Prompt: apocalypse.
Rating: PG,
Length: 375 words or so.
Summary: the world is ending.
Pairing: none.
Character(s): Hera.
Author's Note:
This will be a random collection of stories based on prompts, revolving around Hera, also may be sometimes short or super-long, depending on my inspiration and how it hits me. I like to think that if Hera was not Zeus's wife or always condemned, then maybe she could have been amazing, and worshiped like Athena, or remembered like Aphrodite, and loved like Artemis.
Apocalypse
They say, in despair, one can truly see the ugliness of man.
Hera thinks there is something beautiful in watching the destruction of the Earth, something mesmerizing in the way which the fires burn intensely, scorching the ground, and turning even the largest of trees into nothing but ash that the wind blows away so easily. Her ears drown in the noise of never-ending screams, as she breathes in the stench of blood and rotting corpses. She cannot even feel pity for the dying mortals, or sorry for the fact that both her grandmother's and sister's green Earth is no more. Zeus no longer has anyone to believe in him, not in this time of ruin. It makes her smile, a cruel yet somewhat sad smile.
'It is bittersweet, this kind of end', she thinks silently.
She knows that by now, the gates of the underworld are terribly over-flooded with the souls of the dead, and almost feels something as akin to sympathy for her older sibling, and yet, she does not. All these souls would only enlarge Hades's kingdom. Hera knows that Hades only deserves the best.
This time, when her lips twitch, her smile is stuck somewhere between relief, and utter misery. Her eyes fill with cool unshed tears, cold like her heart, the one Zeus had frozen long ago.
The despair that surrounds this world is suffocating, and Hera knows-thinks that, maybe, she always might have known.
Their time, is over...
And maybe, she is just a little bit sad, because she never got to be happy in all the years she had been married. She wishes-and stops. Nothing can be undone after all, not now.
"Oh well, at least, it ends with blood, just like how it started", as she recalls the death of a man who was to be her grandfather, if her father had not slaughtered him at the orders of her grandmother.
And this time, she does not smile, her tears fall, one by one, before a hollow laughter bubbles out from her throat, loud against the screams. It makes her sound mad. 'Perhaps I truly am', she thinks to herself.
The silence that falls right then, begins slowly, and Hera, well, she is nowhere to be found.
end.