#pretty sick

Was making bracelets today at my new job heh (summer camp counselor), so I painted this with my watercolors.

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"You're going to get yourself killed."

Zeus raises his head from his clay tablet, stylus paused mid stroke. He shows no great sign of irritation at the unexpected intrusion, let alone the criticism — his jaw clenches, but briefly, the muscle smoothing out as soon as he turns towards the door.

"Loukas," he murmurs. "It is late. You should be resting."

Loukas raises an eyebrow. He leans against the mouth of the cavern, arms folded, his face bathed in the dim yellow glow of the flickering candlelight. The scar that bisects his right eye gleams almost white in the light, a contrast against the healing red slash on his cheek that splits his skin like an overripe fruit.

Perhaps it is some nebulous skill of parenthood, but Loukas has never needed to say a word to convey his disapproval. As a child, Zeus had confessed to many a fault when fixed with that unimpressed stare, where even Amalthea's stony silence hadn't succeeded.

It is not so different now, ten years later and on the cusp of adulthood, staring into those same eyes.

"We have no other option." The truth burns in his throat like gorgon acid, coating his teeth in bile. "My father's armies far outnumber ours, and, loathe as I am to admit it, we cannot fight for eternity. We can only choose to strike now, or prolong this war until we succumb to exhaustion."

Loukas' eyes are slits of blue. "And you think it's better to go charging in headfirst?"

'Head-first,' Zeus muses. Loukas has always had such interesting verbiage.

Zeus' siblings slumber peacefully in the other room, piled together under a heap of blankets and furs that will no doubt all end up on the stone floor come morning. The thought of gods, let alone ones as powerful as they are, falling ill to something as simple as mortal sickness is laughable, but Loukas had insisted on the blankets nonetheless.

It's not about catching a cold, he'd huffed, stuffing the warm furs in their hands, it's about not having to sleep on a bare, cold floor when you don't have to. Might as well put those bear skins to good use.

Zeus' brothers and sisters are young, strange as it is to understand at first. They may have been born first, growing up in Kronos' stomach while Zeus grew up under Loukas' care, but they are still so new to the world. Poseidon with his anger, Hades with his silence. Hera with her shy sensitivity and Hestia with her softness. Demeter with her brashness.

Loukas tells him to be patient, that they know little of the world beyond Kronos' belly, beyond the black jagged cliffs of Mount Orthys. They know even less of war. But even then, Zeus thinks, it is a lesson they are taking to quickly. They all are.

The wound on Loukas' cheek is red, red, red.

Zeus clenches his stylus, knuckles white with strain.

"There is no choice," he repeats heavily.

Silence.

Loukas' footsteps are near-soundless, but Zeus has long since learnt to distinguish them from the usual sounds of the world. They are amongst the first sounds he'd known as a child, among the clip-clop of hooves and soft lullabies and the crackling of warm fires.

"There is always a choice, Zeus," Loukas says, his previous sharpness sluicing from his voice. Not gentle, not exactly — tenderness is not an accusation one can make of a man like Loukas — but...softer, perhaps, the razor-edges of his words made dull.

For a moment, his gaze goes distant, in the way Zeus has come to learn means that he is lost in a memory. It is the same look that appears in his eyes when he looks at Zeus or Poseidon sometimes, on his bad days.

(He'd called Poseidon by a different name, once. When his voice was heavy with sleep, eyes half-lidded as he gazed at Zeus' brother.

He had no recollection of it come morning. Poseidon had asked, only once, who 'Percy' was — but the expression on Loukas' face had him closing his mouth, the words dying in his throat.

Yet still, Zeus envied Poseidon. On his worst days, when it came to Zeus, Loukas couldn't bear to look at him at all.

Who are you looking at, he wants to scream. Who are you seeing when you look at me?)

"There's always more than one path," Loukas says slowly, "even if it seems like there isn't. What matters is whether you choose to see it, and then whether you choose to take it."

"I know my path."

"Do you?"

"Yes," Zeus insists. "I do. I must, mother. It is what everyone says — that it is my destiny to overthrow my father, just as it was his destiny to overthrow his father."

Something undecipherable flashes across Louka's face, quicksilver and fleeting.

"'Destiny,'" he murmurs, lips curling joylessly. There is a bitterness in his eyes that Zeus dislikes immensely, clouding his irises like sediment at the bottom of a clear river.

"It's always about destinies with you gods, isn't it?" Loukas asks, smiling. He smiles in the same way a beast bares its teeth the moment before it clamps its jaw shut on your neck.

Zeus thinks of Mount Orthys. He thinks of power and greed and greed for power, of lightning clenched in his fist; of golden thrones and mustard wine and the soft, poisonous whispers of Kronos' court, tittering cruelly behind their clawed hands. He thinks of carafes of wine heavy like leaden weights in his hands, of how his Master Bolt had felt that same weight, when Arges had first placed it, white-brilliant and blinding, in his palm. Of kin and bloody legacies and a crown he isn't even certain he desires.

"I have my duty," he says. "Whether this ends in my father's death or my own, I must follow through with this. Until the end."

Loukas falls silent. For a long moment, he looks at Zeus; his expression is unreadable.

"'Yes," he replies. "I guess you do."

Slowly, he reaches out. Long, calloused fingers curl a strand of loose hair from Zeus' face. Zeus allows himself to lean into his touch, closing his eyes for a brief moment.

"You're still a kid," his mother murmurs. He sounds very tired. "You all are."

A pause. Zeus waits.

He cannot say he understands what Loukas is saying — not entirely, at least. Zeus is a god, and the divine cannot be measured with a mortal yardstick. Neither he nor his siblings have been children ever since he forced them from his father's stomach; it has been a very long time since he has thought of himself as one.

Lost in his thoughts, he misses the moment when he passes. Loukas' hand falls from his face.

Zeus finds himself missing his warmth, though he cannot bring himself to say it. Despite what Loukas may believe, he is no longer a child — and thus he must learn to put aside childish things.