In the beginning, long after war had been waged and the Titans slain, there are only three constants: his hands, the mud, and the creatures he creates for the Gods. He enjoys the work—the slip and grime of dirt beneath his fingertips as he crafts scales and fur and feathers. For a time, that is all that there is. With the rise of the sun, he molds creatures that yearn for the warmth it provides; with the moon high in the sky, he designs creatures that revel in soft shadows. Over and over until he thinks perhaps his task has been fulfilled, that he now is purposeless and adrift.

It is this feeling of unmooring that ultimately leads to his downfall.

She isn’t the first human he creates, nor the second. In fact, by the time he crafts her from the earth and breathes life into her form, he has lost count of how many brows he’s shaped and noses he’s sloped. Only knows that he takes his time with her; traces her cheek with care and molds her collarbones with precision. Places his lips to her forehead and gives her life on a murmured name— Agathe.  

He loves her instantly, and that is his undoing. There becomes a before and an after; a time of namelessness and mud, and then a time of yearning and despair. Months that bleed into years—what is time to the timeless? When he next pauses in his work and lets his desire to see her win out, she’s changed. Hair longer, darker than before and hanging lush and thick down her back. It’s the first thing he notices about her, the second is that she’s shivering—freezing slowly in the late night chill. 

He feels war wage itself anew, this time in his chest. He knows Zeus to be vengeful, less than gracious and even less kind with the humans. Knows what it would take to keep her warm through this night and how the gods would punish him for it. 

He doesn’t hesitate; steals the fire from the forge of Hephaestus in the dead of night and earns his first name. 

“Thief,” snarled from the mouth of Zeus, who crackles with anger and electricity as Agathe cowers behind him with fear. Her hair is red with the flame he’d given her, cheeks rosy with warmth despite the winter’s chill that stains the air with the puffs of their breath. He can’t stop looking at her; can’t stop his hands from twitching towards her, the desire to comfort her— don’t be scared, little one— written plainly on his face. Zeus’s mouth pulls into lines of cruelty, words stained with malice as he adds, “I thought you smarter than this.” Scoffs out a mirthless laugh as he bends and pulls Agathe up by the red of her hair. “Where is your foresight now, hm? Did you not see how she’d suffer for your treachery?”

“Please—” he’s on his knees, head tipped in reverence as he pleads for her. “I will give you anything. Leave her to this world and punish me as you see fit.”

“Is that so?” Zeus asks. Then, “you love this mortal.”

A doomed question that isn’t really a question; he knows it before he answers. Speaks the truth anyway.

“Yes.”

Lightning surges through the sky as Zeus crackles with energy, fingertips sparking as his eyes glow with victory and power. 

“Good,” he says. “Then I want you to watch what comes next.”

She’s gone before he can beg. Ash before he can so much as exhale. One minute she is whole, flesh and flushed, and the next she is gone. He crawls across the space between him and the god who laughs and laughs, speaking wicked words into ringing ears.  He took her. He took her from me. 

He’s not sure how long he sits amongst the ash; it’s everywhere— his hair, his chiton, his clenched hands that shake with fury. He wants to fight back, because win or lose he will either avenge her or be with her once more. He rises from his knees, intent written in every step he takes, but Zeus stops him with words that feel foreign to his shocked ears.

“Thief,” he begins, voice full of promise. “I ought to have you chained to a boulder. Ought to have you pecked to death by starved ravens.” When he does not answer, Zeus continues. “Instead, you will roam a thousand years, and then when those years are up, you will roam a thousand more. You will know no joy in this world unless I deem it so. You will sit with this loss until it drives you mad, until you wish I had been merciful enough to give you the ravens.”

And then, in a flash of light, he’s gone, and the punishment begins in earnest.

 

If a man were to measure the breadth of what the mortals think of as their world, it would take longer than any lifetime to reach a final tally. The thief, however, has had an interminable journey on which to count each step. A thousand thousands, from the river banks of Yangtze to the furthest reaches of Romanorum.

Prettanikē, Alwion, Brittania, this land has cast off its history like a well worn cloak, but he remembers.  He stood in these halls in all their grandeur, and he stands in them now, their ceilings replaced by skies, their walls more windbreak than weight bearing. 

For as many horrible ways the gods had created for a man to die, there were a thousand worse ways in which to live. Somewhere, in all the storms the winds of time had swept over him, he had forgotten the worst of them. And then, he sees her.

It is the way of things, to face the frost and the thaw, the summer and the shade, and feel nothing at all for their passage. Zeus had left him with an apathetic appetite, denied him both sleep and succor, but he had left the eyes in his head, and oh, the sights the Thief has seen. 

There is something of the old magic, he thinks, in watching a man and wife find comfort besides flames, a family feed themselves from a spit, a village set the night alight to toast their harvest. Perhaps he can not taste the juices of the freshly caught hare dripping down his chin, but he still has ears to listen to the tales they weave around the fire it was roasted on, and the Thief takes each and everyone of them for his own. What is the point of being a thief, after all, if he cannot steal the earthly comforts surrounding him? 

It is, he fears, a mortal urge, to find purpose in the pointless. Just as ants crowd around a crumb, the Thief finds himself drawn to the homes and hearths of man. Even in this small isle, he could wander for limitless leagues and meet no man under the verdant skies of their forests, and yet he strays at every opportunity. He finds his feet following the footsteps of his flamebearers, through the shires and the hundreds and into their homes. He cannot walk amongst them, as he sometimes wishes he could, but his gift sees each and every man from cradle to grave, and there is a boon to be found in the knowledge that he has eased the labor of their lungs, facilitated the growth of their young. 

Tonight, he finds himself at the end of his welcome in a valley village. He had failed, as he often did, to resist the itch to feel the warm burn of a fresh loaf in his palms. In a thousand years, he has yet to give up on the fantasy that one day he will feel the heat of its fleshy insides tumbling down his gullet, a deliverance on the steaming promise made every time he cracks a crust open between his fingers. He had taken a beating for his daring, fresh out of coins as he was, but with bones that neither bruised nor broke, that was a small price to pay.

And so back to the woods he wanders, to find a new haven in which to shelter his unweary bones. There had been a city on this path once, he thinks, a month or a millennium ago. Finding it is as good a quest as any, and he traces the path of manifold mortals through the woods, waiting and waiting to find a break in the treeline, a sign of what once had been. They had fallen on hard times, the mortals of this isle, and let their cities fall to wreck and ruin. They weren’t the first, and he was sure they wouldn’t be the last, but as the sun set and rose and set again, the Thief wishes they would have at least left the useful old markers that had once littered the land, to ease a little of his journey. Futility was familiar, yes, but hardly his preference. 

