#this thing will be like 25k words prob so my longest thanzag to date

[rowanisawriter]

exit wounds

hades / thanzag / post divorce AU / ch1 of 3

Years and years after Zagreus’s successful escape to the surface, an untimely and unexpected death brings him right back down to the underworld, and shatters Thanatos’s fragile truce with himself.

.

Thanatos’s anger ripples through his body, like a pebble tossed into a pond. “That’s the thing about you. You’re always leaving.”

The sound of Zagreus’s knuckles cracking as he clenches his fists is conspicuous in the hush quiet of the fountain room. “You know why I have to leave.”

“No, I don’t.” Thanatos jumps to his feet. A restlessness fills him suddenly, a need to pace. He stays still, standing before Zagreus, but his hands twitch for want of movement, another strange influence, another foreign need. Everything is different around Zagreus, always. “I don’t know why you need to leave. You will always come back here, you’re tied to this place and tied to the rest of us even though you don’t want to be. And still you put me through this every time. I feel all your deaths. It’s like a knife in my chest.”

He realizes he’s raising his voice and snaps his mouth shut with an audible click. The room feels smaller suddenly. He wants to leave but Zagreus’s eyes on him seem to pin him down.

“You do know why I’m leaving,” Zagreus says, his voice low and even. For once, he’s the calm one and Thanatos is hanging onto his careful composure by a thin and fraying thread. “My father is an Olympian. So was my mother. Whatever it is that makes the underworld your home, that Chthonic ichor inside you, I don’t have any of that.”

“That’s not it,” Thanatos says. “Not all of it, at least. You’re right that your Olympian blood is propelling you forward. That same pride, that same desire they have for more. You always want more. More than the underworld.” His mouth curves around the words, “more than me,” but he swallows it back, chokes it down.