Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dick knows what it feels like to fall.

He’d been young, when his parents leapt from Olympus—barely even a century old when the war between the gods began to rage out of control and his parents decided it would be safer for them all to go into hiding until the worst of it passed.

His mother had wrapped him up in feathers like clouds, and then they’d tumbled from the heavens, the wind whipping the hair from their faces as they fell and fell and fell, before tumbling into a lush meadow. They’d stayed on Earth since then, hiding as mortals.

Godly essence can’t be concealed, but it can be removed, and rendered inert; to hide as a mortal is to truly become one, with all that entails.

Including mortal death.

Theirs was quick, at least—the snap of the rope, and then the unforgiving ground. Dick knows enough of life and death to know that’s considered a mercy, for mortals.

But his parents weren’t really mortals, and they weren’t supposed to die.

Especially not like this.

Shadows creep into the edge of his vision, and Dick is taking off before he has time to think about it, the instructions his parents had drilled into him taking over.

If anything ever happens, they said, and he wonders if they ever imagined it would be something like this—that they would manage to successfully escape from the war between gods, only to end up casualties in the daily struggle between man.

If anything ever happens, they said, he’s to run straight to their trailer and take the necklaces containing the godly essences that Hephaestus had torn from them as one final favor. He is only to swallow the gems if absolutely necessary, because once he is a god again, there will be no hiding from Olympus after that. He is not to trust anyone—especially anyone who claims that they’re there to help. He is to hide, and to wait until it’s safe.

But his parents are gone—forever.

How can it ever be safe again?

Unless—

He discards the thought before it can fully form—then, hesitantly, reaches back for it.

Even when Dick was a child growing up on Olympus, decades before the war started, he’d only seen Hades a handful of times. The god of death had always cared more about his realm than about whatever was happening in the realm of gods above—which means he likely won’t care to use Dick as a pawn.

Which means he could actually help Dick get his parents back.

Dick follows the shadowy trail of Death to the crack in the Earth from where they had come. It won’t stay open long—in a matter of moments, the crevice will be too small for Dick to fit through, and moments after that, it will close entirely, and he will have to wait and wait and wait for his next chance.

And with every moment he waits, the more likely it is that he will be too late.

Dick tears the gem from his necklace, swallows it whole, and leaps.

Dick’s parents never spoke much about the Underworld; he’s heard more about it from mortals than he ever has from them.

Gods have no reason to visit the Underworld, after all; for mortals, it’s only a question of when.

Most of their tales are the same: it’s a sad, dark place, watched over by the lord of the realm—lord of death and fear and all the things that creep in the shadows of the night—and forsaken by all other gods.

There are three main landmarks he’s heard of: the riverbank, where Charon picks up the souls he ferries across the Styx to Hades’s domain; the gates of the domain itself, guarded by the terrifying and mighty Cerberus; and the fountain of Lethe, where souls can drink from after they’ve gotten their much-needed rest and wish to ascend to a new life on the mortal plan.

The place where Dick awakens doesn’t look a thing like any of those.

He’s on his back on what feels—and looks—like grains of sand, except they’re dark as ash. Tendrils of shadow curl toward him from the shadows, as if in greeting, but when he reaches out to touch them, they dissolve into mist between his fingers. He hears no water, and sees only black above him.

Carefully, he climbs to his feet. Before him is darkness, so thick even the ash beneath his feet fades to nothing only a few paces away. Behind him—it’s still dark, but the ash narrows into a path, leading off into the distance.

Without much choice, he follows the path, which seems to lead more and more into nowhere the longer he walks. He looks back over his shoulder and sees only the darkness behind him. When he turns forward again, he’s inside a building.

He whips his head back around, but no matter where he turns, it’s the same—the darkness has somehow become marble white walls, the ash beneath his feet a pitch-black rug leading ever forward.

