Title: Ghostly
Fandom: Greek Mythology
Rating: T/PG+
Length: 495
Content notes: Hades/Persephone
Author notes: For the 'seasons' challenge, because who else is governed by the seasons if not Persephone? Never written in this ~fandom before, orz.
Summary: He knows that Fate has wound them both like this, together in a cyclic motion of seasonal insanity.



She drinks rainwater from snapdragons in August. He watches her from below, his Olympic eye perennially turned to her when he is away from Hades' depths, from the black and the cold and the boredom of life within death.

She drinks rainwater from snapdragons, and it's silly really - crazy - that he has fallen so ridiculously for this human girl, all flesh and corporeal warm bones and toes curling against him as he makes her scream. She is no queen of darkness; she is no wicked spirit. He visits her in ghost-form, to watch her while away her summer days, lounging and sighing and driving him crazy, until she is returned to him. Without her, he is bereft, like a sickly starfish lopped in two, and it unnerves him that he could feel so attached to another being.

In October - and he feels real again, more than a god; he feels alive - she is by his side. She kisses him, often, and he tastes fruit on her lips, flowers in her hair, very real earth scents in his nightmare lair.

"This is not the life you deserve," he makes his voice appear in her head. He has driven men mad like that, and enjoyed it, but with Persephone it is different; with Persephone it is fairy magic, a love song he didn't know how to tell before he met her. Crazy, he thinks, just crazy.

"This is my life," she assures him, "I would not change it." Before, he'd assume she was lying, but as the decades go by they have developed a spooky cognitive connection, and whether out of duty or obedience, he knows she loves him now.

He knows that Fate has wound them both like this, together in a cyclic motion of seasonal insanity; they will never be apart for longer than nine months. This turn-taking between him and Demeter will continue until one of them grows weary of Persephone - and if there's one thing he is sure of about the old goddess, it's that she desires the girl's company as much as he does. Almost.

So he takes deep breaths of hot hellish air and presses kisses like beestings down Persephone's warm stomach. He sucks at her toes, her kneecaps, and at the maddening dip in her collarbone. He fumbles his way through with his eyes closed and still can't believe how she makes him feel everything anew, as if he isn't millenia old, as if he's just a normal man with normal thoughts, homesick for her kiss.

But Persephone has powers of her own. She drives him crazy with her goddess magic, learned out of necessity and practiced while she waits on earth during the slow summer months. Everything with her is slow motion happiness. A short while in her company is enough to keep him waiting - and wait he shall - for the cold three months in which the earth lies dormant and she breathes life back into his ghostly bones.