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When Zagreus comes dashing down the West Wing corridor, Thanatos does his best to not look too eager to see him.
“Than!” he greets, skidding to a stop right before him, “you’re here!”
“So I am,” Thanatos agrees, absently flicking away the droplets of Styx water that had flown off the dashing Prince and onto his clothes, “you didn’t reach the surface. How did you die this time?”
Zag’s face twists into a grimace, “Asterius’ stupid boyfriend did me in again. He’s going to be insufferable when I make it back.”
Thanatos huffs a laugh. He doesn’t like Zagreus dying ever, but at least if he dies down here, rather than on the surface (something he’s been doing more and more often), Thanatos himself doesn’t have to go collect him and lower his cooling corpse into the Styx. It’s easier to laugh at his little slip-ups.
It’s easier to pretend that Zagreus isn’t so eager to leave him behind — despite how difficult staying on the surface is for him — this way.
“If I were in better shape, I’d have been able to beat him soundly,” Zag grumbles, but then his face brightens, “wanna know why I was in such bad shape this time?”
Thanatos can’t even begin to guess why Zagreus would look so excited about being too injured to defeat Theseus. “Because you’re a reckless idiot?”
“Nope,” and then Zag is grinning, all feral teeth and glimmering pride. Thanatos’ traitorous heart swoops and trembles and aches all at the same time, and he hopes dearly that his face isn’t flushed as golden as he feels it is. “I beat Charon!”
Thanatos blinks. There is the sound of a record scratch somewhere. Thanatos isn’t even sure he knows what a record is.
“You… ‘beat’ Charon?”
“Yup!”
“Zag,” Thanatos stalls, his brain struggling to compute this fact, “you’re telling me you got into a fight with my brother?”
“Yup!”
It doesn’t make any sense. Thanatos casts a surreptitious glance around the looming architecture of the House of Hades, wondering if perhaps he’d shifted wrong and fallen into some alternate dimension by accident. “Why. How?”
“I stole some of his obols,” he says, casual as anything, as though his words don’t immediately cause all the ichor to drain out of Thanatos’ face in sheer horror, “it’s my way of telling him I wanna have a friendly fight to the death.”
“A friendly fight to the death,” Thanatos distantly hears his voice parrot back.
“Yes, Charon’s really strong.” Yeah, no kidding? Thanatos thinks faintly; No one messes with the Stygian Boatman. No mortal nor god nor beast. It’s not a done thing. “He got me good a couple times. But this time I finally beat him! Got to keep that hefty bag of obols I filched from him too. He said ‘no hard feelings’ when next I met him… or, rather, he said ‘Hrrooooaaoooohhhh haaaarrghhh’ but, y’know. Turns out no one’s tried to fight him in ages, he’s bored and misses it.”
Zagreus, Son of Hades, Prince of the Underworld, Unknowing Captor of Death’s Heart, is an absolute fucking madman.
“...Congratulations,” Thanatos manages to wheeze out, eventually. “You intend on making this a habit? Shouldn’t you be focusing on getting to the surface without such a… debilitating detour?”
“Ah, but that’s just the thing, see?” Thanatos does not, in fact, see. “If I can sharpen my skills and reflexes to the point where beating Charon is easy, not only does it prove that I’ve got what it takes to beat my father and get to the surface reliably, I also get a guaranteed reward of a nice chunk of change that I can use to get nice upgrades from his shop, which also makes it easier to get to the surface.”
“Yes, but you have to beat Charon first. Wouldn’t that just exhaust you? If you saved your strength-”
“I just have to get good then!” Zag says cheerfully, and Thanatos wonders how Lord Hades could ever think this wonderful and incredible person was a failure by any measure.
“Speaking of, Than…” Zag continues with a gleam in his eye, “I’ve never fought you before.”
Thanatos cocks his head in confusion, “we spar all the time, Zag. Every time we meet on your runs, I challenge you to a contest.”
“No, no. I don’t mean a shade-vanquishing contest, I mean a direct one-on-one fight. You against me; my weapons against yours. Like the way I fought against Charon.”
Thanatos grasps his scythe with both hands, “...I don’t think that’s a good idea, Zag.”
“Aw come on, Than,” he whines, just a little, the way he used to when they were children and Zag would cling to his skirts and follow him everywhere. When he would beg Than for treats and stories and they would huddle together under Zag’s quilts, close and warm.
He’s grown now, and the tones of his voice even in a whine are mellow and and deep and soft and it does things to Thanatos’ insides that he would rather not examine too closely. He’s grown now. They’re both grown now. And Zagreus is leaving and leaving and leaving until he can finally stop coming back to the coldness of Death’s company.
