Halves

XXIII. Persephone

We are preoccupied with our own thoughts on the way back to the Underworld. Hades's mind is veiled to me, dark and suppressed. 

Part of me wishes I knew what he was thinking, but perhaps it is better if I do not.

My own head is a tempest. As sure as I am that I cannot let the people of the mortal world suffer any more than they already have, everything else almost outweighs my compassion for them. 

I do not want to go back to Mother. I miss her as a fond memory, but there is also a nagging dread that she will make our life exactly as it was before. She will smother me, turn me back into her innocent little girl, and I will go back to meaning nothing more in the greater scheme of things than growing pretty flowers.

Panic crowds my chest, turning my breath ragged. I cannot live like that again. 

I shall go mad.

But do I have the strength to rebel? Or will I just fold in on myself, like one of my flowers closing up when the sun is too hot? 

I spoke my mind plainly to Zeus, in front of a tribunal of the most powerful and influential beings in existence.

Why can I not imagine standing up to my own mother?

I climb the stairs to my room in a daze and pull my old white chiton out from where the shades tucked it away in the bottom of the wardrobe after they washed it. Holding it up against my body, I stare at it in the mirror.

It looks so juvenile, the garment of a child. Does Mother know I am not a child? Is she truly blind, or purposely so? 

I have not been a child in a long time.

Why did it take leaving her behind completely for me to see it?

Rage overtakes me and I savagely shred the white chiton with a razor, watching the strips of fabric flutter ghostlike to the floor. I will not wear that when I go to find her. I will dress how I wish, even if she disapproves.

Throwing open the doors of the wardrobe again, I stare sightlessly at the row of options. I could run down to the orchards and eat something right now. Olympus has no jurisdiction over the laws of the Underworld. 

I could sit at Hades's side, and simply watch as the mortal world freezes to death and Olympus goes up in the flames of anarchy.

And yet...I cannot. Even if I went back on everything I said I would do, I know that Hades could not let the mortals die. Others may see him as frozen and heartless, but I know the truth. 

He is a sensitive man, who feels everything very deeply and so builds walls to protect himself. I love his powerful emotions and his guiding sense of justice. 

I am in many ways his opposite — I have never had reason to hold back, or carefully measure out my feelings. I have never restrained myself from growing attached to places, animals, plants, or people.

But I love HIM more than anyone or anything. 

I never knew that kind of love before, that all-consuming adoration that prompts one to let everyone and everything else flounder and fall, so long as that one person is right there next to them.

Maybe that is how Mother feels about me?

I feel like I'm going to be sick.

As I grew up and came into my own, I fervently denied that Mother and I were anything alike. I didn't want to be known as nothing more than "Demeter's Daughter" for the rest of forever. 

And yet, in my attempts to distance myself, in my awakening and my new life here, I am now tempted to let both the mortals and the Olympians burn, just so I can be with Hades.