Work Text:
"It was like she was someone you'd always known
It was like you were holding the world when you held her
Like yours were the arms that the whole world was in
And there were no words for the way that you felt"
Epic III. Hadestown.
The city is filled with skyscrapers of onyx and jet. The sky, if you can call it that, looks like blue-black velvet, a dark, gleaming, eternal night. As Jyn walks, she doesn’t notice the mossy roots and flowers that sprout up beneath her tread. She doesn’t remember how she got here, if she came willingly or if she was swallowed up by the earth. She isn’t sure if she should be upset by this strange turn of events, but it is at least a little unnerving that she feels so disconnected from life. From the living.
She finds herself drawn through the streets as if by an invisible thread in her center, pulling, gently urging her deeper and deeper into the urban landscape. Cut off though she feels, she doesn’t feel like she’s in any danger. A bit of thrill, certainly. But nothing lethal.
A palatial high-rise soon looms before her. The thread tugs her forward, and she passes through the seemingly-locked doorways with shocking ease. Spirits surround her, though they don’t crowd her, and they stare as she follows her curiosity to the elevator. She’s about to press the up button when the silver doors slide open, and the thread tethering her to her target slackens and sends her stomach into free fall.
Death himself stands before her, and she has never wanted something more.
His face wears a startled expression, and it makes him look nearly human. Nearly, because of course, he carries an aura of divinity that neither of them would never be able to escape. His deep, dark, dangerous eyes don’t know what to make of her. He looms above her much like his building does, much like his city, but she wants to touch his face and place a necklace of flowers around his neck. He isn’t so much intimidating as he is awe-inspiring.
As his lips fall open, startled but sure, she expects him to chastise or placate her, like all of the others of the pantheon do. She expects a barked order, or a bellowing question, but what she does not expect is a soft, lilting, accented voice, saying in a delicate murmur, “You don’t belong here.”
And yet, she thinks, I do. Don’t I? Jyn shakes her head. “I don’t,” she agrees, speaking slowly, hesitantly.
His gaze falls to her feet, then travels the path she took to get here. His eyes go wide, and when she looks over her shoulder, she understands why—she sees it now, the trail of greenery she’s left in her wake, out of place in such an environment and yet not unwelcome, it would seem. When she looks back to him, he now looks at her with something bordering on intent.
He holds out his hand. “Will you come with me?”
She almost reaches out to take it, and though she tries to speak something sensical, her words fail her. “I should…”
The tips of his fingers brush against hers. “Do you trust me?”
I don’t know you.
“I don’t know why, but,” she starts as she slides her hand into his, warmer than she thought it would be, “yes.”
Forgotten. Whatever he had stepped into that elevator for is forgotten. Every painstakingly papered wall, every fiber in the weave of the carpet, it all pales in comparison to the enormity of his future standing before him in the form of a girl.
No, not a girl. A woman. Young, undoubtedly virtuous, small but strong. Willful in a way he admires, and he doesn’t even know her name. He doesn’t really care, either, though. When he touches her skin, soft as gosling down, he thinks his heart might beat for the first time in a thousand generations.
When he takes her hand, when she gives it to him, when she chooses to trust him, he pulls her gently back into the elevator. There is little light—there is never much, down here—but he can see her just as well. Her eyes are as green as the grass that sprouts beneath her feet, and her skin looks freshly kissed by the sun. Perhaps, if his hope proves true, then he could be the next to kiss it. Kiss her.
She stands so close to him that if he were to lean forward and bend his head down every so slightly, their lips would touch. But a kiss to an emperor of eulogy, it must be given freely. He won’t ever take what isn’t given freely.
“You brought life,” he says, an obvious thing. Still, it is worth saying.
“You say that as if life isn’t the most natural thing in the world,” she replies, her brow furrowed in confusion. If she gave him permission, he would press the little wrinkle out, smooth it with his thumb.
“Life fights every day against its loss.” And yet, he’s never felt more alive. He’s never felt more immortal. “All roads lead to death, eventually.”
This maiden, this goddess, she smiles. “On and on, until the chances are spent.” She reaches up with her hand, her soft, silken hand, and it hovers over his face. “You can’t have one without the other, can you? Life and death, that is.”
He doesn’t stop himself from chasing the feeling of her touch, leaning his cheek into the palm of her hand. Something inside of him cracks. He can feel the heat breaking through. “Like sleeping and waking,” he whispers. She is so warm—he wants to live in her springtime.
