~~Young~~

Chapter Twenty Three

   “You’ll get us all killed Zeus!” Gage argued, his own yellow hued wings shaking behind him with his angered gestures, “Just ask for forgiveness and get this over with!”

   “The king of Olympus does not apologize!” Zeus huffed.

   Then as now he held his head in pain from the stress, “you know,” he started calmly as he spoke to the palace floor beneath him, “I don’t need this.”

   “It is your job to defend me son, no matter how insolent you may think my behavior to be it is what must be done to stay in my good graces.”

   Gage snapped his head up to glare at Zeus, “Fuck you,” he shook his head at him, “I don’t need you!”

   “Then prove it,” Zeus laughed haughtily.

   "Fine!” Gage shouted back tightly as he pointed to Zeus’s reflecting pool, the one he used to check in on the mortals, “But I’ll show them they don’t need you either and then you will all fall for your arrogance!”

   “Is that what you truly wish son?”

   There was a threat in his words that Gage refused to be afraid of, “Will you admit fault for your affairs?”

   “Never.”

   “Then yes.”

   Gage’s head spun as he came back from that memory, the last one he had before he abandoned heaven for the mortal realm. God wasn’t to know that another had heard the exchange between the two though, Hates, Lucifer, must have been waiting in the wings. He must have known Gage was leaving and figured he’d try to sway him to his side, but how lucky was he to find Gage without his memories.

   He glanced at the tip of his wing, at those white feathers knowing his memories weren’t the only thing God had taken from him. He had robbed him of his divinity too, and in doing so Gage’s feathers had turned brown. They couldn’t turn black, not then. His blood had run red up until that first step he took into hell.

   “This is all your fault,” Gage threw his hands out to the side with this new clarity, “all of it. Me leaving, Sera leaving, then Josephine leaving, you,” he pointed at God, “you started this.”

   “And you think I don’t know this?” God swatted Gage’s hand out of his face.

   But Gage wasn’t backing down, “then admit you were wrong.”

   “In what?”

   “Admit you were wrong and I was right, that you should have just apologized to Hera for getting that mortal pregnant and forcing all of Olympus to choose sides.”

   “Pregnant?” Sera looked at God appalled.

   “Hercules?” Gage looked to her in question, “I know you know the stories.”

   She nodded, “and Jesus?” she looked to God with raised eyebrows.

   “Well…” he began but it was Gage’s turn to interrupt him.

   “It doesn’t matter, none of this does,” he sighed and looked to God, “so why the bullshit over all these centuries, huh? Because you were mad at me for running away or because you were afraid I would accomplish what I said I would?”

   “I made you in my image Gage, in heart, body and mind. You could not be more like me so of course it was because I was afraid you would succeed.”