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Aphrodite visits her husband’s hidden forge deep within Olympus. As a burbling construct lets her in, she raises her voice and calls, “Hephy?”
“Back here, Aph, I’m in the middle of something.”
She could tell that much, based on the steady rhythm of his hammer. She picks her way through the sooty cavern, a handful of sparrows kindly following with her hair in their beaks lest it drag on the floor. Hephaestus nods a greeting without taking his eyes from his work on what appears to be a spearpoint.
“I’ve come with good news,” she informs him. “Your brother is back.”
Hephaestus’s brows go up, and his rhythm nearly falters. “Is he now?” But then he just shrugs. “It’s about damn time.”
“Your lord father said the same.”
Hephaestus snorts and then is silent, his focus returned to his work. Aphrodite contentedly watches him hammer away, although her mind drifts: back to Ares’ arrival at the Palace of Zeus, carrying all his accustomed dignity with him despite the horrible shaking of the mountain. If anything, he had been warmly at ease. And why wouldn’t he be? With Olympus trapped in this seemingly endless war, he has never been so in his element. He presented himself dutifully in the Great Hall to receive a lecture for his absence. But as Zeus had berated him, his eyes had wandered to Aphrodite, drawn there by the connection they shared, and when he beheld her—when he saw her golden greaves and bracers, the spear and shield in her hands, the slash of white that she has taken to painting across her face just as he does—his eyes had gone dark with understanding and desire. Aphrodite, feeling the same, had smiled and lifted one eyebrow. That was all it took to communicate, between the two of them.
Once Hephaestus sets the spearpoint, shaped now to his satisfaction, aside, he wipes sweat from his brow and wheels his chair to face Aphrodite. “I assume you two have some fairly involved catching up to do. D’you want me to spend the night at the forge?”
“It would make things easier. You wouldn’t mind?”
“Anything for you, Aph,” he says, entirely without resentment or jealousy. How fortunate Aphrodite is to have him, truly. She cups his face with one delicate hand and then, with a shivery little sigh, drops to her knees so that she can rest her head in his lap. His hand settles onto her head, and she feels the wry, smug ache of his love for her, and she is at peace.
She has not often felt at peace recently.
“I am relieved,” she says, with a slight pout in her voice. “The longer this went on without him coming home… It’s been awful.”
He strokes her hair. “I know, Aph. He shouldn’t have left you for so long.” Then, as an afterthought: “Think you can find out where he’s been all this time? I bet Dad’ll want to know.”
“I think your father’s already pressing him for that information. If they don’t go straight to talking strategy, that is.” Aphrodite rolls her eyes delicately. “And, I admit, that isn’t going to be my first priority.”
“Right, I suppose you’ll have other business,” Hephaestus agrees.
Resting her arms on his knees, her chin tucked on top of them, Aphrodite gazes up at her husband and smiles with irrepressible fondness. “I’m going to show him that lovely spear you made for me,” she promises. “I’m sure he’ll be very impressed.”
*
Returning to her chambers, Aphrodite washes away the soot and grime of the forge and then reapplies her war paint. She keeps her spear close by, thinking again of the heat in Ares’ eyes when he beheld her.
Still she is left to wait for several hours; Ares must be getting quite the debriefing indeed. Dusk falls, and the little bell by her vanity tinkles, indicating that the Princess of the Dead has set out. Aphrodite will leave her to the others tonight. She won’t be expected to participate; everyone on Olympus thinks they know her plans for the evening.
At last one of Aphrodite’s doves flits in with the information that Ares is on his way. Her lips curling with anticipation, Aphrodite takes her spear in hand; and as the god of war pushes aside the velvet curtain at the entrance to her room, she drives it forward and stops a hair’s breadth from his neck.
There is a frozen moment as Love and War take each other in. Aphrodite has thrown her head back proudly, summoned a light breeze to toy with the streamers decorating her spear; Ares stands unmoved, one eyebrow arched, ease on his face and blood spattered up both his forearms. He steps forward—Aphrodite bends her arms so that the spearpoint is still at his throat—and lets the curtain whisper shut behind him. Then he smiles, a kinder, gentler smile than Aphrodite has often seen on him.
“Quite the warm welcome, my lady Aphrodite Areia,” he says with sincerity in his voice.
