and i need nothing more
It wasn't that Persephone had felt like an "other" — it was more that everyone else had felt like "others."
(And she was perfectly aware, of course. She was not aware of fewer things than she was.)
It began with her name and ended with her mind. Persephone: goddess of an unwanted land, queen of the dead yet undead herself, the sole bartering coin upon which the seasons turned. Other. Loved and hated, separately and at once. And then Persephone's mind: fluid on both sides of reality, nimble and faintly terrifying, floating millimeters off the ground in a not-quite-grounded perception of it all.
The most other of others, this foot in both doors.
(She was eighteen when she finally lived, always knowing but finally known.)
There were so many reminders before she did.
She was not an indoor creature by nature. Distant, perhaps; removed, perhaps; solitary, perhaps; but not confined, anchored, prisoner in her own home. She found a home in every place — places with people were no different.
(Ah, but the reminders. They were so much more prevalent when there were so many strangers' lives swirling around her, a leaf caught in a roaring torrent.)
Persephone was far from blind, and at times like this it brought a special sort of pain.
They were glaringly obvious to her eyes, accustomed to finding and searching and seeing what was in front of her. She saw it everywhere — from tight-knit spirals of hawks in the sky to loose-gripping fingers of hands between swinging laughter.
Everywhere, everywhere were lives reminding her she was without other others. Without their assurance, their constancy, their unfailing I am here, known by you and knowing you; and still, here I am.
(Persephone had never gone beyond knowing; once known, they had always decided she was too other — and they were not.)
She was so, so aware.
—
There were nights where it became unbearable, so she alighted upon the wilderness. Her forest. The only beings on this earth known by her and knowing her, and yet stayed with her.
(Out of choice, or out of lack of choices? One of the few things she might never know.)
She rarely sought there, but tonight she brought her cards. There was a gaping chasm stretching ever wider at the center of her heart, and Persephone wanted answers.
She stormed to the ley line and threw herself down on it, a crackling heap of precariously crossed legs and fuming palms. Why me? Why me? Why me? She slammed three cards facedown onto the chill of the evening soil and hesitated, recovering her choking breaths.
Persephone stilled and looked up at the glistening sky, trembling behind the frozen branches etched into it.
Why am I cursed to be lonesome?
She reached out and, with single-minded purpose, flipped the cards over — and felt her breath stagger soundlessly in her throat.
The cards were blank.
(A rookie mistake: she had set them down the wrong way.)
All she saw were the backs of the three cards, gray in the slivered moon, unyielding; she already knew it was no use looking at which three they were, because what mattered now was that she was seeing the back and not the front.
(In other words: The ley line was telling her it would tell her nothing.)
(Or, worse: that it had no answers for her.)
It was betrayal, by the one thing she thought would never betray anyone, anything. It was the truth, the truth she sought and longed for and now saw unblinded.
It was the night before she turned eighteen.
The next day, law declared she was now old enough to rightfully join Calla and Maura at the table and read the fortunes of strangers without the hassle of guardian signatures and paper permits. Fit for labor, for work. For society.
It wasn't as though she hadn't done it before; she had absolutely been pulled into the room on occasion, whenever the Calla-and-Maura duet lacked an accompanying voice or felt the need for the duet to progress into a subtle trio. But never had Persephone been present from the beginning, an undeniable third in the reading room that began altering the melody of their sonata from the exposition. It began as a Calla-Maura Janus; it ended and began anew as a Calla-Maura-Persephone Cerberus. She was joining the table now.
So she did, officially and in full presence of all two customers that day.
As they cleared their cards from the table following the departure of the last customer, Calla raised her eyebrows meaningfully at Persephone. "You can talk more, you know," she said. "We can't have you sitting there acting as if you know less than you actually do. If we had wanted that we'd have made a statue of you and put it there instead. Much simpler."
"Okay," Persephone replied. What else was there to say?
"Just don't forget," Maura said distantly, stepping out from the threshold of the room and into the hallway. "I have a feeling you actually might."
Calla graced this with a good-humored snort. "Or pretend to, so you won't risk being wrong." She slipped her cards into the box and shrugged. "Stop worrying. You know more than you think." She closed the box's lid and stood, sweeping out of the room without a backwards glance — as though trusting that Persephone would wait for her to leave before leaving herself, taking her time, intent and distance and knowing slowing her movements, reluctant to leave behind this room of lives seen, lives heard, lives knowing.
Persephone felt known.
—
That night she perched on her bed, flushed lightly from the warmth of the crowded kitchen when she'd recounted the day's business to the other occupants of Fox Way. There was the usual banter, the usual snark, the usual jokes and side commentary and unshakeable camaraderie that ran as freely as the tea between them.
But tonight was different — tonight Persephone had added more than usual, a sidelong glance at her promise to Calla and Maura, joining them as they described their various customers and their fortunes, laughing with the rest when Calla almost took Persephone's drink in a demonstration of — and I was so tempted to just take his wallet right then and there to just show him, like this — which Persephone had interrupted by effortlessly lifting the mug, raising her eyebrows at Calla, causing everyone else to snigger and Calla to roll her eyes through a dry smile — Okay so like that but I'd actually get the wallet. Persephone had laughed airily and let the heat of the tea seep through her fingers.
As the evening had progressed she even found herself going beyond participation, finding herself at the center of attention — and so she somehow wound up explaining how No she hadn't dropped her deck in front of the first customer because she was nervous, it was just a new deck and the cards were larger are more slippery than she was used to all right?, then nearly snorting into her drink when Orla had raised an eyebrow and made some sexual remark about the way she'd worded her explanation — she couldn't remember what it was now, but what did that matter when the room erupted into spluttering shrieks and Persephone's half-hearted Oh come now you know that's not what I meant and there was this pulsing, glowing air of joy and contentment in the moment sprawling between them?
