Chapter Text
Ares doesn’t know what to do.
The war has been escalating, and this time not even himself and Athena can handle the damage. What started as a political assassination garnered too much attention, first from the mortals, and then from the gods as the prayers gained strength. He didn’t start this war, but he honestly wished he had— then, maybe, he’d be able to control the damage. But he couldn’t stop the generals from praying to his uncle for safe voyages, and he didn’t know that their opponents would pray to Athena, and then the civilians fled to Demeter and Hestia, and the dissidents called on Apollo, so, really: it’s all a clusterfuck. To put it lightly.
And to make it worse, they’re blaming him for this. Again. Which, fine, he gets it, he’s the god of war, but Athena doesn’t get this treatment, nor does she get to be ostracized for it, not to mention that this time, it wasn’t even his damn fault! The mortals didn’t even pray to him first!
So, really, all of this means that Ares needs a break. Desperately. And not just a “I need to go lay down because this is exhausting,” a break like he needs help . The prayers barely ebb; instead they’re getting stronger, and now the nymphs are reporting that Hecate has joined. And Ares can’t fight her. Won’t. He refuses to fight her, because it won’t be worth it. He’s seen her magic first hand before. Back then, he didn’t have to fight her before a joint effort was made to counter her hexes... but he’s the only one on his side right now. He’d ask Hermes or Zagreus for help, but they’re both too busy with the death count in the Underworld to lend any real aid.
Contact with Artemis has also been rough. She’ll try to get to him when he can, but she’s too occupied hunting the monsters released by the carnage to join him on the front lines. The only chance he has left is to contact his Uncle’s realm; specifically, Lady Nyx. He’s seen Thanatos collecting souls, but his sisters more than him have been glutting themselves on the fields of carnage. Hermes relayed that his letter has been delivered by now, but he can’t promise a response. On some level, Ares was expecting this. But by Hades, if he really has to fight Hecate, he can’t promise he won’t freeze. Or just run, for that matter.
For a moment, he contemplates if an Olympian god can die like his cousin Zagreus. Perhaps hanging out in his uncle’s realm for a few years will save him the assured tragedy.
But— no. He has a position to uphold. If, in doing so, he falls to Hecate, then… that will have to be how it is. Perhaps, hopefully, maybe, Hermes will realize and save him like last time. Maybe he won’t. But he refuses to turn his back on those that called for him.
Despite what it might cost.
Hypnos hits the ground. Hard.
His arms smack the ground before he does, a short delay before the fall, but the shock travels up his body so hard he’s sure he won’t need his shoulders after this. For a moment he lays there, panting into the ground face-down, but he brings his arms underneath him to push himself up. He doesn’t get far before the shake in his limbs makes him catch himself before his chin can hit the ground. He makes a sound, he thinks, something high in his throat, but the ringing in his ears makes it hard to hear it. He’s panting harder now, but his breaths come out in hiccups randomly, like his body doesn’t understand that he’s not still falling. It hurts like a bitch, but the tears beading in his eyes have no real say on what his body can or can’t do, so he keeps trying. The progress is jerky, and he’s stopped panting in favor of making terrible, choked up noises in his throat. The rasp makes his voice sound like a wasp nest, but a part of him is glad that he at least doesn’t have a sore throat yet. Small mercies.
Once he hits his zenith, Hypnos sighs and rocks back onto his calves, choking down the inhale when his bleeding palms reach the ground behind him to support his weight. He wastes time like that, looking up and just choking through his breath. It feels like his forehead is bleeding. It probably is. Whatever. Head wounds always bleed a lot. What might need something, Hypnos thinks, trying not to even entertain the thought of moving, is the open wound in his torso.
Granted, it’s not that large of a wound comparatively, but it’s deep and what originally made it had gotten wrenched out earlier, so he’s not that happy with the state of it. Usually he’ll just go home and bandage his wound, or drink some nectar and pass out while he’s waiting for the bleeding to slow, but when Hypnos lifts a shaky hand to assess the damage, his fingers skate across the slick skin to find a well of blood. It bubbles up when he presses on it, which in hindsight is probably not the best idea. Finally his fingers hit the ragged edges of the wound, which should probably hurt more than it does but he might be in shock. So.
So, in reality, he’s fine! Chthonic gods heal quickly enough, it’ll all be over in a few days. In the meantime, he’ll just— just have to catch up on work! Not that it’s really a bad thing, of course, his job is important, and it’s not that he dislikes it, it’s just that— everyone else gets to talk to other people. They get to move around, and do other things, something other than just stand there as a particularly garish decoration.
