#already has immense amounts of baggage tied to it for me

[springtrappd]

this is The Most Nerd Shit but the best way i can think to explain my feelings on the daycare in ruin is that it is very much the st/ormblood of sb

[hadestownmodern]

Fight (4/4)

If I post this on the wrong blog one more time I stg. Who let me have access to technology? WHO?

-Danielle

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             “’Rydice?” He knocks a bit louder than intended, driven by the nerves that dance painfully along his skin. The complete lack of knowledge in this situation presents himself in a discomfort, a prickling sensation that clouds his thoughts as he waits intently for an answer. When none comes, he knocks even louder.

             “’Rydice, it’s me.” His voice cracks slightly on the last syllable, but he barely notices. There’s shuffling on the other side of the door, a voice quieted by distance. A small coming that sends a shock of relief through to his chest.

             “I have to go,” Orpheus speaks quickly through the phone, shreds of hope hitching themselves back to his voice. “She’s here, I have to go-I’ll call, I promise.”

             Before Persephone can answer he’s hung up the phone, stuck it in his back pocket with shaking hands. He can hear the clicking of locks, the slow sliding of metal against the doorframe, and then her face.

             Her face-she pokes through a crack in the door momentarily, as if checking to make sure that the voice she’d heard matched the person in front of her. Her eyes are substantially paler, darkened only by the baggage that weighs underneath. She seems smaller, yet so much more guarded in comparison. In the two days since he had seen her, it’s as if he’s met with a stranger. She looks him up and down through the slit in the door before pushing the door open, covering her eyes with her hands.

             Orpheus stands still for a moment, hands lingering awkwardly at his sides until he hears the shakiness in her breath, witnesses the immediate collapse of that guard she’d held onto so fiercely when she’d first opened the door. The sound of her sadness pushes his hesitation to the side, drives him to close the distance between them to wrap his arms around her completely, gently.

             “I’m sorry,” her chest is heaving with the difficulty of her breath, the relief and the sadness and the nerve of it all. It’s all she can say, the words stuck on a loop she can’t control, the words that should have replaced her running. She lets him cling to her, her face against his chest, one of his hands running soothingly along her hair. With each apology Orpheus longs to hold her tighter, longer, long enough to wash both of their tears away. His shirt is damp with her grief and his cheeks are raw from wiping his own tears with the rough backs of his hands.

             “Do you want to talk?” He waits until her breathing has slowed, her body has fit itself against him without shaking. She hiccups, sniffs and nods her head. Orpheus does not move from her side, keeps an arm wrapped around her as she turns to face her apartment.

             It’s a tiny studio, a shoebox stereotypical to the experience of living in a city. In one small room she’s fit a loveseat of scratched up leather, a rickety shelf with an amount of books that do not fit, a pile started on the floor next to it. There’s a small houseplant with browning leaves set in front of a tiny window, a valiant effort as he notices her view of the old brick of another building. The kitchen cabinets are hung haphazardly, as if by second thought. He can tell she’d tried to fix them by the way she’s kept them, one set of cabinet doors tied together with a craftily thought-out system of ribbon and neatly tied knots. In one corner of the shoebox space there’s a mattress on the floor-just a top sheet and an old quilt on top.

             There are memories; Eurydice sinking into his bed the first night with a sigh, the way she’d slept completely splayed out and wrapped tight in his blankets. She’d apologized so much, sat with that slight stiffness in her back and attempted to refuse the breakfast he’d made. The longer she stayed the more he noticed her little quirks; the way she kept a corner of his thick blankets between her fingers while they watched a movie, her texts of outpouring gratitude each time he hid a snack in her backpack or brough her a lunch. He remembers the way she spooked at the noises of the bar below at first, how she locked the door twice at night as if she didn’t trust herself. It had taken her so long to become fully acclimated to his space-their space. He’d thought the stiffness in her body and the hesitation in her actions had been a result of the wall she’d kept up, the wall he’d been trying to tap gently though.

