Chapter Text
Seattle, 2014. Isabella.
“Do you want to grab a sandwich?”
She didn’t. There was nothing she wanted less than spend her lunch pause with her noisy colleague, that also happened to be close friends with her direct supervisor. Five years and counting of a desk job she was grateful for, but the loud calls and uncomfortably bright office weren’t pleasing. For a long moment, the regret of not waking up a few minutes earlier and fixing something to eat weighted on her.
“Well?”, Sarah insisted.
Isabella smiled. “Of course. I’ve been wanting to try his new spicy-chicken recipe, but I might have to buy some orange juice to go with that.”
Around the corner of their building, the almost hidden Vietnamese market also sold fresh food daily. That is, if you got there late enough to avoid the last remaining ones from the previous day dinner, but early enough to still find something for lunch. The owner, Ramirez, had bought the place from the actual Vietnamese family that moved from their grey Seattle to Florida. Predictably, most of the people around knew – or assumed – he was an illegal immigrant. Racism never went out of trend.
“You’re brave,” replied Sarah, grabbing her purse and reapplying some sticky gloss on her lips. Isabella fished hers from her back pocket and copied the action. “I heard Matthew had explosive diarrhoea from it last week.”
Bella thought he most likely got food poisoning from the office party. Those devilled eggs looked nice but their smell sticked to everyone’s clothes after.
“Maybe he only has weak resistance for spicy. He’s so white I saw him reflecting light the other day…” The little joke went through Sarah’s head. The blond was too occupied checking her phone and typing furiously against the bright screen.
“Damn. Give me a second,” she murmured, walking away with the phone attached to one ear. She stood close to the bathroom doors whispering for a while. For such a noisy person, she was very reserved with her own life; one child, no husband and an apartment on the suburbs. The son played soccer every other weekend.
When Sarah returned, her face was grim.
“We’re going to have to raincheck on that lunch, Bells. My kid got a fever.”
“Don’t worry about it. I hope he gets better,” wished her, honestly. Sarah smiled softly and said:
“She will. One of her friends has the chicken pox, so I was already dreading her turn.” Isabella always assumed the child was a boy. You know what they say about assuming things.
“Everyone’s bound to have it. Stick some oven mites on her and just wait.”
Without Sarah, Isabella enjoyed getting a bit of fresh air. Ramirez was talkative, but a quick lie about backlog at work fished her out of the conversation. The sun shone and it was an uncharacteristically hot day for March, but the spice on her sandwich wasn’t overwhelming and the orange was sweet, which made her pause enjoyable.
A pause so enjoyable its memory almost helped when her six-feet tall, beautiful boss reprimanded her that afternoon. Two times.
The 1998 Toyota Camry that waited for her posed like a saving boat in the sea of cars on the parking lot. This week, Friday came faster than usual. With Sarah’s absence and the looming presence of next month’s audit, her mind was all over the place. Even her ever-reliable father, that still lived in Forks and was usually trusted to keep a boring life, had decided to become the step-parent of his new wife’s children and to keep inviting his actual daughter non-stop to the family parties. As much as Isabella loved Sue, the Reserve’s people were still mostly cold towards her. They didn’t want the vampire’s pet around and she didn’t want to be around them. Even if she was no longer a pet.
She wanted though. The thought was like a nudge she felt sometimes, something on the back of her mind. The memories of her teenage years, of when she was in love, rarely came. But vampires never left her mind.
When Bella got out of the car, a familiar fob dizzied her. These days, it was rare to go without it. A friend cloud that never left, even when the third bottle of prescribed iron pills finished. The doctor also said that the tight chest and the palpitations were the results of stress, anxiety. She had believed that damn man, and now she had been laid off.
The talk came without surprise. Beautiful Ava, the Nordic ice queen, her boss, who liked efficiency and long, long hours of dedication, fit right in the American work ethics. Bella knew she was going to be jobless, but she expected Sarah would be back by then, to pick up her load. Maybe there was no difference between with or without her then.
The cardboard box, with her personal items, was light on her hands. There were no personal memorabilia on her office, so it was easy to pack in under twenty minutes and leave. It was still embarrassing to pass through her colleagues and see their faces. Pitying her downfall. All of them thinking about the housing crisis and how difficult the job market was, no doubt. Poor her, but at least it’s not me.