The rain comes on the fifth day. He has followed the valley to its peak,  and finally catches a glimpse of light unfiltered by layers of leaves. The skies are dark and heavy when he sets eyes on them, but he receives the first drops of the downpour like the blessing they are, face tipped up to allow the water to pool in the hollows of his eyes and run in rivulets down his cheeks. He stands there until dawn has become dusk. Only then, with the light dwindling, does he take tripping steps down to the banks of a stream, a perfect place to lay his head and bask in the glow of the stars against the pitch black sky. 

There is something different about the light of this night. The bright white glow of the moon, the silver pinpricks of the stars, they are familiar. So is the golden glow of flame , flickering in the distance. It calls to him like a siren song, and so, he follows. At its source, he finds the city he has been searching for. Or at least, its ruins.

That itch returns, the instinctive certainty that there is still more to learn of mortals, even now. Despite the ravage of death, the carnage of loss, there is reverence in mourning. Peace to be had at the foot of ancestral shrines, though few of them dared to linger for long lest the wraiths follow them home. But one has ventured there, and that invokes a curiosity in him that had long since fallen dormant.

He finds her in the temple of old. A little thing, rain soaked and shivering. He has seen her face in the form of a thousand cold creatures. There is no reason to think this to be different to any other time he has tasted ash in his mouth, and felt the grit of it under his fingers. And yet, he feels like Zeus has cast him to the ravens, afterall. Like the vital, bloody pulp of him has been torn clean from his body. For this is not a mirage, a hallucination borne from too long wandering alone. The face before him does not settle into ignominious reality. Instead, the amber light catches on one carefully formed brow, the bruised swoop of her cheek. 

How she has ended up in such a dire place as this should be beyond comprehension, but he knows, now, the worst of human folly. Knows how easily they turn on one another, and cast the best of them out into the cold. For what else could she be? Lit up by the glowing glory of the flames he stole for her, she is as beautiful now as when he first breathed life into her lungs. Not his first creation, but his finest. The one for whom he had consigned himself to an errant eternity. 

He should leave. Should deny the gods whatever entertainment he finds himself in the midst of. But… But it has been this long, and he has never been allowed the sight of her. What harm could there be in lingering a little longer? In allowing himself this rarest of comfort, to slake even a little of the thirst that has plagued him a thousand years. 

The decision is taken from his hands in the next moment, an ill-thought step snapping a twig beneath his foot and sending her eyes careening towards him. To meet her moss green gaze is to step into a warm bath, to see his flames flicker in them makes the comfort only sweeter. 

Oh. He thinks. Agathe. Though, he supposes, time has likely changed that name too.  

“Who goes there?” she calls, with all the foolish confidence of youth, “Show yourself!”

Now. Now is the moment he needs to leave. To huddle back into the shadows of the young cherry tree he shelters under, and let her consign him to a trick of the light. He lets that moment blow past him like the evening breeze. 

“Please, do not be afraid! I mean you no harm,” he calls back, “I have travelled an awfully long way without shelter. Would you not share your fire with another lost soul?”

She cannot know that his soul is the most lost of all. The only one that could neither walk the path of the Olympians nor traverse the river Styx. All the same, he watches as compassion rises in her, and is finally offered the same human decency he has seen shared in myriad moments across this world, yet never partaken in. 

The damp cloth of her cloak drags across the grassy carpet as she sweeps her arm towards the fire. It is little more than kindling, nothing like the infernos he had once faced. It is all the more precious for it. Just like she had been. 

“It is not much. The wood was too damp to burn well.”

A flick of his wrist as her eyes settle on him, and it burns as well as any blaze. Zeus could not take all of his gifts. “I’m sure it will keep us warm enough.”

Her eyes widen as she takes it in, and something settles in the Thief as she rests on the log beside him. He can almost see the cold seeping from her bones, and a spark of pride takes light in his chest. 

“I am Agata,” she says, an offering of cordiality he did not expect. 

It is achingly similar to that which he whispered when he brought her to life. There is a question in her eyes, written in a language he cannot read. He smiles at her, and that itself is a foreign feeling stretching at his cheeks. Silence blooms between them, broken only by the bells of her laugh. 

“What is your name?” she asks, and it takes him a long moment to fathom her meaning.

How odd, to live so long an existence, that one could forget their own name. Whatever it had been, stolen by time, and Zeus, it was no use to him now. He searches through the words he has heard on the tongues of travellers, tries to find one that will sound familiar to her ears. 

Eyes locked on hers, he breathes new life into something for the first time in an eon. “Rihberaht.”

“Rihberaht,” she repeats, and it sounds so lovely in her lilting voice it takes his breath away. “A handsome name.”

“How did you come to be here?” he asks in reply. 

It’s clumsy. Not quite the right rhythm for conversation. But as this is his first, he hopes he will be forgiven. 

Her cheeks blush, her eyes skitter to the trees. It makes the purple mottle all the more obvious, and rage burns in him at the sight.

“Can I not simply be a traveller, as you are?”

That is not the way of things, he knows. Womenfolk belong by the hearth, are kept safe and shrouded by the walls of their family homes. Certainly, they are not cast out into stormfilled nights with bruises blooming. 

Rihberaht has seen men conjure a great many things out of so very little with only the effort of their speech. The problem is, he has not learned the trick of that yet. And so he is forced to concede to her question, lost as he is on how to counter it with one of his own. 

“Two travellers, then. What good fortune, to be able to shelter together.”

Tension he had not noticed leaks out of her form, and she relaxes into the cool embrace of the night. A little lack of knowledge on his part is worth it, if this is the result. 

They slip between silence and solemn conversation for the next few hours. Rihberaht finds that she has followed the same path down the valley, that while he had been guided by a wish to find new light, she had been tied to the water’s edge by her need of its vital sustenance. 

She is a dear thing. Rihberaht is utterly enchanted by her. All these years wandering, the worthiness of his cause insisted upon by the lives of the mortals surrounding him. None could have convinced him as thoroughly as this clutchful of moments spent with his Agata. 

At first, he does not recognise the shaking of the earth for what it is. It is not the first time the figure in front of him has sent his world tilting on its axis, after all.  It is followed, however, by a wretched scrape from the walls around them, their long neglected forms wrenching apart under this final strain. 

Hand in hand, they sprint for the great stone arch that once separated man and mortal, abandoning their fire to try and escape the destruction raining down upon them. The temple had been a gargantuan thing, and they feel all the godly span of it as they flee its hold. 

The earth beneath their feet strains again, tipping them over as the world unbalances. As they scramble to their feet, Rihberaht finds a new certainty taking root within him. An inevitability built with all the strength of a god’s wrath. They have come for him again. For daring to seek solace in this torturous lifetime. 

Well, Zeus be damned, he will not watch his Agathe die again. Let him be cast to the ravens, let them feast upon him for all eternity. They cannot have her. With a great push, he sees her clear of the crumbling walls, moved by the last of the unearthly strength he had been born with. 

He makes it a few steps further. He is halfway between the temple and the world beyond when the arch finally gives, and he finds that he and the ground are one. 

