4 - Honest Intentions

"I had it!" Ganymede's voice shook the tunnels. "It was practically in my hands!"

"But you don't have it," Hades replied, making no attempt to hide his displeasure as he lounged in his throne. "Shame, I almost had high hopes for you, kid."

Ganymede gnashed his teeth and stared between his own clutching and empty fingers. Pacing back and forth in the centre of the Great Skull, throwing wild gestures around his body, his shadow hit the back wall in a warped and grasping projection.

"The hole they dug was clean!" he roared, yelling at himself as if the god of the dead wasn't even there, "No human could have done anything like that! And the timing - my village was on high alert when we showed up, so the trail can't have even gone cold!"

Hades' gaze followed Ganymede's blond head as it bobbed to and fro. He wasn't sure exactly why he had let this little 'meeting' continue for as long as it had, except that watching a mortal shake his fist at Olympus was kind of funny, in a pathetic kind of way.

A finger jabbed suddenly towards him. "You!"

"Me?!"

Ganymede faltered, dropped his hand to his hip, then rubbed his smooth jaw in thought. "No... If you'd taken it, you'd still be bound by our deal, and it's not in your best interest to keep it a secret. Besides, why send me on a wild goose chase with Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee? Waste of time and resources."

"You sure think you've got it all figured out, huh?" An incredulous smirk crossed Hades' face. Snapping out of his own head, Ganymede turned to face him in a toss of hair.

"What'd you mean?"

"I mean..." Hades drew himself to a stand as smoke crawled up the cavern walls. "You've got quite the little ego for someone who got himself sacrificed - what, this morning?" Ganymede drew back as the air around him turned to soot and the smoke, coagulating up and along the ceiling, merged into one bubbling dome. Hades disappeared in a lick of flame.

He reappeared an inch from his face. "Boo."

Ganymede jolted. Hades' voice steamrollered over him, raising an octave and quivering on the very edge of true fury. "You think you've got problems, kid?! You think I'm a pawn in your little deathbed game?!" Even as Ganymede staggered back from him, he pursued. The smoke around Ganymede turned to flame as, with a cry of concern, he leapt back from the heat. "I've got waaaaay bigger problems than some jilted catamite, ya little worm, but you seem to wanna demand a monopoly on my schedule! Well-"

The smoke vanished. Hades clapped his pulseless hands to Ganymede's cheeks. Grinning like some creature with far too many teeth from the bottom of the sea, his eyes as wide as the very first monster under the very first bed, he growled, "Now you've got my attention. I'd be very careful about how you use it."

Ganymede's white-knuckled fists shook, his body rigid, as dread infected the anger that had been so successfully animating him before. But, as if his own fear was a wolf to be threatened into submission, he opened his eyes wider to get a better look at the sociopathic pupils burning a hole in the back of his throat.

"Maybe I got a little overheated," he said, his voice cracking only once before returning to a low, vibrating monotone. "Not a great first impression, I admit." Hades scoffed, but he let him go.

"Don't get me wrong, kid, I love the energy," he said as he sat back down in his throne, "You'd just better make damn sure it's pointed away from your benevolent patron." Muttering to himself, he added, "And I thought getting 'fixed' was supposed to stop this kinda bad attitude."

Ganymede's lip curled into a bitter attempt at a grin. "Imagine what I must have been like before." Hades let out an appreciative, low whistle.

"Boy, I bet you wrecked that veterinarian's office." Before his minion could react, he continued, "Don't try my patience, kid - what little of it I've got, I'm not wasting it on you. Next time you start screeching at me, I don't care how much you start scraping at my feet, I'll bury you so deep in the walls that you'll wish I'd tossed you in the river." The boy stood in front of him with muscles so rigid that he could have snapped himself in half.

"Great! Now," Hades clapped his hands with a nose-wrinkling smile. "Lemme show you to your room."

The floor opened up beneath Ganymede's feet. He plummeted into the void with such a screech that it made Hades' teeth ache. "Don't worry!" he called after him, "I'll give you that one for free!"