The epithet that names her War sends something greater than a shiver through Aphrodite’s body. It stirs that vicious hunger that has filled her lately and makes her heart skip. It says I know this side of you and we could have been each other’s and we are as one, you and I. She smiles too, because she loves him, and she does not put up her spear.
“Welcome home, Lord Ares,” she says. “I have missed you.”
“And I you,” he agrees conversationally. He leans back slightly so that he can actually see the heart-shaped spearpoint she has thrust at him. With one unconcerned thumb, he tests the edge of the blade. Gold ichor blooms through crimson blood, and he makes an impressed sound. “An elegant weapon,” he observes. “It is my brother’s work, I presume?”
“Naturally,” Aphrodite says.
“Then he understands your power, where perhaps the others do not.”
It is a comfort to hear him say so, and that is why she lets him take one calmly portentous step toward her and then another. He trails his fingers up the shaft of her spear, turning its point aside, leaving a long smear of red and gold. Aphrodite can feel his touch as though against her skin. The smells of battle have often made her stomach squirm, but now, here—when blood mixes with the leather of Ares’ armor and the familiar scent of his body—Aphrodite’s skin prickles instead with anticipation.
His bloodstained fingers trace over her hands where they hold the spear; up her gleaming, curlicued bracer; to the bare skin of her décolletage. “Although as lovely as this armor may be,” he says in a low murmur, “it leaves several of your vital points woefully exposed.”
Aphrodite simpers as he paints a scarlet trail along her collarbone. “Lord Ares, there is no one on this earth who would ravage my beautiful breasts for as dull of a purpose as to kill me.”
Ares, who has on numerous occasions ravaged Aphrodite’s breasts for much more pleasant purposes, snickers. His hand drops then to her left breast, his touch warm and firm, her heart racing beneath it. “How confident you are in that assertion,” he says.
“I am,” she answers with a perfect confidence that she does not fully feel. She has lain with the god of war and felt his violence turned paradoxically towards pleasure; she has watched murderous blades appear from thin air into his hands; she died once at those hands, aeons ago, because how else could they have resolved the question of whose domain war would be? And now his other hand is creeping around her waist, drawing her too close to effectively wield her spear, and she feels so achingly alive that she cannot move.
“Areia,” he breathes again, tracing lazy, bloody patterns across her breasts and leaving heady pleasure in their wake. Again Aphrodite’s heart swells with all that War is, with cruelty and pride and horror and rapacious want. Her body starves for movement. She could push Ares away with the haft of her spear, spring backwards, drive forward again as though dancing and pierce his throat to feel his golden ichor spurt over her hands. She could defeat him—this child—this deserter who left his family, left her undefended in a time of need. She could claw back lost territory and rule and strike down all those who have chuckled behind their beards or hands at the sight of her wielding a weapon. Ares knows that she could: she sees it in his eyes, that intensity, that respectful alertness that treats her as a threat. His heart must be pounding as hard as hers is. The whole world is not enough to contain the two of them.
And yet what he says, softly, is, “Dite.” He lifts his hand to her cheek; a shudder goes through her and she bucks ever-so-slightly. “We resolved this matter my way once, the last time it arose,” he says. “Perhaps this time your method would be more suitable.”
And, moving slowly—wary of her reaction—he leans in and presses his lips to hers.
Aphrodite catches her breath. She feels the kiss in her whole body: a fluttering relief like a thousand-thousand birds taking to wing, her heart spread open wide and glowing. A longing whimper escapes her throat. Oh, this. This is what she wants to be. Why can she not be this only and always?
Her death grip on the haft of her spear loosens at last. She steps back from the kiss—sees, in Ares’ face, that she has taken his breath away, so easily, with a kiss as gentle as that which hadn’t even been her idea to start—and her lips curl. She lets the spear fall to her side.
“Then conquer me, Lord Ares,” she says, in a voice rich with sincerity and irony combined, “if you think you can.”
Then his lips are on hers again, his hand tight around the back of her neck. The warmth of it travels all the way down to Aphrodite’s toes and back up, and she lifts her now-free arms to drape them around his broad shoulders. Her head spins with desire and with forward drive. She teases her tongue over his lower lip until he opens his mouth and they kiss more deeply, more hungrily, oh, Fates, how she has missed him. She wants this cuirass gone. She wants all of his armor gone. And he must be thinking something similar, because with one hand he lifts her hair from the back of her neck and she feels the kiss of a thin blade slicing through the laces that hold shut her collar. For a moment, she thinks of betrayal, deception—her stomach plunges but the fear feels like arousal—and then he is pulling the collar off of her and burying his mouth against her neck. He sucks and then bites, and the burst of pain sends a shiver down her body. With a moan, she bares her throat to him.
