WHO: Apollo and Cin WHEN: Sunday 17th WHERE: Both sides of the grave WHAT: He's baaaaack WARNINGS: Torture references
The beatings were the worst.
Constant beatings by the shades with branches of a laurel, against every sensitive part of him, every inch of his skin till it was broken and raw and ripped and then more, even more.
No, no, the teasing was the worst. Nymphs, laughing, teasing him to the point of climax and then always, always denying him.
No, worse was the sun. The sun burning down on him, scorching him, him who never had a sunburn in his life, but was now constantly blistered and burningly hot, the brightness searing his eyes to the point of insanity.
No, the music was worse than everything. Always, always discordant music playing, off key, terrible, too loud, too wrong.
No, all of that was untrue; the sensation of being pulled apart was the worst of all. The feeling that grew worse and worse as time – whatever time meant – moved on. He felt he was being unmade, felt his concept of self growing thinner, and wondered, in some deep corner of his heart, he wondered is this how Hyacinth felt as he was forgotten?
The horror of that.
The finality.
The complete powerlessness.
He was unmade.
Everything in the cosmos reduced to nothing.
This was worse than a mortal death.
He was unmade.
And then.
Made anew.
Brain first. Brain aware it was blind and dead and dumb. Brain aware it was, and could do nothing about the new awareness of existence except exist. Fear in the brain, that swamped everything else. If he had air to fill his lungs he would have screamed.
The need for air came next. The knowledge he had a mouth again came as the mouth opened, the memory of a trachea followed as the diaphragm tried to yank life back into his lungs.
Tried to.
It yanked alright. It yanked whatever was in his mouth. It yanked the water and the mud that had seeped into the taped-up tarp that was his death shroud. Water and mud hit the inside of his lungs, and the pain and fear and powerlessness were not just lords of Tartarus but lords that had followed him back to life.
He could see nothing. He could feel solid ground beneath his body but shallow water all around it, and he could feel the weight of corrugated iron, a shopping trolley, a long dead fan, an empty broken ceramic garden pot – he could feel the weight of trash on top of him. He could feel the water in his lungs. He could feel sensation rushing back to his limbs. He could hear the sound of himself drowning. He could feel his body thrashing without any say-so from his brain. He felt a portion of the trash shift above him, and the ceramic pot that once (and he did not know this, and he would never know this) held a daphne plant rolled down the corrugated iron and bashed him on the head, and he felt the bite of the water embrace his head completely.
And the beatings were the worst, again. And the teasing, and the burning, and the music, and Hermes looking the most delighted he had ever seen him, Hermes laughing so hard he had to hold his own sides, Hermes crying with laughter that he was back.
Hermes waving goodbye as he made his way effortlessly back to the upperworld. Hermes calling something over his shoulder Apollo could not hear, because the discordant music was tearing him apart once more.
And it began again, and again and again, until life finally tugged him out of the grip of the shades.
By that time he’d forgotten that he may, somehow, come back to the land of the living, and instead he despaired about being unmade all over again, and the horrified thought that he was bound for the same forgotten fate as Hyacinth swallowed him up.
But once again, he was not unmade, simply unmade in Tartarus as the belief of the world forced him back to his half drowned hole of trash, and this time when he thrashed, his head broke free of the water.
He was still wrapped in a tarp, still tightly taped. Apart from a very brief respite in the middle, his limbs had been dead for just shy of four weeks. There was absolutely no finesse in the way he fought himself out of the tarp. No relief – just a dogged determination to keep moving – as he saw light again, real daylight, dim and worn daylight that peeked down on him where he sat in the water. The brown water covered his legs, it crept up his waist, but most of all it was still in his lungs, and he coughed it up for a long time.
Exhausted, he slumped over the shopping trolley, which was now half sunk in the water in the bottom of the hole. It propped him up, and maybe it saved him from drowning again as his heart pumped blood into all the unused corners of his body.
It hurt to be born. Worse than it hurt to die. The death had only been in his gut. The life was everywhere.
It took hours. The sun was at its peak before he freed himself enough to climb to his feet, before his feet allowed him such a thing. He stood on the shopping trolley and his weight pressed it down into the mud (and his nose had come back, too, and told him it was not just mud) but it made him tall enough to reach out of the hole.
But it did not make him strong enough to simply pull himself out.
That strength took another several hours to return. He scrambled. He slid. Eventually, the memory of swearing came back and he did that, too, in every language he possessed.
By the time the sun set, he lay on even ground, limbs trembling like a newborn lamb (though several times more disgusting). It was not solid ground, it was ground soaked with winter rain that made it a slimy mass of mud, it was ground matted with cutty grass and weeds... but it was not a half flooded trash filled hole.
And it was not Tartarus.
The sun was hours gone before he stood again. It had started to rain, but he was too cold to feel the needles of it. It cascaded down his face, down his body, as he put one foot in front of the other, over and over again. He walked through the mud around a burned out house, he stepped over deep tire tracks, he came up against a chain link fence and felt his way along it till he arrived at a hole big enough to push his body through.
He stood on flooded asphalt, under a dead streetlight, and tilted his face upward, and drank down the rain.
Somewhere in the distance was a bass beat. A rhythmic thumping, the beauty of it captured him like a magnet and he started stepping, one clumsy-cold foot in front of the other, toward it. It was a perfect beat, because he kept expecting it to hitch and jump and change into the hideous music the shades pounded into him, it didn’t. It kept its rhythm till the very end, and then another song began, and it was as perfect as the last.
It took him to a row of houses, some with lights, others dead with darkness. It reminded him that humans existed, that their music existed, that houses and electric lights existed.
It reminded him that other things could exist too: showers of hot water. Dry clothes. Warm arms.
Across the street was movement, a human, walking more swiftly that his halfdead limbs allowed.
Apollo would have these things again.
“Hey,” he called, to the figure, who only sped up; a woman, then. His voice sounded… like a half dead thing that had just crawled out of a hole full of trash.
“Wait,” he called again, wishing for Peitho’s persuasion.
Or… no, he didn’t need Peitho. He had powers of his own. God of truth, he was, he remembered, Tratarus hadn't beaten everything out of him. The truth. He’d use that. Nothing but the truth, so strong she couldn’t deny it: