23- Honest Intentions

Squawks, insults and sales pitches flew over their heads. They crashed past a market stall selling multi-coloured drinks, syrup exploding across the street. Panic checked the loose watch on his wrist. "I hope the kid's still at Herc's place! You think Hades'll be mad if we're late?"

Pain stared at him, though he now had a smoothie in one hand. "You know what?" he panted, "I think he might be!"

"Oh, we should've gone with him!" They took another corner, kicking up dust. "Why didn't we give him a cell phone?"

"Nobody would've believed him if we'd been hanging around! And if they don't believe him then 'pshh!" Pain threw a chubby hand into the air. "We all fry in a big, red cloud of thunderbolts!" They stumbled out into a broader, cleaner, wealthier street and staggered to a light jog.

"I hate karma," said Panic.

"You keep saying that."

They passed by perfectly groomed gates with individual, yet perfectly homogenous grounds out front. Sometimes a villa would peek through the hedgerows or a slatted roof would emerge above a cyprus spike, but for the most part these buildings had withdrawn aloofly from the street and could not be seen. The greenery dimmed to a charcoal black as the sky burned redder. Pain glanced up at the sky with growing concern, sipping the straw of his drink, but Panic arched towards one of the gates to try and catch a glimpse of the landscaping.

"It's alright for some, huh?" he said, eyeing the sprinklers misting the front lawns. He let out a sudden, soft gasp. "Ooh!" Pain turned with growing frustration as Panic dashed to the gate. He ducked down, ignoring the manicured grounds rolling lazily beyond him, then twanged back upright with something shiny in his hand. "A bottlecap!"

"Oh!" Pain perked up. "For your collection!"

Panic flicked it into the air like a coin and caught it with triumph. "That's the last one!"

At the bottom of the street, a wisp of pink glitter slipped out from the gates, her face in her hands like a mourning shade. They froze, Panic stashing the bottlecap in the pocket of his tunic.

"Lady Hera!" he hissed.

Her thin body rattled with a single sob, but then she pulled herself straight, lifted her chin, and solidified herself against the world. With a wave of her hand, she summoned her divine chariot to the empty street with an unfolding flutter of peacock feathers.

Pain ran over to her, leaving Panic stumbling in confusion. "E-excuse me!" His precocious voice dropped as his disguise hissed away. "Lady Hera!" She spun around and drew back her skirts in disgust as if a rat were aiming for her ankles.

"You!" she snapped, "You awful creature!"

Pain rolled to a stop in a skitter of gravel. "... Fair enough." She withdrew with a pink-eyed glare.

"What do you want? Has Hades sent more of his minions to ruin everything?!"

Panic dropped his own disguise and approached with a ducking beak. "So... I guess this means it didn't go so well?"

"No!" Hera's next attempt at a snap choked itself. Her chin quivered. "It didn't!" The two imps glanced to each other and held onto their necks.

"Uh-oh," muttered Panic under his breath.

"You wretched little things!" Hera turned on them with wet and quaking fury as her tears turned them into shaking smears of light. "How can you be so flippant at a time like this?!" Her face crumpled as her composure fell to pieces. "This is all your fault, too! If you hadn't turned him mortal in the first place-!"

"Hey, lady!" Panic snapped, his spine lifting in self-preservation, "Unlike some people, we don't have the luxury of just ignoring Hades!"

"Well you don't exactly seem wracked with guilt over it!"

Pain's head ticked back and forth as the goddess of marriage and Queen of Olympus lowered herself to a screaming match with a goblin. Her cheeks flushed, her eyes blinded, her voice scratching up her throat, something in her haggard desperation made his tail twitch. After glancing down at the drink in his hand, he cut in just as Panic began to inflate with a few carefully-curated Theban cusswords.

"D'you want some of my smoothie?"

She faltered like a clockwork doll and turned to face him with utter incomprehension. He held out the cup and wiggled it at her, as the shock of such an absurd offer knocked all thought out of her head. Then, defeated, she sank to sit on the raised floor of her chariot and held out a limp hand. He handed it over, and she sipped meekly on the end of the straw.

Pain sat on one side of her, Panic on the other, as she stared numbly out at the road. They waited in silence until they heard the rattle of air from the bottom of the cup. She sniffled, then spoke.

"You didn't warn me it was pineapple."

Pain snatched back the cup. "If you didn't like it, you didn't have to finish it!" A slightly mad laugh escaped her, and as they all sat together in a line, they all realised that in the darkening shadows of the reddening sun, they were the only things they still recognised.

Hera sniffed, head bent. "I should have been with him from the start," she said.

Pain shuffled closer to her, and leaned in to look up at her face. "You mean... you wanna be mortal?" She faltered. For a long time she sat, unthinking, in front of a bare fact that she could not deny, but did not want to accept. She waited for it to move first, but it didn't. It existed in front of her, a blockade that she had ignored for a long time, but as the other roads had vanished, one-by-one, they was now no other way around it. She nodded.

"Well hey!" Panic said. "We can do that! There's more where that stuff came from, you know?"

"What?!" She drew herself back. "Oh, no, really-" To desire something was not the same thing as wanting to go through with it, but the skinny little goblin nodded at her.

"Yes, really! I mean, why not, right?"

Pain's tail wiggled behind him, and though he tried to sound encouraging, a quiver of fear ran through his voice. "It's not like we've got anything left to lose." Hera's eyes softened at him.

"There may still be hope." Then, with polite apology, she added, "May I ask your names?"

"Oh!" Pain hopped from the chariot with a slapping sound and flung out his arms to introduce himself. "I'm Pain!" Panic joined him.

"And..." Pain's tail drooped, "We're sorry for making you cry."

Hera gazed at them with quiet wonder, and as they ducked their heads and watched her sniffles with genuine concern, her mind fell back to Ganymede. She had left him back at the temple to chase down her son, and while she was certain he could handle himself just fine, he deserved this patience (and leftover pineapple smoothie) far more than she did. A clutch of maternal instinct deep in her chest squeezed for someone else's son, and so with a deep breath, she rose to her feet.

"Thank you, both of you," she said, conviction drying the last of her tears. "Allow me to take you to your friend. Then..." Her eyes rose to the deep, red sky. "I must return to Olympus, with or without Hercules."

Ganymede dragged himself back together again, all the parts of him slinking over the stone like a nest of crawling vipers. He didn't grumble this time. There was nobody to hear him, so he gathered all his pieces in silence.

One hiccup bounced off the walls. He pulled on the first leg with his lips clamped shut, blinded by the water scalding his eyes. His shoulders shook, choking out his attempts at breathing as he shoved his foot onto the end of his ankle. His throat slapped open, air squeaked in, then it clamped wetly shut again.

Once complete, he hugged his knees to his chest and held on as tightly as he could. He tried steady breathing, but every breath squeaked in with erratic staccato, and he tried to keep his eyes open but the tears drowned out his surroundings. The red doorway ahead of him swam so much that he wanted to vomit as the glowing, scarlet squares quavered back and forth over stone-gray reflections. He bit his lip, but the muscles had tightened it so much that it sprang from his teeth like a bowstring.

He buried his head in his knees, and through such tightly-gritted teeth his sobs sounded like a string of clumsy and ineffectual hissing.

They were done. He had failed, and though he knew he had tried as hard as he could, the outcome was still the same. Sometimes a guy was just the wrong man for the job.

He gripped hold of Pain and Panic's trusting faces in the safety of his imagination and refused to let them go. He thought of the Minotaur and fantasised bringing him to the surface for the second time in his life - this time without yelling and without chasing, so that he could smell it properly. They could all walk through the long grass together, at least in the watery daydream he tried to grab between his fists. And Hades-

Hades had done many bad things in his long life, but he was Ganymede's friend. He was funny and driven, and just like him except that he lacked a dogged sense of shame. Hades believed in himself. Ganymede had believed in him too, and the bubble in his throat that pushed hot, wet tears into the backs of his eyeballs sat there because it was just so unfair. Hades deserved a chance to walk on the surface too.

They had shown him kindness down in the Underworld, and all he had done to earn it was promise them that they mattered. He bawled into his clamped knees as he burned with love for them. He grieved for all they wouldn't see and everything they had never gotten.

Though his bleating echoed from the walls, they eventually had to come to an end - he couldn't cry forever. When they finally gasped to an end, the silence was waiting for him. He had no idea for how long. Sniffing, he raised his eyes and gazed through blinding tears as they streaked down his grey-green face.

For all the good that it did him, his heart still ached in his chest. It seemed so big that it pushed against his rib bones and stopped up his voice box. Hades, Pain, Panic and the Minotaur - he loved them all because they had been given to him, and something in the silence compelled him to his feet. The shifting of his sandals against the broken mosaic echoed by themselves.

His voice came out thick with phlegm and saltwater, and staggered over the sobs still sticking to his diaphragm, but he spoke to the silence out loud.

"Hey, whoever-you-are," he began, to nothing, knowing that the nothing could hear him, "I'm real sorry you backed the wrong horse. I know you guys like to pick out your Theseuses and your Perseuses or whatever-" There were a lotta eues-es. "-and I promise, I tried as hard as I could... but that's - that's all I've got. Wonderboy was my last scheme, and all I did was screw Hera over." The silence levelled its attention on him, and although the fear of what was to come lay frosting in the pit of his stomach, a strange yearning still squeezed him harder. The beat of his heart pounded with the silence's own unknowable pulse, and as they regarded one another he no longer knew where that love in his chest ended and the movement of the silence began. He had never thought love to be a living thing before, but it seemed to latch on to him and do his breathing for him.

He took it, accepted it, and gave himself up to the terrible things that must be coming.

"I'm sorry I let you down," he said, as he wiped his eyes with his wrists. "But if I've gotta go down, I'm gonna go down with them."

A shadow poked its head across the solid, red light of the entrance. Ganymede raised his eyes to meet Pain's sad, yet hopeful smile, and knew he had been given a gift no matter how late it had come.

When Panic came skidding and tumbling back into the throne room, the chamber was dark and Hades was sat in the centre, his head bent, his flames crackling at a low ember. "Hey!" His spines lifted. "Lord Hades!" The god raised his head.

The spines fell again. In a thousand years, through all of Hades' failures, his rages, his self-pity and his apathetic cruelty, he had never seen despair wreck its way across his boss' face. Ducking his head, he slithered to his side and in Hades' quiet grief, he actually listened to him.

"Uh, this might seem like bad timing - actually, now that I'm down here, it seems like really bad timing, but I wanted to ask..." Hades wheeled his hand at him to make him get to the point. "Do we have any more of that potion? The- the one you told us to give to Hercules?"

Hades stared at him. Panic twitched. Then he was swept from his feet as Hades swung him up into the air with a sudden shout. "Panic!" Panic screeched and struggled in his grip. "You creepy little genius! That's it!"

Panic went still and hung from his fingers. "I am? It is? What is?" He fell back to the ground. Hades pumped his fist in a burst of blue fire.

"it's a short-term solution!" Hades paced back and forth in front of him. "But hey, beggars can't be choosers, am I right?"

"Zeus'll be here any minute, and he's gonna be able to tell whether or not his deal's gone through-"

"You took the deal?!"

"Don't interrupt me when I'm on a roll. We gotta find a loophole - some way to finagle this deal without actually making the deal. I mean, I'm going down either way - what, are we supposed to believe Zeus'll actually hold up his part of the exchange? - but there's no reason to take the kid down wi-" He stopped himself.

Panic caught a skull-headed key and jumped to attention as Hades turned to him.

