Work Text:
It was the heavy smell of earth that seemed to coax her from sleep. A slightly musty smell that filled her lungs up and made her wrinkle her nose a bit. The sheets under her body were cool against her skin as a light breeze seemed to blow in through what must be an opened window.
Green eyes opened as a deep sign left her lips. She was tied to this place no matter how the passage of time made it feel impossibly antiquated. Though she supposed the fact that her mother in law allowed her time on earth now and then eased eons of being barred from it.
The stone walls were a gleaming white while the furniture around the room looked like carved wood. There was a sitting room on the far side of the room with a pathway which she assumed led toward a bathroom. The very bed she was in, which seemed to be both of stone and wood, twisted almost impossibly into intricate shapes. Her breathing started to come quicker and quicker the more she looked around. The room had cutouts in the stone that served as windows and the very style of the room she was in.
Getting to her feet, the stone was warm under her; she made her way out to the balcony.
She couldn’t tell where the light source was coming from, but she could see far and wide. There were masses of land in the distance with large rivers flowing between and around them. Each island seemed to have a light source glowing within the misty dome around each. One of the islands glowed an almost blinding white, while another looked like a yellowish green, a third a reddish orange; there were more, but her eyes were drawn to the three largest as she tried to take stock of where she was.
As she looked down at herself, she noticed she wore what she always did when she was here, robes with armor under them. As she pressed her hands against the armor, she had thoughts of battles and bloodshed filling her head. She shook her head, that was all so long ago.
She heard a voice behind her, calling to her back to bed. Sun kissed skin with thin silk being the only thing covering it. She was stunningly beautiful with long limbs and perky breasts. Her hair was messed up in a perfect way to tell just what happened between them the night before.
She headed back to the bed, sitting next to the woman laying in her bed. She took the woman's hand in hers, matching bands of gold on each of their left ring fingers making it clear to anyone they were bound together.
“Alright back to your robes and armor? We’ve been back less than twelve hours,” The woman laughed.
“When I got out of bed it appeared back on me,” She explained.
“It’s missed it’s master,” The woman said knowingly. “We’ve been gone far too long."
A knock rang out over the thick carved wooden door at the far end of the room. She bowed her head as she wondered for a moment if she could just pretend that she wasn’t up yet.
“Go,” The woman in bed said firmly. “You are lord here. We’ve returned after too long gone. They need you.”
“A wife, begging her wife to leave her alone in bed to go work?” She laughed at it while shaking her head.
“Go,” The woman in the bed urged with a smile on her lips. “I will come find you soon with your breakfast."
She stood up after sharing a lingering kiss. Squaring her shoulders she turned and walked to the door. Opening it she found a man on the other side dressed in a toga with a scroll in his hand.
“Lord Hades, we have much to do,” He bowed his head to the woman.
“Aubrey,” She said. “That’s what I’ve been going by on the surface. It suits me don’t you think?"
“As you wish, My Lord,” The man moved back to allow her in the hallway. They walked side by side down the stone hallway as the man filled the god of the underworld in what she had missed in the centuries she had been gone.
- - - -
The work of a god or goddess had never come from laws passed by the gods themselves or by the humans they oversaw. They were natural laws. People lived on the sea and worked the rivers so Poseidon ruled over that area. Humans flocked to the theater and parties, they drank wine and made merry and so Dionysus oversaw them. Treating each and everyone of them as a dear old friend and possible bedmate. Ares had his wars to oversee and clashes with Athena, who loved nothing more than to get his goat when she wasn’t overseeing other areas.
And Hades, Aubrey now after centuries in the human world, had the underworld. She had to roll her eyes at the way that humans feared her though. Thanatos was the god of death or at least the personification of it. Not her. Humans often feared her as if she wanted to murder each with her bare hands. No, she was intimidating but also fair in her judgements. And being the god of riches had benefits when your wife loved sparkle as much as hers.
“I have forgotten how the lights down here play off your features,” Persephone said from the doorway with a tray of breakfast. She went by Stacie in the upper world now, something Aubrey had found fell from her tongue in a pleasing way.
“Charming in any form, but I had forgotten now beautiful you look wrapped in clothes from a different time,” Aubrey looked at her, drinking in the way that the fabric fell around her frame.
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Stacie stepped into the grand office that Aubrey had been working in.
High ceilings, stone walls, a meeting table made out of dark wood with stone chairs carved by hands of the dead, iron twisted and blackened formed the frame of the large desk. The walls the door was on were twenty feet tall and covered with twin bookshelves that had leather bound books. Though it looked more like a modern human study than it had the last time either was here.
