AN: This is a character piece, wherein Helen reinvents herself by...not reinventing herself. Sort of. Well, it's a circle, not a line in any case. It's in theme with artaxastra's "Seasons", and follows my own "Long Road Home" and "Begin Again", but it can probably be read without the rest of the series.
Spoilers: Into the Black
Disclaimer: Not mine, donate to S4K.
Rating: Teen
Character: Helen Magnus
Summary: It's time to be Athene again.
Enter Athene
It's time to be Athene again.
She armourless and fatherless, patronless and has no temple to call her home. But those were never the things from which Athene took her strength. Creation, reputation, the founding of cities, the keeping of homes. The spinning, the weaving, the cutting loose threads. It is time to see the picture of the whole in the pieces she holds in her hands. It is time to be the muse.
She's out of practice.
She's been Persephone for more than a century, traveling the road between life and death, summer and winter, and the pattern has become so familiar that she has walked it sleeping since Ashley died. In life, where she is loved, there is light and hope and work. There is Will and Henry and Kate. There is Nikola, and there is the memory of James.
The light has never been enough to hold her back.
It's John, of course, who waits for her in the dark. Cold patience and heated passion and all the things she craves, all the things she needs. She needs the dark, not to recognize the light, but to useit. The underworld offers dark peace, and every time she finds the will to leave it, she strides into the light with reborn purpose, darkness slipping through her fingers in ribbons that can never tie her down, because she made them to serve.
She needs her purpose now, and Persephone will not be welcome in this old world.
She hasn't been Athene since she chose the blood, the needle. Since she chose the Underworld and gave up her armour and her owl for a power far more profound. Here again in London, it's been little more than a decade since that choice, but she can feel the full span of time in the blood which courses through her veins. Persephone's power is her blood and Athene's is her mind, and now, more than ever, she will call on both.
She has never shied away from power, not even when instinct screamed to run.
Persephone's lover would have her all undone, John's madness driving him to seek the most simple, the least elegant, solution. Athene has no lover at all, yet she is not unloved. That loneliness, intentional and unforced, is welcome to her, now worn out from the clamour and claws of the Underworld. She knows that on her own it will not be enough for long, that before the season passes, she will seek the Underworld, and ruin, again. But Athene will shield her from that temptation.
She will not be idle.
The world spools out in threads before her, tapestries half-woven with edges that will fray if no one tends to them. She was the centre before, leaving the fringes to themselves. Now, she can weave along the edge, completely trusting that the centre will hold, because it is she herself that holds it. She cannot escape the Underworld, but she relishes the freedom of being courtier instead of Queen. Winter is over, and she is ready for the fresh breeze of spring.
She has all the time in the world. Persephone will wait.
It's time to be Athene again.
finis
Note: It's worth pointing out that when I talk about Persephone, I'm not talking about the girl who got kidnapped and tricked, and plays the pawn between Hades and Demeter. I'm talking about the Queen of the Underworld.
Gravity_Not_Included, June 23, 2011