A ringtone cut the softness of the late afternoon. The twilight was close.
“Hello.”
“Bella!” It was Renée, her voice filled with affection.
She had desired that love from her mother for so long that having it now, when she was already an adult and far away, seemed rather pointless. Some odd four years ago, the previously airhead had the nerve to get pregnant again; a planned baby with her exciting second husband. Isabella felt sorry the child the same way her colleagues pitied her today.
Renée had come around this time though. The baby was fed around the clock, with a regular sleep schedule and baby-led-feeding method when it was the correct time. Her mother was not even permissive with the child, Bella’s half-brother. Montessori agenda, a stay-at-home mother. A responsible one at that. Renée Dwyer now. The proof she was capable of doing all the things she had denied her first daughter.
Isabella loathed to witness her mother’s new family.
“Hi mom,” she sighed. “How’s little Phil going?”
It was enough to send the older woman in a tirade about child development. Isabella half-listened with her keys and box dangling in her hands while she walked towards her building. Her apartment complex was simple: cracked grey painting on the outside walls, six floors with mostly families and no lift for anyone able-bodied, but there was one elevator for wheelchair users attached to the stairs that the older residents used almost daily. It was almost in the outskirts of the city, with lots of green and a big garden, something quite rare on Seattle and a courtesy of the first-floor resident, a strict woman of Armenian descent that occupied one of the biggest units. It served her well, as the couple had four black-haired children — thankfully every single one of them well-behaved and clean.
Yasmina was kind and beautiful. Black hair and big eyes like her children, an aquiline nose and thin lips. Overall, she had a very pleasing face, and Bella would argue the prettiest woman on the building. Her husband was fully Armenian, so they had similar facial features — Bella was sure they were cousins or something —, but he was balding with glasses that made his eyes even bigger. Arev came to the U.S. only to marry her, after she went on a trip to visit their family in Yerevan. Maybe due to that, he was way more severe than his wife and only a look from him made the children stop talking, but the girls adored him. They had three of them and a boy.
Maybe out of pity, but Isabella was sometimes invited to their Sunday lunches, where she got to know the whole family. By now, almost two years of shared meals, she was also expected to help with the clean up after and with the gardening on the afternoon. She was usually followed around the garden, Yasmina’s pride and joy, by their second, a shy boy that liked the silence as much as her.
Her mother rambling was still going on her ears as she tried to fish her keys out. The damn thing was always lost on an alternative dimension somehow connected to her purse. She didn’t hear anything, but rather felt something soft rubbing on her legs, and didn’t need to look down to know it was that stray cat the Armenian kids used to feed but couldn’t take in — their mother was allergic or some other lie you tell kids to avoid taking pets in.
“Oh, hello there,” she murmured, softly enough so it wouldn’t alarm Renée.
Isabella lowered herself down to rub her hands on the cat’s back and ears, earning herself a slow rumbling that spoke about its satisfaction. It was a pretty thing, colours meshed together to form a beautiful pattern of orange, white and black, with green eyes and a black spot near its mouth that made it seem the cat always had its mouth open. Bella thought it was female, but she didn’t know enough about cats to know for sure. It would require a vet visit.
The thought made her pause the caress and actually look at the animal for a second. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to take her in, after all, was the last thing that passed through her mind before she lost her senses.
Greece, 680 BC. Alcmena
There was a high number of people packed together in their surroundings. More than what it was common for nobility and way more than what was comfortable for him, but not yet to be considered a mass. The stories that invaded him at every random, unsolicited touch made him feel manic with fury and giddiness at the same time, the kind only his ability would provide. Immortality had bequeathed him with something more, a gift, some would say. Only a glimpse of skin and someone’s oldest and most hidden thoughts passing through him with ease, being catalogued away in his mind’s library.
Putting away the lives of people, almost everyone he got to know, away from his conscious mind was an arduous task in the beginning, but he learned. He adapted. It would be impossible not to. So easy to shatter. And he refused to break; he only bent enough to be able to change and continue. Before his library he had made a palace in his mind, with corridors that would stand high and halls that seemed endless. After a couple of centuries, the rooms of the palace became cluttered and visitors, people that surfaced from the memories without his permission, walked and talked and he went into a state of mind less than ideal. Insanity, or the start of it. Then it became the library. It was perfect and had only a pair of hands that worked around: his.
