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Her son died.
Not just as she remembered, the worst day of her life: she remembered the first time in all its awfulness well enough. Remembered Hades' face, unblinking in grim shock; unable to answer her cries as she asked about the child, whose flamed feet had not burned her (so often, those little feet had kept her up, each and every night, and now they were cold, cold, cold). She had not really seen him, seen only the hint of him then: pale as his father and still as death itself. They had not talked much, after, and she strained in that silence to hear cries that would not come. Yes. She remembered that.
But this—her stomach turned. He was alive. Zagreus was alive. And then he had died again. Died in her arms, and drifted down the Styx until he had, presumably, reached home. (And how she hoped, desperately, that he had reached home—she had no way to know, now, lest she use the one obol Nyx had pressed in her hand—just in case, for emergencies—and she knew that to use that would be to cause even more chaos than surely her own son had.)
The obol would stay on the shelf. But how tempting it was to grasp it!
Zagreus. Alive! And yet, no longer alive. Possibly he would live again—were he truly as godlike as his father? Had she blamed herself for her half-mortal blood all this time for nothing? Or had Nyx some dark magic (and she knew well enough to know that if Hades had gone to anyone for help with Zagreus' death, it would be Nyx, who knew all things in the underground that Hades himself did not) that would lead their boy to live again, but only the once? Had he returned to his father's house for the final time? Too many questions. And there would be no answers: the boy would not likely come again, not after all he'd had to go through to get out of the underground.
She would have to be content with the knowledge that he lived, that he was alive, for a few shining years, even if all but ten minutes of that time had been before she had known.
It was not enough.
And so Persephone did the only thing she could.
She sat down at her little table and sobbed her eyes out. She felt wholly numb, seeing Zagreus had been the first god she had seen in—how long? He was a man now, so it had been at minimum decades. Decades. The cruelty of life among the immortals; time was a luxury in a way it had never been for her father. How long was Hades waiting before he would tell her? Would he ever? She had always admired the morality of the man, the way he held fast to his rules even if they inconvenienced himself; it was a novelty compared to the flightiness of the Olympian standard. Only after Zagreus had—had gone, she could not think died, not now, now with the sight of him falling dead at her feet so fresh in her mind—only then did she see how that could sometimes lead to his cruelty as well: they did not talk about his...parting, for such was improper. They did not talk about how her role had wordlessly changed; the hoped-for heir gone. He stayed at his desk longer; she was empty and alone longer. Now she saw how that stupid law-abiding nature could twist him further, could tell him that it was no longer Persephone's purview, the fate of her son; perhaps he thought in some twisted way that he was sparing her from the pains of motherhood, for longing for an underworld-bound child she could not see.
But she wanted to know, and she was suddenly, achingly furious with Hades, with his cruelties, with everything he had hidden from her and for what? For what could he possibly have wanted to have hidden this? Was he no different from mother, from the Olympians who had only seen her worth as an amuse bouche, and little more?
She felt sick to her stomach. Her eyes looked toward her cottage, where she knew the obol, still shiny, lay hidden on a low rafter. She would not call.
She instead grabbed a pencil and opened a scroll; it was one she had been saving for a long time, for mother or Hades or Nyx or whoever it should be when someone inevitably found her island of green in a cold, hard world. Mother's fault, and therefore hers, but she could not feel guilty about it now, no, not when she had to preserve the boy, preserve as much of him as she could and as fast as she could. Mortal memories were fickle; her father could not remember who she was before he had died. Who knew how much her memories would fade with time, with her blood half-red and half-gold?
She had never been a great artist, but twenty years of solitude had given her a newfound time to practice, and though drawings of hay and apples were not quite the same as a face, it nevertheless helped her capture the unruly mess of his hair - like his father's, it seemed to go everywhere. She hadn't had a chance to pet it, but she imagined it would feel the same as well. She tried to jot him down as much as she could—yes, the cheekbones were sharp, the eyes mis-matched, the skin-tone hers—and drew with a mad passion, afraid she might forget details before she finished it.
But she did not.
And though the picture was perhaps crude in some ways, the likeness was there. She took it quickly to her house, tacked it up on the wall, and breathed a bit easier. There. He would be honored; he would have a place within her home. It was not much, but it was something she could do, to honor her son, her so-unknown son!
She went back to her daily duties after that; harvested food for the coming few days, sewed up a ripped up old dress, but each time she happened to cross her little cottage, her eyes lit up at the picture of the boy. At night, in dimmer light, she ran her finger over his jawline, trying to memorize further every bit of him. And in the morning, she found herself waking up and staring at him right away.