Her hands claw at his, a feeble attempt to save him, when she could not even save herself. Rihberaht feels every stone as it falls upon his body. Each vertebrae of his not-quite-mortal spine bends and breaks, ribs shatter, bones turn to dust. There is a roaring, rending pain, struck through by the sight of her tear filled eyes. And then– 

He has lived for her through a thousand lifetimes. In this one, he dies for her too. 

OLYMPUS, an instant later.

His first instinct on waking is to reach for her. His second is to breathe. He knows, as soon as he takes in a humid lungful of air, that something is terribly, horribly wrong. Dust and dirt blind his eyes to the world, but his limbs still work well enough to parse out the absence of her in an instant. 

Terror fills him—those great slabs of stone, that great creaking of the earth. Had it swallowed her whole and crushed her beneath its weight? By the time he pries his eyes open, there is an odd staccato in his chest that he realizes is the beating of his own heart. It has never done that before. 

There is no temple. No forest. No Agata. Only the imposing form of Mount Olympus, splitting open the sky with its jagged sides. 

The sight of it leaves an urge burning through him. To run to Zeus’ temple and shred the flesh from his bones. To throw himself at Hades’ feet and beg for a mercy that will not come. Anything, anything , rather than accept the facts before him. 

She is too far. Her life too short, if she still lives at all. 

He will never know what happened to her. It is a fate far worse than that which Zeus first inflicted on him. He digs his fingers into the wretched earth and howls. 

FRANCE, a generation later.

He makes it as far as the shores of Frankia before his knees give out from under him, and he finds himself sinking into the sand. Prettanikē, Alwion, Brittania. Her home. Her graveyard. A distant speck across the sea that he has battled through war torn lands to reach.  It has taken him too long, his journey a lost cause before it was begun. 

This, he thinks, was the trick Zeus wished to play on him. It had been too easy, to allow eternity to slip by unmarked. One lifetime spent alone is a tragedy, but a millenium of solitude is bound to fade into little more than miserable monotony in the end. 

I ought to have you chained to a boulder. Ought to have you pecked to death by starved ravens.

If time is the boulder, here are the ravens come home to roost. 

He turns his back to the crisp sea breeze and the swells of the ocean waves. Tells himself that at least this time he did not watch the world lay waste to her body; tells himself that’s enough. 

It isn’t. 

 

PORTUGAL, a world later.

It is something Zeus could not have foreseen. A place that has never known the name of the old gods, yet still knows the Thief’s gift. He follows the sailors from the shores of this well worn continent, stows away in the bottom of their ship, to set foot on brand new soil. He is, for the first time, no different from the men he walks amongst. A new face amongst a thousand new faces. 

He follows their path, traces their steps. 

This time, when someone asks his name, he has an answer. 

 

There is still a fear in this world, though the reverence  the old Gods had once enjoyed has faded. Instead there are new gods and new demons that the world has created instead. The weather cools. Harvests fail. Settlers, so far from home, start to see suspicion in every circumstance. A difficult time to be a nomad, and so, he had become a settler too. There was always a home to be found for helpful hands, afterall. 

He is taken in by a family from Brittania, or England as they’d left it, and he tries not to hear the echo of her voice in the lilting tones they have carried with them across the sea. His form, muscled and lithe as ever, is hewn to be a brutal thing, as useful for heaving beside an ox as it had been for Atlas to carry the Earth. 

Sweat trickles down his brow as he brings the axe down once more, the wood splintering clear down the middle. It is new to him, the feeling of exertion. This new-old world has held discoveries for him, though he, like the people truly of this land, has been walking the earth since civilization began. 

“Robert,” calls the voice of his new patriarch, Michael, “Let Alistair finish that. The new pastor’s arriving, he’ll need help with his horses.”

“Aye, sir,” he says, and tries to suppress the rumble in his chest that arises whenever he takes orders from a mortal, “I’ll be right there.”

“As quick as you can, son. I won’t have any man of God feeling unwelcome. Not in a town like Salem.” 

 

 

There is something warped and wicked about the men to be found here. They whisper between themselves, mutters of ‘heresy’ and ‘sacrilege’ following each of their enemies to a fiery grave.

The first time Robert sees a burning, he takes himself to the woods. Sits, with soil under his fingers and bark to his back, until he can stand the sight of his creation once more. Would it have been better, he wonders for the first time, to have left man shivering, if it kept them from this? If it had kept his most sacred of gifts from being desecrated by their cruelty?

He is gone for days, and met with mistrust when he returns. He shakes off their questions, shrugs away their concern. 

“God called me back to nature,” he says, because he knows that nonsense is the kind that Michael likes to hear, “The woods still have things to teach us.”

“Hm,” hums Michael, “I suppose you’ve been listening to our learnings after all. Well, there’s plenty of labor left for you. Best get to it.”

And so Robert goes back to his axe, and his scythe, and the feel of exhaustion trickling down his spine. He averts his eyes, for the first time, from the amber glow of flame, lest he spend the next millennium hearing the echoing screams of the poor souls lost to it. He works his hands bloody, breaks his back with his toil, earns the respect of those around him. 

Summer comes and goes, and Robert walks the streets of Salem with his eyes glued to his feet, stands and sits and sings in church with all the dedication of the faithful, while never once seeing the world around him and how it shifts and shimmers with new potential. Sundays pass over him with all the potency of watered wine, until he is jolted back to wakefulness by the promise of a full bodied red before him. 

“Robert!” calls Samuel when his sermon has finished, “I’ve heard about town that you’re the man to ask if I want something fixing. There’s a leak up in the eaves, my wife’s having awful trouble keeping the weens warm. Could you have a look at it for me?”

Robert gives his assent, as he has little else to do, and the next morning he finds himself scrambling up the roof of the Pastor’s cottage with tools in hand, fiddling with roof fittings until they look something akin to watertight. The wind picks up as he makes his way back down to solid ground, and he finds his ladder falling out from under him, and he makes a short, sharp plummet to the ground. 

There is a screech, and then a face is hovering over his, delicate fingers gripped tight at his shoulders as they try to shake him awake from an unconsciousness that did not come. “Sir? Sir are you alright?”

A tendril of flame kiss hair slips free from a bonnet, and Robert thinks he must be capable of taking a head wound after all. “Agata,” he whispers, though he is sure that is an impossibility. 

“Agatha,” corrects the girl before him, “Come on, we’d best get you up. Mama has some food  waiting inside for you, and she might be able to look at your head.”

“My head’s just fine,” he says, ignoring her hand to haul himself up. He doesn’t trust, yet, that this isn’t just some trick of the light. “And I’d best be going. Harvest won’t ready itself.”

There is an adorable little frown to her brow as she watches him go, and Robert finds his feet don’t work quite as he expects them to, dragging along the ground with reluctance rather than carrying him away from her as they should.

