NB: this is a rewrite of an older hadestown fanfiction that i published on here a long time ago!!! i really missed this fandom guys and I'm so unbelievably excited for everything that's happening with this show in the next couple of months (i.e. obc return, hadestown Australia)!!!
Something otherworldly that suspends Eurydice in Orpheus’ orbit. After all, something has to hold the tale together, and that something is compelling and magnetic, inexplicable and unstoppable.
The three sisters have named the something “fate,” and exchange looks of glee whenever the word slithers from their mouths.
“Fate keeps the world turning, and the story will play as long as the world still turns,” they always say, voices soft as the thread they spin and sharp as the scissors they wield. They have always thought themselves wise, the sisters three. “Can you conclude the syllogism yourself, Hermes?”
But what is a story without its designated teller? Where would the narrative be without a silver-clad psychopomp darting from one ending to another beginning? If fate had brought Hermes to the story, then he’s likely got a part to play in the wider picture. They’re all just cogs in an engine; an engine that keeps this story rolling.
For starters, the story’s the same; it’s always the same. There’s always a god-blessed boy who tries his darn hardest and a songbird of a girl who only knows how to survive, but the details have blurred over time. Well, at least he thinks they’ve blurred; immortality doesn’t guarantee that you remember everything that happens in your impossibly long life, especially not when you’re only going to live for longer, and longer, and longer.
Sometimes, Eurydice appears earlier, a tad more desperate than she should be. Sometimes, she leaves a little later, lingering by the station like a drying leaf clinging to its branch before it’s swept away by an autumnal breeze. Sometimes, Orpheus takes a little longer to get to the land below. Sometimes, he chooses a shorter route. Sometimes, he spends more time trying to get out of the land of the dead alive.
Regardless of how the lovers cross into each other’s lives, though, the story is always the same. He sings; she falls. She dies; he tries.
And Hermes has always found himself responsible for keeping this train of a tale rumbling along the tracks until it reaches a fork in the road. He’s never seen what it looks like on the other side;
something inside him crumbles every time he realises the train’s only ever going to go in one direction. It’s the way the story goes, after all. He’s nothing but the narrator, and there’s no room in a story for the narrator to write his own ending, no matter how bleak things look.
The boy’s always gotta turn; the girl’s always gotta go back. It’s her fate, after all; it’s both of their fates. And fate is what keeps the story from rolling on, and on, and on, down the road to hell and back up again. It’s his job to keep the train rumbling along the railroad line ‘til it gets back to the beginning.
In this case, the beginning is defined as a station where a goddess graces the floor with her presence six months every year, where a poor boy runs underfoot as he’s moulded into the story’s guitar-wielding hero, where a hungry girl learns to let loose for the first time in her short, short life. It’s where love, in its purest form, is allowed to blossom for a little while.
He claps his hands together. The lights go dark.
It’s where the world begins and where the world ends.
