Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

caffeinewitchcraft:

ohhbobs:

stop checking on them
they don’t miss you

These are the words written on a post-it (a human invention) in Persephone’s bedroom. They’re written in what she fondly calls New English, aka the English that her mother still doesn’t know, even after all these years.

Every morning, when she wakes, she sees this post-it stuck onto the stone wall and makes herself read it out loud.

“Stop checking on him,” she says, arms wrapped tight around her knees. “He doesn’t miss you.” The words bring the familiar sting of pain, the familiar tightness in her chest, the accompanying breathlessness. There’s still a part of her that rebels at the thought, that clings to what he said before and not after.

She thinks she might have been happier loving a mortal, which is so in fashion these days that her mother is gallivanting about Earth like she hadn’t spent centuries chastising Persephone for the same. If she loved a mortal, she could bind them in ways that it’s impossible to bind a god.

She gets up and gets ready for her day. Being an immortal means that she can’t just spend all day in bed. That path leads to centuries of apathy and she’s still young. So very, very young.

“Go back to Olympus. I should have known better than to let a child into my kingdom.”

There was no “letting” about it. She’d been younger still and in chains and in captivity and in love. She’d beguiled and coerced so that he’d take her with him, made him free her. 

She’d thought she was shedding her chains, choosing new ones that better suited her, but she didn’t see the way her discarded shackles slipped onto him. She didn’t see what a burden she was, what a burden she would become to him, how limiting, how heavy, how stupid.

It’s been five years now and she’s still counting seasons like she has a chance of being let back in. Summer and winter, summer and winter, summer and winter, ad nauseum. Her mother had said that she’d stick to the cycle, that the Earth actually benefited from winter, but Persephone sees the way the summers are growing longer and hotter, the way the winters are short but so sharp she could cut her teeth on them.

Spring? She stopped that a long time ago. The melting of winter is good enough for mortals and gods alike. They don’t notice and, therefore, they don’t ask.

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