#mrih

The morning Homer Lehrer died, he made bad coffee.

This was not unusual. Homer made bad coffee every morning — not because he didn't know how to make good coffee, but because he operated on a specific philosophy that the first cup of the day was purely functional and did not deserve to be good. The good coffee came later, from the place two blocks from campus that Hades had initially refused to enter on the grounds that its name (*Grounds for Divorce*) was inauspicious, and which Homer had dragged him into anyway, and which Hades now privately considered the best establishment in the mortal world.

Hades was sitting at the kitchen table with a book he wasn't reading when Homer shuffled in at seven-fourteen, hair catastrophic, wearing the green hoodie that was two sizes too big and that he'd had since what appeared to be the early Holocene.

"Morning," Homer said, with the specific inflection of someone who was not yet convinced it was.

"It is seven-fourteen," Hades said.

"Yeah." Homer squinted at the coffee maker. "Your point?"

"Your first class is at eight. You told me last night that you needed to stop by the library before class. The library is a twelve-minute walk. Accounting for your — " Hades paused, diplomatically — "your morning pace, you should have left four minutes ago."

Homer stared at the coffee maker.

"I'll walk fast," he said.

He did not walk fast. Homer's walking speed was a matter of public record and it was not fast. He moved through the world at the pace of someone who had a great deal to think about and considered locomotion something that happened incidentally, on the way to the thinking.

Hades watched him pour coffee into a travel mug and drink approximately a third of it standing at the counter, eyes still not fully open, and felt the usual thing he felt watching Homer exist in the morning — which was a complicated thing he had spent several weeks cataloguing without successfully identifying.

"You're staring," Homer said, without looking up.

"I'm reading."

"You've been on the same page for twenty minutes."

Hades looked down at the book. He turned the page.

Homer made a sound that was almost a laugh. He picked up his bag — overpacked, always, straining at the zipper, because Homer believed in being prepared for every possible contingency and defined *every possible contingency* very broadly — and headed for the door.

"I'll be back by four," he said. "Don't let Mrs. Papadopoulos talk you into helping with her groceries again. Last time you carried everything in one trip and she thought you were showing off."

"I was not showing off. I was being efficient."

"She's seventy-three, Hades, let her feel helpful." Homer pulled the door open. He looked back over his shoulder — just briefly, the automatic glance of someone leaving, making sure nothing's forgotten. His eyes landed on Hades and something in his expression did the complicated thing it sometimes did, the thing Hades hadn't successfully categorized either.

"See you at four," Homer said.

He left.

The door clicked shut.

Hades turned another page he didn't read.

---

Homer Lehrer died at two-seventeen in the afternoon on a Tuesday in October, which was, by any metric, a bad day for it.

He was crossing the street outside the science building — the shortcut, the one he always took because it was forty seconds faster than the crosswalk, the one Hades had told him three times was statistically riskier. The driver of the car that hit him had been looking at his phone. The impact was enough. Homer was unconscious before he hit the ground, and he was gone before the ambulance arrived, and the paramedic who tried to stop the bleeding did everything correctly and it didn't matter.

He was thirty two years old.

He had been in the middle of composing a text to Hades about what to have for dinner.

The text read: *what do you think about—*

It was never sent.

---

Hades's phone buzzed at two-forty-three.

He was in the middle of an argument with the vending machine on the second floor of the student union, which had taken his dollar — legally obtained, he was very clear on this, he had followed every protocol of mortal commerce — and had not produced the chips. The chips Homer liked. The ones with the ridges, which Homer claimed were structurally superior for dipping purposes and which Hades had initially found to be an absurd distinction and now privately agreed with.

He'd been passing the machine and thought: *Homer would want these.* And then he'd stopped. And put in the dollar.

He looked at his phone.

*Unknown number.*

He stared at it for three full seconds, which for a god was long enough to have a great many thoughts.

He answered.

The voice on the other end was professional and careful in the way voices became when they had to carry unbearable information. Hades heard *accident* and *two-seventeen* and *I'm so sorry, he was already gone when* and then a roaring in his ears that had nothing to do with sound.