             “I, uh…I wasn’t expecting company,” She attempts an awkward sort of humor as she bites her lip. “You can sit, you know. It’s not…it’s comfortable.” She gestures to the well-worn loveseat and he obliges, pulling her down and wrapping his arm around her shoulder. Her body responds to his touch with a sigh, a muscle memory, a craving that’s nearly tense in nature. It had only been two days, but the span of time without the comforting smell of his skin and the softness of his voice had felt like months. She’d wrapped herself in loneliness and accepted that the world was not made for her, laid in her own bed for a day as time passed around her without her own knowledge.

             She’d let herself shut down completely and still, Orpheus had come.

             “How’d you know where I live?” She has to ask the question on her mind, the one that had made her think that his knocking and calling her name had been nothing but her last thread of hope sewing itself into a hallucination.

             “Persephone told me.”

             “I’m sorry.”

             “You don’t have to say that anymore.” His finger reaches for her chin, gently tips it up so she can see the sincerity in his eyes. “I messed up too.”

             “You didn’t do anything, Orpheus. It was me. You were trying to help. You were excited. And Persephone was too. I just…it set something off in me, her offering money and clothes. People just…they used to do that to me all the time with this look in their eyes that…it was dehumanizing. Even as a kid I knew it. But I shouldn’t have reacted the way that I did. It’s not okay. I hurt you. You don’t have to be okay with that because you don’t deserve to be hurt.”

             He has never seen her so upset; that hint of anger runs in tandem with a tenderness, a passionate resolve that strikes him as the final word. She will not let him continue to think that this fight is his fault, that her leaving the store and staying away from him had anything to do with his helpfulness or his excitement. She will not let him believe that this is his fault, not when their relationship is still so new.

             With Orpheus beside her on the scratched up leather, listening to the sounds of doors slamming and her upstairs neighbors very clearly arguing again, Eurydice is caught between the life she’d grown accustomed to and the life she’d been trying to leave behind. She hadn’t told Orpheus about this place-once a source of absolute pride as she used her own keys on the door and paid her own bills each month. She hadn’t told him much of anything-just flashes of her past as they’d come, filtered bits of herself.

             There isn’t shame; she refuses to feel shame for what she’d been through, how she’d fought to get this little rundown shoebox. More than anything, Eurydice had wanted to believe that maybe the pieces of herself she’d grown to know-the pieces that so closely resembled her mother-would fade away as she left her past behind her. The decision wasn’t completely cognizant, rather a piece-by-piece display of fright. The intricately lain fabric of her life had been torn so many times that one sentence had sent her into a spiral of panic. Leaving had seemed like the only option.

             Eurydice braces herself with a deep breath. Orpheus is here. He sits and waits patiently. He’s come to talk-to let her cry. He hadn’t left her. He’d come to find her.

             “I’m going to start talking, and I need you to just listen. I need to tell you some things that might get hard to hear. You deserve to know more about me than what I’ve told you. I’m not looking for pity, and I’m not looking for you to save me because I’ve already saved myself. I just…my actions weren’t justified, but they didn’t come from you. You didn’t cause my running away, and I should have never done it.”

             “Okay,” Orpheus shifts in his seat, waiting. His mossy eyes are trained patiently on her, their color swimming with warmth-adoration. Eurydice finds an immediate sense of comfort here, in this space typically lacking the overwhelming sense of security she finds in him. His arm around her shoulder brings her strength, and she begins.

             It’s not something she’s done before, this rote recitation of her past. She’d run through the basics so many times that this deeper diving feels immensely intimate, more than shedding a few layers of clothing or sharing the password on her phone. Her gaze shifts between Orpheus and the wall as she talks, and she becomes acutely aware of the way he pulls her closer at the harder parts; and then they left me there-my dad told me I was too much like her-I chose to tell them everything that happened-I never thought I’d get out. There are memories she hadn’t accessed in a while, things she’d buried deep with the hope that they’d soon just become another part of her fabric, a fraying thread in her own tapestry. These are the things that bring Orpheus to tears, to kissing her hair-her forehead-her eyelids-with a hummingbird sort of delicacy mismatching the protection of his hold on her body, his hand on the space where their baby grows.