Slowly, he begins to walk again, wandering through the twists and turns of the hallway until he stands before a portrait of, he thinks, a family—two adult figures and a child. All faceless—or maybe not quite.

He stares at it, trying to make the swirling faces resolve into features until his eyes water so badly that he’s forced to blink them shut. When he opens them again, he’s on the landing of a staircase, standing between two wings. The wall behind him is bare.

He picks a direction at random and walks and walks and walks, until he finds himself inside a library, the shelves stretching higher than he can see. Directly before him is a window that stretches from the floor to the ceiling, in front of which sits a large armchair. Sitting in the armchair is a little boy wearing a formal black suit, staring out the window into the darkness.

“Hello?” Dick says.

The boy doesn’t turn.

Dick creeps closer, and quickly realizes it isn’t completely pitch black outside, after all—a man and woman are emerging from the darkness, with a small child between them, holding each of their hands.

The child is wearing the same clothing as the boy.

They’re passing by the window when they suddenly stop in their tracks. Dick blinks once, and the man and woman are on the ground, bodies stained in red.

The child is still standing between them, covered in blood.

Dick jerks back, bile rising in his throat.

The boy turns, looking at Dick impassively. His eyes are the same suffocating pitch black that hangs over the rest of this world.

“Hello,” he says politely.

Dick flicks his gaze over the boy’s shoulder, to the window. There’s nothing outside but darkness. He swallows down the sourness in the back of his throat. “Do you know where we are?”

“The Manor,” the boy says. He hasn’t blinked at all. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“I’m looking for my parents.”

“Here?”

“Is there somewhere else?”

The boy continues to stare, unblinking. Then he turns to the window again, even though there’s nothing to see outside anymore. “You won’t find them here.”

“Where should I look, then?”

The boy points without turning. Dick follows his finger to the shelves of books.

“What should I—” Dick starts to ask, but when he turns, the boy and the armchair are both gone.

He turns back to the shelves and pulls out a book at random. To his surprise, he can read it: it’s a book of fate, describing the life of Anthony Zucco—the man who had killed his parents. He flips to the end, and sees Zucco is fated to die peacefully, in his sleep. The book creaks in Dick’s hands.

He forces himself to put it away.

The next book he opens is that of a stranger—as is the next, and the next. All strangers, and all still living. He moves from shelf to shelf, carefully placing back every book he pulls off, until he finds one from someone who’s already passed—Lyna, the previous lion tamer at Haly’s. At the end of her story are the words of Hades and a series of letters and numbers that mean nothing to him, but might to someone else.

He tears his way through that shelf and the ones beside it, until he realizes that it’s all sorted by date and time of birth. But it isn’t as though his parents were ever born as mortals were. He searches the books around the time of their fall, and centuries before, and finds nothing.

There must be somewhere else—some place that holds the books of the gods.

He turns and shoves open the double doors of the library. It’s dark, and completely empty—save for the armchair, and the boy.

“They’re not there,” Dick says.

The boy looks at him with his eyes like voids. “If they’re not there, then they’re not here.”

“There must be somewhere else I can look.”

“There is nowhere else,” the boy says, and Dick, surrounded by darkness so thick he feels he might choke on it, has no choice but to believe him.

Dick finds his way outside, eventually.

It’s dark and ashy and dead, but it’s better than the cold marble walls, and the boy that appears when Dick looks over his shoulder and disappears when he blinks.

He sinks down to the ground, fists his hands into the ash, and wishes he’d never come. His parents are still gone, and now, here—he feels like he’s gone, too.

They hadn’t been gods in over a decade, but they were still surrounded by the things they once blessed: the birds his mother nicknamed him after, the trees he loved to climb, and the flowers—he loved the flowers most of all, loved how beautiful they were and how they blossomed into the sweetest fruits.

Pomegranates were his mother’s favorite. The vibrant burst of red and yellow and green are painted on his clothing, even now—the only splash of color in this otherwise monochrome world, and he barely even sees them on his own body.

