WHO: Apollo and Melpomene WHEN: After the fight WHERE: Melpomene's place WHAT: Anagnorisis / recognition WARNINGS: Descriptions of wounds
Apollo came to on a stretcher, opening his eyes – no, just the one eye – to see a blur of light flicker at him as they moved past a bus stop, the ad on the side changing from something yellow to something blue. He blinked it back into focus – and the image of a bowl of sugary cereal formed before his eye. And then it moved, as the stretcher moved, and Apollo’s eye turned upward to the man nearest his head.
He shot out his hand to grab the man’s arm. His limbs obeyed him this time. “Put me the fuck down,” he said.
“Our orders are to dump you outside the hospital,” said the man, and winced, as Apollo squeezed for not obeying straight away. Squeezing hurt his hand rather a lot, but no one but Apollo needed to know that. He released the man and sat up on the stretcher. The world lurched. He rather felt like the night he’d broken the record for longest keg stand but on top of it had been hit by a train.
Still, he staggered off the stretcher, and something cracked as he stood up again.
There were enough witnesses around that killing both of them would be a messy idea.
“Go on,” he told the two staring men. “Off you fuck.”
Off they fucked, and Apollo looked around to get his bearings, found a street sign, dug around his mental map of the city, and started walking south.
Each block he reminded himself of a different victory. Every enemy he’d slain for every wrong they’d committed against someone who belonged to him. He’d killed Tityus the giant for assaulting his mother Leto, and he’d slaughtered Python the monstrous serpent for harassing her while she was pregnant with him and his sister. He slew the six sons of Niobe, who had insulted Leto, while Artemis killed her daughters. He killed the four sons of the cyclops who had forged the lightning bolt Zeus had used to kill his son.
The list went on and on but the road ahead of him didn’t, he wasn’t all that far from his destination at all.
It was just one loss, that was all. Just one. He’d rise again, like the goddamn sun that he was.
On the balcony outside her apartment, Melpomene was curled on a deck chair, a soft black blanket keeping off the gentle chill of the night air. It was not very late, although Melpomene kept late hours, so things like lateness were all relative. She wasn’t a person who put a whole lot of stock in wishing but… she wished it was later. She wished the morning was sooner.
At nine o’clock the next morning she would stretch out on a table and let a medical technician smear her stomach with cold gel and let the modern witchcraft of ultrasound technology project an image of her future king onto the screen and Melpomene was not sleeping a wink tonight, in preparation.
Even if sleep would make the night pass faster, she couldn’t.
It was too…
It was something. Something else. How could she be so stripped of words to describe this. She was a Muse, for fucks sake! But stripped she felt. It was something else. The same words Ares had used to describe her were the only words she could summon to label this feeling. She closed her eyes and just let herself feel it, this shapeless thing coming into existence.
Till there was a sound from inside; her front door closing. She opened her eyes as footsteps, heavy, dragging footsteps made their way into her kitchen. She sat up in her deck chair, looking through the panes of glass into her apartment. Among the soft gray furnishings, there was Apollo, the outline of him as familiar as her own reflection, though within that outline he was barely recognisable under the blood.
She shed the blanket as she stood, moving toward him with curiosity, caution... and a strong suspicion about what he’d done. Few people were powerful enough to get one over on Apollo, there were two in particular she knew he had beef with, and from what she’d last seen of Hermes he was too depressed to beat up a noodle. Ares, then.
“You look meaty,” she said, circling him to take in the worst of the damage. He wore the worst of it on his face, though his chest was a watercolour painting of blood and sweat beneath the blossoming bruises. The smell of blood made her hungry, which would have been unnerving before she was pregnant but had, lately, become expected. Her whole body felt heavy with extra blood, it seemed only right that she crave rare steaks, venison, anything that bled. Not people, usually.
“Your fucking babydaddy is such a cunt,” Apollo said, pushing a bloodsoaked lock of hair from his face. One eye was swollen shut, crusted with blood from a deep gash in his forehead, the other was bloodshot and bore hard into her. “If you love me at all, Melpomene, you will never let him fuck you again.”
Melpomene’s head tilted slightly to one side, her heavy eyebrow raised. After their parting words on the night of the equinox, Melpomene found that a much more difficult promise to consider making. “I love you,” she said. “But I make no promises involving ‘never’.”
“I fought him for you,” the bloody monster that was her Musagetes grabbed her face. It caused a dark thrill in her body. Possessive, dangerous Apollo.
“You fought over me?” she asked, just as dangerously. And jealously. “I should have been there.” She’d carved a place there, between Ares and Apollo. How dare-
“No,” he said, cutting off her thoughts. His hands were rough on his face, and her heart was racing. She didn’t hate this. “He would have fucked you in front of everybody.”