He stood in front of the vending machine for a very long time.

"Which hospital," he said, because he needed to go somewhere and do something and that was the only variable he could think to acquire.

---

The hospital waiting room had forty-two chairs, nine of which were occupied, and a television mounted to the wall showing a news program with the sound off. The carpet was a grayish blue that someone had presumably selected for its calming properties and which was achieving the opposite effect. There was a child in the corner playing a game on a tablet. There was a man asleep with his mouth open. There was a woman knitting something red.

Hades sat and looked at the door they'd told him Homer was behind.

He had seen millions of people die.

He had built the systems that governed what came after. He had presided over the intake of emperors and poets and soldiers and farmers and children, had watched whole civilizations empty out through his gates, had known the names of kings before they knew they were dying. He was the oldest and the most inevitable, and he had never — not once, in all the long catalog of his existence — allowed himself to hope that inevitability might be negotiated.

He sat in a grayish-blue chair and did not hope, because he was very practiced at not hoping, because hope was the one thing he had always known better than to carry.

He thought about *what do you think about—*

He thought about the green hoodie.

He thought about the crosswalk, and the shortcut, and the three times he'd said *statistically riskier,* and the way Homer had said *yeah, yeah* in the tone that meant *I hear you and I'm going to do it anyway.*

He pressed his hand flat against his thigh and stared at the door.

The doctor came out at three-fifty-one. Her name tag said *Dr. Vasquez* and she was tired in the particular way people became tired when they had done everything right and it hadn't been enough. Her face arranged itself into a configuration Hades recognized — not from personal experience, exactly, but from standing on the other side of it, from watching the faces of those left behind at the threshold.

He was always on the other side of it.

"Mr. —" She checked her clipboard. "I'm sorry, you were listed as Homer Lehrer's emergency contact?"

"Yes," Hades said.

"I'm so sorry," Dr. Vasquez said. "We did everything we could. The injuries were — he didn't suffer. It was very fast."

Hades looked at her.

He thought: *I know.* He thought: *I know exactly how fast it was, I know the precise moment, I felt it the way you feel a door closing in a room you're not in, a change in the pressure.* He thought: *I should have been there.*

"Thank you," he said, because that was what was said.

He stood up. He walked down the hall, past the grayish-blue chairs and the sleeping man and the child with the tablet and the woman with her red knitting, through the automatic doors, and out into the October afternoon, which had the audacity to be beautiful — crisp and golden and smelling of leaves, the kind of afternoon Homer would have made him notice, would have said *okay but look at this, look at how the light is doing that thing,* gesturing vaguely at everything.

Hades made it three blocks before he stopped walking.

He stood on the sidewalk and put both hands over his face.

---

## Part Two: Three Days

He went back to the apartment because he didn't know where else to go.

This was, in itself, evidence of something. He had a realm. He had a palace, technically, though he'd always found it drafty. He had three thousand years of existence preceding this apartment and this city and this semester, and none of it presented itself as a destination.

He sat on Homer's side of the couch.

He did this without deciding to. He simply moved through the apartment and stopped there, and only noticed it was Homer's side when he was already sitting down, when the specific angle of the cushions and the particular view of the window were already familiar in a way that meant he'd observed them before — through Homer, from Homer's vantage point, watching Homer occupy this space so many times that he'd memorized it without meaning to.

The apartment was very quiet.

It was always quiet when Homer was in class, or at the library, or at the coffee shop where he sometimes went to study because he claimed the ambient noise helped him focus, which Hades found neurologically puzzling and had spent considerable time researching. But this quiet was different. This quiet had weight. This quiet was the specific silence of a space that knew something had changed and was waiting for someone to acknowledge it.

Hades looked at the coffee table.

The crossword was there. Homer had been doing it Sunday morning — the physical newspaper, because Homer was committed to the physical newspaper the way he was committed to all things that were slightly impractical but felt more *real* — and had gotten stuck on fourteen across and left it there, because getting stuck meant it was time to think about something else for a while, and coming back to it later was practically the same as finishing it.

He hadn't come back to it.

