This is a project I’ve been working on since November of last year and am excited to put some feelers out there for. This story will be exploring difficult topics such as suicidal thoughts and attempts, self injury, and mental illness in general. This is not a story about how love conquers and cures, but how having someone there to dance in the darkness with you can make that bit of difference to motivate you to climb your way out together eventually or at the very least to help make it feel less lonely. Beyond that, this is a story about how family can be more than the one that you’re born into and that form of love is often the most powerful of them all.
This is the story about how Death learns to live again.
Thanatos does not get sad. They get contemplative, reserved, introspective. But never sad. But they do get tired and lately in the darker hours, in the deepest nights, an entity lurks in the corner of their vision. It has their face, their voice, but its too wide smile glints like a blade under moonlight and their voice has a lilt like it finds everything entertaining, perhaps especially everything Thanatos does.
It begins to invite itself to everywhere Thanatos goes and everything Thanatos does. Thanatos tries not to let their thoughts known to the entity, but it is a part of them, and thus, anything can be used as ammunition for a being who you slightly suspect is out to destroy you.
When the fatigue gets too heavy, the weight of their duties too overwhelming, the entity has a solution. For every excuse that Thanatos throws at it, it has a rebuttal to give right back. Thanatos isn’t the only one who does what they do, just the only one who does it as gentle. But who makes it gentle for them? They could tell someone that they’re exhausted, that the work has become an unmanageable weight that they’ve been carrying alone since time immemorial or… they could just simply stop. Stop the ledgers, stop the guiding. Stop living.
But stopping, unmaking oneself as a god isn’t as simple a task as when a mortal. The entity introduces Thanatos to Chaos who offers them a day to live as a mortal to go through with their plans. However, there is a caveat being that if they aren't successful, they won't ever have the opportunity again and will revert to immortality.
For a being of gentle succession, Thanatos has an extremely hard time finding what they want to be their violent end until the entity leads them to a skyscraper in the In Between (an area that is outside of time and place, somewhere just beyond the veil of the Underworld towards the mortal realm). By the time they’ve made it to the top of the building, it’s already nearing the final hour until Chaos’ deal is null.
Thanatos’ newly mortal body has opinions about being this high above everything and panic begins to set in despite their mind already being made up. The entity is there, not goading them on, but gently reminding them why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s never portrayed as outright malevolent, always smiling, always pleasant. At one point of time, Thanatos fantasizes that Hades seizes them before they even jump off the roof and the entity snaps them back to reality and reminds them that all that is here is them, the roof, and the decision they have to make. And that’s the final push that Thanatos needs to step off the ledge.
The fall is violent and bruising, and they’re knocked unconscious before they ever even hit the ground, but they never do because Hades is actually there, catching them. Six feet. That was all the distance between Thanatos’ bargained mortal body and the asphalt until Hades arrested their fall. Thus, Hades breaks the contract with Chaos, returning Thanatos to immortality, but still leaving some pretty heavy physical damage from the fall and residual traces of mortality since Chaos likes… well, Chaos.
Hades takes Thanatos to be healed by his nephew, Apollo, on Olympus. The entire time that Hades isn't sure whether Thanatos will wake up, he's questioning everything he's ever said or done regarding them. He vows to do better if he gets another chance at making things right.
Thanatos does wake up eventually and Hades sticks true to his own word. He tells Thanatos he's going to stay the entire time that they're going to be there, even when Thanatos keeps trying to push him away under the guise of very reasonable logical reasons to do with their realm. Apollo proves to be much more than a healer of the physical wounds and turns into a sort of counselor for Thanatos who slowly learns to let others in to the private pain that they’ve been holding onto for centuries. Hades’ ward, little Persephone, also plays a part in Thanatos’ recovery by offering light and life in the way a young goddess of spring can. Together, Hades, Apollo, and Persephone show Thanatos that even while the entity will try to convince them that an ending is the only way out, there are always people there to be underground with you too until you can find the light again.
(Note: I wanted to do something a little different with Persephone, so I went with the young, childlike goddess route. She's supposed to be basically like the equivalent of the mortal age of ten or so in the story. A bubbly and bright little flower who will talk incessantly about singing fungi to Thanatos until they're no longer so much in their head.)
I haven’t written it all out yet, but that’s the general gist. And it also has a playlist of all Eve songs! https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7m0452OcHvGnzg3q637iT0?si=748089e0b6b04c4c
pixelskylines
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
discoholicmusic
ellievsbear