“Why not ask Hypnos,” Thanatos shoots back, internally wincing at the sharpness that leaks into his tone.
Thankfully, Zag either doesn’t notice or seems content to ignore his outburst, “I’ve already asked him, actually. Most boring fight I’ve ever had. Either I hit him once and he falls asleep immediately, or he hits me once and I fall asleep immediately. Wouldn’t you know, the very second I woke up and looked over, Hypnos had just yawned and rolled over to sleep on the other end of the courtyard!”
Thanatos sighs, “that sounds like Hypnos, yes.”
“So you see, you’re the only one of your brothers that I haven’t fought, Than,” Zag says, as though it’s the only obvious conclusion.
Thanatos knows he doesn't rank all that high in anyone's esteem, knows that Zag won't ever return his foolish feelings. Still, it stings to know that even in this, Thanatos will place last.
He was the last to know that Zagreus was unwillingly betrothed. Last to know that he'd fallen into bed with her anyway. Last to know whenever they broke up, last to know whenever they got back together. Sometimes he'd go multiple cycles of this without ever hearing about any of it. He was still last to know when the betrothal was cancelled for good. Last in line of people Zagreus turned to for comfort after yet another explosive fight with Lord Hades. Last in line whenever he needed help with anything.
And he was, still, last to know when the Prince decided he'd had enough of the Underworld and began making his escapes. Thanatos had just come home one day and he was simply gone. Gone without a goodbye, gone without even a note, and he'd intended wholly to never return. And everyone, absolutely everyone, knew; was allowed to know. Dusa, Cerberus, Hypnos, Megaera, Tissiphone, Hades. Everyone.
Everyone… except Thanatos.
“I have many more siblings,” Thanatos reminds him, just in case Zagreus would rather go through them first. Work his way down properly before he condescends to wasting his time on Thanatos, “it’s not just us three.”
“Yeah, but you’re the only three I know,” Zag says with an lazy shrug. “Please, Than? Just once?”
Thanatos tightens his grip on his scythe, chewing the inside of his bottom lip. He’s never been good at denying Zagreus anything. Never been good at staying away and keeping his distance, even when being near caused him nothing but pain.
He should’ve known that this time wouldn’t be any different.
“Fine,” he breathes, “just once.”
They’re in the practice courtyard behind Zagreus’ bedchambers, the purported Skelly has made himself scarce for their duel, and Zagreus has run a considering hand over his assorted weaponry and picked the Fists of Malphon.
Zagreus stands by the broken window through which he always leaps for his innumerable escape attempts, his fists up in a guard, bouncing on his heels and ready. Thanatos is at the other end, floating before Zagreus’ cabinet of keepsakes, both his fists clenched tightly around his scythe in front of him.
He tries to not look too much like he’s hiding behind the oversized harvesting tool. He’s not sure he succeeds.
“Alright Than,” Zagreus calls out, his mismatched eyes attentively watching him, “show me what you got.”
Maybe the sword would be better..? Or maybe not, he hasn’t sharpened it properly in quite some time, not since he picked up the scythe some centuries ago. The scythe had a longer reach, allowed him to be a little more efficient at reaping souls. The sword had been serviceable, a long time ago, but the scythe was handy now the dead from the eternal winter piled higher and higher.
But maybe the bluntness would be better? It wouldn’t cut, wouldn’t make Zag bleed… But on the other hand it would just bludgeon him. Maces and hammers are often crueller than blades, as Ares once told him.
Across from him, Zagreus has given up on just watching him and begun to run mindless, dizzying circles in front of him, occasionally dashing back and forth and up and down by his sides, whipping up the loose ends of Thanatos’ robes with each pass. His ever-flaming feet leave a trail of sparking embers in his wake. Thanatos pulls his scythe tighter against his chest, drifting back a bit when Zagreus dashes too close.
Incapable of staying still, even now. Thanatos was a fool to have ever thought Zagreus could have been content here, trapped in these pits with the dead. With Death.
“C’mon, do something, mate!” he says, not sounding in the least bit winded despite his vigorous speed. He truly is cousin to Hermes. “Hit me!”
“I’d really rather not.” He’s not Megaera, born to punish and torture. He doesn’t enjoy suffering, neither inflicting it nor receiving it. One of the greatest boons of his job is being able to end the long-suffering of the dying, to grant that complete relief and see the way that their faces ease, finally at rest, at peace.
He’s also (unfortunately, thanks to the lack of a door to the Prince’s bedchambers) well aware of the Prince’s sexual proclivities, of the ways he and Megaera used to enjoy each other’s company.
Just another reason Zagreus would find Thanatos lacking.
