WHO Cin WHEN September-January WHAT A scene to cover everything I should have written in other scenes WARNINGS brief mentions of domestic violence
From the moment that Brody had almost bled to death in the back of a Ferrari, Cin’s entire life had changed. Not only had she almost lost her brother - the little boy that she had raised from a baby, the little boy who was more her son than he was her brother - she’d had her entire understanding of the world torn apart and put back together upside down.
Three months ago she had been living in a cold, rundown house in a cold, rundown shitty part of the city, and now Cin was living in an apartment in Manhattan that may as well have been a palace. She was living downstairs from a man who practically worshiped her, a doubly strange thing when that man was an actual living and breathing god himself.
Gods were real and one of them was in love with Cin. He whispered against her throat that she was his queen and that he would do anything for her, and Cin couldn’t help but believe him because, so far, he had done everything for her.
It had taken a while for Cin to relent on moving anywhere where she would be somehow beholden to Archie, to Apollo, but after Jake had come out of the bathroom saying “the mushrooms are back,” Cin had to admit that the thought of somewhere Apollo could provide would be so good, not just for her but for the others. Ruth and Jake and Brody shouldn’t have to live in a house where mushrooms came up through the bathroom floor and where there was black mold in the kitchen and where it was always cold and damp and not a single floorboard could be trusted.
So the next night she went out with Apollo, and Cin told him she wanted to get a better home. She told him what she needed from a place and her demands seemed to be far less than he expected: she needed four bedrooms, and everything else was optional.
Their home in the Hole had three bedrooms, and before Kelly had disappeared (and Cin had taken over her room) it had been the three girls sleeping in one and the two boys in the other. Ruth had her own bedroom for the first time in her life, and if they moved somewhere new then Cin wanted the same for Brody and Jake.
And Apollo got it for her almost immediately: an incredible apartment with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a couple spare rooms that didn’t have a specified purpose. And views. It had views out wide windows that looked across the city in ways none of the Warmoths had ever been allowed to have before. That view seemed to terrify and fascinate Brody (as many things did) but Jake took to calling out into the apartment when he saw cool birds.
It wasn’t long after Cin moved in that she told Apollo that she wanted to own the apartment. Cin wanted her name on all the paperwork so that if this went wrong, if this all fell apart like it so easily might, she had something to use. The god had handed it all over to her with a smile and without any hesitation, and when Cin saw that she now owned something worth sixteen million dollars, she couldn’t make her hands stop shaking.
That wasn’t even a real amount of money. No one had that much money, it was made up, it was fake, it was-
Cin had bolted from Apollo, the contract still clutched in her hand, and thrown up in the kitchen sink because it was closest. As she did, Apollo stroked her hair with concern and offered to heal whatever was wrong, and Cin didn’t know how to explain what she felt or her reaction. After she washed out her mouth under the tap and looked at Apollo sideways, she found him still looking adoring and worried and right then Cin wanted to tell him that she loved him.
But saying that for the first time after he had just handed her sixteen million dollars wasn’t what Cin wanted and she didn’t want to be a woman who could be bought, and so she didn’t say it.
There was such an ease to being Apollo’s girlfriend though. He was so easy to be with once she could let herself relax into it, but even that took time. He was a good man, getting her siblings music lessons and private tutors and literally every other thing they asked for.
He gave Cin everything she wanted as well, including credit cards she was free to use however she pleased. Cin wondered, a little bit, if this just made her a whore. She minded but… it was easy not to mind when they could order take out every night and Cin never had to cook, and never had to worry about the heating getting turned off.
She dropped her exhausting job at the laundry but kept the cleaning gig with Gabe, almost worried that if she let herself she could forget how to be a person at all. She’d always dreamed of the Kardashian lifestyle but now that she had it, she worried it could make her into too shallow a person, that maybe she’d never be able to go back to being normal.
But it meant that for the first time in her life, Cin had an abundance of both time and money. No longer was she working her fingers to the bone every single day and traveling an hour each way to do it, only to come home and be full time mom as well. She could just… pursue her interests?
It didn’t take Cin long to realise she didn’t actually know what that meant. What did she like? She liked… fucking Barak and now fucking Apollo? She liked drinking? She liked… eating good? Fuck, did she really have no interests? She’d spent so long just trying to get by and trying to make sure her siblings wouldn’t, like, die, that she never had much time to consider what she actually enjoyed.
Was that depressing? It certainly felt depressing.
Cin had turned to the internet, googling different variations of ‘lists of hobbies’ and ‘things to do in nyc’ in the hopes that something might get sparked.
She bought a guitar (since all her siblings had started learning instruments) and started to play it, stubbornly refusing Apollo’s help and shooing him away. If she was going to learn guitar, then she was going to learn on her own. She didn’t care if he was the god of music, because Cin was the god of ‘fuck off, I’m doing this alone’.
(Easy to say when the god of music had paid for the guitar in the first place.)
Cin started ticking off a few more things on the internet’s suggested hobbies: join a club was one, but so was play golf and so Cin decided to make both happen at once. When she strode into the golf club with Jake she glared down everyone, daring them to say she didn’t belong. She and Jake were dressed just like them, and they’d paid just like them, and Cin refused to hear even a murmur that this wasn’t their god given right.
