A/N: written for the 10whores challenge at Livejournal, for which I will pair Aphrodite with ten different people. Prompt: look to the sky
Warning: adultery, explicit femmeslash
Sun girl
In general, Aphrodite doesn't think too much about the underworld. It's not her domain and not her concern. She is the body, the earth, the touch of hot fingertips on solid skin. She is the temporary pleasure, the ending of the orgasm. Death might very well be her antithesis – taking the body, leaving nothing but the empty desires of the soul to never be fulfilled. The eternal abyss.
She? She does not die. She does nothing but dance in the sun and string along her little victories, wear her temporary lovers like necklaces, like beads of water breaking on her skin. The young men and women of the human race; how fully they love under the threat of death! Egged on by the eternal end of the orgasm, whereas she? She stays on her cloud and never comes down.
In general, Aphrodite is too worldly, too captured in a haze of pleasure of the flesh to think of the underworld, where it's cold and bodies don't work. Where her power ends.
It's why she's interested when she hears the news from Zeus. He's looking flustered and somewhat defeated – the king of the living, met with the limits of his power. Grand like a mountain (but brought down by a mole).
"He will only agree to a compromise," he snaps at her (he always did have trouble distinguishing the lust her form woke in him from his other emotions – it's why he's always angry with her when he's really angry with someone else).
She waits, doesn't feel like asking (thinks of the open mouths and the fingers of her lovers waiting down the mountain). He still tells her, the way he always does, somewhat affronted as if she's asked him for anything when she hasn't, really.
"Hades, of course! He refuses to let her go. Says she 'makes Dis burn bright'. The king of the dead! In love! The old gods are laughing at us from the heavens."
"In love?" she involuntarily asks, having forgotten that she had no desire to speak with Zeus.
"Or a parody of it," he replies gruffly (which makes her smile, because if anyone knows love's parodies it's him, except he doesn't realise, because realising isn't something Zeus does), "Kore, that's her name. He took her by force, won't return her to Demeter for another half year and now the world is wilting."
The world is wilting. Aphrodite leaves him alone to his angry muttering and has to think: what a love that makes the world wilt. What a love that makes the earth cry instead of rejoice as it usually does. What a love that runs so deep that it kills, that it cuts veins and snaps necks. This is her territory but it seems alien to her. Have her loves been shallow in their happiness, then?
Love in the underworld – the words are like burning ash in her mouth, yet she keeps saying them. The place where her power ends.
-
Soon there is a word for it: winter. The lush plains of Greece are dead and cracked with ice, without treasure to collect. The humans huddle together, die with their foreheads glued to the frozen floor and curse the gods, curse the gods! – and so does Aphrodite, because dead bodies have no desire to be close to someone else. Cold eliminates all heat. It's as if her time is over.
(Except it's not because all this was brought on by love, deep dark drowned love that doesn't care if everyone dies as long as it can survive – and is that not the essence of love, no matter how people try to make it seem good and wholly devoid from evil? She knows better.)
The gods do not die, but they do feel cold. The cold that creeps up to Aphrodite comes from the heart and not from the skin. In that endless winter, the first winter the world knows (which is why it seems so endless), the goddess of love shrinks to a pale shadow. Love freezes easily and so does she.
Demeter's wailing is heard up to the top of Olympos (day and night day and night although there's barely a difference now).
She finds Ares, wrapped in skins of hunting trophies. She tries to kiss him, but he pulls away and tells her (coldly, like his skin) that he has no desire to share his warmth with her. She tries to spit at him but her mouth is too cold and she feels as if the blood running in her veins is pulled out of her through her skin. She runs from under his indifferent eye and curses the gods, curses the gods! curses herself.
Enough, she thinks in the fever-filled hours that follow. Enough.
I will make it stop.
-
She has never visited the underworld. She has guided lovers to retrieve their loved ones, she has sent down the desires lost on bodiless souls (but oh how they still desire! The torment of Dis in one word). Yet she has never been down here in the flesh, and the stillness, the vastness and the cold of it make her feel as if she's occupying not enough room to breathe. Is there even air down here or are her lungs simply doing a faltering impression?
Dead people need no air. Upon thinking it, she has to wonder if Hades still needs to breathe.
Charon leers at her from on his boat, telling her no living soul can cross, and it's only when she screams at him that she will take out his eyes – and even the removal of blind eyes hurts! – that he bares his teeth in defeat and allows her to pass into the boat, shielding his face.