But even if this world is devoid of everything else, he had made himself a god again in order to survive it, which means, maybe—

He digs his hands deeper into the ash and breathes. Growing the gardens in Olympus had come as easy as breathing; flowers would sprout underfoot just from his joy as he danced. Here, where the very ground itself is opposed to life, it takes more effort before he feels the roots catch—but they do, and before long, he finds himself staring with exhilaration at a tree, bright red flowers blooming from it like little bursts of light in the darkness.

“What is that?”

Dick turns to see the little boy staring up at the tree with his pitch-black eyes.

“It’s a pomegranate tree,” Dick says.

The boy points at the flower. “Is that a pomegranate?”

The bit of joy Dick found turns to unease. He hadn’t thought deeply about who or what the boy actually was, but now that he’s showing the curiosity of a child—a child who’s never even seen a flower—

“Have you always been down here?” Dick says.

The boy stares at him. “I don’t remember anything else,” the boy says. “Does that mean I’ve always been here?”

Dick shivers at the thought of this lonely darkness being the only thing the boy has ever known. Has he ever met anyone else, aside from Dick?

“It’s a flower,” Dick says. “But it can become a pomegranate. Some flowers can do that—become fruits.”

“Fruits?”

“Plants, that you can eat,” Dick says. “They’re sweet, and their juice—I can show you, if you’d like.”

The boy doesn’t say anything, but continues to stare at Dick with rapt attention, which Dick takes as a request.

He plants his hands against the trunk of the tree, and, letting the memory of his father splitting open the pomegranates and carefully handing him and his mother the seeds be his guide, he wills the flowers to fruit.

When he opens his eyes, pomegranates hang from the tree, heavy and full of life. He picks one gently, thanking the tree for its fruits, and hands it to the boy, who turns it over in his hands.

“You can eat this?” he says, and it’s said as impassively as everything else, but Dick smiles at the bewilderment he senses underneath.

He takes the pomegranate from the boy, removes the top, and carefully digs his thumbs in, peeling the fruit in half. Juice spills red down his fingers. He pulls aside the pith, and shows the fruit to the boy. “The white part is bitter, but you can eat the seeds.”

The boy takes it slowly, and picks at a seed.

Dick raises his fingers to his lips to lick the juice off.

“Stop,” the boy says, in an echoing voice that makes the back of Dick’s teeth ache, and he freezes, fingers an inch from his mouth.

“What’s wrong?”

“Don’t drink it.” The boy grabs Dick’s arm with fingers that send ice down his veins, and wipes the juice away with his sleeve. “Don’t eat this. Don’t eat anything.”

“What?” Dick says. “Why not?”

“It was born of Hades,” the boy says, “which makes it bound to Hades. If you eat it, you’ll become bound to Hades, too.”

Slowly, Dick lowers his hand. “If you can eat it, does that mean you’re born of Hades, too?”

The boy is silent for a moment. “Yes,” he says finally. “And no.”

“What does that mean?” Dick says.

The boy looks at him with his dark, dark eyes. “I can’t be born,” he says, “if I don’t exist.”

The boy exists.

He must.

Dick spends some time worrying that he doesn’t—that he’s just a figment of Dick’s lonely, distressed imagination, someone he created to keep him company in this infinite darkness—but he must.

If Dick were to conjure up companions, they would be his parents, or his friends from Haly’s—it wouldn’t be this boy with pale skin and sunken features who politely dislikes berries but is ravenous for stone fruit, who wants to know the difference between lilies and orchids and hydrangeas and roses, who slides his frozen hand into Dick’s and watches with rapt attention as Dick constructs him a garden with more colors than he could even name.

There is no day here in the below, and no night, but the rush of creation followed by the wave of exhaustion simulates it well enough for Dick. When his limbs feel too heavy to move, he lies down in the meadow he created, looks up at the little pinpricks of light in the sky, and pretends that they’re stars.