*Fourteen across: mythological ruler, four letters.*

Hades looked away.

He needed to go home. To his real home. He had been attempting to return to the Underworld since leaving the hospital, had reached for the mechanisms of transit he'd been using his entire existence, and found them — unresponsive wasn't right, because the Underworld was responding, he could feel it, humming under the surface of the mortal world the way it always did. It simply wasn't *opening* for him.

He tried again.

Nothing.

He pressed his fingers together and reached for the authority that was his birthright, the fundamental kingship that had never failed him, that had opened gates and parted rivers and commanded the dead for three millennia.

The apartment remained an apartment.

He put his head in his hands.

Homer was there. That was the logic that kept assembling itself regardless of his attempts to think about something else. Homer was in his domain now, newly arrived, processing through intake, standing in the gray light of Asphodel for the first time looking around with that expression he got when he was in a new place — the one that was curious first and uncertain second, that catalogued the details before it allowed itself to feel anything about them. Homer was there, and Hades was *here*, and Homer was dead, and Hades was —

He was not going to complete that thought.

He did not sleep, because he didn't need to, but he sat on Homer's side of the couch for approximately six hours and did not move.

---

Hermes arrived on the second day, because even by Hermes's standards two days was a notable period of silence from Hades.

He manifested in the kitchen — he always arrived in the kitchen, which Hades had commented on once, and Hermes had said it was the room where people were most often glad to see someone arrive. He was wearing mortal clothes, expensive ones, with sunglasses pushed up on his head despite being indoors.

"You look terrible," Hermes said.

"Thank you," Hades said.

"I've been trying to send a message through for two days. The Underworld's been — odd. There's a kind of turbulence at the gates, the records staff are confused, Persephone sent me to —" He stopped. Looked at Hades more carefully. "Oh."

"Don't," Hades said.

"Your roommate —"

"I'm aware."

Hermes was quiet for a moment, which required visible effort. He came and sat on the arm of the couch — not on the couch itself, never fully committing to any piece of furniture, always half-ready to leave. He looked at Hades the way younger siblings looked at older ones when they'd made a discovery they weren't sure how to present.

"You can't get back," Hermes said. It wasn't a question.

"I am working on it."

"How long have you been working on it?"

"Since yesterday morning."

Hermes pressed his lips together. "Hades. You're the king. The Underworld literally *runs toward you*. You don't work to get back, you just —"

"I am aware of how it normally functions, yes."

"So why isn't it —" Hermes stopped. Started again, more carefully. "What happened? Exactly?"

Hades told him. He did it in the precise, unadorned way he did most things — the phone call, the hospital, the three blocks, the apartment. He did not editorialize. He reported.

Hermes listened without interrupting, which was so unusual Hades would have noted it as significant under any other circumstances.

When he finished, Hermes was quiet for a long moment.

"Why do you want to go back?" Hermes asked.

Hades looked at him. "Because it's my domain. Because I am needed there. Because the records staff is confused and there is turbulence at the gates and —"

"The turbulence at the gates is *you*," Hermes said quietly. "The Underworld doesn't malfunction. You know that. Something is wrong on your end, not its end."

Silence.

"Why do you want to go back?" Hermes said again.

"I just told you —"

"You told me the administrative reasons. I'm asking the actual reason." He waited. "Why do you need to get to the Underworld right now, specifically?"

Hades looked at the crossword on the coffee table.

*Fourteen across. Mythological ruler, four letters.*

"Homer is there," he said.

"Homer is dead," Hermes said gently. "Which is — I'm sorry, genuinely, I know that's — but he's dead, and the Underworld takes the dead, and that's working fine. So why do *you* specifically need to be there? What does Hades need from Homer Lehrer that can't wait?"

"I don't —" He stopped.

The sentence wanted to end in several ways and none of them were right and one of them was the only true one.

"He doesn't know where to go," Hades said. It came out quietly, which surprised him. "He's never been there. He doesn't know how it works. He'll have processed through intake and then he'll just — be in Asphodel, and Asphodel is fine, Asphodel is perfectly comfortable, but Homer doesn't like places he doesn't understand, he asks questions, he wants to know how things work, and there won't be anyone there to —"

His voice stopped.

