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Thalia
Thalia kicked the bathroom door shut behind her, swearing when she stubbed her toe on the doorframe. Damn Pirithous! Why did he have to ruin things? What difference did it make to him who she worshipped? It wasn’t any of his business what her relationship was with God and God’s relationship with the Virgin Mary was even less his business.
Aphrodite! Of all people!
“Ridiculous!”
“Thalia?” She swore again, loud enough for him to hear, with some choice commentary regarding his parentage. “Speak as ill of my father as you wish, I will not argue, but my mother had little choice in the matter of my birth.”
“Go away, Pirithous.”
“My leaving will do nothing to help you.”
“Neither is your staying.” She slammed her fist against the door, but he didn’t so much as grunt. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“You need only listen.”
“Ugh!” She dropped the sheet to the floor, pulling a shirt over her head. “Haven’t you said enough? You’ve insulted everything I believe in already!”
“It was not my intent to do so, only to warn you of the dangers you face after we have parted company. I would not have you go unknowing, Thalia. I would have you safe, always.”
Once she had her underwear on, she jerked the door open. “You self-righteous asshole!”
He had been leaning against the doorframe, but stepped back at her shout. “More insult?”
“You stand there, going on about how all you want is my safety, and the minute your shoulder heals you’re going to turn around and walk out the door, disappearing into the woods to get yourself killed!”
His forehead creased, and he raised his good hand palm out in surrender. “What has this to do with Aphrodite?”
“It has to do with you! Being stubborn and ridiculous and a fool!” She jammed a finger into his breastbone and he backed up another step, staring at her hand as though she held a knife. “And don’t get me started on your gods, either! All of this is just because you’re afraid of actually forming a real relationship with someone because you spent an eternity in that damn chair! Well guess what, Pirithous? Your wife didn’t die because of the gods or the centaurs. You saved her, you oaf, and if you really wanted to, you could save me too! But no. That’s too hard. Going off and getting yourself killed so you don’t have to deal with anything, that’s nice and easy.”
He stiffened, and she remembered suddenly just how tall he was, and how big in general. It was easy to forget that he was a demigod when they were in bed together, but she never realized how much he leaned around her, bringing himself down to her level. Did he do that on purpose to keep her from being uneasy? Either way, he’d given up the ghost, clearly, because his eyes were burning white hot, and his mouth had become a thin line of fury while he towered over her.
“You know nothing of which you speak,” he growled.
“Of course not,” she sneered, ignoring the fury beneath his words. “Because only you can know anything about anything, being a man, being a ridiculous, fool of a hero. I’m just a woman, right? Just a silly girl who worships some imaginary god?”
“You spit venomous words I would never utter,” he said, stepping forward. “It was not I who believed entire races of men had deluded themselves, who believed I had suffered some failure of the mind when you learned the truth. Nor did I accuse you of cruelty when you showed me nothing but kindness.”
She stumbled back, more out of instinct than anything else, when his voice dropped to a whisper, and he followed. The bathroom. Why was he always pinning her against the wall in the bathroom. Why couldn’t they have fights in the kitchen like normal people? Throwing plates and breaking glasses. God, he was still naked. How had she not noticed that he was naked. It didn’t matter. Naked or not, he was still a coward.
“You brag that you never served the gods before now and you never suffered for it, except for the time you spent in that chair. Why should you be afraid of not serving them now? Why should you be afraid of loving anyone now, when it didn’t bother you to marry a girl in Greece, back when your ridiculous gods walked around smiting people?”
“Careful, Thalia.”
She wasn’t sure if he was warning her about his own temper or insulting the gods, but she didn’t care. “It’s the chair, Pirithous. The nightmare from the chair! It’s turned you into some kind of lapdog.”
“I am the son of Zeus, a demigod!” He loomed over her, his hands fists at his sides and his eyes so bright a white it was glaring, forcing her to blink and then again, the afterimage burned into her retina. “I am no pet, no sniveling puppy.”
“Oh yeah?” she said. “Well, I guess that neither one of us wants to be bothered with hearing the truth.”
“It isn’t the same.”
“It’s exactly the same!”
“You don’t know!” he shouted, slamming his open hand against the bathroom wall. One of the tiles cracked with a loud pop beneath the force of it. “You don’t know what happened, because of me, because of my pride! The men who died, the women who suffered, because I would not listen when I was warned! It is not the chair alone, Thalia, for fool that I am, one life would not have been enough to change me. But you do not know what war is, safe here in your unwalled cities, while men fight for you on the other side of the world. You do not know the blood on my hands! Is it so wrong that I would not want to be washed in yours?”
His eyes were no longer white, but dark and gray as tornadoes, and she felt his grief weighing on her, sinking into her heart, until he stumbled back, all his anger turned suddenly inward. And she found herself reaching for him almost at once, stopped by a sharp spark of static leaping from his shoulder to her fingertips, startling her into dropping her hand instead.