He took a careful breath and nodded along the conversation. It was relatively boring, but necessary. A part of him, the largest one, revelled in the machinations of politics; that game of push and pull strands. Another part, the one that was mastered in the beginning, hated the patience it took for things to work. Alas or not, time passed differently when you had so much of it available; one hundred years and it became elusive. Another five hundred and it became a concept he was no longer acclaimed to. Humanity was no longer a part of him, but a game to be toyed with.
Other than the amount of people around, either did the sun help with the discomfort, even if the burning lessened with the tics of the clock, as the sun went down. The twilight was upon them.
The first glance he caught of her, the new her, was by chance. The slight recognition came after.
The woman was turned from him, but he saw a glimpse of hair turned red by the sun. She was attached to a figure he knew by a memory that wasn’t his own: Amphitryon. He was imposing on his own accord, so it was likely what secured Argyros’ attention on the first place. He walked clearly uncomfortable, trying to dodge as much people as possible and holding his lips in a tight line. One of his hands glitched by his side, a warrior reflex of uncertainty, the constant search for a weapon that was not there, in a place no one was expected to defend oneself. His right hand was tightly woven in that woman. The wife, then? According to a web of tales, he was oddly amorous.
It could be pretence. After all, Amphitryon was married to the king’s daughter. Even if he was a ruler himself, albeit to a smaller kingdom, he could not scorn the wife. Watching him now, maybe the love wasn’t untrue. Argyros tried to reach for the woman’s face from other people’s recollection, but nothing came. Concentration didn’t help and he got curious. Her face was still turned from him, and her hair had become brown after she moved from sun. A slight movement and he saw her profile: it was a face he almost knew, but instinct told him she was from before.
The days before his change were hazy at best. A human life that was akin to his mother’s womb; impossible to remember. If he walked through his mind library, there was a section dedicated to his mortal days, but he never cared for it other than for the times he wanted to nurture his affection for Didyame. His fair, untamed sister. His eternity wasn’t bound to her, but time was definitely more pleasing, as her own gift made her presence addictive. He made no effort to visit his human memories that didn’t feature her.
The face of the woman dangling on Amphitryon’s arm tickled those mortal souvenirs, unimportant as he had paid no attention to her. A slave, young enough to not be punished for the times she strayed off duty, but old enough to have hard, bleached fingers from doing the laundry. Youth clung to her cheeks then when she watched his Didyame, more than a decade younger than him, to learn how to ride a horse. At his mid-thirties he never had the opportunity to spend time with his sister, so his human eyes almost lost the small slave hidden in the foliage. Her mahogany hair was what gave her away. “If she was lucky enough, she would be plucked from her family to dedicate her life to Demeter. A little priestess”, was his fleeting thought.
The girl hadn’t known no such luck. A Persian battle, a simple one at that, with not a lot of casualties, took her life. She was no more than seven years old, if Argyros had to guess. He walked the normally unvisited corridors of his mind library and forced a recollection: the small head of a child on the floor, wet with blood. The other slaves sorrow faces. His own mind at the time taken by the reparation work. How funny, he recalled, the first time the young maid bled was during the raid that killed her. He wasn’t mature at that point; his father was the pater familias. No one near him cried about hers and other deaths, no one that mattered had lost their lives.
His world burned almost a decade after that. He was transformed and his blood became venom.
Didyame also seemed to recall the slave girl. His sister artfully laughed next to him, but it didn’t attract his attention. She was always made content by her husband and others around her, no matter who; but her mate was special. When Argyros came back in search of his sister, after becoming undead, he had Markos with him. His own companion, trustworthy and bound by love for him. Little did either of them know that their shared companionship was an extension of Markos’ tie to Didyame, even before her death to a new life. It took awhile for Argyros to accept but accept he did.
Markos was not gone, and his sister was but an extension of Argyros himself.
“Ah yes, I think she might be timid, my love”, said Markos, his voice so low Argyros could barely understand him. “Even without that, maybe it would be careless to take the general’s wife as a lover.”
Didyame was as insatiable as always, and she usually took whatever she wanted. Ever the strategist, Argyros agreed with Markos’ opinion: Amphitryon’s prized possession was off limits for his sister.