 

As the men and women of Salem head out into the fields, the fires that burn are those of warmth and comfort once more. Every hand is put to work as the fields are empty, the year’s final bounties brought in before everyone braces for what promises to be a bitter winter. 

Around too many of those fires, Robert finds himself tracing Agatha’s active form, watching as she flits between the faithful of her father's flock, playing with their children and chattering with their wives. 

He breaks when the last sheaths of wheat have been brought in, and the youth of the town are making merry out of sight of their elders. She glows in the bright light of their bonfire, and Robert is drawn to her like a moth to a flame, more than willing to let his wings crisp.

“Hello!” she calls as he approaches, mead spilling from the rough hewn goblet in her hand.

She is sitting all alone at the edge of the clearing, watching the proceedings with a little half smile on her face. Her cap is still affixed to her head, proper little thing that she is, but the braid she keeps looped beneath it has loosened, and tantalizing tendrils peek out at the nape of her neck. Robert is overcome, suddenly, by the urge to know its feel beneath his fingers, to find out if it is as soft as its shine suggests. 

“May I sit?” he asks, and a thrill of pride runs through him as she nods her assent. He has improved, since last they met, in the arts of man. Though there are a few he is yet to try.

“Of course!”

She shuffles along the log, ensuring there is a respectable distance still between them when he sits, and she is so sweet his teeth ache with it. They sit in silence together, watching on as the young folk get drunker, the night gets darker and bodies draw closer. He thinks they have the right idea.

“Would you like to dance, Agatha?” 

Her wide eyes stare up at him as he stands before her, hand outstretched. He can’t help but think of the last time her little hand was clasped in his, as they sprinted for safety as the earth shook and the world fell about their ears. He would challenge any god to blame him for wanting to build a better memory between them. For wishing that their flesh could meet in a kinder embrace than that which they have known so far, haunted by the echoes of his sin as they have been. 

His fingers twitch, his smile does too, and then Agatha is standing, and he is drawing her close. Her eyes flicker around them, terrified to be seen, and he points himself towards the crowd, lets her face the green of the trees, lest someone else dare covet the beauty that is his alone to hold. They do not follow the steps of their compatriots, jigging around with lewd laughter and fumbling fingers. They simply hold one another.

Her hands at his elbows; his at her waist. Swaying until the scuff of one shoe sends her tripping, falling into the tight circle of his arm’s embrace. 

“Careful, dear one,” he murmurs. 

Pressed against him, he feels the hitch of her breath as his words rumble through her. Her hands tighten imperceptibly around his waist, and then she pulls back from him, a bright blush burnishing her cheeks.

“I- I–” 

He gets no more from her than those few stuttered syllables before she is off, disappearing down the lane at a sprint. 

Despite himself, Robert laughs. For this is not like the other wicked worlds that have come before. In this world, there is tomorrow, and tomorrow, he will make her his.

 

He has found, of late, that Michael has more deliveries for the Pastor than he once did. That there are creaky floorboards, and ill-oiled doors in that godly house, and Robert offers his assistance to heal each ailment that plagues their family home. He does it out of duty, of course. Though duty to who, he doesn’t tell. 

The next time he sees her, he very nearly costs her six precious eggs. She is coming back to the main house from the chicken coop, bundled up against the cold, when the sight of him stops her dead in her tracks. So swift is her loss of momentum that the poor thing flies forward, saved only by the brace of his grip, basket saved by a whisker from a sticky end. 

“We have to stop meeting like this,” he says.

She jerks backwards, patting down her skirts with all the offended hauteur of a hen ruffling her feathers. “It is not I who has us meeting in such a way, sir.”

“Sir? Surely we know each other better than that, Agatha?”

“We most certainly do not,” she huffs, “Y-you just take liberties!”

“I thought you liked my liberties.”

Her beet red cheeks are the only response he gets before she shoves past him, and Robert lets out a deep bellow of a laugh into the chill air.  She has no way of knowing, of course, just how far he would go for her. But that is part of her loveliness, he supposes. 

 

They circle each other as the nights grow startlingly short, and a true frost starts to form across the ground they tread across. It is the first time he truly marks the passing of the seasons, watching as her sturdy boots bulk out with extra socks, her fine fingers disappear behind well worn gloves, and her hair is shrouded by a great woollen scarf that he aches to peek beneath. 

She softens to him, bit by bit. As he carries her wares home from the market, helps her patch up the scraped knee of one of the stupid village boys that trail after her like stray cats. He wants to yowl at them, establish once and for all that the only one feeding from the scraps of her table is him. But there is a quiet dignity in this version of his Agathe, and he would not harm that for the world, and so he follows her careful footsteps, treads not so much as a toe off the straight and narrow, and waits patiently for her love to come home to him. 

Well. As patiently as a man who has waited a millennium can hope to. Which is, in the end, not that patiently at all. 

 

The church pews have long since cleared by the time he joins her at the head of the aisle, resting a hand against the wood she leans against as his knuckles brush the tapered waist of her dress. She gasps in surprise, a frown of consternation marring the soft sweetness of her face as she turns to him. It is soothed into a smile when she takes him in, though it is bitten back as her eyes dart towards the doors, uncertainty and nerves warring in her gaze.

“Do not fret, little one. It is you and it is me.” The backs of his fingers rest against the soft flesh of her neck, and he can feel the rabbit-fast thump of her heart as it trembles below the surface.  “That is how it has always been, how it will always be.”

Her throat bobs with a swallow, and he can resist no further, pulling at the soft linen ties of her cap until she is free of it, flame red hair revealed to his adoring gaze once more. He cannot help but stare as the low lamp light catches at the soft strands and ignites them. He feels undone; he feels free. He feels like she is his.

“This is a sin,” she says, and if he worried more for her Gods, he might care more about safeguarding her soul. “You’re not my husband.”

“No,” he says, “No, I’m much more than that.”

I am your creator , he thinks, Your first breath and last gasp. I am the fire that keeps you warm, and you are the fuel that keeps me burning. 

“I don’t know that there can be more than that.”

“I’ll show you.” 

She is bird-like and delicate, his hands spanning her neck with such ease it’s alarming. She needs the barest of nudges to stand between his open knees, and then his rough, age-bitten lips are sliding against the soft plush of hers, and the Thief finds himself stealing sensation for himself anew. The swipe of her tongue against his. The feel of her jaw as it moves against his thumb. The soft sigh of pleasure she breathes into him, something he is so greedy for he chases it with abandon. 

They don’t hear the creak of the iron as the doors swing open. Nor the footsteps that carry her father over the threshold. It is only when she is wrenched from his grip that the acrid taste of accusation becomes reality. 

 

A storm rolls in, and Robert finds himself trapped in his little farmstead, gnawing at the walls like a stray cat as he is kept indoors. They have never seen rains like this, says Michael, and he and his family take to their knees in prayer as they thank god that their bounty had been brought in before the storm.