Hermes was looking at him with an expression Hades did not examine.

"To what?" Hermes said.

"To *explain things to him*," Hades said. "To tell him where he is and answer his questions and —" He pressed his hand against his mouth. He took it away. "He made bad coffee this morning. He was going to be back at four. He sent me a text he didn't finish sending. He —"

He stopped again. His jaw was tight and the tightness was traveling somewhere it wasn't supposed to go.

"He died at two-seventeen," Hades said, very carefully, "and he was crossing a street he crosses every day, and I told him three times it was statistically riskier than the crosswalk, and he said *yeah, yeah* and crossed it anyway, and I —" He breathed. "I have presided over the deaths of millions of people, Hermes. I have watched every kind of death there is. I have never — I have not once allowed myself to find them *unfair.*"

"And this one?" Hermes said.

The silence lasted long enough that the refrigerator kicked on and then off again.

"This one is unfair," Hades said. Each word cost something. "This one is wrong. He was twenty-six years old and he was in the middle of a text message and he was going to be home at four and I was going to —"

He stopped.

He'd been going to suggest the coffee place. He'd been sitting with the unread book thinking about it — thinking about the afternoon light being the kind Homer liked for the walk, thinking about the seasonal drink Homer had been wanting to try, thinking about manufacturing a reason to go because *wanting to go* was not something he'd let himself use as a reason.

He had been sitting there thinking about it.

And Homer had died at two-seventeen.

"Oh," Hermes said. It came out soft, without any of his usual ornamentation.

"Don't," Hades said.

"You're in love with him."

"I said don't."

"You're in love with him and you didn't know, or you knew and you didn't —" Hermes cut himself off. He looked at Hades for a long moment with something that might, on anyone else, have been called compassion. "That's why the Underworld won't take you back. You're not choosing to go. Part of you is still — you're still here. Because you don't want to leave, and you don't want to arrive, because arriving means it's real."

Hades said nothing.

"And the other part," Hermes said carefully, "the part that does want to get back — it wants to get back for him. Specifically. Not as a king. As —" He gestured.

"If you finish that sentence," Hades said, "I will reassign you to paperwork."

"You're in love with your dead roommate."

"I am going to find the most tedious administrative role in the entirety of the divine bureaucracy and I am going to put your name on it."

"Hades." Hermes leaned forward. His voice had lost its amusement entirely, which was rare enough to be arresting. "You can get back. You know you can. But you have to actually *choose* it. Both parts of it — going back to the Underworld and going back *for him.* They're the same choice."

Hades stared at the crossword.

"He doesn't know how to do the dead water," he said, which was not responsive to anything Hermes had said but was what his mind produced. "He'll try to drink from the Lethe on accident. He has no sense of caution around bodies of water, I have observed this, he tried to put his hand in the fountain outside the humanities building the second week of semester —"

"Hades."

"He's going to have questions that nobody is answering. He asks *so many questions.* The intake staff is not equipped —"

"*Hades.*"

He stopped.

He looked at the space that Homer occupied in the mornings — the particular space, the kitchen-adjacent seven feet of floor where Homer stood while the coffee brewed and blinked at nothing while his brain assembled itself. The space was empty with the specific emptiness of something that should be occupied.

Hades thought, without any more hesitation or evasion, clearly and entirely: *I love him.*

The floor opened.

---

He arrived at the gates at a run, which was undignified and unprecedented and he did not care.

Cerberus met him — all three heads, tail going, each head doing something different the way they always did: the leftmost trying to lick his face, the middle one nudging his hand for attention, the rightmost remaining stoic and professional, which Hades had always privately respected. He gave them each a brief acknowledgment — a scratch behind the nearest set of ears, a firm pat — and kept moving.

"Lord Hades." The gate registrar looked up, startled. "We weren't — that is, the records indicated—"

"Has Homer Lehrer been processed?"

"I — yes, my lord, yesterday afternoon, intake completed at —"

"Where is he now?"