“We’ve stayed away from here too long,” Aubrey said as she leaned back in the leather chair she sat in. “It’ll be decades before I’ll be able to undo what my neglect for my kingdom has created."
“You will undo it.” Stacie set the ray down in the middle of the desk before walking around the desk to use Aubrey’s lap as a seat.
“Why did we stay away so long?” Aubrey asked. It was like all the reasons she had run from this place left her head once she returned from it.
“People stopped believing in the old ways. Gods fell and rose and my mother stopped keeping you from my side when I was in the upper world. Pretending to be human was a welcome change from the pain and duty you had taken on for eons. It was easier to be human than gods. And we deserved a bit of ease after the wars we fought,” Stacie wrapped her hand around the back of Aubrey’s neck. She reached for a fig before holding it to her wife’s lips.
Aubrey opened her mouth, closing it to chew the treat her wife had somehow managed to bring her. “I can’t leave my duties like this again. But we can take smaller breaks to the upper world. Of course each spring when you are called on, we’ll go together."
“Spring in the upper world and here the rest of the year.” Stacie bent her head to kiss her wife. Aubrey had given her years in the sun, taken her everywhere she dreamed of being and allowed her to run nude under the moonlight. It was time she acted as consort to her.
“You won’t wilt away from the sun?” Aubrey asked. She reached for a bit of cheese on the tray. She held the cube to Stacie’s lips.
“Not as long as I have you to bask in each night,” Stacie winked before leaning forward to take the cheese from Aubrey’s fingers. The tip of her tongue running over the pad of her index finger.
“Charmer.” Aubrey leaned in to press a kiss to Stacie’s bare shoulder.
“Yours,” Stacie agreed. She rubbed her thumb against the back of Aubrey’s neck. A thick scar that wasn’t there when they were in the upper world reminded her just how much pain was etched over her wife’s body.
“No one else draws your eyes to them?” Aubrey asked.
“Not since I learned to love the taste of pomegranate,” Stacie said as she bent down to kiss her again. She nibbled on Aubrey’s lower lip as a reminder to them both how strong their bond was.
“Taking you away from your home was the most selfish thing I’ve ever done,” Aubrey rested her head on her wife’s chest. “You should hate me."
“Being back here is bringing up the greatest hits of our past, is it?” Stacie asked. “You and I are from a time no modern human knows. Gods we are and will always be, my love. The taking of a young god by an older god who was so overcome with desire and love, happened. Often by my own father. I embraced you as my lord a very long time ago. And the love between us, the respect between us, the passion between us has only grown in our time together,” She spoke with passion and a sense of devotion to the life they created. “I am not the girl you plucked from the fields nor are you any longer the person who did the plucking."
Aubrey allowed Stacie’s words to sooth the pain of how history had categorized them. The lonely god of the underworld who had to pillage for her partner because she couldn’t act as her brothers had and make them fall willingly to her bed. “I love you,” She whispered.
“And I love you,” Stacie kissed the top of her head. “Hades, Aubrey, whatever name and form you take. Your godly soul and mine are bound together. And in any lifetime I would willingly dine at your table."
Aubrey lifted her head up to capture her wife’s lips against her own. She was as demanding in this kiss as she had been the first night they had been bound together by laws older than either one of them. She knew she would bruise their lips more than slightly but she didn’t care. When she pulled back she poked her tongue out to lick her wife’s taste from her lips.
“Go back to your duties, I have my own to take care of,” Stacie said as she stood from her wife’s lap. “And eat my wife. You might be one of six original Olympians but I am your wife. I outrank you dearest,” She grinned and then just like that she was gone.
- - - -
The work needed to turn the underworld back to a more functional place was difficult. Aubrey had to figure out just why things had broken down the way they had. It wasn’t major issues but a shack of small ones that grew and grew as the god of the underworld left the underworld to itself.
People in the incorrect afterlife pained her the most. She had taken great pains when she oversaw the underworld to make sure that every soul was weighed properly and those who deserved the damnation were given it while those who deserved paradise were allowed it. It would take a very long time to sort all the souls that had come in since she left to make sure they had been weighted correctly.
Finally, when the unnatural light meant to replicate the sun her wife loved so was setting, Aubrey pushed back from her desk to go find what her wife had gotten herself up to.
When she found Stacie she could only shake her head in wonder.