It’s while he’s lying there, the boy beside him, turning a hyacinth over in his hands—his mother’s favorite flower, the boy remembered, and he must exist if he has a mother—that Dick asks, “Do you have a name?”

“Bruce,” the boy says without looking up, and Dick feels a flutter of victory—because how can one have a name, if one doesn’t exist?

“Why don’t you exist?” Dick says.

“Nothing exists here,” Bruce says. “This place is Forgotten.” He turns to Dick. “That’s why no one has come for you.”

“There’s no one to come for me in the first place,” Dick says, though that’s not entirely true. Olympus would come, maybe—they’re just not who he wants to see. “Do you know where Lord Hades is?”

“You want to see him?”

“I want to ask him if he’d let me bring my parents’ souls back.” Dick presses a hand against the necklaces hidden under the shirt. “Do you think he’d agree?”

“You’re not afraid of what will happen if he says no?”

“Then he says no,” Dick says, “and I’ll be in the same place that I started.”

“Why don’t you fear him?” Bruce says.

Dick frowns. “Why should I?”

“Even the gods fear death.”

“It’s not Lord Hades’s fault that death exists,” Dick says. “But because it does, someone has to watch over the mortals who pass, and so he does. I heard that Zeus offered for him to live on Olympus, but he refused, because he felt the mortal souls here needed him more. Those are not the actions of a cruel man.”

Bruce stares at him with blank, unseeing eyes, and Dick sighs.

“There is nothing he could do to me,” Dick says, “that would hurt me more than I’ve already been hurt. The worst he can do is say no.”

Bruce’s lips tug downward, just a little. It’s the clearest expression Dick has seen from him thus far.

“I wish,” Bruce says, “that you wouldn’t hurt.”

Dick smiles softly and squeezes Bruce’s cold, cold fingers. “Thank you, Bruce. But I’ll be all right.”

Above them, the sky seems to shine brighter.

Dick knew his time in the Underworld wasn’t limitless—he just didn’t think it’d come to an end quite like this.

“Wake up,” Bruce says, voice crawling beneath Dick’s skin, but even then Dick can only drag open his eyelids to peer tiredly at him.

“I’ve been here too long, haven’t I?” Dick says.

Bruce’s hand against his face feels almost warm, which Dick knows to mean that Dick must be frozen cold now, too.

He wasn’t meant to be so cold.

“Bruce,” he says, and tips his head up at the pomegranate tree above them. “Can you open one for me?”

“You can’t eat it.”

“It was the first fruit I created here,” Dick says. “It has the most of my power. It will return strength to me.”

“No.” Bruce walks away, his hands in small fists by his side. “There’s another way. There has to be another way.”

Shadows creep toward them from the Manor, and from the inky blackness beyond—they’re drawn to Bruce, a fine black mist winding up his legs.

He doesn’t acknowledge them at all.

Dick pushes himself up to sit with shaky arms. “What are you doing?”

“He has to remember,” Bruce says, and the ground begins to tremble with his words. “He must.”

The ground rumbles violently, the stars in the sky above them shining brighter and brighter until, with a mighty crack, they connect to each other like constellations.

Like the entire sky is splintering apart.

Dick has a second to realize it isn’t a sky at all before it shatters into pieces, and with all the energy he has, Dick throws himself over Bruce as the shadows pour over them both.

Dick’s heart pounds so strongly he can hear it resonating in the cavernous darkness, where there’s no one but him and Bruce—and then a third.

From the darkness forms a figure, a writhing mass of shadows with long, pointed ears and sweeping wings unfurling to its side. It reminds Dick of a bat—and suddenly he remembers the tales of Hades’s favored form.

The Bat studies them in silence. Dick tries to open his mouth, and finds it frozen shut. Even if he told Bruce that he wasn't afraid of Hades, it's different to be before the god himself—to feel the presence that Dick has no doubt could bring even Zeus to his knees.