The registrar checked. Checked again. The expression that crossed his face was the particular bureaucratic discomfort of a record that didn't say what it should.

"Current location," he said carefully, "is listed as unresolved."

Hades stopped. "What does that mean?"

"It means — that is —" The registrar pulled up additional documents. "He completed intake, he was given the standard orientation, he was directed to Asphodel, and then subsequent tracking indicates he is — not in Asphodel."

"Where is he?"

"My lord, we don't —"

"Where is he?"

The registrar flinched. "The system doesn't have him in any designated location. He's in the Underworld — the tracking confirms he hasn't passed any exit — but his precise position isn't —"

"He's wandering," Hades said.

A pause.

"It appears so, my lord."

Of course he was wandering. Homer wandered when he was thinking, moved through spaces without destination because motion helped his mind work, had a habit of ending up in places he didn't intend because he'd been too busy thinking about something to notice where he was going. Of course he'd taken the orientation pamphlet or whatever the intake staff had given him and then walked off into the Underworld without staying where he was supposed to be.

Hades turned and went to Asphodel.

Homer was not in Asphodel.

The shades of Asphodel drifted in their comfortable vagueness, the in-between contentment that Hades had always considered one of his better designs — not bliss, not torment, just the soft gray ease of those who had neither earned Elysium nor warranted anything else. They moved around him as he walked through, parting gently. None of them were Homer.

He went to the edges of Asphodel, where it blurred into the paths that led elsewhere.

Homer was not there.

He went to Elysium's gates and checked with the guardian, who confirmed no one matching Homer's description had requested entry.

He went to the palace, because sometimes new arrivals were confused and followed the largest structure. The palace was empty of Homer in every room Hades checked, which turned out to be all of them.

He went back to Asphodel.

He stood in the middle of the gray fields with his hands at his sides and he reached, the way he reached when he needed to know the location of anyone in his domain — the absolute authority of a king over his own realm, the fundamental connection between ruler and the ruled, the thing that had never, not once, failed to work.

He reached for Homer.

He found — something. A presence, somewhere in the Underworld, alive-but-dead in the particular way of new shades. Somewhere. The direction was imprecise. The distance was unclear. Every time he tried to narrow it down it slipped sideways, and he couldn't tell if that was because Homer was moving or because there was something interfering or because he himself was —

He couldn't find him.

He, Hades, lord of the Underworld, king of everything that lay beneath and beyond, could not find one person in his own domain.

He turned in a slow circle.

The gray fields stretched. The pale light — the light that wasn't quite light, that came from nowhere specific and illuminated everything evenly, which Hades had always considered efficient — lay over everything. Shades drifted past him. Somewhere, far away, the Lethe moved.

Homer was somewhere in this.

Homer, who made bad coffee and carried too many things in his bag and talked to himself when he was thinking and had opinions about chip ridges and had been going to be home at four —

Something in Hades's chest did something that had no precedent in three thousand years of experience.

"Homer," he said. Out loud. To the empty field, to the gray air, to the Underworld that was entirely his and entirely failing him right now.

Nothing.

"Homer." His voice cracked slightly on the second syllable. He pressed his mouth shut. Breathed. Opened it again. "Homer Lehrer. I am the king of this realm and I require you to —"

The authority fell apart in his mouth. He couldn't finish it. He couldn't make it a command because it wasn't a command, it was —

He needed to see him. He needed — he didn't have language for what he needed, he who had been precise with language for three millennia, he who had written the laws that governed the words of judgment, he couldn't —

He pressed both hands over his face.

The shades drifted around him. A god in the middle of the fields he'd built, hands over his face, unable to find the one person he'd come back for.

He did not cry. Gods did not cry, or more precisely he did not cry, had not cried, in so long that the mechanism felt uncertain. But something was happening in the vicinity of his eyes that he was not examining, and something was happening in his throat that was making it hard to do the breathing that wasn't necessary but was helpful, and the gray fields kept stretching and Homer wasn't in them and —

"I should have gone to the coffee place," he said, to nobody. His voice was doing something he wasn't authorizing. "I was sitting there with the book I wasn't reading, and I kept thinking about the coffee place, and I kept finding reasons not to suggest it, and if I had just — if I had simply —"

He stopped.

