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ARIADNE CUT HIM OFF before he could continue, not wanting to know more, her heart already experiencing pangs of burgeoning hope. “Of course we are! But if Silenus can see through my disguise, I didn’t have much time before someone else much less friendly found out.”
Something passed across his face, impossible to make out in shadow. “Silenus?”
“He told me I would live longer if I got out while the charade held up, basically.” Ariadne sighed, smoothing out the wrinkled paper, fingers brushing the wet spots. There was no mistaking the golden tint for anything besides divine tears. “It was never my intention to hurt you.” More to avoid further pain, really.
“I- I thought you wanted nothing to do with me.” Dionysus suddenly sounded like an unsure man, and not an infuriated scorned god. The wrathful aura was gone like it had never even existed. It had probably been the pain of rejection, wrapped up in the thin comfort of anger.
Ariadne set the paper aside and stood up, pulling him into a tight, slightly sweaty hug. “You are my friend. Always.” She held him for long minutes before pulling back to look at him. His body was finally out of that awful dark shadow of power and the untouchable divine perfection was gone. His face was still wet, expression heartbreakingly hopeful under his smeared makeup.
“It would just be rather hard to be your friend as a smear on the floor of Olympus.” She told him wryly with a smile.
He didn’t smile back. “I would never let that happen to you.”
She let her smile fade. “You can’t control everything.” She told him solemnly.
Dionysus stared at her, wordless and eyelashes still wet with tears. Ariadne pulled him back into her arms for another hug. He slowly relaxed into it until he was limp in her arms. The sun beat down, and she pulled him under the tree to join her afternoon nap, head pillowed in her lap and hands laced with hers.
Ariadne didn’t sleep, chewing her lip as she ran her thumb over their joined hands. She had a problem. She had a big problem. Thyone as Semele was wrong. Ariadne did have a friend and she had stupidly forgotten that. Gods may treat their lovers with varying levels of care and then move on. But friends and favored ones were almost universally treasured while they lived.
Dionysus was her friend, first and foremost. They may not have started that way, but it was what they had wound up as. Ariadne had forgotten that, buried under her loneliness as Dionysus got to know his mother for the first time. That combined with her terrible, secret desire to have him to herself, to be the center of his world as he was hers had overwhelmed her senses. She forgot what she already had.
Ariadne was going to die. There was no way around that. She would have an eternity in the Underworld, probably wandering around without memory. Or maybe she would be used as eternal prey to her brother, the Minotaur. It would suit as punishment for leading innocents to their deaths and never trying to help until it was her neck on the line. She had dreamed about it often enough lately.
In comparison, her time alive was going to be short. Ariadne glanced down at the dozing god in her lap. Dionysus was going to live a long, long time. He had already been alone too long. His mother would be there for him, as she couldn’t be during his childhood. Ariadne could only hope after she died the memory of their relationship wouldn’t make him feel worse than before.
But she couldn’t control that. What she could control was what she did with her time while she was alive. No matter how the thought of her wandering around and picking flowers while someone she cared about suffered alone pissed her off. Most of all because she wouldn’t even be able to remember him.
“I can feel you thinking.” Dionysus muttered into her thigh, breath hot on her skin where her dress had ridden up, a green eye peered up at her through the hair spilled across his face.
“I am thinking, imagine that.” Ariadne squeezed his hands with hers before pulling one free to run it through his hair. They stayed like this for long enough she almost dozed off herself. All she could smell was the roses in his now crooked flower crown and the sun baked rock surrounding them.
“Why did you stop meeting my eyes when I took lovers at my revels?”
Ariadne’s eyes popped open. He blinked sleepily up at her, patiently waiting.
“Why did you avoid me on Olympus?” She countered, embarrassed about her reasoning.
“I asked first.” Dionysus pointed out reasonably enough, and had the gall to be smug about it. She recognized his expression from his terrible attempts at poker face when he tried to practice against her before entering the divine tournament. When he thought he was getting away with something the skin around his eyes curved, matching the movement of his mouth.
Ariadne started slow, picking her words carefully as she thought them out.“It felt like a game when it first started. You would wander far and wide, but always come back and spend time with me. We would sit up the whole night talking and laughing. But then you quit talking to me as much, or touching me as your lover.”
“When I brought mother back.” Dionysus agreed.