“Save him,” Bruce says, and Hades turns his gaze onto him.

“Why?” the Bat says. His voice resonates on every plane, sending a chill wracking through Dick's body and making his teeth chatter.

“Remember,” Bruce says, “and you’ll understand.”

“If I remember,” Hades says, “then we will forget.”

Bruce stands still for a moment, then steps out of Dick’s embrace, toward Hades. “Maybe it’s time,” he says, and his voice is soft. “Remember. Understand. Save him. Please.”

There is a long moment of stillness, and then the Bat moves forward, the shadows that swirl around him reaching forward to lap at Bruce.

“Bruce!” Dick shouts.

Both Bruce and the Bat turn to him. Shadows fall from Bruce’s eyes like tears. He smiles softly—the first smile Dick has ever seen from him.

“I’ll be all right,” Bruce says, shadows spilling from his mouth. “You’ll be all right.”

The figure of the Bat blurs at the edges, and in a blink, he becomes a rushing mass of darkness. Dick cries out and shields his eyes as the shadows surge forward, sending cold through his bones and sucking all the air out of the room and into its vortex.

Dick takes a desperate breath of air, only to swallow a mouthful of shadows that fill his soul with that unbearable cold.

Darkness overtakes him quickly.

“—can’t handle that much chthonic energy—”

“—anything that we can do—”

“—the best option, but you won’t even consider—”

“—last resort, so find another—”

“—try, but I’m not sure—”

The voices fade and fade to nothing.

There are lips pressed against his, cold and dry and firm.

Dick gasps, and coughs, choking on a liquid that lingers sweet and tart in the back of his throat. The mouth against his pulls back, revealing a pale and serious and oddly familiar face.

“You’re awake,” the man says in a resonating voice that makes Dick think of Bruce. His lips are a dark, dark red.

Dick is sitting upright on a bed, supported by pillows. He tries to open his mouth to speak, but his jaw feels so heavy. He can’t even move his fingers, or lift his head. His eyelids droop.

A cold hand lands against the side of his neck, a thumb brushing his cheek. “You’ll be all right,” the man says.

He drinks from a glass of dark red liquid, then presses his lips against Dick’s once more. Dick closes his eyes as the liquid trickles into his mouth and slips down his throat.

It tastes like pomegranates.

The juice is cold as it spills from the man’s mouth, but it settles with a warmth in Dick’s belly that radiates through his veins. Dick gasps as he feels the life return to his fingers, and then he’s choking again.

“Careful,” the man murmurs, and wipes the back of his hand against Dick’s mouth. His fingers are cold, so cold.

“Bruce?” Dick says. His voice is quiet, but not intentionally so.

This man is not the child that Bruce was, but his small smile sits the same on his face. “I haven’t been called by that name in a very long time.”

His voice echoes again, that resonating rumble that rattles in Dick’s bones; Bruce’s voice, and—

“Lord Hades,” Dick says, the name spilling from his mouth without thought, and he struggles to sit up further and bow forward all at the same time.

Hades catches him by his elbows, and guides him back to lay against the bed. “Careful,” he says again. “Your body isn't meant to handle all the chthonic energy that you’ve been exposed to. It will take time before you recover.”

“You’re him, then?” Dick says, and he isn’t sure which of them he’s speaking to.

“I lived in the mortal realm for a time,” Bruce says. “A short time. They carried me from the river, gave me a name, and loved me as their own. And they both died, far too soon.”

Dick remembers the man and the woman and the boy and the blood—and the child-like Bruce sitting there alone, silently watching it happen, over and over and over again.

“That time was brief, compared to eternal life, so a part of me stayed there, to always remember it,” Hades says. “The part that grieved, and the part that loved. And, in time, I forgot him—and he let me, to save me from feeling his pain. But you reminded him that pain wasn’t always all there was. And he couldn’t let you be forgotten, too.”

“I’m sorry,” Dick says softly.

