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“Each one of us will be the vessel to a Greek god, it’s our destiny to relive their story. There’s no way to fight it, you can’t go against the fates.”
Fates. Anders laughed at that. Fate had never done anything good for him his whole life and he assumed it wasn’t going to start now.
“Who are you then?”
“Ares.” Mike said with the corner of his lips turned up.
“Oh, is that why you’re such a prick?”
There wasn’t a ceremony, but before Anders twenty-first birthday he noticed a change. He noticed the way that plants tended to lean towards him when he walked. How the sun felt against his skin, warm and welcoming.
“Persephone?! How the fuck did I get a goddess? That doesn’t even make any sense.”
“Maybe the fates realized you’re just a slag at heart,” Olaf, infinite in his bullshit, looked at Anders with a grin on his face. “Everything happens for a reason, you should embrace it.”
“Easy for you to say you’re the god of booze and tits.”
“Wine and pleasure but same thing.”
Anders didn’t really give two fucks about how the whole aging bit worked, all he knew was he was now immortal. He figured he would stop aging sometime in his 30s around the same time his grandfather did.
“Have you even read about Persephone?”
“Wasn’t she some chick in a field?” Anders falls into the couch cushions with a beer in his hand.
“So much more than that.”
Not everyone becomes a vessel on their twenty first, there are others that get chosen if a vessel dies and the god picks someone else.
It was so long ago that Mitchell barely remembers it, barely remembers the war.
He spent years moving from city to city, to small secluded towns, anywhere to try to feel like some semblance of home. He was always reminded of the green of home, of how water looked on grass in the morning.
He’s not always in the Underworld, he spends months at a time above ground, doing whatever the fuck his destiny is supposed to be.
When he is above ground he tries to be as human as possible, tries to fit in, tells himself that the walls of his apartment don’t harbor screams of restless souls.
He likes is above ground, likes the way that he can leave dishes in the sink, cigarette butts on the windowsill. There’s something about being able to leave his clothes on the floor that makes him feel remarkably human.
Mitchell doesn’t know how old he is anymore, time stopped mattering. He watched the world change, and change, and change. Now he stands in the lobby of an apartment building in New Zealand.
He wonders what the fuck took him so long to get here. It’s not Ireland, but it feels close. In the mornings, when the chill from the water rolls in, it reminds him of home and he lets his spine shiver at the breeze.
There’s a windowsill with empty flower pots. They’re always empty. Mitchell has been looking at them for weeks now, watching as the owner ignores them blatantly, refuses to even acknowledge that he has a window. The man is a bit shorter than Mitchell, a bit, Mitchell laughs to himself at the thought.
He’s watched the way the man never leaves his apartment at the same time. There’s a hard pattern to figure out. Mitchell narrows it down to this, on his more sober days he leaves a few minutes before nine in the morning, then there are days where Mitchell knows the man is ravished by liquor and it’s on those days he doesn’t bother to leave his apartment.
He finally catches him in the lobby and it takes less than a second to figure out, it takes the connection of their eyes for them both to feel an unshakeable pull on their heart strings.
Anders runs. He doesn’t give it any time, he bolts out of the lobby and down the street leaving Mitchell standing there with words on his tongue.
Are you ever going to garden?
Ok so maybe Mitchell isn’t the best Hades. He digs through books, goes online and reads stories about Hades watching Persephone and thinks to himself, well I’m not doing all of that, he seemed like a right prick.
Mitchell is a bit of a prick in his own way.
He leaves packets of seeds for flowers outside of the apartment of the man that he was watching with a small note.
Thought your pots could use some life
From 2B
He didn’t expect them to be returned with a knock on his door and a “you can shove these up your ass.”
The man is already storming off leaving Mitchell to lean against the doorframe of his apartment watching him walk away. Regardless, Mitchell thinks to himself that at least he has a good view.
He barely even knows the man, doesn’t have a clue what his name is and he’s expected to take him to the Underworld. To share the violence of his throne, his burning crown, and the cries of the dead that sing eulogies.
“Mitchell,” He says as he leans against the post boxes along the wall in the lobby.
The blonde man is going through a stack of mail and pointedly not looking at him. “Couldn’t care less.”
Mitchell’s eyes scan the white envelope. “Anders Johnson. Hmmm. Not what I was expecting but I like it.”
Anders pulls the letters to his chest and turns quickly on the man. He figures for a moment that this is like a scene in a movie, all slow motion frames and obscure angles.
“Listen,”
“Oh, I’m listening.” Mitchell grins at him and the fight Anders has had in him the past week seems to be evaporating with each roll of a vowel from Mitchell.
“Why don’t we just get this over with, yeah? You come upstairs, I’ll let you fuck me into the mattress and we can fulfill our destinies and go on our way.”
Mitchell only wishes it was that simple. He takes a moment to think about the offer, think about taking it and letting Anders figure it out on his own later.
He doesn’t give himself time to think of a second option, he goes with the first.
“Sounds reasonable.”
Two days later Anders is pounding on the door to 2B to find Mitchell shirtless and with a jar of Nutella in his hands.
“What?”
“You’re a right fucking prick you know that right?”
“Heard worse but yeah.” Mitchell shoves a spoonful of the hazelnut spread in his mouth as he watches the well tailored pieces of Anders come undone.
“I’m not spending the rest of my life with you, especially not if you’re a disaster like this.” Anders gestures behind Mitchell to the empty pizza boxes and take out containers that seem to have a permanent home on his coffee table and floor.
“Immortal life.”
Anders groans and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Fuck you.”
“Already did,” Mitchell grins at him.