He obliges her unspoken desire, leaving further love-bites on her skin, soon shifting his attention to her shoulders. Aphrodite laughs breathlessly, reveling in the pleasure that coils within her. “Oh, people will see those ones,” she says, and the thought sends another pulse of heat through her body.
“Hmm,” Ares rumbles, thoughtful and smug. He bites down on her skin and pulls with his teeth, and Aphrodite makes a sound that isn’t intentional. “Do you think they will approve of how we are spending our night?”
“Absolutely not, but they are all such idiots, and they have no idea what you and I are to each other.” Aphrodite shivers. She is tired of waiting. “Come, Lord Ares—”
She means to lead him to her bed. But as she reaches for his hand, he seizes her wrist suddenly and shoves her backwards all of his strength. She spills onto the marble floor, narrowly avoiding her spear, and he follows her down. His left arm sprawls across her ribs to hold her in place. Aphrodite gasps. There is no change in his bearing: he is as calmly malicious, as inevitable, as ever. Before Aphrodite can protest or try to free herself, his free hand finds its way between her legs, into the slick heat of her folds, and pleasure strikes her like a blow. She bucks, her head arching back on her neck.
“Surrender to me, Dite,” Ares says in his even, unholy voice. “Give me back what is mine.” He probes her with his strong, callused fingers, and waves of need wrack Aphrodite’s body, and she remembers what the word surrender means but the part of her that cares is slipping away from her as her desire builds. She writhes as War pushes two fingers into her.
“Ares, wait—I—nnn—”
He is too relentless for her to finish the thought. He isn’t going to let her lead tonight, and that should displease her, but he rubs that spot inside of her adroitly, knowing exactly how to make her shudder. Pleasure blanks out her every thought. Her legs fall open and Ares only finger-fucks her harder, thrusting in and out of her dripping cunt until at last release seizes her and wrings her dry.
When the aftershocks fade away and her eyelids flutter open, Ares’ eyes are waiting to meet hers. Very deliberately, he lifts his fingers to his mouth and sucks them clean of both her arousal and the blood of battle. Aphrodite watches him do it, entranced; then she reaches up indolent arms to pull him towards her and into a kiss. She licks that strange combination from his lips for herself. Her defeat, her victory.
“Ares,” she says in a drawn-out, breathless pout, her arms draped around his neck. “Let’s go to bed.”
With a low chuckle, he sweeps her into his muscled, bloody arms and carries her there. He lays her out with the utmost gentleness in the center of her enormous bed, kisses her; then he steps back and begins the lengthy process of divesting himself of his armor. Aphrodite watches as he sets aside each piece of his selfhood, revealing the part of himself that is only hers. His pauldrons give way to broad shoulders; his grieves yield shapely calves; and then once his pteurges are gone, even before he removes his tunic, Aphrodite can see the shape of a hard-on between his legs. He turns away from her to shed his cuirass and at last his tunic, leaving himself completely bare. He never does permit scars to stay on him, but oh, those muscles, that lovely dark skin. Aphrodite’s hand twitches with the longing to touch him.
But she relaxes it as he turns back towards her and slides into bed beside her. There is a hungry look in his eyes still as he slips one hand around her throat, ready to pull her into another kiss—
And she pins both of his arms to the bed and rolls on top of him, straddling his abdomen, before he can realize that the light has come back into her eyes. For a moment, something animal and furious twists his face; then she leans over him, her hair falling down over his body in shining pink waves, and the force of her power blunts his rage. His pupils dilate all at once.
“Dite,” he says, his voice low and husky.
“That was a dirty trick you played, Lord Ares.”
“All is fair in war, no?”
She chuckles musically. “I suppose so.” She drags her fingertips up his arms and presses her palms to the firm shape of his pectorals. A longing shudder goes through him, and Aphrodite smiles. “Fine,” she says. “Keep it, then.”
She does not resent what has been taken from her, not when she has this to keep her warm, to keep her who she wants to be. Her whole body buzzes with the joy of her recent release and the desire for more. And beneath her, Ares is breathing in the scent of her perfume and his body is relaxing—all parts of him but one. He twitches slightly when she catches one nipple between her fingers and tweaks it.
