Xenios estate, outdoors, during the Heteraidia festival.
@hephaestusgalani
The pool around the far side of the Xenios estate is empty this late at night, but all the lights are on, purple and blue beams shooting up from the edges and bouncing off the gilded tiles, silver flood lights arcing elegantly into the water like divers. A lone holo-toy circles one of the ladders, a life-sized dolphin in pulsing pink neon, its tail waving back and forth lazily. Across from him, the side of the pool facing away from the house overlooks a cliff’s edge, a view into a lower section of the city unfurling below it, a thousand different blinking lights in every color, Olympe more alive than ever during the all-night parties of the festival. Sisyphus wonders if it ever really gets dark out here, this far into the city; settles on no, probably not. He always found it fitting that Hades kept his house so far underground, safe and secret as some crucial organ. That Zeus Rhea sleeps here, at the center of his own crawling universe, seems fitting for him too.
The bubbling of the jacuzzi is loud enough to drown out his uneven breathing, making his senses feel dulled, distant. Sisyphus takes out the last little wilted piece of the purple joint from his pocket. Tries to light it with the lighter he stole from the bar, but his hands are shaking too much, and he fumbles. Sends the lighter careening into the pool drain with a metallic clatter.
“Fuck!” Sisyphus crushes the joint between his fingers and throws it in the drain too. He runs both hands down his chest, pressing his shirt around him, trying to calm down. Trying to ignore how much he smells like a smoky bar. The touch hurts the banged-up parts of his hands he had forgotten about, but that’s helpful in his own way– grounding, the way pain can be.
The liquor has faded enough that he can’t pretend this isn’t a bad idea, a rash decision in a night of them, but after his nearly-blown cover in the bar, the glimpse of his own future fate, he’s desperate. A year of inching progress was bad enough aboard Pontius, its never-ending horizon like a promise, an infinity in seasick purgatory. But every minute in Olympe feels like borrowed time, the wind-up to a joke at his own expense. When the punchline comes, he knows it’ll end with his blood across the marble.
He hears a rustle of movement behind him, back by the rows of lounge chairs, and half-turns. “Oh, hey,” he says, which– isn’t quite what he meant to say, something more charming perhaps, but his eyes are burned from staring into the bright lights of the pool, and he has to squint to see into the dim, so perhaps it’s a losing cause anyway. “Thanks for responding to my Tal message. I was hoping you’d still be up.”