“Like dawn and dusk,” she whispers back.
As the elevator travels slowly and steadily upwards, they stand together in quiet closeness, a reconfiguring of the universe happening in the small, enclosed space. Will all still function normally once this moment dissolves? Will she disappear? He doesn’t know what he would do if she disappeared.
“How is it that you can bring blossoms into this realm of decay?” he asks her, slowly wrapping his large hand around her small wrist, sliding her palm from his cheek to his lips and kissing it.
Her eyes glaze over for a moment before she refocuses, and he pretends not to feel a sense of satisfaction at having such an effect on her. “I’ve never been one for arbitrary divisions,” she answers.
He steps closer, crowding her into the corner of the elevator, but she doesn’t seem to mind. “Why did you come here?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know…” He can practically see the way her eyes dart back and forth, searching her memories as if to say, No, no, that isn’t right. “I was brought here. One way or another.”
He has questions. A million of them, really, but there is no need to ask them now. Not when his heart calls out for hers, and hers answers in kind.
Only one question matters right now. “What is your name?”
“Jyn,” she answers. He feels the way it shimmers through the weft of Fate’s tapestries; it may not be her only name, but it his her truest one, in this moment. “What is yours?”
The elevator slows to a stop, and its charming little bell chimes as the doors open. He steps out into the atrium of the penthouse—his penthouse—and extends his hand once more as an invitation.
“Cassian,” he says. “You can call me Cassian.”
Cassian. His name is like a constellation, and Jyn finds she quite likes the way it tastes and feels on her tongue. As she follows him out of the elevator, she finds she can only keep her focus on his face. If she stares too long at his body, as things stand now, his clothes flicker and re-form with ethereal, ghostly wisps of divine magic. In one moment, he wears a chiton dyed the blackest black; in another, a fine silk suit fringed with gold. The tailoring changes, but the man beneath the clothes does not.
“Do you believe that we are subject to the Fates, Cassian?” she asks. “Or do even the gods have free will?”
His eyes darken, as if that were at all possible. “It is the Fates who brought you here,” he answers, “but you will make your own choice, Jyn. I will not take that which you would not give me of your own free will. I refuse to play any other role than that.”
It’s time to be brave, now, what with the warmth flooding through her, the need to restore life to a place like this. A heart like his. “What if I want you to decide?”
He stumbles backwards, as if pushed. “You would—you would trust me like that? With such power?” He shakes his head. “”You don’t know me. You don’t know the great and terrible things I’m capable of.”
“Nor you, I.”
“She who brings such life to the Underworld could never—”
“I could,” she interrupts him. “I would. I have. It is equal parts honorable to me, to be venerated for springtime and for destruction. Or do you disagree?”
Cassian shakes his head vehemently, his own awe only seeming to grow. “I don’t,” he insists, stepping closer. “I don’t.”
He stands so close now that she can feel his breath on her skin. Something in her tells her that it’s now or never. “I don’t give a damn if it was my choice or if the Fates laid out my journey generations ago. I know who I am right now. I know what I want.”
He licks his lips, and she’s jealous—she would have liked to do that, truth be told. “And what is it you want, Jyn?” he asks huskily.
“To be worshipped,” she tells him. “To be known. By you.”
He is not a being known for his self-restraint, though he possesses it in spades. Surely, if he did not, the world would have been made over trillions of times by now. With Jyn, though, he wants to be restrained, if only so that he does not overtake her senses from the start. If he lunges after her with too much enthusiasm now, he would ruin his own plans to consume her slowly, deliciously.
So. Slow it is.
He has said nothing about intensity.
Featherlight, his hand glides upward and lands on the back of her neck, and he can feel the soft wisps of her hair at the root. He presses the pads of his fingers into her spine, his hunger only growing when she gasps. He pulls her even closer so that his lips hover next to hers, almost but not quite touching.
“This is what you want?” he asks once more, just to be sure.
“Yes."
“Then you shall have it.”
She shivers, and he puts his other hand on her waist. Lithe though she is, she isn’t quite so fragile and delicate as he thought she might be. She’s lean, and her muscles have tone. He doesn’t dwell on it, but the thought does briefly enter his mind that her fitness, her strength, could open up a great many possibilities in his bed.
