Blue Lullaby || Hades One-shot
Summary: After Hades is unable to summon his dead sister from the Underworld, he must exorcise the ghost who stole her body.
tw for death (kind of murder? exorcism?)
Want to catch up? Read in this order: Journey to Hell Saga w Helle Mother Blue, a Seph and Hades one shot in the underworld Callie’s Nightmare Previous Callie/Hades threads, Ad Congregandum, ft. Callie, Howl, and Hades.
After Howl and Calliope leave, it is just Hades, Calcifer, and her—Cassandra, the once-ambassador, wearing Persephone’s face.
Hades cannot decide whether he hates or loves her. He has missed his sister’s face, even as it smirks at him with a look his sister never practiced. Cassandra has turned Seph’s face into all these strange and crooked angles. Where once he could read every line, now her expressions are broken fragments. Words missing, punctuation in the wrong place. She stares at him with an ellipsis for eyes, leading him off into nowhere. But she knows what he’s thinking. He knows that she knows.
Before Howl peeled away it became clear what had to be done. Seph was not coming back. Cassandra was an anomaly, and she’d slipped through a loophole that Hades had never meant to open. The dead could not return to the living, even by his hand. Hades knew that now. It was his job, it had always been his job, to correct that.
He needed to send Cassie back where she came from.
“You’re not going to do it,” says Cassie to him. She sits cross-legged. Seph called this crisscross-applesauce. She used to make him sit like this as well, directly across from her. He’d put his hands out flat and she read his fortune; or she taught him playground games that had their hands clap out rhythms, Seph reciting silly rhymes above the beat. He would have only ever done these things for her.
He tells himself now that he will exorcise Cassie for Seph too. He will return her body to the earth and she will rest peacefully there, after nearly seven months torn from it. He imagines her smiling at him. He imagines that she nods at him, that she is here now, and for once, he is doing the right thing.
Maybe he could not save her for this world, but he’d save her for the next one.
“Didn’t you once swear you’d never burn her again?” speaks Cassie again. He glares at her but he does not move. He feels stuck to the ground, his back pushed up against the armchair.
“Exactly.” She smirks.
“You aren’t Persephone,” he bites back. “I won’t be breaking any promise—”
And Cassie only laughs. “If you believed that—“ she leans like she is going to break from the cage, her eyes leering, “-- you’d already have your hands around my throat.”
An hour passes.
Hades paces like a wandering ghost himself. He makes a loop around the living room and keeps his eyes, always, forward. Calcifer crackles in the fireplace, but he’s trying to keep his flame low. All the lights are low, the room glowing amber. It feels like autumn in here with the chill and the long shadows—and the ghosts.
He knows where each sits. They’ve come for the show.
“Hades,” says Cassie sweetly. His head snaps toward her. She has plastered on a smile. Her hair is tucked behind her ears, the way that Seph used to do. “Hades, I’m cold. Do you mind…?” She tilts her head to the side, eyes flicking toward the blanket tossed over the arm chair.
He scowls at her. Cassie drops her eyes, then pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “Never mind,” she sighs. Her cheek presses against her knee.
Hades crosses the room and grabs the blanket, tossing it into the circle. “Now shut up.”
She scrambles for the blanket to wrap it around her shoulders, Seph’s small, fragile body disappearing underneath it.
Cal’s flames pop. “It’s only going to get worse, Hades,” he says gently.
“You shut up too!” Hades sneers. Cal’s flames jump, startling even Cal himself in the hearth. Hades turns his face and smashes the palm of hand against his eye. He shuts both. He wants Belle. He needs Belle. He can’t do this, he can’t, not without her.
“What if… there was another way?” says Cassie.
He jerks his head up. “I thought I told you not to speak—”
“Hades, there’s so much you still don’t know about your own powers—”
“Shut. Up.”
“I don’t have to be your pr—
“NOW.” Hades’ voice thunders, shaking the walls.
Persephone curls under the blanket. No—not Persephone. Cassie. He shakes his head again and stalks away fast like he is the one on the run. He hears Cal call him, but he does not look back.
Two hours.
Hades has slumped on the counter of the kitchen, a cooling mug of tea near his right elbow. He hears the soft murmur of something from the room. His head lifts, eyes cast toward the girl in the circle.
She has the book of poetry in her lap and she is reading. She reads to Calcifer as once she had, after bringing him biscuits, after making him tea. From this distance, the girl in the circle is Persephone. She knows how to pause between the words, how poetry must bloom on a tongue like a shy flower before it is finally plucked. Seph knows how to take her time.
…but I grew, I grew, and God was there like an island I had not rowed to, still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked…
He closes his eyes and pretends that it is her, taking deep, slow breaths. The smell of tea wafts in the air. It is as green as the gardens Persephone once tended with her hands.
…and I grew, I grew, I wore rubies and bought tomatoes and now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing though the oarlocks stick and are rusty and the sea blinks and rolls like a worried eyebal, but I am rowing, I am rowing, though the wind pushes me back…
Once he does this, once he kills her—again—there will be no poetry like this, none of these last-minute miracles to which Hades can cling. He will have to bury her back in the very garden those hands had grown so many things in. Cucumber, zucchini, squash, rosemary, thyme.
How he wants more time.
…and I know that that island will not be perfect, it will have the flaws of life, the absurdities of the dinner table, but there will be a door and I will open it and I will get rid of the rat inside me, the gnawing pestilential rat. God will take it with his two hands and embrace it. As the African says: This is my tale which I have told, if it be sweet, if it be not sweet, take somewhere else and let some return to me. This story ends with me still rowing.
After midnight.
Hades walks, slowly, back into the living room. His eyes flick from Cassandra to Calcifer. He wonders what else this ghost of his has told the demon. He wonders if the demon believes her stories, if he misses Persephone enough to want to believe this shadow of her could suffice.