"Good morning, Zagreus," she said, feeling entirely silly and yet - and yet it felt right. She could not tell how much of his life she had missed already; she couldn't see him again. At least in her own mind, she could fill in the gaps, pretend they were, in fact, not separated by as many layers of dirt that lay underneath her feet as the underworld itself, so limitless that she could not dare to even send a single root down that far.
It had been part of the draw for her, once, after all. Mother could not reach her there.
And in a cruel twist of destiny repeating, she herself repeating her mother's fate. Her son was buried far underneath the earth. She could not reach him. And she too, for the first time, understood her mother, and the sadness that froze the world to ruin.
"I wonder what you are doing now," she said, feeling ridiculous, but she had been alone for so long that it was nice to actually pretend to talk to him as she sliced her morning bread, dipping it in a bit of wine. The usual breakfast: it tasted more bitter with the knowledge that her son could not eat it with her. She had never made him a single meal; some mother, some provider.
She wondered, idly, what Hades had done, how he had raised the boy. She doubted his sternness would allow him to show much tenderness, but she wanted desperately for him to do so: wanted to believe Zagreus coming to her was nothing more than a desperate desire for a son to know his mother. Did he feel the way she did, the longing ache in her chest that did not cease?
Her eye went back to the obol; no, she could not. It would be cruel to the boy, and Hades both, to go back when she had no intention to stay. There were certain decisions that could not be undone, no matter what Nyx had said.
"I suppose I shall go to work, my boy," she said; she wondered, idly, if Zagreus might show up, and then wondered immediately after, in far more bittersweet terms, if this would be the thought that she'd have for the rest of her life, and if that were not, in fact, part of what perhaps Hades had been trying to prevent, this constant longing. Perhaps what felt like his immeasurable cruelty had been kindness in his own mind, at least.
She did not know what to think. She knew only that she wanted to see her boy, wanted desperately to see him again: the picture, that crude picture, was not enough.
But he did not show up that day, nor the next. Nor the next after that, nor the one after that. And each day she found herself thinking he might come, and, despite knowing the odds were long, being disappointed that he did not. The temptation to hold the obol was tempting, too tempting; so too was the badly made portrait. The longing to see a son she had never known infused her veins with bittersweet longing and were she able to drive the world to snow and ruin she would be so, so tempted to.
It was the seventh day when she thought of him in the fields when she heard an unfamiliar but badly wished for noise: the sound of two feet, running down her path with a sort of determined fervor. Two familiar golden feet (so achingly familiar)! She remembered only now, seeing his grinning, brash young face—and this she could not say was the fathers, nor hers, for neither of them had lives much given to smiling—how often she had begged the fates, in those cold and lonely nights where Hades sought comfort in his paperwork and she sobbed in her bed, for Zagreus to return to them.
And now, it seemed, the fates had a sense of humor.
"Mother!" So formal, the boy, like his father, and not a surprise that, she supposed; the accent, too, was his: surface-tinged. Hades must have raised him personally, and such both soothed her and made her afraid, for Hades was not a warm man with most and she hoped, desperately, that his son would prove so much an exception as she herself once had been.
But just in case it had not...Well, there was nothing in this world that could stop her from reaching out to her son. He would find love and warmth here, if that was what was leading him to run from his father's kingdom.
"My son," she whispered, as she gripped him tight. "My son. I begged the fates for you to return to me. Perhaps I ought to be more careful in how I speak to them." And she had, she had, and lo, the fates truly did have a sharp wit, for here he was, safe (for a moment) and sound (for mere seconds). The three elders truly did have a twisted sense of humor, to have brought this to pass, but for the moment, she was nothing but thankful. Thank you goddesses, she prayed, as loud as she dared. Thank you, thank you.
And so she smiled, and said, "Tell me, how was your journey?" and listened as the boy told her what had come to pass, treasuring the richness of his voice, his animated way of speaking. They might not have much time, but she would treasure these moments, until he came again. She knew he would now, now that he said he wanted to see her again: they would meet, as many times as he wished, for immortal lives were long, even if they were, in some ways, cut momentarily short. They would meet, moments at a time, again and again.
And that, she told herself, would have to be enough.
But still—as she watched the Styx take him once more back to the home of his father, her hand itched to grasp the obol, and she wondered if—perhaps... there was a way.
She had not realized how much she had missed home.