When they're halfway across, Aphrodite realises Styx is still lapping gently at the boat, deceptively calm. She turns around to ask Charon, and he, having sensed the question before she poses it, answers gruffly: "The movement of the souls keeps it from freezing. Styx is not filled with ordinary water."
Ironically, that answers makes Aphrodite feel as if she is freezing.
Charon doesn't ask her why she is here (here, where she feels like a flame about to be extinguished), but she stills tells him: "Kore."
He is silent and pulls his hat over his unseeing eyes, is silent the entire slow ride across Styx.
-
Even though she told Charon she was here to see Kore, she was actually expecting to find Hades in her path – he's everywhere in Dis, and he should have found her before she found Kore. She's surprised when he doesn't meet her to throw some biting words into her face – why are you here where you have no power? Do you think your words have any authority here? He's not around. Dis is silent.
It's Kore she finds seated on the throne, with long fingers that are tapping nervously on the dark fabric stretching across her knees. Her dress – probably still the one she was wearing when Hades kidnapped her – has faded into an ashy grey. She is white like the snow covering the earth; a bleakly shining beacon in the gloom of Dis. She remembers what Zeus had said: "he says 'she makes Dis burn bright'" and how he had snorted at that – but it is true, it is true. Kore has lost her colour in the absence of sun but not the glimmer of life lying on her shoulders and between her ears. It hurts Aphrodite's eyes to look at her (she is too tall, too beautiful to wither in the depths of Dis) and suddenly all she wants is to bite Kore's lips and neck until blood comes out – blood that will restore the colour to her cheeks, her eyes, her breasts blushing rosy under the grey dress. Or so Aphrodite assumes.
"Aphrodite," the new goddess of the underworld says; a slow murmuring like a creek in spring.
"Kore," she returns the greeting, but is immediately met with a headshake of disapproval.
"My name is Persephone." The words are flat and drop to the ground like coins – Aphrodite feels how much it pains the other woman to speak them. Away with the flowers of youth. Persephone now. No such frivolities like "Kore" are allowed in the ancient underworld. And yet, she is so young, the woman holding herself like a queen – so young, with her hair that should be streaming freely and her hands that should not be tied in her lap.
"Shedding your girlhood, then?" she replies sharply, gazing hard at the motionless face of the white, ghostly figure of what was once the embodiment of the fertile earth. She wishes that face would move – smile or scream or frown, so she could imagine what Kore (Persephone) must have looked like with the sun kissing her shoulders, crowned with a halo of ripe grain.
Persephone rises from the throne. "My girlhood was lost some time ago."
"Yes, when Hades decided to impose himself on you," Aphrodite finishes the sentence (that hadn't needed to be finished, but now it was and she couldn't take it back).
Something happens then: a twitch in Persephone's blank face, a flicker in her eyes – but she does not speak.
"He stole the sun from your heart and the life from your lap," Aphrodite presses on.
A silence, the wailing of the dead.
"He gave me love when I had none," Persephone (or is she Kore again?) says calmly.
"You had your mother and the earth and the sun in your hair, did you not? He stole you from life and now he wishes you to be dead so you will be silent and colourless and compliment his sorry life! So you can be dead together!" Aphrodite doesn't know why she is yelling so – she just wants Persephone to yell back, to show that she is still alive (that Hades hasn't killed her yet).
"Remember where you are," the queen of the underworld hisses, "this place is not forgiving to those who badmouth its master."
"And you? Are you forgiving?"
Persephone eyes her and descends from the throne. "I don't appreciate it when my husband is slandered in his own house, no."
The two women stare at each other for a moment. Persephone is standing a bit closer than is strictly necessary and for the first time in months, Aphrodite feels the stir of heat in her stomach.
"Why are you here?" Persephone asks eventually, "Why did you come? Simply to rage like a depraved woman?"
"I came because I'm losing my colour like you are," Aphrodite says and then, drunk with the closeness of Persephone's body (her warmth), she slowly brings her hand to the pale skin of Persephone's shoulder, feelings strangely stilled, as if the air is heavy and she has to fight to move through it. (Dead people don't need air, she remembers.) The contact, so light, so innocent, has her reeling as the warmth of Persephone seeps through her skin.
The queen of the underworld responds madly, crazily (as if she had been waiting for this since the day she was born) and forcefully takes Aphrodite's face in her hands to crash their mouths together – it's not a kiss, it's a fight of teeth and tongue and oh how the heat of it burns! How the warmth of it makes Aphrodite's heart beat after a sleep of months!