Zagreus stops running about long enough to give Thanatos a wry look, “Than, mate, I don’t think you understand the concept of a spar.”
“You’re right, I don’t,” Thanatos snips back, “I don’t need to brawl in the dirt to harvest a dying soul. I end suffering, not cause it.”
“Plenty of people suffer when a loved one dies.”
Thanatos swallows around nothing, dipping his head and letting the shadows of his hood fall over him, trying not to remember the way grieving families and friends and lovers screamed and cursed his name whenever he came to collect. The way the large majority of prayers and offerings made to him was just to beg him fruitlessly to stay away, to remind him he was unwelcome, unwanted.
As though he could ever forget.
He’s never let it bother him before, easy enough to shrug off while he tries to do his duties as swiftly and cleanly as possible. He doesn’t know why it stings so much, lately. Why it feels like a wound that never healed right has been reopened and is bleeding freely, when he'd never even known a wound existed before.
“I can’t help that,” he whispers, can’t help the misery and bitterness that colours his tone either.
“I- I’m sorry, Than, I didn’t mean-”
No, he knows why.
“I know. It’s fine.”
They stand in silence for a while.
“Well,” Zag says, clearing his throat and speaking just a touch too loud to be convincingly casual, “if you’re not going to do anything, I am.”
He charges, drawing back his fist for a full-bodied blow, clearing the length of the courtyard faster than Thanatos’ eyes can even track-
The unholy steel of the gauntlet tinks harmlessly off Thanatos’ godly shield.
“Are you serious,” Zag remarks drily, skidding to a stop and throwing another half-hearted punch, watching as it tinks off the shield again, “real sporting of you.”
Thanatos rolls his eyes, drifting a little closer to the ground so that Zagreus can amuse himself with punching various angles and sections of the shield, at varying speeds and strengths. “If it helps, I’m not doing that consciously. It just happens. It’s why you’ve never hit me by accident even in the most messy melée.”
“No kidding? There’s no trick to it? Not if I punch it really hard, or at a certain spot, or tap it lightly first to make it lower its guard and then follow up with a hard strike while it’s down?” He asks, pondering and inspecting. He reels his arm back and strikes with deadly purpose at the roundest past of the shield, raising an eyebrow with amusement as it generates a deeper dong sound rather than the tink .
“Guh-dong!” he laughs.
“Guh-dong.” Thanatos agrees.
To answer Zag’s questions, he says, “I have no idea actually. The others; Meg, the hydra, your father… They have shields too, do they not? Shields that make them impervious to all damage, like mine. How have you gotten past those?”
“I wait them out,” says Zagreus, carrying on his casual assault on the unfailing barrier, “they usually just go away on their own after a couple of seconds. Or in the case of the hydra, after I beat all its other littler heads. But you haven’t got any other littler heads to beat, and I think it’s been a solid minute now and it’s not going down…
“Oh hey!” he suddenly jumps back, putting a couple of paces between them and punching his gauntleted fists together, “maybe the shield will go down after you pull off an attack! That’s the other way I know of for the shields to fall.”
Thanatos looks dubiously down at his scythe, “so in order for you to hit me, you have to get hit by me first? Seems counterintuitive. Wouldn’t you want to minimise damage to yourself as far as possible in a fight?”
“You’ve really never been in a fight huh,” Zagreus smiles, amused.
Thanatos just blinks slowly at him.
“You don’t have to hit me, you just have to try to hit me,” Zagreus clarifies, “I’m fast, and I’m pretty tough, if not. I did beat Charon, you know.”
“You did,” Thanatos acquiesces. He wrings his hands on his scythe, worries his lower lip between his teeth. He could dodge, right? Zag was really fast, he honestly didn’t see him coming up behind him, even if the shield had still gone up by itself. He doesn’t actually have to hurt Zag. It’s fine. He’ll be fine.
Thanatos doesn’t really need to breathe, but he takes a deep steadying breath anyway, letting it slowly out through his mouth. “Alright.”
Thanatos raises his scythe.
Zag crouches low to the floor, eyes intent and alert, leg muscles tensing, preparing to run.
He swings.
9999!
ஓ ☠ Slain by Thanatos ☠ ஓ
“Ugh,” Zagreus sputters as he emerges from the Styx once more.
He was honestly still a little disoriented. One moment he was fully healthy and aware, watching Than raise his scythe, and in the next heartbeat he was floating facedown in the Styx. He’s not sure he even blinked.
He shakes the bloody Styx out of his hair, running his hands down his face a couple of times just to get the red out of his eyes, before finally looking up to see…
…Than, speckled and dripping with red, mouth an unamused flat line and his hand holding one of the towels outstretched to him.