But he’s waited long enough now, even if he’s hardly waited at all. He presses his lips to hers, and it is like a shock to his system. Everything cold and dead inside of him bursts from stony, icy cages, and he is alive. Heart beating, blood pumping, lungs filling with air that is, for once, not cold and stale. Life invades his senses, and it is all because of this woman and her unshakeable spring.
Experimentally, he runs his tongue slowly along the seam of her lips and is pleased when she opens for him, sighing into his mouth. The taste of her is perfect, cherries and rosewater and sweet, fresh air. He can’t help but inhale, to breathe her in with such need, as if she might disappear.
He could spend an entire lifetime tracing the contours of her mouth with his tongue, but when she nips at his lower lip, he pulls back slightly to look at her, his vision filled with nothing but her.
“Not enough?” he asks in a whisper. Breathless and panting, she shakes her head. A deep hunger within him rears its head, and the most primal, chaos-borne parts of his mind are deeply satisfied with her reaction to him. He thumbs at her lips, swollen by his kisses, only to find that her hunger is as strong and desperate as his own. She takes his thumb into her mouth, and his blood simmers as she licks around it.
He presses further, and a soft little sound of surprise emanates from her throat. Quickly, though, it gives way to a wanton moan.
“You still need more, don’t you?” he asks, though he already knows the answer. She needs in ways that only a maiden goddess could need, hurried, clumsy, instinctive. He silently praises the pantheon for sending such a creature to him.
Cassian pulls his thumb from her mouth and kisses her again, but only briefly, this time, hardly a kiss at all. Her eyes look wet. Is it possible that she misses the sensation already? He’s already in awe of how unafraid she seems of him, how unaffected she is by this dark and damp realm he’s spent generation upon generation calling home. If she were to let him, though he hardly knows a thing about her, he would have her call it home, too.
By the Fates, he needs her. But the fear strikes him that he will infect her with his decay, the scent of death, the taste of stolen life. If he were to touch the flowers beneath her feet, would they wither and die? Would they shatter like glass?
He shakes his head with wonder. “You would have me, even like this? Rotten and ruined and hollow?”
Her hands come to rest on his chest, and he never wants her to move them, but he’s nearly started when he looks into her eyes. There is suddenly a laughter in her eyes that he doesn’t know how to take. “Throw rotting matter on a bed of growing seeds, and it will grow,” she tells him, leaning forward—into him. “You aren’t hollow, king of shadows. You are what takes, and what gives again.”
He was wrong. He doesn’t want her to call this place home.
He wants to be her home.
“Jyn,” he breathes, pressing his forehead against hers. “I don’t know what favors I did for the Fates to send you to me.”
Her hands fist in the fabric of his shirt. “Show me,” she nearly growls. “Show me why I’m here, Cassian.”
He cannot deny her.
Cassian’s hands, once permission is given, roam Jyn’s body like a gardener’s in fresh soil—searching, grasping, feeling. She wants him to shape her, to mold her, to sculpt her into the finest statue, to place her on a pedestal in his garden and let what they create together make flowers bloom.
“Please,” she gasps against his lips, clutching at his shoulders, his neck; tangling her fingers in his hair and tugging in desperation. Doesn’t he know she needs him closer?
Suddenly, his hands are gone and she is left shivering from the loss of him. But before she can complain, his arms are under her back and her knees, and he’s lifting her, carrying her through the place she assumes he calls home. It’s as if she weighs nothing to him as he moves with purpose with her in his arms. Feeling off balance, she weaves her arms around his neck and buries her face there, breathing him him, delighting in the softness of his skin and the lovely, gentle scent of gardenias she finds there. How could he ever think of himself as rotting? Hollow? He is perhaps the king of shades, but she would argue that he lingers in her senses as only living things do.
When he deposits her onto his bed, there is no roughness or violent passion she would have expected with another deity, or even another man. He lays her down gently, tenderly, and then he lays beside her with his hand on her waist, careful and considerate. He places a kiss on her shoulder, and for a moment, she’s afraid he’ll stay there unmoving. Instead, though, he gradually moves his body over hers as his lips make their way across her collarbone, up and down either side of her neck, all the way to the other shoulder. The press of him against her is exquisite. Still, she wants more.
She’s always been a bit selfish that way.
“Touch me,” she pleads with him, though she tries not to sound like a beggar. She only wants to know him as she knows the sun and birds and trees. She only wants him to be a part of her, to be one with her. If he needs reassurance, she’s happy to give it to him. “I want you, Cassian. I want to feel you everywhere.”