"Listen to me very closely," he said, all the attention in the room lowering in and around the little creature. Hades' eyes stared at him with the determination of a Moray eel watching prey from the shadows. "You're going to go get more of that stuff, and you're gonna keep it on you - don't go burying it in the yard, don't go stashing it away in one of your little hidey-holes - I want it with you, where you can use it. You with me so far?" Hades nodded his head with a unhappy grin, goading Panic into repeating the instructions.

Panic nodded as quickly as he could. "Get the stuff, keep it on me!"

"Great. Now - get outta here. Don't talk to strangers, don't pheasant out on me and go breaking cover - I want you out of sight, out of mind." Panic's hand snapped to a salute.

"You got it, Lord Hades!"

"Good!" The pressure lifted. "Now get outta here before the rest of the gods show up! Go!"

Something occured to Hades, and as Panic vanished into the wall his fire faded. The plan, desperate though it was, should work - and yet even if it went off without a hitch, he would still be leaving this place alone. The cavern dripped, one lonely drip at a time.

The silence was temporary now - both he and it waited to be swept away by an incoming army - but still it stretched out on every side of him and still it rang as hollow as the space in his chest.

He hissed as if he had been burned and rounded on the silence that had hounded him all his life.

"You couldn't let me have one thing, could ya?!" His voice barked off of stone. "Even when I was tryin' to be nice!" A snarl reared up inside of him as he lashed out at nothing, and nobody heard him. "What's even the point of trying if I'm always gonna be the heel, huh?! You always wanted me to die alone down here!"

He told himself that he was aiming this tirade at Zeus, until it all faltered and he growled, "Great, now I'm yelling at the walls."

Drawing in a deep breath, gritting his teeth against any emotion that might hurt more than outrage, he whipped out his voice so sharply that it even hurt him when it lashed back at his ears.

"Fine! You wanna keep me as the big, ugly punching bag of the gods? Whatever!" He stormed for the door. "But that kid ain't goin' down too!"

Ganymede let himself into the Minotaur's room with a paper bag crunching under one arm. As the heavy door unlocked and swung open, the beast lifted its snout and flicked up an ear, picking up something new among the familiar, sandy smell of wet granite.

"Hey pal," Ganymede said, making sure the door locked behind him. "It's been a long day. I stopped on the way back." The Minotaur approached the bag and rolled his snout over it, crumpling it up and releasing more of its smell into the air. Ganymede tried to pull it upto his shoulder, but as the beast beared down upon him he realised that if he wanted something, he could take it - so he just about managed to snatch his own portion out before the great, big animal gave a great, grumpy swipe and took the rest.

It plodded to the stone slab of its bed and sat down. Feeling its way around the wrapper, it ripped the paper free and devoured the burger inside with one chomp. Then it felt around the bag and chased the fries at the bottom. Ganymede eased himself down beside him, unwrapped his own and nibbled on the bun.

"I dunno if it's kinda wrong of me to buy you beef, but-" He eyed how fast the Minotaur scooped out the fries. "I take it you don't care." The Minotaur held the bag above its head and shook the remains into its mouth. Ganymede's shoulders hunched, his body sagging, as he spoke over the rattling bag.

"Sorry about... everything," he began as the Minotaur lodged its nose into the bag and licked loudly at the salt lining the inside, "I know you don't understand what I'm saying but I just thought... unless Hades has some grand scheme I don't know about..." A crackling sound drowned him out as the Minotaur tried to chew on the bag. "Hey!" He snatched it, ripped it up, and tossed it to the ground. "I'm tryin' to talk to you!"

The Minotaur's ears flattened, and he shuffled around to face him, his hoof-like hands between his knees. Ganymede's twitch of irritation dissolved, his brows lifted with a sorrow that tried to stretch physically out from his chest and reach for the creature, but he kept his voice level as he carried on. "I think your days might be numbered, just like ours. A-and I figured you're the only guy around here who's had it worse than me, you know? At least I got to see the sunlight once. Quite a few times actually. I don't mean to brag." He grinned without any change in his misery, but dropped it when he remembered that the Minotaur had no eyes to catch it with.