“I felt, I don’t know how it made me feel. You didn’t want me as a lover. I had been replaced as your friend too. Hurt.” She realized. “I felt hurt. It wasn’t fun to play the game anymore. It felt like I was watching from the outside of something I wanted but wasn’t needed or wanted at. ”
“I’m sorry.” The low words caught her by surprise, but his face is completely buried in her lap now. She had nothing to gauge his sincerity but the muffled tone and the tight grip on her hands still holding his.
“Me too. I should have said something earlier.” Ariadne admitted bitterly, thumping her head against the bark of the tree. An olive fell and smacked her on the head, making her yelp.
“Quit that.” Dionysus rolled out of her lap to catch the back of her head with his hands, mirroring their first meeting. “You’ll hurt yourself, Ariadne.”
Their eyes met, brown and cat green.The moment hung between them. He leaned forward and pressed a soft kiss to her lips, chaste. He rested his forehead against hers, smudging his makeup onto her. He closed his eyes and swore quietly.
“I was avoiding you because- I didn’t know, still don’t know how to really- to talk about-” Dionysus cut himself off with a sigh, opening his eyes. This close she can see the starburst of darker green that surrounded his pupil and the pale yellow ring surrounding his iris.
“Is this something you don’t have words for, don’t know how to explain or are not sure what you’re trying to say?” Ariadne prodded gently, pushing her arms to surround his neck and lacing her hands together loosely.
Dionysus gave her a crooked smile and pressed a kiss to her nose. “You have the kindest heart.” He deflected, instead of answering.
“No, I’m not.” She whispered to him, confessing her darkness in a cracking voice. “I would have left that labyrinth and never went back if I could have. I would have let my father slaughter countless children and thought only of how I was relieved to have escaped. I tried.”
Ariadne thought of her twin, the way blood dripped from his severed head in a hot pool at her feet. The begging and screaming of sacrifices not old enough to leave home alone, led to slaughter. The ruins of wax wings washing up the shore.
He said nothing at first, pulling back and studying her. “It’s not wrong for you to have fled from being a part of that evil. It was not your fault, nor your duty to stop what your father did.” He finally spoke and pulled his hands up from cradling the back of her head to cup her cheeks.
Dionysus licked his lips slowly and asked carefully, ”Do you feel like you have to escape me?”
“I felt like I had to leave before you broke my heart by forgetting me entirely.” She covered his hands with hers and didn’t meet his eyes, staring instead at his glittering earrings. “I’m lonely on Olympus. Even with you. It’s a place of gods and immortals, not ‘base animal companions’.” She quoted.
“Who told you that?” He demanded sharply, leaning back on his heels, ferocious expression from earlier returning.
“Who didn’t?” Ariadne countered. “In a thousand different ways, a thousand different times from a thousand different people.” She snorted. “Even Silenus as kind as he was, pointed out I didn’t belong. Far be it for immortal gods have to witness death up close and personal.” She muttered, forgetting her audience, so comfortable in his presence that she began talking freely again.
He reached out and tugged a chunk of her hair free from her sweaty braid. It was entirely silver, almost glowing in the bright sunlight. Dionysus sighed. “I try to forget you are mortal. I don’t like to think about it, and what it means.”
“Neither do I.” Ariadne told him dryly. “But it’s rather hard to forget when you’re surrounded by people who don’t age and laugh frequently at people who do.”
“You have been hanging around the wrong people up there, that much is clear.” Dionysus grimaced. “Yet another thing I should have helped with.” He put both hands on his face and pulled down, lower eyelids stretching downwards. “How am I going to fix this?” He complained dramatically, letting go of his face and flopping over to lay on her again.
Ariadne took a moment to reflect back on her awe and shyness when she had first met him and how far she had come from there.
She didn’t get a chance to respond to his rhetorical question. Hermes, the god of messengers appeared in a flicker of light, rocking back on his winged sandals.
“Good, good, you’re not busy. Nice to see no one got smote. Got kind of worried when I felt that spike of energy earlier.” Hermes laughed and it had a distinct undertone of nervousness that piqued Ariadne’s curiosity. What was there for the other gods to fear when the god of wine and parties lost his temper? Sobriety? He certainly wasn’t going to lose control over his powers. Not after how hard he had worked to get control.
“Dad sent me to check on you.” He added, glancing at them and then away like a hummingbird not sure if it should land or not.
“I’m fine.” Dionysus’s voice from Ariadne’s shoulder was muffled and petulant.
“Yeah?” Hermes sounded wary and not confident. “Then you should probably go see Dad. You worried him when you destroyed your wing of the palace.”
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