He turned another slow circle.

"I don't know how to do this," he said, quieter. "I have never — this has never been —" He exhaled hard. "Every other death has been inevitable, and I have been on the right side of inevitable, I have been the thing that comes after, and this is the first time I have been — left. The first time someone has gone into my realm and taken something with them that was also mine. That I didn't know was mine until —"

"Hades?"

He turned around.

---

Homer Lehrer was standing approximately fifteen feet away, looking more or less like himself, which was so much worse than Hades had anticipated and also the only thing he'd wanted for three days.

He was wearing the same clothes — the jeans, the green hoodie, the shoes he'd had resoled twice because he liked them too much to replace them. He was slightly translucent in the way of new shades, not gone exactly but thinner, like a photograph of himself rather than the original. His hair was the same catastrophe it always was.

He was looking at Hades with an expression that Hades couldn't read, which was unusual, because over the course of a semester he had catalogued Homer's expressions with significant thoroughness.

"How long have you been standing there?" Hades said.

"A while," Homer said. His voice was the same. Hades hadn't been sure it would be. "I heard you. The last — I heard the last part."

Hades looked at him. He didn't move, because he was not sure what happened if he moved.

"I've been looking for you," Hades said.

"I know. I heard that part too." Homer took a step forward. Stopped. "I've been looking for you too. I got here and you weren't here and nobody — the intake people gave me a pamphlet. A pamphlet, Hades. About the Underworld. It had clip art."

"That is being reviewed," Hades said. "The onboarding materials are a known issue."

"It had a cartoon boat on it."

"The boat is Charon's, it is historically accurate —"

"There was a speech bubble coming out of a skull." Homer's voice had gone slightly unstable, the way it went when he was trying to anchor himself to something concrete. Hades recognized the mechanism. Homer did this when he was overwhelmed — catalogued the absurd details, stayed close to the surface of things until he could handle the depth. "It said welcome to the underworld, please follow the path."

"I didn't design the pamphlet personally," Hades said.

"There was a clipart skeleton giving a thumbs up."

"Homer —"

"I'm dead," Homer said.

The words landed and stayed.

"I know," Hades said.

"I was crossing the street. The shortcut. You told me not to." His voice did not break, but it came close. "You told me three times and I said yeah yeah and I did it anyway, and I —" He pressed his hand flat against his sternum, the way he did when something was sitting too heavy. "I remember the sound. And then nothing. And then the pamphlet."

Hades crossed the distance between them.

He hadn't decided to do it. His body made the decision without consulting him, moving across the gray field until he was close enough to count the translations of Homer's face — the way his jaw was tight, the way his eyes were doing the thing where they didn't blink enough, the way he was breathing deliberately because he'd learned somewhere that deliberate breathing helped with the feeling of too much at once.

"I should have walked with you," Hades said.

Homer looked up at him.

"I should have walked you to campus. I have done it before, I have manufactured reasons to do it before, and this morning I was — I was sitting with the book, and I was thinking about the coffee place, and I was finding reasons not to say any of it, and if I had simply —" His voice stopped. He made himself continue. "If I had simply said I'll walk with you, the timing would have been different. The street would have been different. You would have —"

"Don't," Homer said.

"The probability —"

"Hades, don't." Homer's voice was firm, the way it got when he was being serious, which was a different firmness than his usual. "Don't do that. Don't calculate it. I know you can, I know you're doing it right now, stop."

Hades stopped.

They looked at each other.

"I heard you," Homer said. "What you were saying. About the coffee place and the — about being on the wrong side of it." He paused. "I have to ask you something and I need you to answer me honestly."

"I have always been honest with you."

"I know, but this is — I need you to be very honest." Homer looked at him steadily. "What were you going to say? Before I got here. You said this was the first time someone had taken something with them that was also yours. What was yours?"

The gray field was quiet.