He lowers his body down onto the ground again, not even arm’s length from the circle. He sits, crisscrossed-applesauce. Like the old days.
Cassie still has the book in her lap, but now she closes it. “Remember when we sat in the floor in front of the fire with Mother? And she was the one who read to us?”
Hades’ eyes burn with tears. He blinks. “That memory isn’t yours.”
“I was there too,” says Cassie. She looks so gentle. She reaches out like she wants to hold his hand. “I’ve always been there, Hades.”
Hades sniffs, and he looks down at his own lap. His breath feels shallow. He cannot look at her when he asks this. “What did you want to tell me earlier?” His voice sounds fragile enough to snap in half; he wishes he were stronger.
Cal’s fire crackles again, filling the two seconds of silence. Then, he hears her shift the blanket and Cassie speaks.
“I didn’t tell you everything about the Underworld,” she begins. “I was the ambassador for nearly five years. In that time, I learned everything there was to know about what it meant—Calliope was the one who showed me. You weren’t supposed to be the ambassador, you know. Not really. I was supposed to pick you.”
He looks up at her at that, a crease in his brow. His mother, and yes, Cassandra herself, used to tell a much different story. You’re chosen. You’re special. You have great things planned for you.
His face hardens. “Are you saying I’m a mistake?
Cassie shrugs. Her act is slipping; Sephy would never be so cavalier. “Someone chose you, Hades, but it was not me. The way it’s supposed to work is the old ambassador decides when to move on, otherwise they could—live forever, if they wanted. Just by staying in the underworld. The ambassador before me lived nearly 200 years. But eventually, they enter the underworld and they visit the Fates. Then, they choose another medium to whom to … pass the torch, so to speak.” Cassie smirks, giggling for a second. “The medium must be mature. Not a baby, not like you. Think of all those curtains you burned.”
Hades does not laugh, he does not even flinch, just stares at her.
“I never got to choose. Because I was murdered. Which means this doesn’t have to be your life, Hades. You could go to the Fates too. You can ask them to take the powers back, you can choose another medium—”
“You want me to choose you,” Hades cut her off. “No.”
“I can bring her back,” says Cassie. But he knows that she is lying.
“No one can bring back the dead,” says Hades. “Not even you.”
He feels the disappointment start to flood him. He’s stupid. For a moment, weakened by poetry, controlled by cowardice, he thought he could find yet another loophole. But now his resolve hardens and he begins to get up—
“No!” the fear flashes in Cassie’s face again. “Hades—Hades, even if you didn’t choose me, you need me. You need me find the Fates.”
“I can find some other way,” sneered Hades. “Maybe your dear Callie will show me. She’s supposed to have the answers.”
“There are other things the Fates can do, there are—are bargains, deals, things that only you could ask for—“ she’s rambling now, like before, when he nearly brought Seph’s spirit back. She’s desperate to save her own skin but it’s not her skin to begin with. Hades’ heart has never felt heavier. He can’t let this go on. Calcifer was right. It will only get harder and harder.
“Please,” whispers Cassandra. She curls the blanket around her even tighter, cocooning herself. “Please don’t make me go back there. Please, Hades. I…I can be good. I can be her.”
Hades blinks. He has begun to cry, each tear colder than the last. He wishes he could believe that but what kind of brother would he be to hold Seph’s body hostage? It doesn’t belong to him, just as much as it does not belong to her.
“If you were me,” he says, swallowing roughly. “If you were me, and you once were, would you let a ghost walk among the living? Would you let it steal the body of another?”
Cassie stares at him. Her lip trembles.
“You’re the bad guy, Cassie,” he tells her. “Not me. Don’t make it harder for either of us.”
And then it is easy. The fire floods through him, but Hades does not fear it. It will burn for Persephone. He looks down at the salt ring and watches it catch with the blue flame, so it circles Cassie and traps her. She bursts into tears, wrapping the blanket even tighter around herself.
Hades walks straight through the flames and kneels in front of her. She’s clutching Seph’s book to her chest. Gently, he peels it from her hands.
“No, no, no,” cries Cassandra. He touches her hair to soothe her, setting the book down. It flips open, the pages fluttering with Hades’ ghost hands.
“Close your eyes,” he tells her. She shakes her head, shakes and shakes it, her entire body trembling. The fire grows higher, so not even Calcifer can see what happens behind them.
“Close your eyes. Let it come. Let it go,” he says to her. He is the one reciting the poetry now.
And she does. Cassie squeezes her eyes shut, disappearing behind them and leaving Persephone in her wake. There she is, Hades’ little sister, once again scared and lost and in pain. He can make all of it go away. Hades has always been brave for her.
He kisses her forehead, closing his own eyes for the briefest of moments. His hand on her cheek, he wipes at her tears, and draws her closer to his chest. Once again, his eyes close and he can see it in his mind: the line between body and soul as thin as a sewing thread.
“Goodbye Cassandra,” he whispers. “Goodbye Persephone.”
He snips the thread. With his eyes still closed, he watches the soul leave the body, like a balloon let go, rising with the smoke, rising up into the sky. It floats until it is just a speck in his mind’s eye, a star that will burn inside of him forever.
Dawn rises.
The candles are snuffed, the salt burned into the carpet. Hades’ mug has been washed and returned to its cupboard. The blanket has been folded and left on the armchair. The book of poetry is gone.
Hades slips back the way he came, Persephone’s body carried in his arms through the backstreets of Swynlake. She still feels warm to him long after she should, warmer, somehow, in death than in life.
He takes her to the riverside where she’d died in the fall—where a new garden, Hades imagines, can grow. Where Seph can build mud castles and dream of the sea.
The sun climbs, washing away the purples from the night before, and Hades begins to dig.
