it.
She pads into the kitchen, no hint whatsoever that Hades has been in here. Reassuring in a sense - not a day goes by that Hades leaves for work without abandoning her dirty breakfast dishes at her tail, the one little laziness that Persephone has ever managed to clock amongst all of her usual fastidious preening. Not reassuring in a wholly different one - where the hell is she?
Persephone still can’t wrap her head around how to use the damn espresso machine that Hades had dropped too much damn money on when they got the kitchen renovated the year before last - too many buttons that don’t state their purpose nearly clear enough. She gives up with it quicksmart, standing on her toes to reach the tin of instant coffee in the cabinet. Caffeine is a need more than a want right about now, she’ll accept a cup of cheap mud.
Tastes like her twenties, she thinks, butt perched on the edge of the counter and mug clasped in both hands. Well, tastes like shit, but in a nostalgic sorta way. She used to run on this stuff - working in that bar at night, college classes during the day, stretching herself every which way too thin. Convinced herself sometimes that it was good for her; that her burgeoning sleep-deprived insanity made her more creative. It very much didn’t - just gave her shaky hands and no ability to discern a good idea from a crap one. Exhaustion can make anyone feel like a genius.
Doubt loves to pick at a dangling thread - that horrible little nipping worry that she’s made some great shitfaced fuck-up that she doesn’t remember creeps back in.
Not like Hades to slink off elsewhere and lick her wounds, though. No, that would be too big a show of vulnerability from a woman who pulls the sheets over her face when she comes. More likely, if Persephone had been a bitch in her inebriation, Hades would have woken her up at the asscrack of dawn to rub her nose in it. Gets up at six am on the dot every day like a goddamn psychopath, Persephone could practically set her watch to the woman.
So it’s probably not worth all the goddamn despair. Hades is somewhere, while Persephone nurses a hangover and waits for her like a lovesick fool. Not least because she actually knows how the infernal fucking coffee machine works. Persephone has adjusted to certain finer things in life off the back of promises made and kept, and she needs her single-origin arabica like she needs air to breathe.
Seph tries to wring out her mind, put together whatever the hell she can from last night and make some sense of it. Adding two and two to make sixteen, maybe; her pissed-up nonsense and Hades’ baffling absence might not be connected in any way whatsoever.
Bits and pieces coming back. A big dumb weepy emotional overspill, reminiscing over the crumpled little Polaroid framed by their bed - how she never thought they’d live to see the damn day. It’s been legal for over a week.
Is she?…
Is she what, exactly? Hades runs all hot or all cold; chill consistency where she’s not splashy extravagance. If she’s doing anything to act on Seph’s burst of sentiment last night, it sure as shit won’t be here and now; would take more planning and fussing than could be accomplished by slipping out the door before her lover awoke.
Planning and fussing, the closest things that Hades has to hobbies. Persephone huffs a laugh at herself, sipping her coffee and tasting the oncoming heartburn.
And then her ears prick up as a key clicks in the lock of the front door. The soft thunk of shoes on floorboards, and then there’s the woman herself, standing on the other side of the breakfast bar with hands jammed in her pockets and sunglasses on her head.
“Nice of you to finally show your face.”
“Sorry,” comes the slightly meagre reply from Hades, her voice low thunder but quietly, confusingly bashful beneath it all. “Didn’t think you’d be awake yet.”
“Where the hell did you disappear off to?” Seph asks with a lifted eyebrow. “Been driving myself crazy thinking I’d pissed you off.”
Hades doesn’t have an answer for her. Her ears are tinged pink - is she blushing?
Hasn’t been at the office, either. Shirt and slacks, about as close to casual as she gets - definitely wouldn’t be caught dead facing her subordinates like this. She has her sleeves pushed to her elbows, top buttons unfastened, hair disorderly. Seph had thought to herself a few years ago that she was getting to be more silver than brunette, and here in the light her old lady is starting to seem more white than silver. No pomade, no pretension. This is a strange look on her; Persephone studies her for a moment, trying to figure it all out.
Won’t meet her eyes; if anything, Hades is suddenly very interested in her own shoes. Not going to poke at it. Seph pours the dregs of her coffee down the sink, her back turned to her lover.
“Look, if you’re not gonna talk to me could you at least remind me how this stupid thing works?” She gestures crossly to the espresso machine. “I know you’ve shown me a hundred times, but I can’t remember and this instant horseshit is turning my stomach, I really-“
“Persephone.”
That was something interesting. Hades would call her every sweet nothing under the sun - lover was a favourite, darling, Seph or Sephie on occasion, lover with a heavy-handed dash of venom if they argued - but her full name was a rare delicacy. It would be some great lie to claim that it didn’t set sparks flying within Persephone’s chest. She turns around.
Persephone’s breath catches in her throat. She retreats back a step or two, a hand clasping over her mouth.
Hades is down one one knee on the kitchen tiles, little velvet box sitting open between her clasped palms.
“Hades…”
Hades shakes her head, a quiet rumble of a laugh in the back of her throat, so much maddening, gooey love in her dark eyes. Tries to harden up as soon as Persephone‘s gaze meets hers, mind - persistently abashed by that soft underbelly of hers.
“Was out buying the ring. Couldn’t bear to wait any longer.”
“Why are you- I’m not even- Hades…”
What she’s trying to say is ‘why are you doing this here? Why now?’ She’s not even dressed - she’s barely even awake, barefoot in her dressing gown with yesterday’s mascara settling in the creases beneath her eyes.
But Persephone can’t make the words come out in a coherent fashion - mind rattling along at a mile a minute. Mad at herself for all of her misplaced conspiracies, caught up in the shock of it all - in the absence of any kind of great showy gesture that Hades is so fond of. Head fuzzy with a syrupy cocktail of joy and confused adoration.
Loves her anywhere. Loves her sharp-dressed swagger when she’s out on her arm. Loves the way she’ll show her off like a prize she’s delighted to have won at functions and parties. Fancy dinners and vacations and extravagance, she adores all of it.
But, and Persephone thinks it may just be sheer force of habit, loves her best in private. Doesn’t need shiny things to keep her affection; she’s the happiest in the bed that they share, the home that they’ve made. Wasn’t sure that Hades realised, preoccupied as she was with upping her own ante.
Clearly she has.
Persephone steps towards her, reaching for her. Hades’ cheeks are flushed, deep smile on her face. Persephone wears one to match, beaming fit to split her cheeks in two.
It’s her. Just her. It’s perfect.
“Marry me?”
“Yes.”