blood from a stone,

Zeus bumps into Aite outside the ballroom, after his own ‘News and Tech’ presentation with Aphrodite. “Oh! Hello!” He smiles, shifting gears quickly out of the adrenaline high from being in front of so many people, the cool focus of it all, and into Charming Employer mode. “Aite, how nice. I didn’t know Nagging Nemean was branching into tech?”

Truthfully, Zeus doesn’t consider the possibility that Aite herself might be interested in the topic; to be fair, he doesn’t really consider Aite much in general. He’s spent enough time in the entertainment industry to get a read on its people pretty quickly, and had seen nothing in Aite in those first few hiring meetings beyond those big, blinking eyes, the vapid smile. The enthusiasm for her– seemingly quite shallow– little gig she’s got going. Nagging Nemean. The title speaks down to itself; it was one of his few comments, when the idea was pitched to him. But his people assure him it ‘tested well with the young crowd’, and who is he to question the tastes of youth?

She wonders how often he says those words: we live to inform. If she was in a more casual setting, not as intent on playing nice, she might gag. But there’s a twinkle in her eyes, still. “In an era of widespread information, we prefer to stick to our own methods of letting the masses know about … well, us. But I’m sure after your brother’s presentation, you’ve plenty to report on?” This is not an offer for an interview, after all: she’s not about to go on record for Zeus fucking Rhea. 

Her lips curl, slightly. “Stellar proportions, plenty of character … there’s a softness to your features due to their roundness, which is sure to lure people in.” Was there anything soft within Zeus Rhea? She does think so: someone so set on seeming like a loving person in the public eye must find some worth in love. “Interesting characteristics. I won’t borrow them, I promise.” She chuckles, then, “There are rumours that my eyes are an augmentation of their own. I can neither confirm or deny such kind of gossip, of course.” Something about being enigmatic.  

–

“Yes, the presentation was quite... revealing. Enlightening.” He raises his eyebrows. “Not to mention, a surprise. I suppose you had to let the cat out of the bag sometime, but it still feels so...” He makes a move between a shrug and a shiver, like a ghost is passing through him. “Who knew all it took to make you talk was a– literal– boatload of cash, and some very high-tech equipment? How could us lowbrow Olympians ever compete with that?” A sigh. “But yes, thank you for your generosity in there today. You’ve given us enough to report on in our tech review, for the next week at least.” He lowers his voice, as if conferring bad news with a dear ally. “Unfortunately, once a secret like this is revealed, the returns on its coverage are... diminishing. It sets quite a difficult expectation to meet, you know? Almost impossible for any answer to not fall flat, in the face of all that built-up speculation.”

He almost snorts at her description; covers up the unflattering little laugh with a sip of his drink. Soft features. It’s not something he hears often, but he doesn’t think she’s exactly wrong, either. But what an interesting feature to catch on to first. “I’d like to see you try to borrow them. I could take you to court over it, the first case of copyright infringement via facial features. Or would it be an invasion of privacy issue? Or theft?” He grins, bright and quick. “I bet we could have some fun with it, either way. Make some history together. I hear your team enjoys controversy.”

Athena’s eyebrows shot up. The fact that there was something he hadn’t told her hardly had to be stated aloud. His answers to her questions about the separation had been cryptic at best, endlessly frustrating at worse. She’d known, of course, that there was more to the story. But she hadn’t believed he’d ever give her a straight answer. She felt a little thrill go through her at the prospect of knowing the truth. Maybe she’d proven herself?

She composed her expression into one that was more serious, head inclining slightly as she looked at her father, trying to read his expression, as if it might have some clue as to what was to come. “Okay,” she said, giving him a small nod, a go ahead. “What is it?”

– “I’m not completely sure how to tell you this.” He pauses. Lets the tension simmer, building in the air between them like a storm. Tells himself its for realism, not procrastination, and nearly believes it too. “A few days ago, a sympathetic stranger reached out to me. A contact of Pandora. They wanted to warn me about an article going live this week, a courtesy call so to speak. There’s no stopping the drop, but they thought we deserved the chance to prepare for it, as a family.” He smooths an invisible wrinkle on the knee of his pant leg. Lets his gaze drift away from Athena, downcast, in feigned shame. A dread too easy to embody.