Well, maybe not everyone. Achilles does just that, but then again, Hypnos thinks it’s rather a good idea that he doesn’t move around the house as much. He doesn’t need another mortal on his hands, he’s busy enough with the ones already alive. Plus, Achilles is allowed to move around, it’s just that he doesn’t want to. He’s like a tall lamp that occasionally will utter a phrase or so. The point is, Achilles is definitely fucked up, and Hypnos can prove it— he’s seen him in the Nightmares mortals cook up, and it sure isn’t all sheep and sparkling waters. He doesn’t need that guy to walk around and possibly get provoked; Hypnos doesn’t want to have to deal with that and have to put him down for good! Let him stay in his lonely little corner. He just wishes that guy were further away from his station, he’s kind of an eyesore. Well. Not that Hypnos has room to talk, but still. He likes to entertain the idea that at least as a god he’s more valuable than that little squirt.
Speaking of that little squirt, Hypnos teleports into the house with a puff of smoke, letting the remnants of the Lethe disappear as he peeks out behind the pillar he’s hiding behind. Wipes his hands together furtively to try to flick the blood off. He can hear Achilles’ quiet murmurs to Zagreus in the Hall behind, and Hades is behind his desk communing with his paperwork as always. Hypnos can’t see Persephone, but she’s probably somewhere around. Maybe with his mother again. Whatever.
He settles back in at his position, carefully summoning his pen and list. No one bats an eye, and even the shades just form into line without a word. Nothing to see here.
Hypnos hunches over his torso, curling his legs under him. Once he gets a break, he’ll stitch it up, or fuck it, maybe just cauterize it. For now, he lets it bleed into his cape. The inside’s dark for a reason. His head throbs, but at least it’s similar enough to fatigue to brush it off.
Gods, he’s tired.
He isn’t sure how much time has passed. Hypnos is still there, mindlessly floating and checking boxes on his list. His wound is still bleeding sluggishly, but he hasn’t been able to get a break yet. At some point Hades noticed his presence and ordered him to submit his next report, which! Wow, who fucking knew, it wasn’t ready! So he’s behind. Again. Wa-hoo!
Which is to say, he’s looking for a break.
He’s not sure where to go, though. The underworld might be full of dark and dank corners for him to hide in, but after eons of playing one-sided hide and seek with his brother, Thanatos knows almost all of his hidey-holes, and he could probably find a good chunk of the rest just through poking around where Hypnos has been reportedly found before: anywhere with an absence of light and a comfortable enough looking rock. It might take Thanatos longer to find him, especially given that he's been absent more and more from the house, but ever since Nyx stopped talking to Hypnos, she also stopped looking for him. Which means that when someone wants Hypnos, Thanatos will, eventually, have to abandon his position and go pry Hypnos out of the depths of whatever crevice he lodged himself into just to dump him in front of Hades's desk. Or Megaera’s feet, in one interesting instance that involved three glasses of ambrosia, Cerberus’s dog brush, and three of skelly’s rib bones.
Theoretically, he could probably get a few days of sleep in before Thanatos appeared to court martial him back to the house, especially at the rate that mortals are dropping. The line looks the same as ever, and the shades aren’t particularly gruesome in their non corporeal forms, but he can hear them murmuring to themselves: about rations running out, about a new disease along a string of cities on the Ionian coast.
“My lord,” the shade in front of him murmurs, and Hypnos smiles as wide as he can, trying to remember if he wiped the blood from his forehead before he sat down. He’d hover up higher so it's harder to see him, but then only the taller shades can talk to him, and even they have to strain themselves, and that just isn’t fair. Instead, he pushes a few more curls under his sleep mask and rubs at his face like he's tired, and he is, but he's also trying to check for dried ichor. He can’t feel anything, so either he wiped his face off on his cloak before hopping on and he just can't remember because he's so tired, or he can feel the blood because his fingers are numb, again, because he's so tired. He needs to get back to sleep, and soon.
“Hey, little one,” he says. It's quieter than he normally would like, and a little more raspy than normal, because that sore throat he was worried about is making a comeback and he's not sure how loud he can talk right now. “Sorry about that, but I'm here now! Hope I didn’t keep you waiting for too long.”
The shade just sort of shrugs helplessly. “I don’t mind waiting here. I think I’m going to the fields because I didn’t really, um, do much, and at least it feels a little warm here. I don’t mind if you take your time.”
Hypnos grins at that, as wide as he can, leaning back into his blanket and pulling it tighter around his shoulders. “Man, that's one of the best things I’ve heard all, um— well, time is a little harder down here, but it sure is nice to hear. Hey, if you really mean it, do you mind making it seem like someone converted you on your deathbed and you’re reeeaaallly confused about where Anubis is? I’ve just gotta finish this report real quick, and I don’t think the master is really happy about my performance lately!” He winks at her performatively. “Might even get demoted.”