“Do you know what happened to women when a city fell? Not all were so lucky to find men willing to wait for their affection, enjoying the challenge of winning it. Most were raped upon the corpses of their husbands, their brothers, their sons who stood to protect them, only to be torn from their homes and their children to serve as slaves for the rest of their lives. And if the gods involved themselves, for some offense they imagined to have suffered, it was worse!”
“You don’t know that it was because of you,” she said after a moment. “It can’t be your fault that Paris went to Sparta, or that Menelaus insisted on a war to win Helen back. It’s absolutely not your fault that Helen ran away with Paris to begin with. How do you know that Helen wouldn’t have wound up rescued by her brothers some other way?”
He snorted. “If you had known Helen, you would not have to ask. She would have died before she left Theseus’s side willingly.”
She stared at his bowed shoulders, the hand that rubbed absently at the place beneath his wound, as if the muscles were sore. He’d hurt himself, or aggravated his shoulder somehow. She sighed, pulling his hand down and pushing him back against the sink until he sat on the edge of the vanity. She picked up the sheet off the floor, throwing it over his lap before either one of them got any ideas.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, pulling off the old bandage. She hadn’t changed it yet, and with all the sweating he’d been doing, it was more than overdue. Besides, it was an easier topic than Helen of Troy. She grimaced at her own cowardice while she had been yelling at him for his, but then she wasn’t the one balking at some possible future threat because maybe possibly some god someday would want her out of the way. She shook her head. “You’re supposed to be resting your shoulder.”
“It does not matter,” he said.
“Stop it,” she said, frowning at the wound. It wasn’t nearly as bad as she thought it would be. Only a little bit red. A damp washcloth took care of the blood where it was leaking, and at least it was only blood and not puss. “It does matter. And I’m getting tired of listening to you talk about yourself like your life is meaningless. It doesn’t have to be. You can make it into whatever you want, now. Build your temple, sure, and maybe if you meet someone who seems interested, talk up your gods, but make your life your own, Pirithous.” She swallowed and busied herself applying the new bandage so she didn’t have to meet his eyes. “Even if it isn’t with me.”
He stroked her cheek, then tipped her chin up, making her look at him. “Is that what you want?”
“You know what I want,” she said. “I want you to come with me, but I understand that you have unfinished business here. You have to do what you have to do in order to live with yourself—maybe in order to live with me. But call it what it is.”
“Fear,” he breathed.
“I know I didn’t have a right to say it—any of it,” she admitted, flushing slightly. “But yeah. What’s done is done, the past is behind you. I don’t really know what it was like for you then, or for anyone. I don’t know what you suffered in the chair, or what your people suffered when you left them without a king, but I promise that if you chase after me you aren’t going to start a war in central New York. Sure, maybe my brother will corner you in a dark alley, but I have faith you can take care of that without doing any harm. Just give him the glowing eyes or something, and tell him you’ve sworn to protect me. He’ll get over it. The rest—who knows if it will ever come, Pirithous.”
He smiled faintly. “You wish me to live without thought to the future or the past. As you do.”
“It seems like it would be a lot less stressful.” She shrugged. “Then again, it has been known to cause some misunderstandings. Like when you don’t think to mention that you’re leaving in two weeks to a guy you want to keep.”
“Very troublesome,” he agreed, his fingers tracing the crack in the tile beyond her shoulder, then falling away with a grimace of apology. “But I knew your heart, even then. I was foolish to think you knew mine when you had not the benefit of my gifts.”
“It wasn’t that I didn’t have your gifts. It just didn’t occur to me that you could be serious at all—the guys I’ve dated, none of them were anything like you.” She caught his hand, threading her fingers through his, finding courage in the fit of his palm against hers, and taking a breath. “Nikki is marrying my brother in October. I’m coming back for the wedding. You’d have a month to kill your centaurs and build the temple and do whatever you need to do in the woods while I’m safely away. Then you could come with me, maybe, if you wanted. I could introduce you to my brother. If after that you decide you need to stay in the woods...”
“You will be hurt and angry,” he said dryly.
“Well, yes. But at least we get to put one over on Alexandros first.”
He chuckled. “When you are married, you will miss your brother.”
“I doubt it. It isn’t like I’ll be carried off to a foreign land, never to see or hear from him again. He’ll still be standing over my shoulder, I’m sure.”
“No,” Pirithous said. “When you are married, he will give you to your husband, and never question you again. Do you not see that is why he is so difficult on the men? Because he cannot bear to give you up to anyone who is not fit to care for you.”
She leaned into him, resting her forehead against his good shoulder. “I’m going to miss you.”
He sighed, stroking her hair. “No matter what comes, Thalia, everything I have done, everything I will do, has been out of love for you.”
“I’m not sure that makes it any easier.”
“I thought you did not wish to worry for the future.” His arm slipped around her waist and he drew her against his body, tucking her head beneath his chin. “We are together, now, you and I. For this night, and the next. Is there not hope enough in that?”
“At least promise me you’ll come to the wedding. The rest won’t matter then, if I know I’ll see you once more.”
“You’ll see me once more,” he said softly. “Perhaps even more than once.”
“Now there’s hope enough,” she said, kissing the hollow of his throat.
Or at least she would tell herself that.