She bites Persephone's mouth, exploring the roof of the other woman's mouth with her tongue and then travels down – hot, open-mouthed kisses that lead down over her neck to the frayed edge of the colourless dress. Persephone is mumbling, pressing her fingers into Aphrodite's neck and she's saying "Sun", and she's saying it again and again and she keeps saying it.
Sun.
Aphrodite pulls back, panting with the suddenness of it all and looks at the other woman (so young, with her cheeks flushed the way they should be and her hair falling from its bun). "Are you cold, Kore?" she asks softly, trailing a finger over Persephone's face, following the line of her jaw and neck.
"Yes," the other hisses and bares her teeth before wrapping her arms around Aphrodite's neck in a frantic hug. Their bodies are touching now at almost every angle, only separated by their clothes. Aphrodite hugs her back, feeling their breasts press together deliciously. "Please," Persephone says (except this is Kore: gone is the stern queen of the dead, back is the sun girl with the crown of golden grain).
"Yes," Aphrodite soothingly says and kisses Kore's neck before sliding her hands down the grey-clad form to find her breasts through the thick, stiff fabric.
"Take it off," Kore whimpers, pushing against Aphrodite's hands. Take off this constraint of death (is what Aphrodite hears, so she does and makes sure to breathe warmth over every piece of uncovered skin she finds). Kore's breasts are proud and firm, and the nipples are pink when Aphrodite closes her mouth over them. Love in the underworld.
Hastily, Kore helps Aphrodite to get rid of the heavy winter robe that weighs her down (that stops her from breathing). Once it's gone, the air is light.
They kiss – a real kiss this time, not a desperate jumble of tongue and lips like before. Their breasts brush and oh now without the barriers of their clothing.
"The throne," Aphrodite pants against Kore's mouth, because that seems right even if it's in reality too invasive, too much of an infiltration of Hades' domain. She doesn't care. Her blood is flowing after months of being inert.
Kore stumbles backwards, falls into the throne – a jumbled tangle of shimmering limbs, a shining light in the darkness of Dis. Aphrodite falls to her knees as if in prayer (and it is, the worship of the splendour of the naked woman flushed before her). She kisses Kore's knees, licks the skin stretching taut across the kneecaps, the softness of her thighs. Her tongue leaves wet marks and when she blows her breath on the wet spots Kore squirms and moans.
Oh mother earth, Aphrodite involuntarily thinks as she carefully laps at the hot, throbbing centre between Kore's legs. The other woman cries out and pulls at Aphrodite's hair. The slight pain, laced with the tangible smell of sex and women makes Aphrodite almost come on the spot, and filled with desire she slips a finger into Kore's body, hot and pliant and narrow, as she infuriatingly softly licks the sensitive nub that she knows will make Kore explode. The other woman's legs wrap around her head so she's almost suffocating, delirious with the smell of it and she drinks and she licks and she pumps her fingers in and out and again and again until Kore screams, shaking in the chair, her body soaring. To the light, out of the dark.
Coming down from her high, Kore slides easily out of the chair as if her legs have no strength anymore. Aphrodite supports her and feels her heart almost burst as she sees the dark red flush on Kore's lips, her cheeks – she is alive.
"Let me…" Kore says softly against Aphrodite's neck and (not waiting for the answer, because she already knows what it would have been) trails her hand down the other woman's body until she comes to where Aphrodite is wet and hurting. She does it slowly, without hurry, allows Aphrodite to ride against her hand to heighten the friction while she keeps on kissing the skin that glows around the other woman's mouth.
"You –" is what Aphrodite manages to say before her orgasm washes over her like the sea warmed by the sun and all she can is squirm and feel her throat contract with the pleasure of it.
Making sure she holds her fingers on Aphrodite's clit until the orgasm has completely ebbed away (knowing that if she wouldn't, that would be half the pleasure of it, gone), Kore says: "I." and simply kisses her.
They lie for a moment, share their breath and their bodies.
"You must go," Kore silently says then – and Aphrodite knows this is no longer Kore, but that Persephone has come back to reclaim her role (except maybe happier now? She hopes so). They extract themselves from one another and get up. Love in the underworld, that's what they have had – and they hug and affirm the boundaries of their skin. Where they end, where they begin; their skin, burning hot now.
Aphrodite slides into her robe. Persephone reaches for her bleak dress, and before she puts it on, she looks at the other woman and says, smiling slightly: "Look to the sky when you leave."
Aphrodite takes her hand and kisses it, then leaves.
Upon leaving Dis, she looks to the sky and finds a watery winter sun smiling down on her.