“Since when do you cook? In this realm or any other?” Aubrey asked as she stood before a large kitchen that had been a spare room just hours ago. A blend of decades, created from Stacie’s own ability to turn any part of the underworld into what she wanted it to be. It had been a gift Aubrey granted her when they were first married to make sure she felt more at home here.
“I cook,” Stacie said. She stood before a large stove that was very modern while a large fireplace that was decidedly not, had a whole pig roasting on a spit that was turning on its own. “When I have a reason to.”
“And what is the reason tonight?” Aubrey asked as she moved to sit in a chair near to her wife but far enough away to be out of her way.
“We’re home,” Stacie smiled over her shoulder before turning back to stir something.
“We are.” Aubrey ran her fingers over the arm on her thigh under her robes. “I’ve missed the work. This place needs me to run smoothly."
“And you need the work to feel like you have a reason for existing when so many of the others have faded away,” Stacie nodded.
“There will always be a spring needed to be sprung after a winter thaw, there will always be an underworld that needs tending,” Aubrey wasn’t worried about her powers fading or her body weakening. If it was going to happen it would have happened when she was away from here so long.
“And if you wish no longer to be God of the Dead you will always have the riches the earth hides away,” Stacie laughed.
“What is mine, is yours.” Aubrey stood up to get herself a drink from the refrigerator that looked like it was directly from 1950’s America. She pulled the tab off the can of beer, taking a long gulp.
“I could use a new necklace,” Stacie commented lightly.
“I will see to it,” Aubrey said as she sat down again.
Stacie moved around the space while Aubrey watched her. Seeing her wife in such a domestic setting made her heart swell. Stacie could be a commanding figure even if the world would assume it was Aubrey in command. It had been a very long time since Aubrey held the power between them, if she ever really did.
Soon enough the feast was laid out on a long table. Stacie had created dish after dish to make sure that they had everything they could crave. She hadn’t been sure what to make, so why not make everything, right?
“We will not finish this meal,” Aubrey laughed when she sat at the head of the long table.
“The servants will eat when we’re finished.” Stacie sat at Aubrey’s right hand. “It’s been so long since they have been granted food.”
Aubrey nodded her permission as a formality. If Stacie wanted to feed all the servants of the underworld, who was she to tell her no even if she was God of the underworld?
- - - -
That night she stood in the bathroom just off the bedroom. A white marbled room with a large bath that had a never ending supply of hot water thanks to the pipes running through a thermal vent. And Aubrey’s wishes.
Aubrey stood in front of a full sized mirror and looked at her form. She kept herself in the female form she had adopted in the upper world. It had been so long since she was in a male body that she had no desire to take it up yet.
As she looked in the mirror she saw the scars she did allow back.
She had thin ones, thick ones, ones that curved and snaked down her back, ones that lay over organs that healed themselves the moment they were harmed. The wars she had fought in against the Titans and the wars she participated in against her own father who ate her and her other siblings, had left her battle hardened and utterly broken.
She hadn’t missed looking in the mirror and not seeing them looking back at her. They were part of her though.
Stacie stepped up behind her nude form dressed the same. She brought her lips to Aubrey’s ear as she whispered in Greek. “Great-hearted Hades, lord of the afterworld, noble husband of gracious Persephone, daughter of the earth who shares your golden throne;” she started the prayer that humans would offer up in their time of greatest need.
"Advocate of the dead whose wrath falls on those who deny them due burial, or whose dishonor endures beyond the grave. Relentless Hades, agent of vengeance, friend of the Furies, long is your arm, long your memory. Lord of riches, lord of wealth, yours is the abundance of the depths, the cold, unyielding treasure of metal and stone;” Stacie continued. Her voice was warm against Aubrey’s ear.
“Yours is the black dirt turned by the plow each spring, the sun-warmed soil that hides the seed. Hades, dark-haired son of Kronos, ruler of the world beyond us, inevitable host of men and women, I thank you for your care of those who have passed; I praise you, I honor you, I revere your name.”
“I am no longer dark of hair,” Aubrey whispered. Her eyes were closed as tears leaked from them down her cheeks.
“I like you with fair hair and me with dark.” Stacie turned her wife in her arms to kiss away her tears. “A bit of who we were when we first knew each other, worn for the world to see on the other.”
“I love you,” Aubrey whispered.
“I love you,” Stacie replied.
Aubrey opened her eyes again to look into her wife’s. There was no greater jewel in the depths of the earth than the woman before her. She would trade her immortal heart for this woman’s happiness without a second thought.
“Come to bed,” Stacie whispered.
“Always,” Aubrey replied.