His breath comes hot and heavy and fast; his eyes darken with desire. They tear at each other’s clothes, and Jyn knows she won’t be satisfied until she has him inside of her. He rubs against her with his hips, and a gasp becomes a quiet groan as he slides his cock up and down until he’s coated with her.
“Let me hear you,” he tells her, brushing his nose against her throat and letting his hand roam lower between them. “I want to hear every sound I can get you to make.”
She tries to relax, but her muscles are used to looking over her shoulder and to labor in the fields, planting and harvesting. She can’t quite recall the last time she didn’t have something on her mind, or the last time she didn’t hold all of her thoughts and emotions in her body.
He must sense the tension in her, for he ceases his explorations and puts his face next to hers. “What is it?” he breathes. “What’s wrong?”
A shiver runs down her spine. “I’ve never wanted something this much,” she tells him, the words leaving her lips before she can think twice about them. “I don’t give a damn about anything right now. I don’t give a damn about the world above. I just want… I want what no one else has ever given me. What no one else has given me the chance to have.”
His lips brush over hers, and he nods slightly. “It’s overwhelming,” he agrees, and though it’s not quite an adequate word to describe how she feels, it isn’t wrong. His kisses begin to trail downward from her face, to her jaw, to her neck, to the flat space between her breasts. “Let me help.”
No one has ever been so gentle, so loving with her. “Yes,” she whispers. “Please.”
But oh, she could never have predicted—
“Oh, by the F—”
His mouth on her breasts, the softness of his lips closing around her nipple, the wet lave of his tongue against the hardening point, it’s a shock to her system. Even more of a shock is the way his teeth nip at her sensitive flesh, the vibrations of his happy moans against her skin, the way a bolt of lightning shoots down to her core when he applies only the slightest suction. She can feel herself become wet between her thighs, can feel her own dampness on the sheets, and he’s hardly even touched her. They’ve hardly even done anything at all.
It’s instinct that has her cradling the back of his head with her hands as he moves to her other breast, but he doesn’t seem to mind. His hand works the breast he abandoned, rubbing, twisting, pulling on the pink tip just a bit, just enough to make her keep feeling it even once he’s let go. As he worships her, he grinds his cock against her leg, and she wishes she had the knowledge and wherewithal to do to him what he’s doing to her, to make him feel the way he’s making her feel.
“Cassian,” she whimpers, “Cassian—please—please—”
She looks down at him as he pulls away from her breast, a gleaming thread of saliva connecting them for the briefest time, and shivers. “I want to devour you,” he whispers, his voice rough as the road to Hell. He shifts downward, lazily dragging his mouth along her stomach and settling himself between her thighs. “Goddess… want to drink from you, want to drink straight from the source.”
Jyn doesn’t have words, only tight, staccato mewls as his fingers find their way between her legs. He parts her folds and flicks the pad of his index finger briskly over her center, and she bucks her hips almost all the way up into his face. She nearly cries out, but the sound gets stuck in her throat as he spreads her slickness around, coats his fingers with it.
She can hardly breathe when he puts his fingers in his mouth and sighs with pleasure. His eyes catch hers in the cool, dark glow. “You taste even better than I imagined.”
There’s nothing that could stop the shout from coming out of her when he flattens his tongue and licks a long, broad, greedy stripe up from cunt to clit. The whole time, she keeps her hands on his head—as if he needed any more encouragement—weaving her fingers through his hair and urging him on. Perhaps, she even directs him a bit, which is impressive considering how little she knows about her own pleasure.
Her body tightens, and tension builds at the base of her spine. Her legs twitch with every lick, and she thinks, this can’t be possible. It can’t feel this good. It’s not—
Until she finds out it is.
Cassian thinks he might be getting drunk from just the taste of her. Her flesh is so pink and smooth, covered by a thatch of dark hair that he wants to feel against his face for the rest of his life. It’s like heaven just to touch her, but when he really gets to put his mouth on her—when he touches his tongue to her clit as his fingers work inside of her—it’s more than that. He knows death and afterlives better than most, but this is an ascendance wholly unknown to him. He feels like the devil; he’s never felt more holy.