             It’s dark when Eurydice finishes-when her mouth has become dry from talking, crying, kissing him again. Their cheeks share reddened moisture as they brush against each other gently, slowly, without words or explanation. They sit like this for a while, Eurydice’s body suddenly heavy with the ghosts of her memories.

“Will you come home?” He asks her so softly that she nearly believes the words are imaginary-that the way he’d been holding her for this immeasurable amount of time had been just a result of exhaustion and wishful thinking. When she looks up at him, he is real-unfalteringly real. He emphasizes the word as if it were made just for them, just for the space they had created and the life they’d begun to share. Home. Her lips lift in a softened grin.

“I really want to come home.”

             There’s immediate comfort.

             “Go take a shower.” Orpheus urges, “I’m going to make something quick for dinner.” She sighs happily, thankfully, and her eyes close as he kisses her forehead, runs a hand along her arm. She hadn’t taken a decent shower since she’d left, her apartment boasting lukewarm water temperatures and a lack of water pressure. The scalding water soothes her immediately, just as the gentle rainwater scent of the handcrafted soap Demeter had given them.

             Eurydice puts on a pair of sweatpants and one of his shirts. His clothes hang loose on her frame, but less and less as time passes. She’s thankful for the bump that brushes against the fabric, that causes the cloth to hug and drape differently than it had just a few months ago. Even with the exhaustion of the day settling into her body, she feels a hefty weight begin to drift off of her shoulders.

             Hair still damp, Eurydice walks with bare feet back into the open living space. She smiles at the shelves lined with photographs, puts the needle back over the last record he’d been playing. It’s an older sound, all brass and bluesy rhythms, and the sound fills the space with a harmony she hadn’t known she’d been missing. Her fingers run along the strings of his guitar collection where she stops and stands still, admiring the way he’d had them hung on the wall, put in stands on the floor. Each piece of the room is a piece of Orpheus; kind, gentle Orpheus. Her eyes begin to mist at the sight of his favored guitar case lain open on the ground, the last ultrasound photo of their daughter tacked inside with care.

             She finds herself on the couch without a second thought, lost in the sound of the music and the relative quiet of this neighborhood. Eurydice can hear the sound of Orpheus humming along to the record she’d chosen, his bustling in the kitchen. She considers getting up, walking the short distance and standing there with him while he cooks. Her body protests, having searched for this comfort that soothes her throbbing joints for so long. Her eyes close reflexively, the sounds and the warmth washing over her with a sense of irreplaceable peace.

             He finds her like this; head leaned back on the sofa, one leg draped over the edge of the couch and the other neatly on it. Her hair has half-dried, puffed up and waved. The slightest bit of a snore accompanies her slow, even breaths, and Orpheus chuckles to himself as he listens to the sound. He does not want to wake her, but the couch leaves little room for her to move and his worry flies to her back, her neck.

             He calls her name softly, one hand in her hair and his lips on her cheek. She groans, shifts her position and cracks her eyes open for just a second. She rubs at her eyes, yawning when she hears her name again.

             “Do you want to eat?” He asks. She shakes her head, smiling apologetically.

             “Just sleep,” she mutters, the grogginess evident in the light, slightly graveled tone of her voice. “So tired.”

             “You need to go to bed, this couch is going to hurt your back.”

             “Come with me?”

             She lifts herself off of the sofa with a herculean effort, blinking back to the light of the room. He shuffles around, shutting off the lights and the music, wrapping up their food for another day. By the time he makes it to bed she’s half-asleep; eyes closed, limbs splayed out comfortably, one hand neatly lain across the little bump of her belly. Orpheus lays another blanket over her, brushes her flyaway hair from her eyes and kisses the cheeks that had been stained with tears. She feels his weight as he lays beside her, shuffles herself over until she’s pressed up against him. He settles quickly with her next to him again, listens to the music of her breathing.

             Before he can fall fully asleep he can hear Eurydice whisper against the darkness, feel her kiss on his shoulder and the sigh of contentment that matches his.

             She tells him she loves him, and he holds her closer as he whispers back to her.

             I love you. You’re home.