Oops?
Honestly, the first few times he’d crawled out of the Styx after he’d put in the work order for the towels, he had actually forgotten they were there. After that, his father had always looked so disgruntled by the way that Zagreus kept dripping blood all over everything and making a mess of his precious Great Hall that Zagreus didn’t want to use the towels. Anything to make his father just that little bit more irritated.
Spattering Than was never part of the plan though.
“Sorry,” he says sheepishly, accepting the towel and making an effort to dry himself off while Than takes another for himself.
“It’s fine,” Than says shortly, briskly wiping himself off.
Zagreus tries to reassure him, “it doesn’t stick and it doesn’t stain. It’s not that bad.”
Than’s golden eyes are as sharp as his voice as he says, “I know.”
Oh, he’s really angry.
Zagreus fidgets with the towel, running it over his hair and the back of his neck a couple more times than necessary. He wasn’t kidding, the waters of the Styx don’t cling at all, and he is mostly dry again already. He lets his eyes dart across the Hall, the procession of petitioning shades, his father at his high desk, Cerberus at his side, Hypnos watching them curiously from his post.
When he looks back, Than still looks angry. Furious, even.
He keeps his eyes on the floor instead, picking at the bits of fluff sticking up on the towel and letting them float down like the light snowfall he saw on the surface. He’s already apologised, and Than’s all dry now. Than’s always been a pretty fussy and fastidious individual, maybe he wants him to promise to not be so messy again next time? He doesn’t know if that’s a promise he can make, being who he is, leaving a whirlwind of chaos in his wake whether he means to or not. But if not that, he doesn’t know what else Thanatos expects from him.
Everything between them these days is sour, everything’s gone all wrong. Something between them is broken now. He’s not even entirely sure when it happened. Maybe it was back when his father arranged that doomed engagement between Zagreus and Meg, or maybe it was when Zagreus began making his escape attempts out of the Underworld.
Zagreus doesn’t know how to make sense of the shards that are left behind, how to fit them back in any shape that doesn’t leave jagged edges sticking out, cutting at them both when they least expect it.
When Than came back, found him in that room in Elysium and started this sporadic series of contests to help ease Zagreus’ way out, he was angry. He was as angry telling Zag to come home as he was angry telling Zag he would help him escape no matter what, and damn the consequences to himself. He was angry getting that first gifted bottle of nectar and he was angry in every conversation thereafter.
Zagreus thought maybe they had begun healing past that. Than had always been quiet and gentle and kind, once you got past how scary-serious he was about his job. Surely he wouldn't hold onto this anger, whatever it was, for too long? Maybe the road was rocky and a little uncomfortable sometimes but surely, surely soon enough they’d go back to their silly jokes, with Than’s stories of the surface and dry wit and Zagreus’ showing off and absurd tales. They’d get into some harmless trouble together, like old times, then giggle under the covers about it after, sharing a bowl of snacks between them…
But Thanatos is angry, angrier than Zagreus has ever seen him. He’s been angry a long time now, even though he tries his best to hide it and even though Zagreus likewise pretends not to see it. He wants his best friend back, but he doesn’t know what to say to him to make it better, not anymore.
“I’m sor-”
“Don’t,” Than snaps, and Zagreus’ mouth clicks shut over his aborted apology. “Do not ever- ”
Than hangs his head, his bangs and his hood falling over his eyes. His fists are trembling. If the towel was a living being, Than would be strangling it to death. When Than finally raises his head, golden eyes locking directly onto Zagreus’ own, Zagreus forgets how to breathe.
“Do not ever, ever ask me to fight you again.”
Thanatos is crying.
With a flash of bright green wings and a puff of dark smoke, he’s gone.
He's not sure how long he just stands there, on the steps leading out of the Styx. He’s not sure how long it takes for him to figure out how to move his body again, absently dropping the used towels into the bin for Dusa to wash later. As if in a daze, Zagreus wanders over to where Hypnos had been floating, watching their altercation.
“Says here,” Hypnos jabs at his list lightly with his quill, his voice still light but not quite carrying its usual levity, “that the one who killed you this time was none other than my dearest twin brother, Thanatos?”
Zagreus nods dumbly, “yeah.”
Hypnos hums, in that usual annoying way of his that he does just before he gives some extremely redundant bit of advice.
“Have you ever considered… not being an asshole to my brother?”
Maybe not so redundant this time. Zagreus sighs, running his hands over his face again.
“Duly noted. Thanks Hypnos.”
If Thanatos, God of Merciful, Gentle Death, spends the next few weeks secretly practising how to swing his scythe in order to maim rather than outright kill, well.
That’s no one’s business but his own.