Her hands in his hair have him rutting against the bed. When she bends her knees and snaps her thighs closed around his head; when he hears the sound of her climax ring like cathedral bells throughout the whole of the underworld; when she gushes hot and sweet all over his face, like nectar from honeysuckle; he spends himself on the mattress as if he’s never done anything like this before. To be fair, it’s been a while. But he is far from sated.
He climbs back up to kiss her, to envelop her shivering body with his own. He clasps their hands together in a desperate refusal to be disconnected. When he pulls back to look at her, dazed in her bliss, he catches a spot of color from the corner of his eye. Glancing around, vines with pink-orange-red flowers climb the walls and flood his vision.
He turns back to her, bewitched. “Did you do this?”
She blinks a few times, and then laughs breathlessly. “Guess so,” she replies, and he dives back down to swallow up her words in a kiss, which she welcomes with unbridled enthusiasm.
For his entire existence, he has been Aḯdēs—unseen, invisible, always at the margins but always infinitely present among gods and mortal men alike. His domain is that which is not of others, that which lies beneath the living earth. He is the keeper of souls, the god of the dead. Cool, dark, dank like the darkest recesses of underground, his kingdom has never been a home as much as a place to keep that which is no longer welcome in the world above.
He cannot keep her.
“Jyn,” he breathes against her lips, his voice strained, “Jyn, Jyn—you cannot stay here.”
She stills beneath him; his own heartbeat slows as the organ ices over once more. “What?”
“You aren’t meant for this place,” he tells her. The saltwater in his eyes makes it difficult to see, but he sees the lovely, lingering vines begin to wither. “I want you here, I do—but a creature like you must walk upon the earth, not rest beneath it.”
Her hand disentangles from his and grasps his arm as rage colors her face, and her voice is haunted and hollow. “Who are you to decide where I belong?”
He tries to move back, to pull away, but her hand stays with all of its strength on his arm. Suddenly, his flesh seems to sear and burn at her touch, but when he looks down at his arm, he sees dark lines emanating up from the place where their skin meets. As if drawn by her sheer will, the lines begin to take shape as the thin wooden branches of a tree. One by one, each leaf appears, and just before she lets go, a fruit as red as rubies etches itself into his skin.
When she finally unhands him, he pulls his arm back, awed and angered and, against all odds, aroused. “What—what is this? What have you done?”
She stares at the image tattooed on his arm as if she herself doesn’t know where it comes from, and it occurs to him that she very well might not. The vines on the wall retreat. “I didn’t… that is not my doing.”
Cassian doesn’t know if he wants to shout at her or if he wants to take her into his arms again. With no clue on the horizon of his mind, he turns away. “Go, kore,” he commands, his voice low and final. “Leave this place.”
He doesn’t move until he’s absolutely certain that she’s gone. He sits down on the edge of the bed, his entire sense of self unnerved and unraveled. In all his ages since the Titanomachy, no creature has left a permanent mark on him. He suddenly realizes that she made no mention of the scars left by the thing he once called father. In his surprise and confusion, he stands and stumbles to a mirror.
The scars are gone. All of them, disappeared. Replaced by ridges of gray and brown and green, ending in small buds and blooms.
He watches as one of the buds opens slowly, wincing as it appears to tear open his flesh. The petals unfurl, and though the pain is neither great nor lasting, it is unlike anything he has ever known. Once it fades, however, it leaves behind a flower, white and delicate and—fragrant.
I know these, he thinks, the mirror image of himself bringing up a hand to brush his fingertips against the soft, silken petals. Gardenias. Like… like… Another bud explodes, and he bites his tongue to hold back the quiet groan in his throat. Still, his astonishment prevails over all else. Jyn, my Jyn—how is it that you have done this to me? What powers do you hold? Do you even know?
As he thinks of her, another bloom bursts, but it is not the same as the others. Instead, the petals are long and the same color as the flowered vines that crept up the walls of his palace when she was still there. Honeysuckles, he realizes. The scent of her, the taste of her, the memory of her, all honeysuckle.
She’s ruined him.
She’s revived him.
How can he live without her?
"Crashing and pounding
His rivers surround him
And drown out the sound of the song he once heard"
Epic II. Hadestown.
Jyn doesn’t even make it out of the underworld before she falls to her knees, drowning in her own tears, drowning alive. She sinks her hands into the clay beneath her as her lungs and legs fail her. Such a fool she’s been, letting herself be taken in by his dark, enchanting eyes. Her naivety, her ruthless hope, is going to be the death of her, deathless goddess be damned. Of course, he doesn’t truly want her. Of course, he would send her away.