The shade smiles. She's getting clearer as he watches, her chiton starting to billow around her shoulders and a mouth molding into a smile, a little bit like he's remembering someone he forgot and the details are slowly coming back to him. He likes watching that with shades, because the more you talk to them (as long as you can wait long enough), most shades can remember most of their lives, even the really old ones in Asphodel that like to joke that they’re getting to be as old as Hypnos now.
As he turns to his parchment, quill scribbling across the page, she starts to wring her forming hands and ask the other shades furtively if they happen to have seen a large scale with a white feather around somewhere. The crowd around her turns to the next down the line, and then the next, until there’s a slight background murmur as the question gets passed around. Out of the corner of his eye, Hypnos spots Hades looking up from his paperwork to frown at the line, but he turns back to his paperwork when he sees Hypnos gesturing a little ‘settle down’ with his free hand. Finally, a large, lumbering shade next to her turns to his fellow, and then leans down back to the original shade with an apologetic expression as he whispers that she must have been converted on her deathbed, and it’s okay that she doesn’t remember. Hypnos takes that as his cue to smile at the line and suggest that they form up again, winking at the shade when she retakes her position at the front of the line.
“Good enough?” she asks, her voice just a wisp under the shifting of paper in the hall. Hypnos giggles before he remembers not to move his ribs so much. Thankfully the wince of pain just looks like a burp.
“Very! I’m almost done, promise. Let me just get these last few dates back in order, not really sure how they got mixed around in the first place…”
She nods, focused on the scratch of his quill against the page, before she seems to shake herself out of a trance. “Right, um… my lord?”
“Hm?” Hypnos glances up from his list, tilting his head to prompt her to continue.
“I…” he watches her throat move for a moment. She’s nearly fully corporeal now, and he can see that she was wearing broken sandals with little metal flowers when she died.
She clears her throat and tries again. “The war, my lord… I was wondering how much you knew about it?”
As a general rule, Hypnos likes giving shades what little gossip he can before they're moved over to whatever dinky corner of hell they’ve landed themselves in. After all, the most he sees of them is right before their lives are decided in front of them and an eternal sentence is handed out through wax and ink. It's not hard for him to give them a few tidbits of comfort where he can before it happens.
But anything outside of mortal affairs is out of his hands too. He doesn’t decide the whims of his sisters, and the Olympian gods are enough of a clusterfuck that even if he wanted to divulge any inner dealings he came across, sometimes the affairs of immortals are simply too dangerous to spill, even to a shade. And this war itself? The gods aren’t split evenly, soldiers are switching sides and denouncing their patrons, and the previously pacifist city states seem to be turning on each other for no apparent reason. And that’s just from what Hypnos can tell. For all he knows, it’s the end of the world as he knows it up there, and he's none the wiser. It’s bad enough that he has Thanatos in his ear whenever he decides to deign Hypnos with his presence, only able to talk about how his sisters have been glutting themselves on the fallen and how he’s just not sure any of them are ever going to make up the time to properly catalogue the dead, not that it’s any of Hypnos’s problem. All he has to do is get the name and the cause of death and the shade is on its way, and even that has been proving to be nearly too much for him.
As it is, all he can do is shrug. “I’m not really sure what you're looking for here! I mean, sure I know there’s a war, but I'm pretty sure what I’ve got is just as much as you’ve heard up top. I know that soldiers from Athens seem to be deserting, if that helps at all!”
She shakes her head. “No, my lord, I was just… I was hoping if there was anything a bit more substantial that you could tell me. Like… why has Corinth walled itself off? I’ve heard even just from the shades in line as we were waiting that no one has been seen exiting or entering the city for at least a month now. And the wall around it… it’s not brick and mortar, at least from what I’ve been told. It seems to be… invisible?”
That’s… completely new to Hypnos. If anyone in the House ever mentioned it, then he must have tuned it out— that, or they never bothered telling him in the first place. He wouldn’t be surprised.
“Um…” Hypnos scratches behind his ear with his quill, ignoring the ink matting his hair down. “Really, that’s news to me too. I can’t tell you if I’ve been seeing too much of that crop up in dreams, it really does get too hectic down there to get a good read on stuff if I’m not actively tuning in. And as for the other gods, well, they aren’t interested in sharing with me in the first place!” He gives a little shrug and pulls his cape more securely around his neck, trying to discreetly lean back and balance his list on his knees so he can relieve some stress off of his aching abdomen. Is that a headache setting in? It would be just his luck.
“Actually, lord Hypnos…” She meets his eyes this time, and Hypnos is taken aback by just how young she is. Her general demeanor through interacting with a god has been pleasant, even nearly comfortable, and he had pictured someone thoroughly in their middle age before her face had finished solidifying. But she looks no older than her early 20’s, if even that. And still, she meets his eyes, as blinding and piercing as they are beneath heavy lids. She doesn’t seem very scared, just… pleading. “I was wondering if there was nothing you could do.”