Robert has no such gratitude, knowing as he does that his bounty is locked away where he can’t reach. Damn the storm and the mortals’ fear of it, Robert had braved the wrath of Zeus for this girl, what was rain to him? But the feel of the earth moving beneath his feet, and the chance it had cost him, keeps him still. Perhaps, if he is careful, if he makes himself small like mankind, he will be allowed to keep her. 

Michael had pulled him aside that first night, and explained to him in careful, bitten off words what would be expected of him once the storm calmed. How laughable, that he thought Robert to care about society and scandal when Agatha lived and breathed in such proximity. Of course, he will take the silly vows of Samuel and his church and take the girl to wife. She is his in every way that matters already, what is it to him if he must swear before some foreign God to have those around them recognise it too?

The storm breaks, and Robert dresses in the best clothes Michael can find him, ready to do what is proper and ask the pastor for her hand. But it is not the pastor and his son that greets them when they venture down the dirt road into town. It is a great pyre, ready and waiting to be lit, and a downtrodden townspeople, unwilling to utter the name of the condemned.

Robert knows, though. Knows in the way none will meet his eye, in the pale face of little Jim Johnson and his timid warning that the pastor isn’t taking visitors. Michael takes his shoulder in a firm grip and turns them around, promising to send his wife to talk to the womenfolk and discover what has gone on. 

“It’s for the best, lad, that we find out now. No one wants a witch as a wife.” 

But Robert would have taken Agatha in any state he found her– maiden, mother or crone. And as he walks past the pyre they’ve built, he knows he will take just as he had at the start of it all, and steal her away into the night. 

 

A problem that Robert could not have foreseen, is that there is no night to steal her into. 

 

He has barely made it over the threshold of the house he has come to call home when footsteps thunder down behind him, a frantic little boy propelled to his door, fear bright in his eyes.

“They’re takin’ her Mister Robert, sir! They’re goin’ to light her up!”

Robert does not wait. Does not think. Does not breathe . He runs. 

 

The foolish sheep of Samuel’s flock scatter away from him as he barrels through their ranks, finally smelling the wolf they allowed amongst them. And oh, how he burns on this day. The impotent rage sizzling at his finger tips feels like it could scorch a man down to the sinew. Might well do so, if anyone dares to try and separate him and his Agathe again.

Far across the town square, he sees her. She is beaten, and bloody, and writhing in the arms of her captors. Her figure stands in sharp relief against the crowd, dwarfed by the pyre they drag her too, and every part of him revolts. He cannot do it again, cannot watch as she turns to ash and dust, all that blessed beauty lost on a cruel whim. 

“ENOUGH!” he bellows, with the force of a thousand fires behind his voice. 

Their fear is a living thing as they finally see him for all he is. It has been so long, since mortal eyes have beheld him, he had forgotten the awe they had once offered the Olympians. The men between him and Agatha tumble to the floor with choked off screams, and she is freed from the cold iron around her wrists with a sharp spark. 

When she raises her eyes to his, they swirl with fear and fate alike. One brief grasp of their hands, and he is pushing her, propelling her, sending her sprinting home with a choked off run. 

The power he wields threatens to burn right through him, to scorch at his own heart, but he holds fast, grasps at his unearthly cloak until he has given her the best chance he can hope to. Only then does he allow the elements to return to their natural state. Only then does the Pastor’s voice rise above the cacophony the Thief had created, and the men move to ambush him as one. 

He has lived too long as a mortal. Has tried too hard to fit into their weak and mewling mould. When the menfolk lay their hands on him, his struggle is a futile thing. He twists, and writhes, and calls curses down upon them from heavens that have not listened to him in hundreds of years. 

He cannot see her in the crowd. There is no way to know if his disruption has been enough to set her free. Where will she go, even if it has? How will she live? 

The fight falls out of him. In the end, they drag a limp creature to their pyre. The Thief feels the twisted, bastardised burn of his own gift, and in the scorching agony of it, he remembers.

Did you not see how she’d suffer for your treachery?

He can imagine no greater suffering than this. 

 

OLYMPUS, again.

The rage that washes through him upon this awakening is a molten thing. He’s let the Titan within lay dormant for too long, has slipped from place to place on this ungrateful earth like a spectre—like a mortal, in both name and form. Now. Now he remembers what it was to have the power of creation under his thumb, to sit in the skies before even the Olympians called it home. 

There are no clouds in the sky to witness this awakening. No storm to screech its victory overhead. For no deluge could extinguish the fire he lights on this cold morning, desperate and hungry as it is.

With each spring comes new life to old things, but fall’s grip turns the dying forest to kindling, catching quick and spreading fast as his fury burns through him. It burns and burns. Until ash falls like soft snow onto scorched earth; until the lakes boil and give way to scalding mists that he does not feel across his skin. This is what Zeus had wanted for her, this is the penance he’d meant her to endure for the crimes he’d committed. For the love he’d cupped close to his heart all those centuries ago like flame to her waiting palms. Every bit of suffering, every lifetime they lost to the fury of the Gods and to fate—all of it, his fault.

And by all the old Gods and the new, it is his vow—not Rihberaht, not Robert, but his, the Thief—that should he ever lay eyes on Zeus again, he will force him to feel this same fate.

 

He’s found solace in the ash on his tongue as he consumes— liquors and wines, Pelmeni and Blini. All of it settling like rocks in a belly fit to bursting with the weight of it all. For a gluttonous heathen, he is starved— eats and drinks his way across the continent as the years pass by in a blur. He eats and eats, drinks and drinks.

And waits.

She finds him again in Petrograd mere days after the start of the new year. She’s presented to him like a boar for slaughter, an offering to the Gods that people have long since stopped worshipping. She shakes and shivers, perhaps with cold but probably fear, as his Cook takes her by the arm and urges her to stand before him.

“Give your name, girl,” she chides after a long moment of silence has passed. A moment that lasts a lifetime—seconds somehow stretching to minutes as he takes her in. “ Toropit’zya!”

She was softer last time, rounder in the cheeks and brighter in the hair. This life has clearly been unkind to her thus far, a thought that makes his heart ache for her. So he doesn’t stretch a hand out and trace the hollow above her collarbones; doesn’t tell her that he knows all that makes her. That he loves her and everything will be well,  if only for a little while. Instead, he waits—watching her avoid his gaze in her shabby, too-short dress that is clearly two sizes two small. 

“Agasha, ser.” Her voice is melodic, smooth like honey but burning in his belly like vodka. It’d been so long since he’d heard that voice. 

“Agasha,” he repeats, testing it on his tongue. Watches her shiver again and tells himself this life will be different. That he will keep himself held aloft from her and not bring wrath down upon their heads once more. Separates himself from her further by letting his voice go pleasant, neutral, as he feeds her false names. “I am Rurik. Welcome to your new home.”

