A/N: Here´s the entry which allowed me to win the second NS fanfiction challenge in a row! I hope you´ll like it.
TITLE: "A Modern Persephone..."
CHALLENGE: NS August ´09- Challenge #3- Kidnapped!
AUTHOR: Lexie
RATING: PG
It´s five in the morning when she wakes up with a thumping heart and a panic attack. She looks around expecting to find herself in a restricted environment unable to move, fighting for oxygen, buried alive in a wooden coffin in Chandler´s Field. However, something feels different; she isn´t dressed in street clothes but in a flimsy and revealing nightdress of the highest quality- a far cry from the cotton t-shirts she used to wear to bed. No, she isn´t underground; although sometimes she feels as if she were. There´s no Deputy Watts to blame this time, and she is no longer a high school student. The surroundings are too masculine and their owner too worldly to have teddy bears around.
When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.
She takes a deep breath and waits for her eyes to get used to the dark. She can hear the tick-tock of the grandfather clock, smell the perfumed beeswax on the wooden floors and the sweet pleasant scent of the expensive mahogany furniture. It´s all very soothing and disturbing at the same time because she´s a prisoner and this Metropolis flat is supposed to be her jail. And yet, it isn´t anything like the damp and mouldy cells usually associated with a kidnapping, and her feelings towards her jailor get more confusing as weeks go by. Her analytical mind claims it´s just a typical Stockholm Syndrome case. She´s Persephone living in Hades´ underworld unwillingly, abducted by the God while hanging out with her best friend- unlike her Greek counterpart she hadn´t been picking flowers but bowling with Lana for her bachelorette party.
He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.
And then she realises that abduction behind the bowling alley was months ago and that, unlike that kidnapping she has no actual memory of, this one she remembers very well. It started a couple of days after her mum ended up in a catatonic state one more time and Chloe decided she couldn´t take losing Moira all over again. She´d promised her mother and Clark she wouldn´t do it, and deep down she knew that coming knocking at his door would have a price. Although she didn´t know at the time what kind of ransom she´d have to pay, she put her signature on the dotted line of a document he´d had his lawyers draft. It gave him carte blanche and, with that smug smile of his she´d come to hate, he sealed the deal with an unexpected kiss that astounded her as much for its heat as for the way she responded to it. She knew then what ransom he´d demand of her and trembled because she wasn´t sure her agreement to move to Metropolis would turn out to be what it was in the eyes of the world.
She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,
I was abducted, but it sounds
wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.
Then she says, I was not abducted.
Then she says, I offered myself ...
She turns around quietly, her cheek pressed against a cool spot of her pillowcase and looks at the man lying asleep next to her. It´s at moments such as this that she remembers the old Lex, the one that protected her from the devil, the one that drove Lois´ dad to the safe house one Sunday to bring her and Gabe a little piece of home ... And yet, he´s also the man who´s hurt her friends, had his scientists violate her at 33.1 and manipulated both her mother and her to get what he wanted. She should hate him... Once she foolishly thought everything he did was only meant to get back at Clark; that was when she found safety in self-deception. His wooing and subsequent marriage to Lana wounded Clark deeply, yes; however, she can no longer deny she herself is largely to blame for setting the wheels in motion.
No one understands anymore
how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.
Also that he embraced her, right there,
with her uncle watching. She remembers
sunlight flashing on his bare arms.
She also remembers, less clearly,
the chilling insight that from this moment
she couldn't live without him again.
And now, as he opens his blue-grey eyes and bores his scorching gaze into her, she accepts the truth she´s silenced for years. That seventeen-year-old who kissed Lex goodbye on the lips in front of Sam Lane´s eyes, that girl who chose her best friend Clark over him by cutting all strings when they were back in Smallville has never stopped loving Lex. Despite her efforts to hate him, she now recognises everything he´s done as retribution for breaking his heart the way she did that summer when she claimed she didn´t love him, that she´d just been confused and lonely.
A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn't everyone want love?
His marriage to Lana is over and he can´t find regret in his heart, only satisfaction at knowing he´s got this woman tied to him at last. Just like Hades, who tricked Persephone into eating pomegranate seeds to ensure her return to him, he´s giving her the serum to help Moira stay awake. He´s aware he should feel guilty about having lured Chloe by abducting her mum, and there are times he does, when he loses himself in her and he imagines he sees something other than hatred in her hazel-green eyes. He wishes he didn´t have to feed her pomegranate seeds to make her stay by his side for ever.
A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you.
THE END
A/N: The interspersed extracts of poetry belong to "The Myth of Innocence" and "A Myth of Devotion" from "Averno" by Louise Glück.