SIAT Hermione please! Or dealer’s choice! You’re the best!!
After his mother returns to the underworld, Zagreus says that he can’t survive on the surface for longer than a few minutes.
Zagreus lies.
He laughs off Than’s concern and Meg’s frowns and tries not to feel too terrible about keeping secrets from the people he loves.
He discovers something about himself on accident. He hadn’t even tried to make it far from the underworld’s entrance, had sat himself down on the cold ground and looked out on the ocean, feeling the weak sunlight on his face. He counts the birds that pass overhead until painful spasms wrack his body and he succumbs to his home pulling him back.
When he passes that place the next time he makes it past his father, it’s different.
The place where his body had died has changed. No snow covers it and dark green grass peeks through, darker than what he’d seen in his mother’s garden.
He steps on this spot and takes a startled breath, then another.
It doesn’t hurt to breathe.
The air of the mortal world always pricks at his lungs, but here it’s easy. It’s nothing. It feels like he’s back in the underworld again, as if death isn’t reaching for him.
He stand in that patch of dark green grass for a long time, far longer than he’s ever stood on the surface before. Nothing hurts. The styx doesn’t come from him.
He lies down on the cold snow and blood instantly floods his mouth. He dies choking.
The next time, the spot of dark green grass has grown bigger. There’s a slim stem protruding from the ground, a delicate little plant that he can’t name. He hadn’t thought about this. He hadn’t considered this.
He’s not just a son of Hades.
He’s Persephone’s child too.
On his next run through the underworld, he stops by Eurydice’s corner of Asphodal. This is something he wishes he could ask his mother, but he doesn’t want to raise anyone’s suspicions. She presses a bottle of porridge into his hands and he asks, “How did you make things grow? You’re a nymph, so that’s something you did, right?”
She startles, giving him a considering look, but thankfully doesn’t ask any questions. “Well, Prince, for the mortals it took a lot of work. But I just sort of – willed things to exist, and then they did. You just need some conviction.”
“Conviction,” he repeats, trying not to sound skeptical.
Eurydice’s lips quirk up in the corners. “I don’t think anything but poms can grow here. But if anyone could do it, it would be you. You’re stubborn enough to do anything, I think.”
It hadn’t even occurred to him to try growing anything here.
In Elysium, he comes upon Patroclus’s clearing, and he should accept his blessing and move on, but instead he asks, “Can I, um, try something? Here? It might change the clearing a bit.”
Patroclus raises an eyebrow, but just says, “Do as you like, stranger.”
He takes the pom he’d saved from several rooms back and splits it open. The seeds spill out onto the ground and he digs a hole with his heel before pushing them inside. Elysium doesn’t have plants or dirt, exactly, not like the surface does, but it’ll have to do.
He sits, and he focuses, and nothing happens.
“This is your father’s land, stranger,” Patroclus says. “Nothing happens here that he doesn’t will.”
That’s just not true. Zagreus has proven that, time and again, that he can break past the rules his father has made for his domain.
He’ll just have to make it his own instead.
Zagreus has gotten so good at fighting his way through the shades and wretches that he’s barely even bleeding. That won’t do. He cuts open his arm, blood gushing down onto the ground, hitting the pom seeds and soaking them through.
He knows what trees look like now. He imagines the seeds blossoming and growing, imagines large branches being pulled down with the weight of fat fruit.
When he opens his eyes, there are a half dozen pom trees in front of him, the fruit hanging thick and ripe.
He looks to Patroclus, who has a proper grin on his face for the first time since he’s met him. “Well, would you look at that.”
“Do you know anything about farming?” he asks. “Can you – are there other things, that can be grown?”
“Not here, I don’t think,” he mutters, plucking one of the poms. “Then again, maybe it can, if it’s you.”
Zagreus cultivates gardens below and above and hopes that no one notices. He pours his blood into the surface, growing his gardens bit by bit, and everywhere he bleeds he can live. He could live in a cottage right here like his mother if he wanted. But down with Patroclus he’s growing bright red grapes and orange olives and other things that shouldn’t exist but do, and soon he even figures out how to grow those on the surface too.
His garden has spread, covering the mountaintop, and he’s contemplating dying in a path that could get him closer to the city. He gets pass his father and enters his garden to see a teenager filling a basket with his silver apples. “Stealing from my garden?”
She turns to see him and throws herself at his feet, pressing her forehead into the ground. He’s so startled that all he can do is gape. “Begging your pardon, my lord,” she says, voice trembling. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”
Zagreus has never been in this situation before. “Er, it’s alright, really. Please get up.”
She tentatively lifts her head, revealing her tear stained face.
Now he feels properly awful. “Look, you can take them, alright? But I don’t know if – it’s not a mortal food, you understand. It might kill you.”
He doesn’t know what will happens to mortals who eat his fruits. He doesn’t know what happens when he eats them, even. It never occurred to him to try. It was all about the act of creation rather than consumption.
“We’re dead anyway,” she says, still bowing to him. “We can’t grow anything in the cold and the animals can’t forage. Thank you, my lord. If we die, then we don’t die hungry.”
Well, that’s just depressing. He’s seen the endless winter for himself. He knows people are dying, obviously, but it hadn’t occurred to him to connect those two things. The surface is a strange place. “You’ll live,” he says, hating her fear. He places his hand on the basket of silver apples and repeats, “You’ll live.”
For the first time in his life, he’s exhausted. The apples glow before subsiding and he belated realize that he’s just given his blessing.
He didn’t think he could do that.