#pjo commodus

Now, she was watching something she had had no hand in, but was enjoying the results regardless.  The emotional torment of the loss of a loved one – platonic perhaps, but Apollo had almost viewed Frank as a son for all that he belonged to her beloved – was delicious.  Venus hadn’t involved herself in Juno’s lifewood scheme, wasn’t particularly interested in what the other goddess got up to most of the time, given her prudish and limiting attitude towards things like monogamy, but that certainly didn’t stop her appreciating the way it had ended in such a blaze of glory.

Apollo’s anguish and pain, his heartbreak at Frank’s sacrifice, came very close to toppling her own Reyna scheme for the most entertaining moment since Apollo and Margaret had arrived at Camp Jupiter, and Venus was also eager to see young Hazel’s reaction to the news.  She was a strong young woman, and that only meant her reaction would be all the more exquisite.

Despite that, Apollo wasn’t done providing her with entertainment she would remember and cherish for centuries, because to finish it off, the third emotional torment of the trio he was experiencing, was a mess of his own making, and that…

Well, Venus loved orchestrating her romances and love-based relationships, loved interfering to gain the maximum entertainment, but she also loved it when people were messy enough that she didn’t even need to give them a nudge to bring out the best and worst in them.

Apollo and Commodus were one such pair.  They had been a disaster from the start, hurtling together like two out of control chariots and crashing together in a tangle of reins that couldn’t be separated and instead drew them even closer together, despite how terribly suited they were for each other – or how perfectly suited they were, depending on the perspective.

Venus had watched them the first time, the power imbalance between them and the way Apollo tried to ignore it and Commodus clawed his way up to try and even it out but always falling short because he wasn’t a god back then, and barely counted now, and thrived on it.  It was always messy, always take and take and take, no side ever giving to the other no matter what pretty words they dressed it up in, and was always destined to end in the most beautifully ugly fashion.

There was something darkly romantic about lovers killing lovers, the possessiveness of it all when they loved and hated themselves and each other, but despite it all, claimed each other’s life and death.  No-one else could have them, not a single aspect of them.  Not their love, not their life, not their death.

Venus had watched Apollo straddle the young emperor in his bathtub, outwardly so calm despite his essence being a wreck, and pin him down in a way that was sensual and brutal all at once.  Ending the life of the mortal he had fallen in love with, a stark parallel to the number of times he had desperately tried to save doomed mortals.

There was nothing healthy about the relationship Apollo and Commodus shared.  Not back then, and not now, either.  Commodus had died, but Commodus had survived, and the hate-love-hate between them had only tangled further, both of them still in love with the other while they hated them with every fibre of their being.

It was poetic that it ended like this.

Apollo’s hands were around Commodus’ throat again, straddling him in the same sensual manner he had millennia before, except they were accompanied by fire instead of water.  Perhaps Apollo himself, one day, would be able to craft something out of the parallels there, if he would bring himself to sing of this.  Venus hoped he would; his songs crafted of heartbreak always excited her essence the way nothing else he wrote quite managed.  A broken god beneath a mortal god, the end of the tale of two doomed lovers, doomed from the start and both always aware of it, but too obsessed to let go regardless.

It didn’t matter that Commodus had lost his beauty in the fire, that he was hardly a husk of the beautiful man he had once been.  Apollo’s anguish was still the same, bolstered even further by Frank’s sacrifice mere seconds before.  It was a tangible thing, the grief.

And then Apollo screamed.

Mortal he might have been, but it was not a mortal cry.  It was the cry of a god, a cry that reached deep inside the fabric of the world and tore at it, shaking the essence of watching gods.

It was thrilling, a song of heartbreak and rage and complicated emotions that all stemmed back to his love for his friends, for those he would see as his children if only he could, for the doomed love story he’d reprised against his will.

Apollo was aghast at what he’d just done, what he’d been able to do, and Venus suspected there were other gods watching and drawing their own opinions, but none of that mattered to her.  Let them think what they want, let Apollo struggle with his emotions and what love could do when he unleashed the darker side of it.