Hypnos is faintly aware that he’s gaping at her. She keeps going, seemingly oblivious to his state of shock. “It’s not that I'm trying to demand anything of you, my lord, I would never! It's just that you’re rumored to be one of the kinder gods, and if there was anything I could do to convince you to step in—” she breaks off to tug harshly at a shorn lock of hair near her face, with enough force that she would have ripped it out had her form been any more malleable. “Well, I would be remiss. If I didn't do anything, that is. I owe it to all of them to try.”
Hypnos swallows past the surprisingly solid knot in his throat. He's no stranger to death, of course, but somehow it never really gets easier, looking at all the hair she’s shorn off, all the loss she must have known in such a short period of time. The bruise marks on her throat are a lurid purple, much too bright against the green glow of her body. “I… I’m sorry, but I just can’t make any promises. I’m already swamped with everything else I have going on, y’know? If I could help, I would. And besides, I'm really not the god you think I am. Me putting the big ol’ guy to sleep was an accident! I’m not even sure what I could do, if I even was allowed to step in. Putting people to sleep is more impressive on paper than it is in real life!” He shakes his list for emphasis.
Still, the shade bites her lip and leans in a little closer. With how quietly she’s speaking now, it's like trying to hear if an ant is tiptoeing past him. Hypnos leans closer despite himself and the sharp spike of pain in his side.
“But you did it twice, my lord. Twice! That can’t just be a fluke, you knew what you were doing! I believe that you have the power for more than you think yourself capable. The king of the gods himself could not resist your tricks, so there, there must be something. I understand that I ask you because there is no one else I can, but do you realize what that means? Lord Thanatos has already rejected my pleas, lord Hermes is much too busy to even contemplate them, and the boatman Charon won’t even lower himself to groan at me!”
She’s close enough now that she braves the scant distance to place her hands on one of his. He slowly releases the list in his hand to focus on the slightest bit of heat from her glow, the impression of warmth to his ice-cold hand. Hypnos has never been more aware of the size difference between him and a mortal before— one of his hands could nearly eclipse both of hers. He curls his own hand in, and then thinks better of it. Instead he flips his hand over so she can rest both hands in the curve of his palm. He can’t help her, but he can at least look her in the eye and give her comfort.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, softer this time. “But even if I had the ability to help you, and all of them, my position demands my loyalty. I can’t just give up everything I have to help them. I’m working overtime as it is.” He wills her to understand the circles under his eyes, the fraying at the edges of his cape, the weak fluttering of his wing against his hair, like the spasms of an animal in its death throes.
She stares at him, holding tight to his palm. The end of a fluttering existence, holding tightly to any connection to life she has. “My sister is in Corinth,” she whispers.
Hypnos stares at her. Her hair is so lopsided that all the length she has left is a curling lock just behind her left ear. She must have been rationing, based on the choppiness of the rest of it. Like she knew that the first death would not be the last, and planned in accordance.
There has to be something he can do.
Hypnos bites his tongue and closes his hand gently around hers. His voice is still so hoarse, and it scrapes against his throat when he tries to speak. “I can give them peace, at least. Sweet dreams for the city until the wall falls. I can promise that, at least.”
He doesn’t tell her how much it will cost. A promise is a promise.
But he can tell from the look in her eyes it’s not enough, and the shame burns. He knows it’s a platitude, that another god of his stature should be able to offer a shift in the tides or a parade of soldiers and a fleet one-thousand strong. But this is all he can do.
She pulls away slowly, like she had been taking something from his company too. “I understand,” she whispers. “Thank you, my lord.” Respectful until the end, and it’s definitely a little wasted on him, but Hypnos appreciates the gesture all the same.
He watches as she pulls away, centering herself in the line as she glances back at him. He spares her another smile and tries to make it as kind as he can, even though he feels the fatigue tugging at his eyes. He flashes the completed report at Hades, who nods in understanding and gestures for the next shade to move forward. She steps forward, still holding her mortal form, although the edges are starting to wisp away. It feels as though he’s watching her through a wall of water. He can hear the gruff voice of his master as he rumbles questions at her and she answers to the best of her ability, twisting her fingers together in apprehension.
It’s as her sentence is handed out through the humming in his ears that she looks down with a furrowed brow at her hands, raising them like she just noticed something new. He sees the slight glinting in the light, and at first he thinks it’s a ring, but it coats the undersides of her fingertips and drips down into the creases between her fingers. It’s his ichor, Hypnos realizes, with a dull, rising horror. She turns to him, mouth open in fear and horror to question it, and then she disappears. The humming subsides long enough that Hypnos can hear the echo of Hades’s last words down the hall.
Asphodel. A fitting sentence, of course, for a fairly unremarkable life.