But haven’t they done this a thousand times before? She feels it in her bones, feels it in the way that her tears land on the ground at turn to small, white petals. She knows this story, swears that she’s lived it. In all eternity, certainly—certainly—this is not the first time the Fates have called them together.
“Cassian,” she whispers, the sound of his name choked off in her throat. It isn’t the word she wants to say right now, nor could he hear her even if she shouted out for him. But it’s the only word she can speak, the only word that won’t go away no matter how many times she cries out for him.
Her own sadness roots her there to the ground, vines creeping in, surrounding her, enveloping her in their armor. Hopeless, is how she feels now. She’s felt it before, in flickers, but now, she feels it completely. She doesn’t want to become just another mistress of a god, a scorned lover or spurned devotee. She doesn’t want to turn into a plant or an animal or a damned celestial body. She doesn’t want to be a story that mothers tell their daughters to warn them off the boys and men who might break their hearts.
She is rebirth, renewal. She is life itself. If she concentrates, she knows she is capable of great and terrible things.
You don’t know me. You don’t know the great and terrible things I’m capable of.
With a sudden onset of determination possessed only by those who seek that which is the truest and most pure, she wipes the tears away from her face and rises from the ground. She holds out her hand and, with eyes closed, concentrates on what she wants more than anything else in the universe. Soon, she feels the weight of something heavy and cool in her hand. When she looks at what she’s manifested here in this chilling, lifeless place, she can’t help but smile.
Capable, indeed.
“You—you are a miracle.”
Jyn spins on her heel and finds him—him—standing a ways away, frozen but drawn forward as if he wants to walk but is unsure if he ought to. If not for the divinity that radiates off of him, she would think was merely a mortal man. Handsome, but mortal nonetheless.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
His eyes look right through her, or so she thinks. It’s only when she realizes he’s mesmerized by something else that she bothers looking behind her. There, she sees an orchard slowly climbing up a mountain path. An orchard that wasn’t there before.
An orchard of pomegranate trees. Trees that bear a fruit both sweet and bitter. Full of seeds, red as blood. Life, and death.
Something shifts in her, and she offers the pomegranate in her hand to him. “Here,” she says. She isn’t quite sure why.
He steps closer, just close enough to be within arm’s reach of her, and she sees the slow and steady spread of her flowers creeping across his skin, the buds that form, the blooms that burst. He takes the fruit and begins to cut into it as a small knife appears in his other hand. The skin of his strong hands is soon covered in red juice, and the few seeds that fall freely sink into the soil beneath their feet, sprouting quickly.
“Eat the seeds,” she implores him, her desperate need for him reawakened. “Eat them, and come with me. See the sun again, Cassian.”
Something flashes across his face, perhaps evidence of a mild disagreement or some unfiltered remark, but he is silent as he takes one of the seeds between his fingers and places it on his own tongue.
Oh, my.
“You want me to take what you offer,” he says, gruff without necessarily meaning to be. “Would you take what I offer you?”
In his hand, the fruit transforms into a small silver goblet of wine. Pomegranate win, no doubt, she thinks. On the cup, there is an etching of something ancient, yet familiar. A story her heart yearns to recognize. Something tells her that drinking the wine will deliver the narrative to her.
She takes the goblet and brings it to her lips.
“Wait.”
She pauses at his behest.
“You won’t be able to travel with impunity,” he tells her. Warns her, more like. “If you drink the wine, you won’t be able to leave this place for half the year.”
Jyn raises an eyebrow. “You would trap me here?”
He shakes his head. “I would worship you here.”
“And springtime?”
“You would have your leave, from the sowing to the reaping. If you drink the wine.”
“And if I don’t? If I stay without drinking the wine?”
His face turns solemn and sad. “You’ll start to decay. Become like a shade. It would kill me everlasting to see you reduced to less than a memory like that.”
“And if I went home?” Her voice softens, becomes smaller. She describes an eventuality she doesn’t care to truly consider. “If I never came back to this place?” To you?
“I would venerate you from afar,” he answers. “Burn incense in your honor. Write odes and elegies to rid myself of my need of you, even if it wouldn’t work. I would worship you and the life you brought to me, to this place, no matter how temporary. For, you see, kore, I had forgotten what it was for my heart to beat until you.”