The hole closed up and his good humour dropped like a stone from his face. He rose to his feet with a miserable sigh and banished his throne in a puff of smoke. He had some consultants to call.

Ganymede hit the ground and shattered into pieces. Coughing and spluttering, his arms crawled back to him and shoved themselves into their sockets, then he grabbed his legs and yanked them on like a pair of high boots. He spat vicious curses at the gods. "Stupid!" He slapped his hands on the ground and pushed himself onto his feet. "Self-important!" He thrashed his arms in the air, slashing at nothing as his anger grew bigger than his body could contain, "No-good-!" Letting out an inhuman shriek of rage, he grabbed at his hair. His knuckle snagged in an unseen knot. "Piece of-!"" With a wrench of his fist, he pulled the tangle from his scalp, then slapped his palm to his stinging skull as he screamed through gritted teeth. The air echoed his sentiments back at his face.

His room hung in a damp and idle sort of suspense, the cracked and ancient window in the far wall covered by a ragged strip of curtain. What few soft furnishings it had consisted of tattered black sackcloth, and all the items that had, in Olympus, been gold - torch brackets, lanterns, errant pottery - were here made of iron. It all had an impersonal and dreamlike quality to it, as if the jug and bowl on the nightstand were not a sign of Hades' hospitality but merely a by-product of the bedchamber's natural existence. A flat slab of granite, raised up like an uncarved sarcophagus, lay in one corner, and if he wanted to, he could use it as a bed. The room didn't much care either way if he did or not. It rang with apathy on all sides, in a rising pitch that brought acid surging up behind his teeth. Something clattered down the chute behind him, tinking in a clumsy zig-zag, until his shepherd's crook landed on top of his skull.

He grabbed it with a cry of rage and swung it at the mute side-table. Jug and bowl clattered to the ground like twin gongs, one then the other, then ignored him, undamaged. He brought it smashing down on the slab of his bed and it did nothing - only shook the staff around his palms as the smack of wood thickened, then dissolved, into wet air.

His fingers dropped it to the ground as shame rose up in a great, slimy bubble from the pit of his stomach. Through clenched teeth and heaving breath, he had the sudden urge to get as far away from himself as possible - to rip off his detachable arms like a shedding crab and fling them into the Styx, to kick off his legs and take off his head and crawl away from himself until nobody could find him and nobody could take any more from him. He held his arms away from him as his breath growled in and out, as if he'd been seeped in swamp water.

He wished he felt wounded outrage. To feel as if his pride had been wounded would imply he had pride at all - that he had objective dignity that the gods had been wrong to abuse. Shame, however, which covered him now as much as it had while still alive, meant he was a shameful thing. That meant he and Olympus were of the same opinion.

The air of the room sat too close to his mouth.

He ripped the curtain fabric from the window. Below him stretched the river, whose great, green mass crawled towards the room and then far, far below it. This room, despite all logic, was buried in the mass of temples and jumbled architecture that grew out of Hades' throne room. He didn't care if it didn't make any sense. Blood pounding in his wrists, he grabbed the sackcloth in his claws.

As he struggled to rip the curtain in two, the twitch of a forked tail caught his eye. With a white flash of his eyes, he lunged for it. Panic leapt from his hiding place beneath the window, but Ganymede's fist clamped around the thin appendage and brought him swinging back into the room. Yelling in appal, the imp's claws left scratch marks all along the outer rock as he was launched inside.

Ganymede's free hand grabbed Panic's middle. Panic squirmed out between his fingers, so he grabbed him around the ribs. Panic squirmed higher, and Ganymede snatched fist-over-fist until he had the creature trapped by the neck. Heaving breath through clamped teeth, he asked him, "What... are you doing here?"

"Ach-! Oxygen-!" Panic jittered in his grip. "N-no reason! We were just- I mean, I was just taking a little-" Ganymede squeezed tighter, "-consti-tution-al." Ganymede's eyes pinned on him, his fist quaking.