Then he turns and leaves before her eyes can meet his, afraid of what he may find in their depths.

 

He manages to avoid her, neat as a pin, for days that slide into weeks like socked feet across wooden floors. He works alongside Nicholas, whose grip over Russia loosens by the day. Works himself until he’s empty, lets her place meal after meal that smells like heaven and tastes like soot before him. Over and over until winter gives way to the early days of February and the smell of bread carries him inside late one night by his nose. 

“ Povar , you’ve outdone yoursel— oh.” He stops as he sees her, bread steaming on the serving platter as she sets it down before him with his wine and cubes of Rossiyskiy cheese. “Agasha. I didn’t know it was you.”

“Yes, ser,” she hesitates, looking nervous and uneasy as she stands before him in a dress that is better fitting. He’d sent her with a pouch of coins to the seamstress in town, and he can’t help but notice the way it compliments the slopes of her body in a way that makes hunger gnaw anew in his belly. He staves it off by reaching for the warm loaf of bread instead, buttery and fragrant in his nose despite the flavorless taste that he knows will settle on his tongue. “Cook has gone home for the night. She said that I could fatten you up by myself tonight.”

Rurik’s lips twitch despite himself; for all the fire that she’d lost from one life to the next in her hair, she’s still radiant in spirit—lit from within in a way that can’t help but shine through. 

“Is that right?” He asks, tone playful— too comfortable, too soft. He’s meant to keep himself back from her, to avoid tempting the wrath of the Gods once more. Still, a damned fool if there ever was one, he adds, “I didn’t realize you thought me a plump little piglet.”

Her mouth drops open and her cheeks flame ( Gods, how he loves her).  

“N-No, ser. I—” At his laugh, her mouth purses, lips drawing together in a pucker that makes his skin itch with the need to reach out and trace the bow, the seam where they meet. “I see. You are mocking me. ”

“I would not say mocking,” he teases, voice smooth and low in the dim light of the dining room. “That would imply that I am doing so maliciously, Ptichka.”

Her face scrunches, but there’s an amusement in her gaze that makes him feel lighter than he has in so many years. Like this, with the sun long since set and the muted light in the room catching at the green of her eyes, there’s a tenderness to him that he hasn’t felt since Salem all those years ago. Since he’d asked her to dance and taken something he shouldn’t have, no matter how small. Even here, worn down and weary from the struggles this life cycle had offered, he finds her too endearing—too hard to resist. 

It’s why, when she says I’m no little bird, he lets his fingers find the inside of her wrist. Lets the pads of his fingertips trace against her fluttering pulse and says then why does your heart sing like a hummingbird for me?

He watches the words hit her. Watches as she swallows thickly but does not withdraw from him. Wonders for the first time if perhaps, after all this time, part of her knows him. If perhaps the same yearning, empty, aching between his ribs is mirrored in her own. He’d never truly allowed himself to consider it—had barely drank a taste from her mouth out of fear of taking more than he ought, of the desperation that’s simmered in his belly for her for centuries. It is that fear that makes him finally release her.

“You should retire,” he tells her, though there’s a reluctance in his tone that even he recognizes for what it is. Knows he’ll burn his throat raw from the vodka he’ll down tonight to keep from thinking of her. 

“I should,” she answers hoarsely. Then, when neither of them move, “it is late.”

“Very,” he answers. Then, when he thinks the last of his willpower will snap like winter twigs beneath his boots, she finally blinks and steps back from the table. 

“Goodnight, ser.”

“Goodnight…” He hesitates, watches as she sweeps out of the room and takes a piece of him with her. Only then does he add, “... Dusha moya.”

 

They dance around each other for days that feel like an eternity. He thought his suffering was at its worst without her, but having her this close is a punishment he would not wish on the darkest of beasts that prowl the abyss of Tartarus. It’s only when she sets a steaming bowl of solyanka down before him a week later that he sees the feverish flush to her face—the haze of sickness in the depths of her eyes like a beacon calling to him from the shoreline. 

“Sit,” he tells her, rising from his seat and pulling out his chair, gesturing for her to settle down into the seat. 

“I’m fin—” She cuts off, probably seeing the determination in his gaze and realizing it’s a battle that won’t be won. She lets out a huffy breath of a sound, but acquiesces at last. “I do not need coddling, ser—”

“Rurik, please.” He pushes the soup towards her and gestures at it. “Now, eat. You’re sick.” She tries to protest but he leans forward and places the back of his hand to her forehead. “Pizdets, Agasha. You’re burning up. Why didn’t you stay home?” 

She’s quiet for a long moment, quiet and timid when she finally answers. 

“I cannot afford to miss work, se— Rurik. ” A slight flush overtakes her. “Plus, I can take care of myself, and Cook would skin me if I did not show.”

Anger simmers inside of him at her words, but he buries them down—doesn’t tell her that he would send away each and every last one of his staff if it meant she could be happy. Doesn’t tell her that he chafes at how unkind this cycle has been to her and that, though he promised to keep himself from her, the simple fact is she needs him.  

So he simply lets her eat and watches her quietly; shushes her gently when she protests his words of you’ll stay here tonight. Guides her up the stairs and past the bedrooms he knows he should put her in for the night—opulent guest rooms that have long since sat dormant, begging for company. But instead he turns his back on her as she strips out of her sarafan and settles between the sheets of his four poster bed. It’s only when she sighs softly in satisfaction that he finally turns back towards her. Knows in his bones that he should leave, even more so when she asks will you stay? Knows that this tether between them is dangerous to give into. 

Yet it is not a no that leaves his mouth when he finally dares to open it.

“Anything for you.”

Always.

 

He wakes to  moonlight and soft, supple skin in his palms—a body writing against his own in desperation. It takes him a full minute to realize his surroundings, and another to realize that, though her body had eaten up the fever burning up her insides, it now burns anew. 

“Agasha,” Rurik whispers. “ Dusha moya, my love. Wake up.”

She opens eyes that shine with a need he knows are mirrored in his own—how could he not want her? A better question is, despite this, how could he deserve her?

Like the damned Thief he is; he takes. Presses his knee between the spread of hers and presses up, up to where she’s tender for him until she whimpers.

“Do you need more?”

Her answering nod and the bite of her teeth into the plush of her lower lip are his undoing.

“Oh, little one,” he sighs. 

This is a dance even the gods know, a thing written in his bones, waiting for her, since he was given that first name that time has long since stolen from the grasp of his mind. It matters little, that hers is the first body to call to his like this, that his hands have never touched another, and cannot now. 

There are still gifts to be given, and she is so willing to receive them, twisting her body to suit the command of his voice and her own need until he’s shifted her onto her back and rid her of her undershirt, telling her to touch where I can’t, let me see you.

