#this ficlet is kinda jossed. don't pay too much attention to it

[toushindai]

and here’s another Hades ficlet. Spoilers for the Murder Death Kill update in this one--it was written effectively in response to it--and there’s also a brief, glossed-over mention of sexual assault wrt the parts of Sisyphus’s backstory that he hasn’t shared with Zag yet.

[ Read on AO3 ]

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Megaera is pacing. She doesn’t like to pace, but it alleviates the boredom and the aggravation and the insipid suspense all at once, so until Zagreus shows up this time, that’s what she’s doing. If he shows up here this time. But now Lord Hades has called Tisiphone and Alecto in, because no matter how hard Megaera tries she can’t seem to knock any sense into Zagreus (what else is new?) and the idiot needs to be stopped. So, he’s going to meet her sisters at last. That’ll show him for his curiosity and his stupid crusade.

The meeting with Hades had been unpleasant. Megaera knows better than to take Alecto’s contempt personally—had known better than to respond to her youngest sister’s mocking laughter as he’d explained the situation. She knows better, but the fact that she just can’t seem to rise to competency in this task still galls her. Humiliation and self-disgust boil together in her stomach, and so she paces.

She’d tried, on her way here, to let off a little steam against Sisyphus. He’d been halfway up the hill anyway. A few strategic lashes had him stumbling, and then all it took was a little push to send his pet rock tumbling down over him, crushing him to death on its way back to the bottom. Megaera verified that his mangled corpse wasn’t breathing and then snapped her fingers. At the foot of the hill, the sigil that bound him to Tartarus began to glow. Sisyphus reappeared, blithely cracking the muscles in his neck, and Megaera shoved the butt of her whip up under his jaw.

“You’ve been telling the Prince sob stories,” she accused the shade. “He came home and tried to tell me I’m too hard on you.”

“Ah.” Sisyphus swallowed, his smile shifting from optimistic to humbly polite. “Forgive me, kindly one, I may have bragged a little the last time he came through.”

“Bragged?” Megaera laughed. “But wrapping those chains around Thanatos was hardly your proudest moment. Don’t you want to tell Zagreus about the rest of it? About Tyro, and your dear, sweet children?”

Then his smile was gone entirely. “To be honest, I’d prefer not to,” he confessed, vulnerability in his face.

She held his eyes with hers for a long moment, tormenting him with his own discomfort until he swallowed again.

“What do you want from me, Mistress?” he asked. What would convince her to keep the rest of his crimes to herself, he meant.

She removed the butt of her whip from beneath his jaw and gestured with it towards his boulder. “Back to work,” she ordered. “And stop socializing with the Prince, or I’ll make sure he loses interest in friendship with a worm like you.”

It was one of the more inane threats she’d ever made, but it seemed to do the trick. Sisyphus bowed deeply and then cracked his knuckles. “Understood,” he said, and obediently turned his attentions to his boulder once more, muscles straining as he began his slow ascent. Megaera watched him struggle for a moment, and then moved on.

She has no faith, frankly, that he will do anything differently the next time Zagreus wanders through. For all she knows, they might be chatting right now, Sisyphus regaling Zag with the bit about the coin and utterly forgetting to mention that time he raped his niece so that her children would dispose of his brother. He doesn’t deserve mercy. Zagreus is naïve and ignorant to think that he does.

He’s naïve and ignorant in a lot of ways, each more infuriating than the last. If—or when, she supposes—he runs into her sisters, she’s certain that he’ll greet them very prettily and cordially, even if context should make it clear that they’re there to kill him. Either of them will quickly disabuse him of the notion that friendship might be possible. The thought makes Megaera grind her teeth without knowing why. Jealousy, she supposes—her natural vice, a sharp territorial urge tainted with fondness. Alecto is just eager to do violence, and Tis is Tis; neither of them will bother to understand Zag’s crusade, not why it’s important to him and not why it must necessarily be thwarted. Megaera thinks he deserves better than that. It’s not a rational belief, but she forfeited her ability to be fully rational about him long ago. Stupid of her, really. But what’s done is done.

Megaera looks towards the door to her hall, which remains resolutely shut. It’s been a while; has he run into one of the others? She closes her eyes and strains her ears, trying to pick up some clue of what’s going on in the rest of Tartarus. Will he hesitate to kill her sisters? Because they’re her sisters, or because he wants so desperately to be everyone’s friend and with them he doesn’t have a shared history, a growling half-matched frustration that sublimates into barbed but familiar antagonism? If he hesitates, he’s dead. And if one of them manages to kill him, Megaera supposes, then Hades is right to give up on her.

As she wrestles with that thought, though, she hears a distant scream of a familiar timbre. Alecto. The sound resolves into one of wrath and aggravation, and then Megaera hears —stupid redblood piece of TRASH thinks he can just saunter in here and kill me, aaAARGH—

Turning her attention towards the sound—towards Alecto’s hall—Megaera raises her eyebrows in curiosity. (Maybe, very slightly, in amusement.) So, it’s Alecto he met with. And the battle went in his favor.

Her sister rages on. I’m going to paint the walls with his blood the next time he gets here, I’m going to ENJOY it, I’m going to have fun with this damn assignment even if it IS all your fault, Meg, and YOUR BOYFRIEND CAN GO TO HELL!

And with that, shouted loud enough for all of Tartarus to hear, Alecto quiets. Megaera finds herself smirking; finds herself picturing, unkindly, Alecto with Coronacht’s arrows through her throat or spitted on Varatha’s business end. She imagines what Alecto’s enraged smile will look like, rather than her cocky one.

“He’s my ex,” she corrects her absent sister, and settles in for a longer wait than what she’s used to.