When Apollo was fourteen, he sat at the family dinner table while his father spoke to him and he thought, I hate you. It was a wholly terrifying thing to think on impulse, to think something so horrid about your own father. Since then, he blamed it on being a teenage boy.

Now Apollo can look his father in the eyes and he’s met with that same simmering disdain. But it’s different now. Apollo knows he doesn’t hate his father. There will be infinite love for the man who put him on this planet. No, there is just bitter resentment, and anger. So much anger. But it’s anger that’s brewed for over three decades. It is not inflamed now. It’s hardened. It’s familiar. 

“I don’t think you like me.” He narrows his eyes. “I think you love me the way a father has no choice to but I never think you’ve actively liked me. I have tried for my entire life to be the kind of son that you will show up for. But you don’t. I don’t think you ever will. Clearly that’s the case considering you think this all has to do with Mom.” 

He’s not moving. He remains his ground, somehow filled with the strength to say things he never has in his entire life. “But sure, if you want to paint me as the drama queen, by all means. I’ll be that son to you if that’s what you’d like.”

–

Zeus had hoped this wasn’t all about Apollo’s recent career aspirations. He’d almost prefer to get dragged over the coals for the affair, at this point, than talk about his son’s shifting interest into politics. There is an ache behind his eyes like a migraine building, and he’s considering walking away, when Apollo starts in on his diatribe. With it, the rest of the world quiets like an over-dramatized movie scene, emotion spiking to drown out the rest.

“That is categorically untrue,” Zeus replies when Apollo is done. “I’ve given you more attention than most of your siblings, doted on you at every turn, helped you with every opportunity. Smoothed over every hiccup and wrinkle before it could reach you. Everything you’ve ever wanted, you had on a silver platter. You’ve had a dream life, Apollo. And you think I don’t like you?” It’s almost too ridiculous to react to, incomprehension a shield between him and the blade, the unconscionable thought that his own kid would think something so horrible of him. Almost.

It was his father who approached him, Apollo thinks. It wasn’t as if he was chasing his father down. So he didn’t understand why Zeus was using this moment like a threat to him. Couldn’t he see that he was extremely busy? Who else was going to produce such art onto things? Athena? Pft, come on.

He cranes his head back, looking up at his father, and wishes that things were so, so different than how they are now.

“What difference does it make?” His voice is dejected. There’s bitterness but one that’s not burning. The kind that has brewed for decades, and sits low. Perhaps even iced over. “You treat me as a child regardless.”

– “Wow. How wildly productive this has been.” Zeus wants to walk away. To not humor behavior that isn’t worth his time or energy. Instead he squats next to him, perched on his heels, putting them at eye level.

Athena was rather excited to meet with her father. She was already hard at work developing the anti-bias reforms they’d discussed, and she had about a million ideas to propose. But as soon as she stepped over the threshold into his office, she got the sense that something wasn’t right. She gave him a look as he kissed her on the top of her head and escorted her to a chair, bemused smile on her lips, one eyebrow raised. What are you doing?

She took a seat, eyebrow only arching higher when he sat beside her. She found herself fidgeting with a thread on the end of her blazer sleeve, suddenly all-too nervous. Her mind jumped to the worst conclusions instantly: a death in the family, the separation turning to divorce, your brother’s been in an accident.

“Um, yeah, yep, everything’s going good. I’ve set up a task force, sort of, to work on the reform ideas I showed you, though I still think it would be helpful to do a more extensive study, try to root out exactly where these stories are coming from.” She cut off her rambling, looked to her father uncertainly. Attempted a joke, though she’d never been half so good at comedic timing as some of her siblings, “Are you about to fire me?”

– “Good, good. We can revisit the study, once we see how the task force gets on.” He parrots the line off-hand, a conversation he’s had in pieces with Athena over the past days already, practiced answers.

Hephaestus grins, tries to catch the smoke rings with his mouth, relinquishing the joint easily. “I thought so.” Had folded when it was between him, the most stalwart investor, and Zeus - made a show of his defeat, sighed and leaned back and chuckled. Really, his cards were quite good, but wanted even the most minute detail to feel as if it was between them and Zeus, be it partnership or competition, that these strangers were as good as equals with the man, that they could see it everywhere they turned. “Best hand I’d had yet since we started doing this, though. Pained me, really.” Winks right back. “You ought to take a shot to make up for it. Or something worse.”