She can feel the ground beneath her feet soften as green grass starts to grow again. Damn you, heart, she thinks, every emotion on display with each new sprout and bloom.
“You call me kore, but I am no subservient maiden,” she warns him weakly.
On his face, there is a ghost of a smile. “I would not ask you to be.”
She looks down into the dark red wine, starting to imagine a future that is so, so different from the one she had thought she would have. “I am terribly temperamental.”
He takes a step closer. “Then we shall be so, together.”
“The pantheon will likely have things to say.”
“Let them,” he murmurs, taking her free hand and bringing it to his lips. “I never should have told you to leave, Jyn. Despite everything, I still hope you will accept my invitation to stay.”
Despite everything, I still hope.
She lifts the goblet to her lips and drinks until the vessel is well and truly empty.
As she drinks, Cassian thinks for the first time that perhaps, the gods and the Fates and all of creation have blessed him.
To rule the dead has never been easy; nor has it been a chore. It is an honorable duty. He has always been justly proud to fulfill his role in the natural order of things. But while the kings of sky and sea have had consorts and lovers, have taken their pleasure as they see fit, he has always been different. He isn’t sure, never has been, if it’s because of his own code of honor, or because being surrounded by death and decay have never done him any favors, but he has spent eternity alone.
Not anymore, though.
As soon as she swallows the last drop of wine, he seizes her by the waist and presses his lips to hers. He can taste the pomegranate on her tongue as they move against each other, both of them seeking more, more, more. Oh, that he could take her right here, right now. But she deserves more than that, his Jyn. His love. His bride.
He reaches down and moves her clothes aside with deft fingers, then cups her to the sound of her delighted gasp. He groans as he drags a finger along the slick seam of her. “So wet,” he whispers, resisting the urge to sink his fingers into her just yet. “Soaking my hand, by the Fates, Jyn, you perfect creature.”
She clutches at his shoulders and buries her face in his neck with a whimper. “Please,” she begs, “I don’t want to wait. Don’t make me wait.”
He kisses her hair. “I want to give you what you deserve, my love, want to steal you away—”
“Want you,” she mumbles into his skin, pressing herself closer. It’s a wonder that she means what she says, given the way he’s treated her. Her lips soothe the sting of another bloom. “Want the whole of creation to see how much.”
Fucking hell—she can’t know what she does to him, his kore. His Jyn.
No matter what she says, he won’t take her here. He draws on every ounce of strength and every source of his power to whisk them away to the place they were before, to his bed. Penthouse or palace, it doesn’t matter. Here, alone, together, it is all theirs.
There is no gentle laying of her on the bed this time, once every scrap of fabric is removed from their bodies. She takes the initiative, fall backwards and pulling him down with her. He tries not to crush her under his weight, but she seems to want nothing more as she spreads her legs for him and wraps them around his hips, pulling him closer.
“You have me,” she whispers, her voice raw and needy. “Take me.”
“Shh, my Jyn.” He reaches between them and gathers up the nectar between her legs, coating himself with it liberally. “We have all the time in the world. I don’t want to hurt you, going too fast.”
She shakes her head, already in a frenzy of need. “Don’t care… want you… need you… Cassian, please.”
He pushes her legs apart even wider, opening her body up for him. When he sinks two fingers inside of her experimentally, just to see how she feels, how ready she is for him, they both gasp—her, he imagines, at the sudden intrusion, and him at the way she tightens around his fingers. And when he crooks them… oh, her reactions, her little moans and mewls, they’re divine.
But she wants him, and he doesn’t want to make her wait much longer. Slowly, he withdraws his fingers and takes himself in hand, pumping languidly before pressing the tip of his cock inside her hot, wet, delicious cunt. Gently, ever so gently, he begins to push further inside of her.
One of her hands shoots up to grasp at the back of his neck as her eyes go wide at the foreign sensation. “Cassian,” she whines, her voice shaking. “I need—”
“Say the word and I’ll stop,” he promises. Please, please don’t ask me to stop.
Jyn shakes her head almost violently. “Don’t stop—please don’t—just—hold me—kiss me, Cassian, kiss me, please—”
They both must know by now that he would never deny her. As he surges forward to kiss her, she adjusts her hips and takes him deeper. They both gasp and groan and curse at the feeling, but he manages to seal their mouths together regardless. He loves the taste of that pomegranate wine on her tongue, a fervent reminder of her devotion, and his.
