What if he was for keeping?
For Meg, yes, but also…for me.
“It’s not just me she needs and you know it. Stop being a fucking coward and get in here.”
Now is the time to walk. Meg and I have survived plenty in our decade together, and that history suggests we’ll survive this too. Hercules was only meant to be a temporary fix. Or that was the plan until he burst into our lives and the balance shifted. It’s the one thing I couldn’t have anticipated—his effect on both of us. For the first time in thirty years, I don’t know what the future holds. Not in its entirety. I can’t be sure my plan won’t break us.
I strip slowly, aware of Hercules’s attention on me. A small vain part of me enjoys the way he watches me so closely, but he’s right. This isn’t about me. Or even about us. How can this man come into such a longstanding relationship and see things so clearly? I didn’t plan on that. Perhaps it’s just who he is. He shines a light wherever he goes.
I carefully climb onto the bed on the other side of Meg. She barely shifts as I settle in next to her. She looks younger like this, less world weary with her carefully cultivated mask set down for the moment. It makes me ache. She’s so formidable during her waking hours. She may stand at my side, but she doesn’t need me. Not for protection, not to shore up her defenses, not for a single thing. It’s such an attractive thing in a partner, to know that she can weather any storm and keep the things we value safe in the process. But somewhere along the way, we went from standing side by side to being on either end of a gulf I don’t know how to cross. I’m too old, too set in my ways. I can’t bend for anyone.
Even her.
“She’s worth it.”
For a moment, I think Hercules is pulling thoughts straight from my head, teasing them into existence through sheer force of will. That would be a neat trick, but it’s ultimately impossible. No, this man is simply better at reading people than I anticipated. I shift onto my side so I can see him better, and he mirrors the movement. “Surely your anger at your father doesn’t delve deep enough to sacrifice yourself for it.”
Hercules doesn’t blink at the change in topic. “That’s really not for you to say, is it?”
He has a point, but I don’t like unknown quantities, and this man has proven himself to be one. Since bargaining himself away for Meg, he hasn’t quite done what I expect. I study his face, taking in the strong lines of his jaw and cheekbones, the straight Roman nose, those full lips that save his features from being too harsh. Really though, it’s his eyes that hold a person captive. Contrary to popular belief, not all eyes are the windows to the soul. Too many things can counteract that. Control, fear, a skilled lie. Hercules has none of that. His eyes could drown the unwary.
I don’t look away. “Explain it to me.”
For a moment, I think he might argue, but he glances at Meg and sighs. “My father didn’t stop doing terrible things after he… did what he did to you. I tried to make him pay through the appropriate channels, and it blew up in the face of someone who deserved it the least.”
I could play with this, could tease out his willing victimhood to serve my purposes. But this blasted honesty gets the best of me yet again. “It’s not going to bring him down, little Hercules. I may have had that ability once, but I don’t anymore. I can kill him, but I can’t dismantle his power structure.”
He went pale. “You could kill him.”
“Yes.” No use denying it. It’s what I intend, after all. If he hasn’t seen what I am up to by this point, he’s denser than I could have dreamed. No, that’s not the truth. Hercules is too insightful by half. He just has a pair of rose-tinted glasses that color his experience with the world. Despite being slapped down again and again, they remain intact. It’s the strangest thing.
He shifts a little closer and pulls the covers up when Meg shivers. “Hades.” He gives me a long look. “You didn’t change your name back. You know, in Olympus now, Hades is more bogeyman than real person. I always assumed he was a legend.”
We’re dancing too close to things best left in the past, but the past is here and shining directly in my face. “It’s a legacy role, similar to Zeus. With my son…” Even after all this time, I can barely speak the words. “There is no one to assume the role. It dies with me.”
Hercules reaches across Meg’s sleeping body and takes my hand. “I’m sorry.”
“You weren’t even alive at the time. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“Fuck, Hades, I can still offer emotional support even if I wasn’t directly responsible for what happened to your family.” He strokes his thumb over my knuckles. “What were their names?”
“Amber. Jonah.” Saying them aloud feels like summoning their ghosts to this room. I was a different man in my early twenties. They wouldn’t recognize me now. Some moments, I barely recognize myself.
Hercules squeezes my hand. “You should have told her.”
No point arguing. He’s right. “I know.” I’ve never lied to Meg—not really—but withholding this information is almost the same thing.
Hercules keeps stroking my hand, little movements that curl through me even as they provide the comfort I don’t deserve. He finally says, “What you said before, your plan to defile me and send evidence to my father… It won’t work. He won’t care.” He doesn’t tense up as he says the next words. “For it to be true justice, you’d have to kill me.”
My chest locks up and I stare at him, shocked to my very core. “What?”
“That’s what this is about, right? A son for a son?” He’s watching me so closely, and for the first time since we met, I have no idea what my face is showing. “He already wrote me off, Hades. You could be fucking me seven ways to Sunday, and it will barely make him blink. That’s not how my father works.”
Surely he didn’t just suggest I murder him? I won’t lie and say the thought never crossed my mind in my initial plans, but I discarded it upon meeting him for a thousand different reasons. Meg and the future of our relationship, such as it is. Even Hercules himself. “I’m not killing you, little Hercules.”
“Why not?”
What is his aim with this conversation? I twist my hand and take his wrist, tightening my grip until his fingers splay out and he bites his bottom lip. There are so many things I could say, so many reasons I could give that would detour us away from this conversation. In the end, this strange addiction to honesty wins out. “Because you’re mine.”
He’s mine.
Yes, that’s my truth.
Hercules is mine the same way Meg is mine. Except it’s not the same. She and I push and pull and move through an intricate dance of power in every single one of our waking moments. With Hercules, it’s effortless. He slid perfectly into a slot in our lives that I hadn’t even realized was lacking until his presence brought it to my attention. I acquired him as a gift to Meg, yes, but I never realized that I would feel this way about him, too.
“He knows I’m here.”
He doesn’t form it as a question, but I answer him nonetheless. “He knows you’re here.”