They’re consumed by the same memory of this balcony - Hephaestus taking a dare to do the stupidest thing he’d ever done, easily, some other strangers creased in inebriation, hollering and cheering him on, faces red, his own open with laughter. Zeus had called him ‘little bird’ which delighted him, it sounded so fucking sweet.

‘And what does that make you? The worm or the hawk?’ he’d called. Then there was the unspoken in the well of his smirk: ‘Or the thorn?’ Perhaps it was all of it, at once. That which was the reason he woke in the morning, that which he was beholden to, that for which he would hunt and bring back to make a carcass. All of it, he’d realized, as he began walking across the railing, Olympian winds blowing him right into Zeus’s path. It was eternity, that feeling. 

Hephaestus protests softly when Zeus kicks him, in the way it isn’t really a protest at all, just a small noise that’s halfway between a snort and whine. He’s elated, having that same wind whip gently through his hair, watching Zeus watch him. Perhaps it is a foolish thing to say; of course they’re meant to feel like this. This freedom, this euphoria - they’d created it for themselves, hadn’t they? Worked endlessly at it, never took what Cronus left behind for granted, never assumed anything would sprout from nothing. 

“Yes, suppose I’m not used to it. Not yet. But that’ll change, won’t it? It’ll only become grander, bigger. We’ll grow into it. Or it’ll grow into us.” He laughs, open and wide. “I’m here to keep it interesting for you? What, you’ll get bored without me here? Am I supposed to believe that?” Reaches into his pocket, fishes out the pill, snaps it into two, presses one half into Zeus’s palm, and holds the other in front of his friend’s lips. “Together, yes? What in Chaos’s name are these anyway?”

–

Am I supposed to believe that? “Yes,” Zeus says, simply enough. “I told it to you, didn’t I? Would I lie to you?” He grins like a shark, more open than he’d usually let slip in the open air like this, proud and hungry and dangerous, but it’s just the two of them out here, right?

He leans in next to Heph at the railing, so the guests have no chance of reading his lips, even from afar. Hephaestus is warm through his shirtsleeves, and smells faintly like cologne and detergent and imported liquor. “Do you think,” Zeus’ voice is low. Amused. “Those two, back there. Think they’re sleeping together yet? Or perhaps, tonight...” He raises his eyebrows.

It’s one of Zeus’ favorite games, when they’re in private like this. Speculating on what lies underneath all the– frippery, and eyebrows, and entendre. The card games and intonations and insinuations. Peeking at the underside of their world and pulling out the little human truths, in all their bad taste and illicit substances, sex and gore and nepotism. The cheating and cheated-on, and to-be-cheated-on-soon. The swindles and the double-crossings and checkmates. Nephews with connections to foreign agencies. Daughters caught with their hands in the till, or the server data. The delicious, disgusting whirlwind of it all, with the two of them observing from the center– chuckling and exchanging looks.

Zeus doesn’t break the news to Athena within their home, because he doesn’t want to bring it into their home. Even if his daughter has no way to know that the matter was decided not by heart, nor body, but in a meeting by jury– even if it seems, on the surface, like a subject more personal than anything could possibly be– he doesn’t want to bring it into his home. For Athena to associate anything in the estate with this moment; those are the slippers I was wearing when my father told me about the affair. This is the blanket I was sitting on when my heart broke. For this he will use his office, setting of a hundred tough conversations, a different kind of pain entirely.

“Thank you for coming,” he says, bypassing the usual have a seat gesture and crossing the few steps to her instead, putting a hand on her shoulder and a kiss to the top of her head. It’s more affection than he usually shows during office hours, especially knowing how important the job is to Athena, the professionalism of it all, but– who knows the next time she’ll be open to it again. The easy kind of love, the little daily gestures that add up. The kind that disappear first, in a falling-out.

“They’re innocent,” Hephaestus agrees, delirious, exhausted. It’ not the same, not like before. Perhaps Zeus had been right in the sense; the brothers three, they only had everything to gain, all those decades ago, with murder. He was not the same as them; this fact was a pained revelation, once when he was younger and pinched taut, evolving into a peaceably distinction, and now… an unavoidable truth.

Zeus speaks about the RheSeq paperwork, and Hephaestus feels the twinge of recognition, of the leak he’d pored over the night before, yes, but Poseidon’s reassurance when he’d asked about it. The lie, one after another. The realization that the youngest Rhea had surely discussed this… this plan that Zeus rambles through now with all the rest of the inner circle, and came back to his room and still decided to keep him in the dark, all of it, the knife’s edge driven in deeper and deeper the further this revelation goes. 