Each stroke within her is exquisite; she is so new to this, so inexperienced, that everything she does is on instinct. The way she bucks up her hips, the way she squeezes around him, it’s all primal and unfiltered. He takes her legs and pushes them back, practically folding her in half, and she just lets him. She’s so pliant in his hands, and each touch of his hands on her body is accepted with complete and total trust.
He is so lucky. He is so, so, so damn lucky.
His restraint begins to fail him as he goes from making love to fucking her in earnest, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She especially doesn’t seem to mind when he takes first one breast, and then the other, in his hands and thumbs at the nipple. Each sound she makes begins to coincide with each harried thrust he makes. Her eyes begin to glaze over, as if in a trance. She clenches around him, and his own hips stutter in their rapid, selfish pace.
He needs to see her come, he realizes, if he wants to do so as well. Cassian decides to slow his thrusts and collapse his lower half against her so that his body drags against her clit with each motion, the vines in his skin scraping against hers. She gasps out his name, and he gasps out hers in return. The look on her face is almost pained, but he knows—he trusts her enough to know—that she’ll tell him if it hurts. Besides, it isn’t as if his own face looks much better right now.
A scream catches in her throat as her mouth hangs open and her perfect, beautiful cunt tightens around his cock. Her body seizes in climax, and it’s only a few more thrusts before he finds himself coming, too, spilling himself inside of her and collapsing atop her heaving body. He presses his open mouth against the skin of her neck, an approximation of a kiss in his ecstatic state. And as he comes down, vines and twigs and branches and flowers spread just beneath the surface of his skin, and some begin to grow on hers as well.
When he tries to roll to the side, she wraps her legs around his waist. “Stay,” she whispers. Surely, she means it as a plea, but he takes it as a command, and he follows it without question. After all, who is he to beg for explanation from his queen?
She still holds him to her as he softens and his speed begins to leak out of her. He can’t help but chuckle at her insistence. “We need to get cleaned up,” he tells her, shifting upward to place a kiss on each cheek.
In a frown he can’t help but love, she wrinkles her nose. “Or we could just stay here,” she says, “do it all over again.”
He decides that such a remark deserves a real kiss, slow and heady and tender. “We could,” he concedes, “but the pantheon will come calling soon, and I would like to present you as more than a lover, if that would suit you.”
Jyn combs his hair back with his fingers, looking up at him with far more affection than he is sure he deserves. “I don’t care what they think of me. I don’t expect them to understand, and I don’t need them to. I have you for that.”
“I want to show them a queen,” he explains quietly, though his heart sings at her praises. “My queen. And all that she is capable of.”
Her face lights up with laughter as her eyes dart around the room like a hummingbird. “I think they’ll be able to see my capabilities just fine, Cassian.”
It’s true, he realizes as he follows her gaze. His palace—his entire kingdom, he’d reckon, save for the darkest abyss—has been transformed into a botanical paradise, and it’s all because of her. By her, of her, for her, his kingdom for her love, her happiness.
“You are changing me,” he tells her, but he knows that she knows, knows that she can see the flowers springing forth from his skin in the wake of their union. “You have changed me.”
She traces her finger along the stem of one of the flowers she’s left on him. “I didn’t mean to,” she answers softly. There is no guilt in her answer, no shame. Only thoughtfulness. He would pay infinitely to know her thoughts.
“I know, my love.” He pulls her hand to his lips and presses a kiss to her knuckles that is filled with more emotion than he’d ever be able to express in a thousand lifetimes. “That is what makes you so precious to me.”
When he looks into her eyes, emeralds with specks of the dust of creation, of the cosmos, he sees only the sentiment reflected back at him. She wears her love as plainly as the day, as clear as the sky in the world above them. Her face, her hands, her voice, her body—he can feel it in his bones, how she has dedicated herself to him, and how he has dedicated himself to hers in return.
The spring and summer will be lonely, he knows. He will dream of her every night. His heart will yearn, and all his kingdom will feel his longing, his misery. But when the harvest ends, and she comes home to him again, there will be peace within him, and joy and celebration in his kingdom. All will be right with the underworld.
And then the cycle will begin again, and their love will sustain them, until next they meet.
"Which is where the seasons come from
And with them, the cycle
Of the seed and the sickle
And the lives of the people
And the birds in their flight"
Epic I. Hadestown.