(Knowing, and known — was that what it was?)
Something strange and untamed was galloping through her veins, as sure and proud as the stallion that lifts its head, standing with tail held high at the edge of the wind-shorn cliff. Persephone breathed in deep the evening winds and stared up at the sky that had shivered so the night before, and given her no answers.
She felt alive, alive, alive.
Persephone blinked slowly, and heard the sound of bright laughter below as the Fox Way women gradually trickled out from the kitchen, and wondered:
Is this my answer?
Utterly, utterly known, and utterly knowing — and she knew they would be there again and again and again, night after night after endless night.
Time became meaningless to Persephone, and so when she met the magician she knew he was the same.
It began with his eyes, his hands, and ended with his mind. To be so inextricably linked with Cabeswater: a manifestation of magic, unreal to the point of decisive reality, mirror of the impossibly kind beauty that could exist in a single mind. Other. Human and yet not, separately and at once. And then Adam's mind: fluid on both sides of reality, nimble and faintly terrifying, and so impossibly like hers that all she could think of were ley lines and webs, of cracking glass and coincidences so impossible that they could only be coincidence.
How much time had passed between then and now? She did not know, and that only mattered to those other than her anyway.
"How do you know?" he asks her one dusk, one of the first times they're out. The incoming night is a slow and water-weighted drag, and they sit on the ley line wayside a dimly-lit street and feel out its slow pulse, a mirror of the heart-beating lights that dot the empty road. "How can you be sure?"
Persephone considers carefully, because this was something that she had once been terrified of not understanding too. Not knowing was such a pain, but she is also all too aware that knowing is its own pain.
Instead she touches the palms of her hands to the ground and replies, "If I were, we wouldn't be here."
"...So you're not."
"I am not. No one ever is. But there is possibility that is more possible, and possibility that is less possible, always."
She expects Adam to sigh, or shake his head, or dismiss her in some quiet way she'd become so used to from the rest of the world whenever she offered it her words. Instead he nods and copies her, placing his hands to the earth next to her, and she hears him take a deep breath.
Acceptance.
Interesting.
(No: promising.)
Something roils and curls in the distance, and it ripples through the ley line in a rush of heat. Adam glances at her.
Persephone smiles slightly and closes her eyes. "Hm, maybe a thunderstorm. Or a car accident... maybe one with fire. And: you're not surprised."
"Yeah, maybe. And: I'm not."
"Good."
"I just..." There's that breath in, all reined-in frustration. "Everyone else wants us to be sure. Calculated risks, things like that. And I — I don't know, when I made the sacrifice I thought..."
"That it would be black-and-white, clear-cut paths?" Persephone supplies.
"I thought it would help me," Adam says quietly. "Not make things harder."
"The more we see, the more we know," Persephone says, "and the more things seem to get more impossible than they were before. That sounds about right, doesn't it?"
He finally sighs, and it's not a conclusion or a concession, but the crest of a wave returning to sea so it gives way to the next. "It... I guess it does."
"There is more than one kind of knowing," Persephone adds at last, sensing his withdrawal. "There is this, what you are learning." She lifts her eyes to the clouds, lets their darkening grey fill her to her fingertips. "And there is that, what you already have."
Adam's eyes turn to her, fully and widely. "'What I have?'"
Persephone's mind is filled with the warmth of tea, the glow of kitchen lights, the hazy tremble of stars in a tree-speared sky, and so she tells him the one thing she does know, as heavy as she can, with a slight smile:
"This is what you have, and you need nothing more."
And when the Pig pulls up alongside them on the empty street, Persephone's smile only widens.
Adam looks at her accusingly, its heat almost lost amid the Pig's deafening rattle-roar. "You knew, didn't you?"
"To be precise, I did say it might have been a thunderstorm, or a car accident with fire involved," Persephone says lightly. "But no, I didn't know. Not the way you thought of knowing, then, at that moment." And she knows that he knows what she doesn't say: Now, however, is a different matter.
The door slams open and a wave of incoherent hollering rolls out from the car, all beginning or ending with Adam.
He glances at Persephone, and she laughs quietly. "This can wait; they won't."
Persephone watches as Adam stands, brushing off the seat of his jeans. He pauses, meets her eyes, hesitates. She raises her eyebrows at him.
"Persephone. ...Thank you," he says in that careful, relenting way of his. "And not just for — this. But also, you know. Everything else, too."
Persephone smiles again, wider than the first. "Nothing more," she repeats, but it's lighter this time.
As the Pig screeches away, she watches the magician disappear along the pulsing ley line with everything he needs.
And when Persephone stands to start the drive back to Fox Way, she reminds herself:
Nothing more.
A/N: Honestly, I have no idea if this even lives up to my own expectations. But regardless — here it is!
It's probably pretty obvious that this was an effort to get back into consistently writing fic after a long, long time of... writing primarily for school. Gross. But, yeah: all the inconsistencies and weird stops and starts are because of this, and I mean, I'm okay with that.
I've always wanted to write about Persephone, and her relationship with Adam (I'm s o soft for the mentor-mentee trope you don't even know), and this is my stab at that. And thematically I'm pretty happy with it, so, yay? It still doesn't sit quite right with me, but oh well — a hazard of the occupation, I guess.
Constructive criticism is welcome, as well are kudos and comments even if they're just keysmashes/yelling! Thanks y'all!