He wants to weep and bellow and scream. Instead, he tears his fingers through the grit of the sand, swallows hard. 

“It’s right that it’s you,” he rasps. “Good. It’s smart. Smart of all six of you. Congratulations.”

Zeus sits beside him and he shuts his eyes, almost knows what he’s about to say before he says it, knows the nature of his strategy by rote too well. It’s wise. It’s clever. Not just narrative-wise. Zeus is the martyr, Hera is innocent, and Hephaestus is complicit, tied right back round his little finger just before he can leave for Pontius. His own sudden departure. There’s surely logs of their private meeting at Symposia at the very start of the festival, the entire fucking building empty except for the two of them. He can see the Pandora headline now: BEST FRIEND OR BOYFRIEND? CHILDHOOD FRIEND TURNED SPURNED LOVER RETURNS TO OLYMPE! HOW LONG DID IT CARRY ON? HAS IT EVEN ENDED?

“You…” He bites his lip. “You know what you ask of me? For me to be your… your fucking mistress? My reputation, my relationship with your family - all of it ruined.” But he knows. He’d just said he would have killed Cronus for them all. This is so incredibly trivial in comparison. “And what, Hera and I both on Pontius because? We’ve bonded in the heartbreak? Our little broken hearts club? Fucking Fates.” He knocks Zeus’s knee back, harder, retaliatory, and seeking, and he exhales shakily. “If you missed me so much, you could have just told me.” A wry, heaving, dark jest. “You need to protect me. Somehow. I don’t care how. I can’t do this for nothing.” He almost believes himself. 

–

Hephaestus is in pain. There’s a startling clarity to it, the kind of pain one usually only sees in animals and children, the kind of pain Delos actors would kill to see in their scripts: pure, terrible emotion, telegraphed as clearly as a broken limb.

Zeus feels it like an ache in his own side, wires crossed, mind tuned to the wrong frequency. It’s what happens, growing up the way they did, working the way they did. He can see Heph putting the pieces together at rapid speed, picking up the plan on instinct. Keeps his expression placid, calm, nodding as Heph says his piece, as if he isn’t watching him fall apart in front of his eyes. Then he responds.

“I would never ask anything of you that I hadn’t fully thought out, yes. It’ll be a sacrifice.” He squints, thinks. “But if you want to share the burden, here it is. I can’t take back what’s been done, what you missed out on. Watching the man who hurt you slowly dying by your own hand, what that feels like. The satisfaction and rush of acting out justice on that cosmic scale; the horror and disgust of it, too. But if you want in? This is what I can give you, now, in this moment we’re still living in. I won’t force you.” He says it, even as he knows there was never any real choice; Heph unable to avoid this, not a sacrifice with his name engraved in the hilt. “But in return, I’ll give you– anything within my power to give. All the protection I can afford you. Say the word.” He looks at Hephaestus, tired and drawn, his hair whipping in the wind. A moment cut out of time. “I know I’m asking the world of you. But I want to give you the world, too.”

A horn goes off in the distance. Zeus gets to his feet, brushes the sand off his trousers. Extends a hand to help Heph up. “Ready?”

The words feel sour in his stomach. The tone of his voice and the look in his eyes suggesting something less than thrilled at the idea of his son bringing up propositions. Truthfully, it’s not going horribly, but it’s not going well either, and Apollo tries not to frown at the lack of encouragement from his dad, but he prevails. He came to do something and he’s going to stick with it.

He clears his throat, looking back to the me Zeus has in the room with him. He wishes it weren’t like this, that they would leave and let the two of them have this conversation privately. But Apollo would just have to remind himself that this was an unexpected audience.

“It’s actually an idea for something that, you know, combines club life with performance. Like, what if you could get a bunch of people in a room and they were part of the experience that was happening on stage?” He looks around to the both of them, feeling like maybe he’s not speaking their right language. “You know, like a massive party, but there’s a story.” He turns back to his father, looking up at him with expectant ideas. Did he do good enough?

–

H.C.

After a few rounds of only semi-serious questioning, Zeus brushes Apollo off with a promise to revisit the topic later, and diverts the conversation to one of Apollo’s new acting projects. Apollo leaves the interaction dejected.