FOR: @herarhearp WHERE: the XENIOS ESTATE; GARDENS WHEN: 2130.01
‘Mother’ is a word he hasn’t uttered in nigh thirty years now, not since he’d been seven and stood in black static, watching them lay the woman who’d birthed him to rest in cold earth. The soft syllables made a home in the hollow spaces between his ribs then, where they had been content to lie dormant and harmless most days of the year..until this woman came along and ruined that state of equilibrium.
‘Father’ is a role easier to replace—not easy, mind, but easier certainly. It helps that his father dies in front of him, red on white on polished marble a tangible thing he can at least categorize and process as real. It helps more that he has a face to pin the blame upon, and that face is soon removed from becoming a factor in any fledgling schemes of vengeance that may have taken root. So when Zeus steps into that recently vacated placing in his life, he accepts the replacement willingly enough.
Alas, the same cannot be said for Hera.
Twenty-three years have passed and still he hasn’t learned better. This he discovers when he stumbles across her in the gardens, purely by chance and yet, he suspects, guided. After all, he’s always known this to be one of her haunts. The silence stretches on, surprise giving way quickly to an awkward tension that he is helpless to dispel, not when ‘mother’ is an ugly denial crawling up his throat to curl—something sweet gone sour—on his tongue. He never was good with words, so he settles for something generic, bland and, most importantly, safe. “Welcome back.”