“Your precaution is troublesome,” chanted Didyame. “I could have her. She has such an interesting face. I think I knew her when I was human.”
She remembered the washer too. He mindlessly rushed his arm to hers as if by accident, to get a view of her mind. Her mirth touched him first; her gift was next. The exhilarating feeling of being next to her was almost toxic. A second of concentration and he saw what he wanted, a confirmation of what he glanced at: the curious face of a child, clutched between leaves, mahogany hair that looked crimson in the sun. It was the exact same face, although older than both of their combined memories.
Argyros smiled.
By his side, Mycenae’s king continued to discuss with a counsellor. Electryon did not have the same character as his predecessor and even the advantageous marriage to his niece, Anaxo — the queen was absent that day —, was orchestrated by their father. An alliance made to hold power inside the family and to avoid the two brothers dispute for the crown. Strong, valiant and impertinent Perseus, the old king, was so much more than his son. He had strategy and forethought. A lineage of strength that gave way to the present ruler. A pity, as he was so, so tedious and overestimated peace.
How could a simple washer be reborn as a noble daughter and wife? It couldn’t be Fortune’s doing. Finding her again in a meeting of kings, no less than a millennium after her likely death. Wavy tresses of hair that looked like laurel, exactly like the current noble trend, the way a server could not afford to maintain. Locked on his arms, the general of Tiryns looked at her as if he was ready to invite the Venus’ fury like Cassiopeia.
Endeavor to solve that mystery was definitely more interesting than listening Electryon’s cautious words.
“My only daughter.” Mycenae’s king had noticed their combined curiosity. “She takes after her grandmother and is my favourite child, like I was the favourite son to my mother. I call her Electryone, as she is but myself.”
Didyame’s ears perked to the remark and an untruthful smile came to her lips.
“The stories about the Perseus’ Queen are numerous,” she said, soft-spoken enough to please the king. Argyros knew enough from his memories that he wasn’t favourable to the married women of politicians. “And her beauty is to become… legendary.”
“My mother’s beauty depictions by the bards are trustworthy. She left us the same year that my last sister, Autochthe, arrived.”
The story was known by the court and the entirety of the continent: the chaining of princess Andromeda to a rock coast to appease the gods, her freedom given by Perseus and their subsequent marriage, that later led to the death of the queen after the childebirth of the ninth childe. It was still meaningful that the king himself was the one to retell them. A small chess piece that moved in their favour. Argyros smiled.
Clearly, the woman that moved slowly towards them was not Andromeda, the previous queen of Mycenae. There was no flowing golden hair that shone like melted gold, no divine beauty that defied the gods and… she was clothed. Looking at her father, her profile indicated only a normal woman. Impact came when she looked Argyros in the eyes, and he understood why his sister wanted this princess as a lover. Expressive black doe-like eyes that looked at him. No smile, not to him. She made him feel watched, and he felt like starting to speak just to keep her looking at him. A lilac bouquet hit him at the same moment her eyes did.
A thousand years taught him to control himself even in the face of the most enticing singers, but her smell made him hungry all the same.
“Electryon.”
Argyros had paid no mind to the herculean man next to her, even if his reputation preceded him: strength and lack of strategy, but a brutal force to be reckon with. He was tall like a small tree, razored hair like a slave, olive skin. He carried the smell of iron like a sword, gave no apologies for his lack of political tact, and looked straight into Argyros eyes, disregarding Markos and even Didyame, the most beautiful woman in the room and the one that already voiced her attention directed to his companion, albeit only to their ears.
“Amphitryon,” answered the king, with a nod. “I formally present to you our emissaries from Corinthia. You remember their names,” He paused, and to them, he said: “This is mine own daughter. Electryone.”
The presentation was tense for a single second, then the princess stepped forward and took Didyame’s face in her hands and kissed both of her cheeks. Markos ignored the women and silently watched Argyros.
“The king, my loving father, often forgets my actual given name,” she pointed. “To his friends, he presents me by his own, and I fear you might not know how to address me.”
Her smile died when she caught Argyros gaze, but his lips curved.
“Alcmena.” He savoured her name while it rolled out of his tongue. Amphitryon squeezed her arm, but she held Argyros eyes with challenge.
“Yes.”