He continued, "I don't know whether you'd have been better off staying in the Labyrinth or suffering whatever Zeus is gonna do with you when he rolls over this place, but I figure at least this way you get to try real food. I mean, normally prisoners get to choose their last meals, but you never learned to talk, so... hey, just another way life screwed you over." Then, pausing to let a surge of righteous anger light up his insides, he corrected himself. "Just another way people screwed you over." He glared down at the uneaten burger clenched between his hands.

"If I'd figured you out earlier, maybe we coulda made this a regular thing. That woulda been nice, huh? I mean- hey!" The Minotaur shoved towards his hands. "No!" Ganymede twisted it as far out of his reach as he could. "This one's mine!" The Minotaur knocked him against the stone slab with the flat of his skull. "Oof!" Then he withdrew, and Ganymede lay there for a moment, tumbled and dazed, before lifting his burger up into the air. It was eaten from his hand in one blunt snap. "You're a jerk."

His stomach lurched as a thick hand took his upper arm, and he couldn't decide whether it would be smarter to freeze up or go limp before the Minotaur ripped it off of him. As he was levered back upright he babbled, "Woah-woah-woah! I come apart real easy! Don't yank it-! Oh." Helped back upright, even if he was without his supper, that hand patted down on the top of his head almost hard enough to hurt, but not quite.

The blunt, dark-furred hand of the Minotaur adjusted its pressure, then pet down his long, blond hair. He didn't dare move, but he understood. Learning from the only sign of affection he had ever received himself, the illegitimate prince of Crete pet the man beside him as if he were an animal. A dizzy laugh quavered out of Ganymede as he reached up a hand to pat him on the shoulder.

"You sure lucked out," he said as the bull drew back to sit hunched beside him, "Getting me as your tutor on human affection." Smirking humourlessly, he continued, "Tell you what; if we get outta this, I'll teach you how to shake hands." The Minotaur huffed, probably sensing the end of the sentence, and he allowed himself a smirk. "Finally, someone around here's smart enough to laugh at my jokes."

A sharp knock at the door sent a jolt through his body. The Minotaur rose to a stand beside him and huffed hot air from his nostrils. Hades poked his head around the door.

"Knock-knock!" he said, then added an appalled, "Hey, you stopped for food?! And got some for this guy? Where's mine?!"

"It's in the fridge!" Ganymede squawked back. "What, you think it'd survive being in here with this-" He jerked a thumb at the Minotaur. "For more than thirty seconds?! I already lost mine!" The Minotaur let out a low rumble. "Hey, easy there, big fella..." Ganymede lifted a hand to pat the Minotaur's head, then thought better of it and lay it on his shoulder instead. "You gotta be nice- he's the boss."

"Great," said Hades. "Now you're training him. But hey- uh-" He clicked his tongue and nodded down the hall. "Can I grab you for a quick aside? Won't take long."

Their eyes met slowly, and when they did, they understood everything. "Sure..." Ganymede rose from his seat. "Looks like you came up with a plan, huh?"

"Yeah. It's a doozy."

The Minotaur rumbled again, sensing something shift in the atmosphere. Ganymede glanced at him, but made his way across the room.

Two thousand pounds of muscle rammed for the door, but Hades swept Ganymede over the threshold and slammed it shut. The impact shook slabs of ceiling onto their heads and left their ears ringing as if a shell had hit right beside them.

"Woah! Dude!" Ganymede dove behind Hades' robes. "What's your problem?!"

Hades locked the door with a gesture. "Ah, don't be so hard on the guy; I get that way after street food sometimes too." Looking down at Ganymede, their mutual sallow headlamps softened and silence passed between them. The misery hiding in Hades' expression shook Ganymede worse than usual, but the acceptance in Ganymede' hurt Hades more. "Now come on-" he croaked, lifting his claw to the hallway - and to the Styx beyond. "... Let's take a walk."