A shade drifted past, oblivious, moving toward Asphodel's center with the comfortable vacancy of the long-settled dead.

"You," Hades said. "I was going to say you."

Homer's breath went unsteady.

"I came back to the Underworld because you were here," Hades said. He had decided, somewhere in the transition from the mortal world to this one, that he was going to say the true things and not find reasons not to. He had been finding reasons not to say things for an entire semester and Homer had died in the middle of an unfinished text message and reasons not to say things had gotten him nowhere. "Not because it was my duty or my domain or my administrative responsibility. Because you were here and I was not, and the distance was —" He searched for the word and found only the true one. "Unbearable. I found it unbearable. Which I did not anticipate and had no framework for and which I have been working to understand for three days and the understanding I arrived at is —"

"Hades," Homer said, very quietly.

"I love you," Hades said. "I believe I have loved you for some time and I did not name it correctly until it was too late to be useful, which is its own particular —"

Homer closed the remaining distance between them and put both arms around him.

Hades went very still.

He had not been — that is, the physical contact was not something he had extensive experience with. His history with touch was largely ceremonial, largely formal, the handshakes of kings and the bowing of supplicants and occasionally Persephone had put her hand on his arm when she was making a point. This was different. This was Homer, who was dead and warm anyway, who was slightly translucent and still real, who had his face tucked against Hades's shoulder and his arms around Hades's back like this was something he'd been meaning to do for a while.

Hades lifted his hands and put them against Homer's back.

He held on.

"I died thinking about you," Homer said, into his shoulder. Muffled and unsteady and very honest. "My last coherent thought was about you. I didn't know what it meant. I kept telling myself it was just because you're my roommate, you're the last person I talked to, it's just proximity and I don't —" He stopped. Started again. "My first instinct, when I got here and you weren't here, was to find you. Not to figure out where I was or what the pamphlet meant. Just to find you. I wandered around for a day and a half looking for you."

"I know," Hades said. "I was looking for you too. I couldn't —" He pressed his mouth together. "I could not find you and I was — I want you to know that what you witnessed earlier, the — the state I was in —"

"I'm not going to tell anyone," Homer said.

"That is not why I'm raising it. I am raising it because it is evidence of something and I want to be precise." He kept his hands flat against Homer's back, between his shoulder blades, counting the steadiness of him. "I have been the king of the Underworld for three thousand years. I have not, in that time, lost my composure in an empty field. The fact that I did — for you, because of you — is —"

"Is what?"

"Evidence," Hades said again. "Of how much. Of what this is."

Homer pulled back enough to look at him. Not all the way — still close, still with his arms loosely around Hades's waist, looking up with the expression Hades had finally and correctly identified: the one that was carefully hopeful, the one that wanted very much to be something and was trying not to want too hard in case it wasn't.

"I love you," Homer said. "I'm saying it simply because I don't have your — I'm not going to give you a three-part analysis. I love you. I've been not-saying it for months."

"So have I," Hades said.

"We're both idiots."

"I would not have phrased it that way."

"Hades."

"Yes."

"We're both idiots."

A pause.

"Yes," Hades said.

Homer laughed — small and cracked around the edges and completely real, the laugh that happened when something was both funny and not funny and had to be both at once. He leaned his forehead against Hades's shoulder again.

"I'm still dead," he said.

"I know."

"That's going to be complicated."

"I have three thousand years of experience administering the complicated logistics of death. I have some ideas."

"Of course you do." Homer's arms tightened slightly. Outside, somewhere impossibly far above them, October was continuing without them — the golden afternoon, the leaves, the smell of it. "Hades. I need to ask you one more thing."

"Yes."

"The crossword. Fourteen across."

Hades was quiet for a moment.

"Hades," he said. "Four letters. Mythological ruler."

"The answer they were looking for is Zeus," Homer said.

"The answer they were looking for is wrong."

Homer laughed again, and this one was less cracked, was more like the real one, the good one, the one that had been sitting in the apartment two blocks from the coffee place all semester making Hades forget what page he was on.

"Okay," Homer said. "Yeah. Okay."

He was dead.

He was here.