Hades shakes his head, once. “It was time. And I was wrong, to think that it would have been better to never have loved at all.”

Dick licks his lips, and tastes the tartness against his tongue. “You fed me pomegranates.”

“The chthonic energy was consuming you,” Hades says. “There was no other choice.”

“So I’m…”

“Bound, yes,” Hades says. “But not forever. You won’t survive here forever. After you’ve recovered enough, I’ll call to Olympus—”

“No.”

Hades looks at him in sympathy. “Your parents—”

“Are gone,” Dick says. “I know.”

He thinks he’s known, ever since he hadn’t been able to find their names in the library of fates; thinks that’s why he’d lost his sense of urgency, and nearly let himself fade away in that garden—that small, final paradise that he’d created.

“They drank from the Lethe, didn’t they?” he says.

“Our records don’t show them ever passing through the Gates,” Hades says. “They went straight to the Lethe from the ferry, and ascended.”

“To find me.” Dick’s eyes brim with tears. “They returned to the mortal plane for me, and I wasn’t even there. And now I won’t ever see them again.”

“Their souls may have changed on their ascension,” Hades says, “but parts of it always remain the same. They may not ever remember you, but you can see them again—you can see them happy again. That is a blessing unique to us.”

Maybe so, but Dick’s parents were never supposed to die. Their essences burn against his chest—essences that can never be returned, now that their souls have irrevocably changed the way only mortal souls can.

“I won’t go to Olympus,” Dick says, throat thick with tears. “My parents died to protect me from the gods on the mountain. I won’t go back there, and you can’t make me.”

“Even I can’t strip your godhood from you again,” Hades says gently. “Once you return to the mortal realm, they’ll find you. There are no places where a god can hide from Olympus.”

“Except here.”

“You cannot stay here,” Hades says. “Your body can only tolerate the chthonic energy for so long.”

“There must be something you can do.” Hades is Hades, powerful and feared, but he is also Bruce, the little boy Dick would have called a friend, and it’s Bruce who Dick is pleading with to save him.

The silence stretches between them, thick and fragile all at once.

Finally, Bruce says, “Olympus can’t touch anything that I’ve laid claim to. It’s one of our unbreakable oaths. If you let the chthonic energy overtake you completely, I could take you into our pantheon—”

“But I wouldn’t be a god of life anymore,” Dick says.

“That gift is why the gods covet you,” Bruce says. “Without it—”

“Without it, I wouldn’t be me.” He can’t imagine losing that last tether to who his parents were—to who he is. “You remember what it was like, don’t you, in the garden?”

“I remember,” Bruce says. “Which is why I understand why they want you. It’s a magnificent gift.”

Dick clutches the sheets in his lap. “I won’t lose it. Not for fear of them. There must be another way.”

Bruce regards him silently. Then he says, “There is one other way. The oldest and most traditional claim there is. But, with that, you would be bound forever.”

“You said I wouldn’t survive here forever.”

“You won’t,” Bruce says. “You’ll still need to spend time in your world of springtime and life, but if you’re mine—truly mine—then none on Olympus can touch you, even if they find you.”

Dick shivers, feeling a chill curl around the base of his spine. “What does that mean? To be truly yours?”

“I have waited a long time,” Bruce says, voice low, “for someone to sit on the throne beside me.”

Dick licks his lips again. The taste of pomegranates is fading.

“You’ll take me?” he says, in a voice barely more than a whisper.

“If you’ll have me,” Bruce says, eyes dark and serious.

Dick’s lips part, and close. “What do I have to do?”

Bruce takes the glass of pomegranate juice from the table, and holds it to him. “Drink,” he says.

Dick looks at the glass, and then at Bruce’s mouth, still stained crimson.

“I still haven’t recovered enough,” he says, “to drink on my own.”

Bruce smiles, and takes a sip of the pomegranate.

His kiss is the sweetest Dick has ever tasted.