Melpomene was aware, and even through one eye, Apollo could see that.
He growled. “I don’t like what he’s done to you.”
“As if I had no say in any of it?” Melpomene challenged back. “We’re not Hermes and Clio. I never begged him to stop. I met him, head on, and did to him as much as he did to me.”
“Bullshit. You’re the one that came away pregnant. He just came away more smug.”
“So it was my pregnancy you were trying to avenge?” Melpomene asked, grabbing his hands (broken, the skin ripped open, a mess of bruises and swelling) and pulled them away from her face. She could feel the smear of blood he left on her cheeks. “How dare you.”
“How dare I?” Apollo blazed bright in his wrath, it was beautiful to see, a solar flare, the flash of the atomic bomb. “Have you forgotten who I am?”
“Don't pull that, Apollo. Not on me,” Melpomene said, dropping his hands to turn toward her cupboard for a drink, but Apollo grabbed her before she could walk away. He pulled her in close, his hands around her wrists. She could feel the heat of his swollen fingers against her pulse. She could feel the heat of his bare, wounded chest radiating toward her.
“All of this blood is for you,” he said. “All of this pain in vengeance for the things he said about you and your sisters. I am your Musagetes, and I would slay any who wrong you. He did not treat you like he honoured you and for that, I fought. I will fight, for eternity, and where I cannot fight I will avenge. You,” he said, pulling her wrists closer. “My goddess who knows the ways of vengeance, of brother against brother; who understands this more than you? You and your intimate knowledge of tales of brutal, fitting, satisfying punishment.”
Melpomene swallowed, though it was not out of fear. “And are you satisfied?” she asked, skeptical.
“Fuck no,” said Apollo. “But our rematch can wait. You said you and Ares were not Hermes and Clio? Well, my vengeful one,” he pulled her closer still, to whisper into her ear. “Destroy Hermes with me. For your sister.”
For your ego, more like, thought Melpomene, but for a moment, his offer was worth considering. She did want Hermes to feel something about what he’d done to Clio.
But.
Satisfying punishment.
For a moment she closed her eyes and shook her head. Of course. Of course.
“Where’s Clio’s catharsis, in your plan?” she asked, looking up at him as he kept hold of her wrists. “Where’s mine? Was I supposed to be satisfied, if you’d beaten Ares to a pulp? Will she be satisfied, if you do the same to Hermes? All this,” she nodded her head toward Apollo’s flattened nose and pulverised cheek and unusable eye and every cut and bruise on him. “This was not for me. This was for you, and it shows.”
“Ares said-”
“Everything that happened between Ares and I happened for a reason,” Melpomene growled deeply at him. “Every word, every action, every fuck. This was fate. This baby was fate. Fuck you for letting your ego blind you to that.”
“And Hermes?” Apollo growled back, but he could feel himself losing ground. Damn Ares and his sledgehammer blows, or else he’d be able to think faster than this, reason better than this. “Was it fate what he did to Clio?”
“No, that was Hermes being a divine asshole,” Melpomene said. “And Clio’s closure and catharsis must come from her own heart, not some golden Olympian steamrollering through. If she asks you for help, you give it, and you can give it as hard and as vicious as it pleases you. But if she does not, do not. It’s her story, not yours.”
“Of course it’s my story,” Apollo shot back. “She’s a Muse. You are all mine, under my protection. I will-”
“Fight for us eternally, I know. She knows. We all know. But you spoke of satisfaction, and if you want to give that to her, you need to do something differently. We’re nearly twenty two hundred years away from Ancient Greece, the old ways won’t work.”
“That’s bullshit, you love the old ways. The brutality, the amphitheaters-”
“I do,” Melpomene said calmly, stretching her neck toward him to bring herself closer, to make herself clear. “Clio doesn’t. Now go and have a shower, you’re flaking blood onto my floor and I’d rather not explain that to my cleaner.”
Apollo held her wrists for another heated moment of silence before releasing her, and storming off toward her shower. Not even the shower in the spare bedroom, her shower. Well, fine.
Heart still racing, she examined herself in the mirror of Antigone’s old bathroom, rinsing off the smear of blood across her cheekbone. She sighed, fogging the mirror, as she decided what to do.
It she stayed here, tonight would become about Apollo. Any other night and she might have been with him, in the shower, helping to gently rinse off his wounds. Any other night she might have plotted revenge with him. Might have listened a little differently, might not have taken his words the way she did. But the way he’d muscled in on her pregnancy, tonight, a night she’d wanted for herself, that had helped make it clearer to her how she felt. Made it easier to see how Clio had felt.
She ordered him a pizza, because she did love him, and left a note for him on the counter, before pulling on a light coat, and stepping out into the night.