Anders doesn’t know what comes over him but he wants him to stop fucking talking . He pushes Mitchell against the wall, lets the Nutella drop from his hand and pushes his tongue in the other man’s mouth. It shouldn’t feel right but it does, it’s a litany of things he shouldn’t want but feels the light in him reaching out to touch.
Spring passes and Summer touches their skin until the leaves turn red and gold, until the air starts to smell of smoke and is cool against their skin.
“You know what this means,”
And Anders does, He knows with the seasons comes change and now that he is no longer needed above that he must go below.
Mitchell is different in the Underworld, his movements more calculated. He seems to be more on edge, the way his hands run through his hair until they get tangled, how his knees shake.
Anders watches him with curiosity.
Mitchell is worried, worried that Anders will hate all of this the way he lets his hatred for other things known. That he will rip Mitchell apart piece by piece in the Underworld every year and that Mitchell will let him.
The thing that bothers Anders about all of this is that it doesn’t seem to bother him too much.
“Do you ever think it’s peculiar that you were inhabited by a goddess?”
“I used to think about it a lot when I was younger but to be honest I stopped caring.”
Mitchell doesn’t tell Anders that he noticed how things thrived around him, how flowers bloomed in his wake. He figures Anders must hate it, that something grows under his touch. The empty flower pots add up in his head. He understands the fear that lies underneath tanned skin and behind blue eyes.
Anders sure as fuck doesn’t talk about his family but Mitchell pieces things together on his own. The youngest of the brothers, the embodiment of Zeus, all long limbs and stumbling words, awkward in his own skin.
The oldest, the vessel of Ares and the bane of Anders existence.
Then there's Ty, the one that Mitchell had seen the most, the vessel of Poseidon. Ty who was the most gentle and kind out of the family but feared tidal waves, feared drowning, feared that his hands would cause lungs to fill with water and spent most of his time around Anders. How he would tell Anders, “if you would just water the plants,” and Anders would shout back, “I know how to take care of a fucking plant Ty.”
He thinks that's why Anders had fish, that in some way they reminded him of Ty and not of himself all at once. That it was something he could take care of that he wasn’t predestined to.
“You miss your fish,” Mitchell says quietly one day as he watches Anders stare at the wall of their bedroom.
“Just hope Ty takes care of them.”
“He’s the god of the ocean, I’m sure he’ll manage.”
Next time, Mitchell thinks, next time that Anders has to come down here he will find a way for him to still have that piece of him.
Anders isolation is something for the darker moments just before sleep.
With a sudden shocking intensity he wants Mitchell out of the bed, out of the room. But if he leaves there will be a sharper edge to his loneliness.
Mitchel in the Underworld is full of sharp edges that Anders seems to keep getting caught on. There are days where he is nothing but black hole eyes and harsh words then there are days where he is something softer, something battling his own mind.
Anders wants to tell him to stop feeding the darkness, to stop fighting it, to just stop. He doesn’t know how though, not when the he’s also fighting himself.
He tries not to yearn for the sun, the years spent in it, and he doesn’t, not really. He thinks that he will let the golden glow to his skin fade if it means he is a ruler in this kingdom, surrounded by walls of ichor and screams.
And it’s not the first thing Anders has had to learn to do for himself. Fighting.
Anders was born in a world filled with green and growing and deep down in there is a part of him that holds onto that, veins like vines growing through his body and saying we remember we’re you’re from, a land of sun.
But when Mitchell’s lips are against hips, his teeth sharp as if they’re biting back his soul and his posture that reminds Anders of a funeral pyre, he can’t seem to want the light, only the all encompassing dark.
To Mitchell the walls of the Underworld are made of death, each soul weaves into the foundation. To Anders they’re made of constellations, a faint light in the dark.
“I should have been Icarus,” Mitchell says as they’re laying in bed.
“Didn’t he like burst into flames because he flew too close to the sun?” Anders thinks that isn’t completely right but it feels close enough.
“I feel like I already have.”
Anders bites his cheek hard enough to let it bleed. He doesn’t know if this is love, some twisted version weaved by golden strings, but he thinks that it is he’s glad he can blame it on destiny.
Darkness holds Mitchell by the throat, by his heart but he reaches for the light.
“Do you miss it up there when we have to be down here?” It’s Anders asking the question.
Mitchell wants to tell him that he knows the feeling of missing all too well. That he knew it for years before he finally came down here. That even when he is above he spends his time missing Ireland, missing the moors and the seaside. That he misses the flowers there, how there are shades there of blue and purple he’s never seen anywhere else. That New Zealand was the closest he has ever seen.
“I miss the colours,”
Anders nods his head in understanding.
The color green speaks vulnerability to them both.
Anders is not what Mitchell expected. He has painted visions in his mind of what Persephone would be and this is not it. Anders is destructive, he’s earthquakes and hurricanes, reshaping landscapes, and Mitchell wants him to carve him open like a valley. He wants to tell him, you have me, you have me, you have me.
Light reaches for Anders, tendrils of it grasping to wrap around him but darkness calls to him, begs him to shut it out. He has spent his life with his hands in the shape of fists, teaching himself to fight, to be a monster and that is why the goddess chose him. She knew his heart could handle the dark, to take it in the palm of his hand and watch it grow.
If crimson, blood like pomegranates, is Mitchell’s favorite colour then Anders thinks that it is his as well. That he will swallow seeds and sew them in his sternum, in his heart, let them bloom violent between his ribs.
Perhaps things are the way they are because there needs to be a different kind of gardening, a different kind of growth. That darkness is Anders secret and light is Mitchell’s.