"Where's the other guy?!"

He heard scrabbling above his head. Flecks of dirt trickled down the chute above him. There came a slow, heavy slip, until something heavy crashed down against the toppled jug and bowl. He fell upon it like a lynx, swiping for the intruder as Panic flailed from his white knuckles. His hand shut around the base of Pain's tail and swung him up into the air. Hoisting them both up before his eyes - Panic upright, Pain upside-down - his savage expression snapped from one grotesque face to the other.

"We weren't doing anything!" Pain cried, wheeling his legs in the air as he tried to dislodge himself.

"Really!" Panic choked, "Nothing at all!"

Ganymede slammed them both into the wall.

"Okay!" Panic broke first. "We were spying on you!"

"To make sure you're settling in!"

Ganymede squeezed, and they both squeaked in urgency, "To make sure you aren't planning anything!"

He hurled them across the room. They hit the wall like two wet towels before unpeeling onto the floor. "Planning anything?!" he cried, "Of course I'm planning something! Wouldn't you, if you were me?! At any moment, that ugly mug up there-" he jabbed his finger towards the ceiling, then faltered after one disorienting moment and re-stabbed it towards the floor, "Is gonna sell me to that even uglier mug up there!" Throwing his hands into the air, his shadow fell over Hades' two cringing lackeys. "Wouldn't you be a little concerned if Zeus could turn you immortal at any point?! If Zeus wanted your head - or worse - on a platter?!"

"I mean-" Panic raised one nervous talon. "We already are immortal."

Electrified by rage, Ganymede snatched up his crook and swung it high above his head. Pain and Panic clung to one another, their tails curling into tight and frightened circles, and then he realised with a crunch that he couldn't force his arms to strike down on them. The two little creatures took advantage of his hesitation and scrambled from the room.

He tossed the crook onto the slab of his bed and sank to the ground, left alone in his bedchamber once again as he pulled his arms around his knees.

Pain and Panic scampered up the fluted architecture, their reptilian fingers gripping along bas reliefs so worn that the statues' mouths gaped and their noses burrowed inwards like the nostrils of a skull. "He's kind of a pill, huh?" said Panic. They skittered past broad and crumbling scenes of battles and processions, sculptures of spears, chariots and mourners with their faces buried in their hands.

Landing under the overhang of a temple roof, overlooking the endless sweep of the Styx passing beneath them, Pain pushed on the carving of a shield. It pressed inwards, then fell to the side, revealing a dark hole in the stone. They scurried inside. "You noticed too?"

Inside this nest - and they had a few holes such as this one hidden throughout the Underworld - scraps and filched knick-knacks poked across the walls like a thicket of brambles. Shards of pottery, broken wagon spokes and half-played, imp-sized board games lay in scattered piles amongst claw marks and the occasional smudge of soot. Sitting down at a chess board (half the pieces consisting of pins, rocks or bottle caps), Pain thought for a second before moving a toy horse halfway across the board. "He's not gonna last."

Panic came sniffing over, then smacked him upside the head. "Hey! That's an illegal move!"

"How would you know?" Pain snapped back. Panic slapped the piece off the board. Pain barrelled into him. They bounced and clawed across the floor, bent forks and stolen hinges scattering through their den, Pain triumphantly sitting on Panic one moment, Panic tangling him up in his tail the next. Their hissing and smacking pushed back the silence for a few brief moments until they both fell apart.

Irritated and breathless, Panic stomped over to the overturned board and shoved it back the right way around. "He'll be gone before the next New Year's staff party."

Pain waddled over and flopped down at his end of the board. Glumly setting his pieces back into a starting position again, he said, "Who cares? It's not like we're gonna get attached." Panic sat back down, slumped over his knees and rested his non-existent chin on a curled fist. He studied their chess set, not knowing a single thing about the rules.

"Yeah," he said, head waggling up and down on his chin, "That'd be pretty stupid of us."