He is ensnared utterly by her power, by love and lust and the awe that beauty invokes in anyone whose heart is open. Why should Aphrodite want anything else?
She slides backwards, leading a glistening smear of her slick on his stomach, and then lifts her hips so that she can sink down onto his cock. He groans as she does, but she hardly hears, too enraptured herself by the feeling of it, his thick length fitting into her so familiarly, so perfectly. His hands come to the curve of her waist and exert slight pressure, suggesting; willingly Aphrodite obliges and leans forward so that they are chest-to-chest, her softness against his hardness, warmth pressed up to warmth. She can feel the ichor rushing in his veins.
“Now?” he asks in a rumble.
Aphrodite hums her eager assent, and they begin to move.
She rocks slowly over him at first, reveling in the slow drag of his cock in and out of her body, in each slick sensation. She leans heavily on her left forearm to steady herself, and her hand fists in Ares’ hair, and then he closes his mouth on her breast where it hangs pendulously in front of his face. Aphrodite cries out. She is not too proud to let marks stay, not the ones he leaves on her. Love and War have been each other’s for aeons because there is a deep chasm of want at the core of both of them. Of late Aphrodite has fallen into it, and she has been consumed with a brutal rapacious emptiness. But now Ares is back to shoulder that burden. And to please her. Tomorrow she will enter the Great Hall with her cunt aching and the imprints of Ares’ teeth sprinkled across her torso, and all on Olympus will know what satisfaction she claimed as her due.
It is nearly dawn before they have each had their fill of each other. They settle into each other’s arms to rest, and Aphrodite runs gentle fingertips along the white paint that is now smeared across the whole of Ares’ upper face. She smiles.
“Do I look as horribly messy as you do?” she asks.
“You could never look horrible,” Ares answers sincerely, and Aphrodite laughs to hear the meaningless flattery. She already knew that.
For a little while they are silent, just breath and warmth and familiarity. A few times, Ares inhales as if to start speaking, but he does not manage it. Then, at last, he says, “I did not see my half-sister in the Great Hall.”
Neither of his half-sisters have been around much lately, but it’s obvious which half-sister he means. Aphrodite sighs theatrically. “Oh, Athena’s been up and down the mountain, raining down her shining pikes on the invading forces of the Titan Lord,” she says. And then, to answer his unspoken question: “There were some… rather fraught moments when I came back from the forge with my beautiful new shield and spear.”
Ares makes an understanding noise and pulls her closer by the waist.
Athena has never been warm with Aphrodite, but there had been a new coldness after that. And in turn, Aphrodite had found herself scanning Athena’s gleaming armor, taking note of what skin she left exposed. Not at all for the usual reasons she does such things.
It would have been a calamitous idea. Aphrodite knew that. And yet she had not been willing to back down.
“In the end,” she tells Ares now, “since she is wisdom and strategy, and I am just a vapid, trivial hedonist, she graciously volunteered to spend most of her time away from the Palace, on the front. Leaving me to rot here among these beautiful, soft cushions.”
She rolls onto her decadently onto her back, spreading her arms out across said cushions. Beside her, the bed shifts. Ares’ bloodstained hand creeps across her stomach, and he rests his head in the crook of her shoulder. His weight is solid and comforting against her body. In his low, unforgiving voice, he says, “If I see her, I will be sure to correct her misapprehensions.”
Aphrodite gives a sweet, disarming pout. “Oh, Ares, you’d pick a fight for me?”
“I will. The others are fools to underestimate you, Lady Aphrodite.” The sincerity and confidence in his voice make something inside of Aphrodite melt.
Although he then confesses, “To be fair, I will pick a fight for almost any reason.”
And Aphrodite laughs, because she knows that to be true.
They fall silent again. And at last Ares says, “I should not have left this burden upon you for so long, Dite.”
Aphrodite closes her eyes. Already it is so distant, the emptiness that crawled up her throat and never let her rest. She doesn’t know how Ares can stand it. It makes him cruel and relentless and it makes him hate so absolutely when she is not there to fill the holes inside of him. And yet he is happy with it.
They’re different people.
But they are good for each other, somehow.
She looks at her Lord Ares once more and brings one hand up to stroke his cheek. “I may forgive you,” she says, “but you will have to earn it.”
And when she trails that same hand down his front, he is all too happy to oblige her.