She drank a bourbon at the bar pre-game (Jake had a coke) and once they got out there on the green, Cin discovered quickly that golf was fucking boring. The little cart was kinda funny, but that was pretty much all the game had going for it.
Not according to Jake however: Jake immediately loved golf, and the whole way home he talked about how he couldn’t wait to go again. Cin knew she’d have to arrange a chaperone. She hoped Jake didn’t turn into exactly the sort of person that hung out at golf clubs though. (Seemed unlikely: that place had still seemed pretty white, and she hoped Jake lost interest before anyone became an asshole.)
Even though they were out of their old lives and onto something new, the past still hung over them. Cin had dreams sometimes about Barak dying in that flooded out house, and she woke up feeling sick. If she was in Apollo’s bed she let him distract her for a little while.
Ruth was having nightmares as well. Cin heard her sometimes making frightened sounds in her sleep, one time dramatically enough that Cin had even gone in and woken her, telling her it was just a dream. “Whatever it was, it can’t get you now.” Cin couldn’t be sure she wasn’t talking to herself. Ruth never talked about what the dreams were, but that was no surprise. Ruth didn’t talk to Cin about anything much unless it was a criticism.
Ruth was lucky that Cin didn’t decide to be the kind of parent Ruth’s dad had been, because that would have shut her up real quick.
No, instead Cin was the kind of parent who was putting aside money every week into accounts for each of them. Like Cin, they weren’t coming out of this with nothing. Like Cin, they were going to be better off. She wanted all three of them to go to college and have some sort of chance.
Instead Cin was the kind of parent who could now afford to take any of them to the doctor when they needed it, like when Jake had tripped on the balcony and broken his tooth. Sitting there holding ice on it, Cin had suddenly realised that… she could just go to a dentist. She could just take Jake to a dentist right now and get his tooth fixed and there would be no negative repercussions, just a fixed tooth so her brother didn’t have to suffer. The realisation had made Cin lightheaded even as she found and called a 24-hour dentist.
Instead Cin was the kind of parent who kept texting Bailey’s number to tell her sister where they were living now and that she was always welcome to come home. She never got a response and she didn’t know if Bailey was ignoring her or had dumped this number or was dead somewhere. Still Cin messaged and hoped for an answer.
Instead she was the kind of parent who worried, all the time, that Kelly was going to go back to the old house, find them all gone, and then report Jake, Brody, and Ruth as missing. Because Cin was the kind of parent who wasn’t a parent at all, and if Kelly went to the cops, Cin was as good as a kidnapper. Cin had taken Kelly’s kids. And it didn’t matter that Kelly was a fucking waste, didn’t matter that she barely saw her kids, didn’t matter that Cin had changed Brody’s diapers more than she ever had or that she’d covered for Kelly’s absence to school a million times. All that mattered was that, legally, Cin was just their sister.
But while Cin worried about keeping hold of her kids, Apollo was trying to get to know his own. Cin found the whole concept of Rosario a little much, her boyfriend having a daughter who was practically the same age as Cin. Yes, she knew that Apollo was thousands of years old, he’d explained that, she got it on some level. But… he still looked like some young frat guy and now he had a daughter who would look more like his sister or girlfriend. And it also kinda made Cin her step-mother, and what was she supposed to do with that?
What happened when she met Rosario one day? Was she supposed to try and be some weird mom to an adult? No thanks, that seemed awkward for everyone involved. But she found it endearing the way his face lit up when he talked about her, different to the way he smiled just for Cin.
God, Cin fucking loved the way he smiled for her, like she was the most important person in the room, maybe in the world. Cin had never had that before. It had only ever been Barak, her first love, her first everything. (The one time with Tragos didn’t count. That had all been Barak’s idea and Tragos was just a scrawny young thing anyway. Cin hadn’t exactly been thrilled to fuck him.)
But now there was Apollo, this god who wanted her so badly and who cared about whether she came or not- who seemed to take it as a matter of personal pride to make sure she came, as many times as she might even consider wanting. She supposed once you were a few thousand years old there was no way you couldn’t be good at sex but, damn, Apollo was good at sex, and Cin - still in the fresh flushes of a relationship - felt hungry for him all the time.
And despite all that wanting and all that passion, they didn’t fight. They’d had disagreements, but it had never led to violence, and generally Cin felt she came out on top of them. Mostly it was about things she wanted or didn’t want with her lives or siblings, because sometimes Apollo started pushing in on things without asking her. Cin made it very clear to him that she wasn’t going to be pushed around by anyone, not even a god.
But mostly the thing that had changed most in Cin’s life since all this began was something that it took a long time to recognise: she was sort of happy. After so long feeling like every single muscle in her body was constantly clenched, Cin could sink into the tub in her amazing new apartment, the window beside her overlooking the city, and feel like maybe everything was actually going to be alright from now on. Maybe it was possible in this world to have safety and security and love. Perhaps after all the bad shit and hard work and sufferings they’d all seen, maybe the Warmoths - and Cin - were finally getting exactly what they deserved.