She’s beautiful like this, soft and liquid as she moves against the heel of her own palm—tucks a finger into the slick, wet of herself and moans for him. He lets his eyes trace her collarbones, her breasts, the curls at her cunt, and drinks her in until he feels like he’s drunk off her. This is true magic; not the life he’d breathed into her all those years ago, not the mud and dirt underneath his fingernails as he sculpted her from nothing. She was his before she’d breathed her first breath; is somehow still his as she inhales a ragged gasp now.

“Please,” she whimpers; reaches for him but he cannot touch her. Knows if he does he won’t be able to stop, but can’t seem to stop from taking what he ought not to. Had barely managed to keep from rolling atop her and sinking himself within the heat of her body.

“Two fingers, Ptichka. Show me how you burn for me.” 

“No, no—” She reaches for him again, arms like vines stretching towards the sun, but doesn’t she see? He is her damnation, not her salvation. “I need you.”

“You can do it, trust me.” Then, because he’s wretched, “do you want me to join you? Hm? Just a bit, little one?”

At her nod, he lets out a low curse, barely more than a breath as he undoes the button of his trousers and slips his cock free of its confines. Her mouth parts in surprise, forming a sweet little ‘o’ that makes him groan as he pumps his hand over the hard length of himself. Over and over, until her hand matches his rhythm and their bodies work in tandem. Their bodies hum to a tune as ancient as the Gods themselves. Words fall from his mouth, mine and forever and going to come soon, spilling like promises from a dying man that she answers with yesyesyes and more. Again and again until her eyes roll back and her mouth sags open in relief—until he bends his body over her own and sinks his teeth into the skin at her shoulder as he roars his release. 

In the aftermath there is no discomfort, no uncertainty. No worry of boundaries crossed and rules broken. There is only him and her, encased in the safety of his arms. 

And this time, he promises, I won’t let anything take her from me.

 

There is bliss in his bones and the smell of smoke in his nose as he comes to some time later. The moon is still high and Agasha is warm beside him, a contented sound leaving her as he yawns and squints into the smoke and darkness of the room.

Then it hits him.

Smoke.

“Wake up!” Rurik shouts, shaking her until her eyes fly open in panic. The air is thick with the clog of smoldering wood, and he knows instinctively that they don’t have long. “Quick— fire!”

They race out the bedroom door to find it burning its way up the staircase, blazing brighter than the flames he’d stolen from Hephaestus’s forge that had sent them down this dreadful path. Demolishing boards and rugs and ancient paintings, all of which means nothing to him—not when he needs to get her out of here.

They’re trapped, the only option is back into the bedroom. He shuts the door, hacking a cough as he fights for oxygen. Beside him, her eyes water and she gasps for breath between the heaving of her desperate lungs. Out, out, I need to get her out.

“Quick, the window.” He moves to the sill, which protests beneath his fingers as he yanks at it until— finally— it comes open with a pop. Outside the street is ablaze, infernos in every home. The rebellion, he thinks. Nicholas. But then he hears the groan of wood from beyond the bedroom door and knows there’s no time left to wonder what will become of the others— only her.

He races to the bed and ties bedsheets to blanket, creating a rope that he hopes will carry her safely down to the dried flower beds and snow beneath his window. He holds the rope tight in his grasp and feels the hum of strength, of magic, in his bones and knows he will not drop her. 

“Go,” he tells her. Then, when she hesitates, “Agasha, go.”

It’s in her face, then. The fear, the worry, the what about you? But he doesn’t have it in her to tell her that he has died for her before, that he’d do it a hundred times over. That there is no world where he would let her fall before him. That, though he knows somewhere Zeus smiles down upon him, cycle after cycle, it is worth it, always worth it.

Instead he leans forward and presses a kiss full of worry and pain and longing to her lips and tells her it, just once so she knows.

“I have loved you, will always love you.” Then he presses her towards the window. “Now, go.”

He can barely see her through the smoke as she climbs down the precarious ladder he’s made for her. Still, his arms do not waiver, not even as the room is engulfed in the smog. It’s only when her boots touch softly to the ground beneath her that he sags in relief. He’d done it, again he had done it.

He settles down against the floor when the smoke becomes too thick even from the sill of the window, desperate for his last gasps of whatever air he can breathe. Presses his face to warm wood and lets the consumption take him. Because she’s free; because she’s safe. 

Because his labor here is done. 

 

OLYMPUS. 

For a moment there is silence, no heartbeats, no breath and then he is gasping, clawing at his chest as he pictures the sweetness of her face giving way to smoke as he remembers. Then he looks around and realizes where he is once more.

He beats his fist against the stone of the mountain—waits for it to shake with the anger that boils his blood. Instead it holds firm as he pounds his knuckles against the rock over and over. Until his flesh breaks open; until the softness of him yields to stone and blood drips down towards the dirt that never does him the kindness of holding his body down. Refuses to save him from the fate of saving her. 

He turns away, bloody and battered, and prepares to crawl home to her once more.

 

The O’Haras move in next door three days into a bender of scotch and sin, and shift the world on its axis for him once more. Not because he doesn’t anticipate seeing her, that is the one constant that the agony of this life offers him, but because she’s different here. Her hair nearly leeched clean of the fire he’d given her so long ago—drained even more than in Russia. The years have grown closer and closer with each lifetime–he has barely cleared the smoke from his lungs and already she has returned to him. Yet before him she’s fading fast, and something akin to panic grips his chest; how much time do we even have left?

This life also brings with it complications: things like friendships and franchises and the desperation of his own longing that he’d thought he could rinse out before he saw her again. That hunger that she had stoked within him in Salem and let roar in Russia now feels like an inferno. White hot and melting at his insides, stoking need within him to a crescendo as he watches her bake in the Priory kitchen in the high heat of summer. Somehow flaring even brighter as she pulls her hair to the side and he sees a scattering of birthmarks across her shoulder, a crescent that looks like the teeth he’d marked her with in Russia as he’d roared his release against the soft skin of her belly. 

Still he tries—through Declan, through Venturer, through Cameron— to keep himself from her. To be a man who can exist at the edges of her life without giving in to the greatest temptation he has ever known. Tells himself that he can watch her with Seb; that he can let her be happy, but then she whispers it in the kitchen after too much wine and merriment— only he’s not you.

When he kisses her it feels like coming home; it feels like the piece of himself that has been missing since he last saw her has slotted back into place. She is the sweetness that rots away at the teeth, and she is the craving he cannot shake no matter how many times he is punished for it. 

So he doesn’t stop her when she follows him out the front door, doesn’t tell her that she should leave him be and be happy without him. Instead he lets her get in the passenger seat of her car and take the drive with him back to Penscombe, the soft auburn of her hair dark in the moonlight. Still, he knows the exact shade, could pick the swatch of it out of a book if asked. 

He lets her greet his dogs at the door, the only comfort he’s allowed himself in the later years of mourning what could have been if things were different. Lets her trail her fingers along the drywall as she follows him wordlessly through the house and back to his bedroom.

