"When she breaks for air out here, she's always alone, except for the very first time. She must have fallen off of Van's shoulders, lost their game of Chicken Fight—there are hands hooking under her armpits, pulling her up, and Van's eyes are closed as she's laughing, practically shaking Shauna with the force of it, and Shauna's laughing too, because Van is so beautiful when she's happy, because everyone around her is smiling, because she's looking for Jackie and wants to tell her—Jax, I just had the weirdest fucking dream—
But it smacks her across the face, a rogue wave or a plane crash, knocking her down with the weight of it, sucking the air from her lungs until she's choking or screaming or drowning, dying, finally dying—it was real. It had to be. And she's back here—here, and either here isn't real or Shauna isn't, and maybe never was, maybe none of it ever was—she's back here, and it will all happen again, again, again, unless something gives, unless something breaks. Unless Shauna breaks. Unless she lets it go."
Or: Shauna kills her baby early enough to change things, this time around. Too bad she's already gone a little fucking insane anyway.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
@pangaeastarseed, @luminis-infinite--I wrote this back in APRIL, but in light of your “Persephone Graves” headcanon I thought I should post it...
She drags herself out of the dark, out of her tomb, out of the underworld. The ground where flowers once grew around her feet is dead and barren and withered as the tongue in her mouth. The sun scorches her but she does not back down, because this is her place and she will not be denied. She survived. She lived. There are pomegranate seeds that break between her teeth but she is alive, she is alive, she is alive and Hecate will have her before she gives in.
She walks into the temple of MACUSA. They stop to stare because she looks like a skeleton, perhaps she is a skeleton (the heart inside her broken ribs does not seem to beat anymore) but she does not care because beating or not it is alive. Her wand trembles but she holds it like a scepter because what else can she do? She has nothing more than this.
“You left me to die,” she snarls, glaring at the assembled throng, all their godlike powers not enough to keep her alive.
Seraphina, golden in majesty, standing so high that she might as well be riding in Apollo’s chariot, does not flinch. “Welcome home,” she says, instead of an apology, as if she expects obeisance. “If you are who you say you are, then we are glad to see you again. Are you who you seem to be?”
But no: she found her power, there in the dark, the chthonic depths where real magic lurks. So she bares her teeth in a snarl and says, “I’m real, damn you, I’m here. I’m Persephone Graves.”
***
They whisper about her as she passes. Persephone was never a kind woman, never a soft woman, and now, now the rumors of the curses she casts are true. She flings Unforgiveable Curses without a thought, without a pause. There is still pomegranate juice in her mouth and in the right light it looks like blood. She belongs to him, they whisper, she is his in body and soul—and they could not be more wrong. He does not own her, that dark lord of the dead, and she would rather die than return to him when the winter’s chill again touches the streets of New York.
Persephone wraps herself in the whispers of Grindelwald’s power. She uses it to build her own mysteries, her own cult, witches who hear in her words the promise of greater things than they were told they could ever be. She does not preach, because that is Seraphina’s style, not hers. They are each great, in their own way, and ever has she been Seraphina’s shadow. No, Persephone waits. She builds herself up on a foundation of her nightmares and stands in silence by the throne.
“I’m worried about you, Perse,” Seraphina says.
Persephone smiles and it feels like a scream. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she says.
***
The whispers become reverent, like hymns, like praises, like worship. Persephone does not encourage them, but they spring up anyway. The woman who lived, they whisper, the woman who conquered death. Persephone knows the truth: she did not conquer death. She became it.
There are stories of another woman, a pale wraith, wine-dark power boiling beneath her skin, her voice an echo of the scream of Tisiphone. She is dead, and Persephone grieves for her though she does not know why. It is the only story that can rouse her to pity, to tears, and it stuns her Aurors when she weeps openly for the story of this woman, this “Credence”.
***
It is autumn and Persephone shudders with the cold, the dark hand of Grindelwald reaching out to her, beckoning, commanding. She walks the subway tunnels restlessly, not bothering with a light. The map of these places is etched into her veins. This is her domain.
Deep within the tunnels, she finds her Eurydice. The wraith-woman crouches on the tracks, shrouded in her own shadows and mysteries, and when she sees Persephone she clings to her and begs for salvation, for light. Credence—a worthy name for a hierophant. And Persephone grants the woman justice, promises to bear her into the light at last, an Orpheus to replace the man who’d gone without looking back.
And so in their dark Eleusis Persephone initiates Credence into her mysteries.
***
They emerge from the Underworld together and the world falls to its knees before them. It is not difficult, to depose a god whose power lies only in whispered words. Persephone and Credence throw Grindelwald’s shattered body to the floor at the feet of Seraphina’s golden throne. They are accorded a place among the gods, and they take it together, joined by a compact of blood and chthonic power.
No one dares to speak Persephone’s name aloud, not when she has become everything but a true god herselve. Only Seraphina dares to call her “Perse” now, and it is well. Seraphina holds one half of Persephone’s dead heart and Credence holds the other, and between them Persephone walks the line of the world of the living and the world of the dead.
And where she walks, flowers grow again around her feet.