A better man would send her home; an even greater one would escort her. 

But he, despite the years between him and his origin, is not a man. 

So he takes his time with her, settles her back against the soft cotton of his sheets and tells himself that this time there is no fire, no smoke, no rocks, no urgency. They’ve had months together—perhaps Zeus has grown tired of his suffering. Perhaps in this one, they can be together.  

So he lets himself have it; sinks himself inside her on a ragged breath that he’s been holding since he laid eyes on her for the first time. Lets the roll of her hips meet his own as he trails his mouth over the crescent of her birth marks. She lets out a gasp that sounds like sunshine feels on chilled skin, like the laughter of children he’ll never father. He shudders and she presses him in close, like she can’t get enough of him. Like she doesn’t bear the mark of his teeth in her skin—like they aren’t bound in this love they can’t, or perhaps won’t, give up. 

When morning comes, dawn rising on tender, sore bodies that have spent the night learning one another, he thinks that maybe this is how it starts—how one truly becomes man. That humanity has seeped from the body she’d stripped bare for him last night and into the shell he’d become throughout the years of loving and losing her. 

Then Cameron bursts through the door and he knows that this wretched curse will never shatter.

“It’s not an and Rupert, it’s an or.” Cameron’s voice leaves no room for questions. Unyielding as she stares down the rumpled pair of them, who had slid into clothes like the illicit lovers they were. “It’s me or it’s her.”

He thinks for a moment, of what it means for Taggie to love him. Of the suffering that comes when they find one another. Pauses just long enough for her eyes to fill with tears and her face to crumple. 

“No, Tag—” but she’s gone, out the door and down the hall before he can tell her stop or that it’s never been a choice, it’s always you.

She’s in the car when he makes it out the front door, shirt buttons still undone as he watches her get behind the wheel and fling the gravel up behind her tires as she peels out of the driveway. Behind him, Cameron’s voice echoes through the house—angry words shouted at deaf ears because she’s leaving, she’s leaving me. And maybe that’s for the best; maybe it would spare them both to let her walk out of his life. 

But he knows that there is no cycle, no time, where he would let her suffer when he can help it. So he doesn’t turn back to Cameron; is too selfish to free himself from the loop of loving Taggie, no matter the end result. Instead, he turns to the woman in his doorway and speaks the truth for the first time since Russia.

“It will always be her that I love.”

Then he gets behind the wheel of his car and follows after her, winding down back roads that lead away from the Priory and watching the speedometer creep higher and higher as he gains on her.

It happens in a flash, one moment there is nothing but the trees, the bridge, and the river that flows beneath it. The next, she swerves, narrowly missing a cat that has dashed in her path. Perhaps if there was more time he’d think it a cruel joke, a prank by Zeus himself, to set the animal in her way. To have her spirit be so kind that she would choose the wall of a bridge over the life of another. 

Whatever it is, destiny or deception, he can’t stop it from happening either way. Watches in slow motion as the car slams into the wood of the bridge and careens over the edge. The tires of his car squeal in protest as he slams on the brakes and throws the door open. There’s no time for thought, no option for hesitation because the car is sinking and she’s inside it.

He jumps in, the chill of the water rushing up to meet him as he dives through the surface and down into the depths. He fights the current; he fights the fear that grips him. Fear that only grows as he pulls the door and finds it jammed by a log that rests against it. Inside, the cabin is filling with water and Taggie’s face is etched in lines of panic. 

He gestures for the passenger side, for her to follow him to it and try to open it from the inside. But the waterline only rises, the pressure increasing from both sides. He knows she won’t be able to open it. Between the cage of his ribs, his lungs protest—begging for air that he refuses to seek out. There is no world where he leaves her. If her journey is to end in a watery grave, then he shall take a knife to the threads of fate and drown. 

  He tries the door from the outside, tries to beat against it with his hands, then when that is unsuccessful, his feet. He’s stronger than this, a Titan. There is no door that should be able to withstand the force of him.  But here, now, he feels more mortal than eternal—more man than ever before. Feels the siphoning of power through the siev of his body, leeching away and leaving him helpless. He feels it for the first time since he’d blown breath into her lungs and intertwined their destinies together—a finality to this life. A certainty that this is where it ends. 

Rupert’s lungs are aching, begging for air in a way he has never felt. This, he thinks as he watches her pound the heels of her hands against glass that won’t break beneath his immortal palms, is torment. This is the suffering Zeus had intended. Not the centuries of cycling through his wrath, not the time in between where he was little more than a husk. This, knowing that she will die again and there is nothing he can do to stop it, is true damnation. He’d take the ravens; he’d take the boulder.

His vision is blurring; his body protesting as he fights not to inhale lungs full of river water. Watches the same in her and knows their final moments for what they are. But he doesn’t look away as her eyes shut and the bubbles cease; uses the last of the air in his lungs one final time and presses his hand to the glass of the door.

“My Agathe,” he gurgles through water.

Then, at last—nothing.

 

The girl is young, red in the curls of her hair and racing down winding walkways as her mother calls out for her to slow down, my darling, not too far behind her. She doesn’t listen, letting her feet eat up the pavement beneath her as her mother’s voice grows softer as the distance between them grows. She finds what she’s looking for and ducks behind the stone; makes herself small, smaller, as small as she can get. Tucks her face down towards the grass that tickles at her arms and waits.

“I can see you, you know.” Her mother’s voice is soft, laughter carrying on the wind towards her hiding place. “Come out, come out silly girl.” 

The girl leaps up, makes herself big and stretches herself wide as she lets out a rah! Her mother laughs, blonde hair falling down about her shoulders as she tips her head back and shows the whites of her teeth. She feels so proud, seeing her mum laugh like that, it makes her race into arms that stretch wide to receive her as she wraps her arms around her in a hug. 

“My angel girl,” Mummy says with a kiss to her hair. Then, “you remembered from last time.” 

Her mother turns her to face the stone, etched with letters that now finally form words. Last time they’d come, there’d been only letters. Now she stares at the words through the blonde of Mummy’s hair and realizes they’re names.

“Where are they?” The girl asks, wondering why their names are here, in this place where stones line every corner and names are etched into every single one. Her mother sighs, a choked noise that sounds like sadness, and the girl turns and buries her face in the soft smells of comfort and cotton. 

“Together,” Mummy replies finally. Holds her for a long time as they stand together in the grass by the stone. They stand for a long time, her in her mother’s embrace and the birds calling in the distance. Then, when she’s about to ask when they can leave, her mother lets out another long sigh. “Come on, darling. Let’s go get iced cream. Say goodbye to your aunt.”

“Bye Auntie Taggie,” she says and takes her mother’s hand. She usually likes to run ahead but today, now, she knows that Mummy needs this. Lets her clutch their palms together all the way to the car and thinks of that stone no more.