A/N: Er, yes. Perhaps this is a bit difficult to understand...
Zoë/Orion, Artemis/Orion, Artemis/Apollo, and Zoë/Artemis too, if you decide to interpret it that way.
IT IS A COLD WORLD
by Skadi 2. Marchking
She mistakes broken glass for stars, and stands tall when she is crying.
There are many things Zoë has seen:
She has seen men as they die (gasping and slippery and stuck like fishes) and she has seen the murder of Caesar (a thrill of fear and then, sudden unexpected ecstasy on his bloodied face) and she has seen a hundred freedoms signed (the ink not yet dry, they celebrate, premature) and she has seen slaves on the block (necks like tree trunks, waiting to be cut) and she has seen the eyes of men drawing lines on her back (curving lines that make them smile, crudely, like horses.)
She has seen many things, and she has smelled the forest after snowfall and a basement in the winter and cinderblocks wet with white paint. She has tasted ice from wild lakes and plane exhaust and the air after it rains. She has touched living bones and glassy mountain feet and smooth rocks under the sea. She has heard a coffin lock and a window shatter onto felt and a marble rolling across hardwood.
She can tell you with all accuracy that this world is a vinegar world, one that breathes bitter and tastes acid and feels searing and sounds choked and smells sharp.
It is a vinegar world, a nail polish remover world, a hydrogen peroxide, vodka, whiteout, turpentine world, that burns and smarts so hard it's terribly hard to fall asleep.
(She likes the way the dust in a cement room smells, cold and old and like deep breaths. It is a cold world, a steel world, a vinegar world, a world that cuts a conscious open and hangs it out to dry in storm winds.)
-0-
Zoë would not call it hugging: it was not hugging. It was clutching close to the mountain, letting the cold suck at her bones and crust her skin and keep her balance so she would not tumble off the little ledge and into the crater far below, because her branch of immortality had a few exceptions and she didn't want to test them.
Frosted grass grew in every slivered crack; snow and ice were the same bitter sharp stuff; hawks flew in the white sky. They hunted the Nemean Lion, who was breeding at the peak, and they would not fail despite what anyone said or did.
"Nice and cozy up here, isn't it?" said a voice that was liquid like quicksilver and hot like quicksilver and gilded like quicksilver and husky like parchment, all at once, but over it all, like sour honey, was a dark, humored smile that grinned on the pointed corners of each word. He slid over to her, and in the process, lacking room, slid on top of her, crushing her up against the mountain, hugging, covering.
"Get off me," snapped Zoë. She could feel the points of his elbows and knees, skinny like a little boy's, his stomach hard and firm, his cheek on her forehead, his hands over hers.
"Give me a few minutes and I'll figure out how," he said. "I wouldn't want to fall."
Gods damn that smile in his voice, the cold and smarting vinegar grin.
-0-
Funerals are always sad. Zoë always keeps her face smooth and dry, but even she cannot resist the allure of a hangover. Beer was never for her- it has to be sharp, like gin or vodka, something to cut past all sensibility and shear off the humanity in her.
-0-
A dark gleam in his eyes; a crack in his voice; a ripple in his skin; anything is enough reason to seize him, clutch him to her, grip him hard and scrape white marks into his skin. She wants to tattoo herself on him, everywhere on him, her name a brand on his mouth. She wants everyone (minus her Lady, naturally) to know that, Gods damn her, he is hers. It doesn't matter that she has only touched him seven times (she counts) and five of those were entirelyonaccident.
-0-
Getting drunk when her Lady is away on business is almost ritual now- everyone lies sprawled and wasted on the forest floor, giggling, their silver glow wobbly and their wits a little weak, flasks leaking liquid pools, grass trampled, sky purple, leaves dusty.
Zoë laughs so hard her ribs hurt, and she closes her eyes, back arched, breath clotted, air hot, skin showing, sweat gleaming, the moonlight making the whole damn scene erotic and sensual, if it was ever clean to start with. If only he could see her now, then maybe he would make up his mind.
She shouldn't think like that. These nights are for forgetting, not for lingering. Her heart should burn with the liquor as it scorches the feelings out of the chambers of her heart.
-0-
He was young and she was old. Or perhaps he was the old one and she was the young one. Damn it, it was easy for them to fight, each one with a temper hot and quick like metal in a fire. Zoë heated white, glowing at the top and flushing like paper.
They hated each other, and each was thoroughly justified, though her Lady could never know that. Shouting rang through camp every day as they tried to burn the other to ashes, stamp on their bones and kiss them good riddance.
But hate led to her Lady's banishing them until solutions had been found, if only for a few days, and what at first was brusk, forced cooperation became tentative communication and then daring night time walks with fierce dares and scornful name calling. (Later came the breathless eye contact and stolen stares, the under-breath wishes and growing, growing guilt.)
It was everything a Huntress was not, and hugging him under the fading birch tree one afternoon was the best time of her life.
(And was her only regret.)
-0-
Once, he kissed her.
It was a dark kiss.
Which wasn't to say it was evil, or that it took place at night, or that it was lined with a dusty, desperate, deep sort of want.
(But that is, in fact, what happened.)
He had been savage; she had been wild. Somehow they bled seduction into the night, and he had given in with anger and grabbed her and shouted and she had screamed, and then, viciously, grabbed her face and pressed her against him, and mumbled words into her neck and tensed at the shoulders and it was all she could do to not beg him to stay with her forever.
(Good guess.)
-0-
Funerals. Zoë gets a hangover.
-0-
The next time she sees Apollo, his handsome face and rippled body and stunning smile stir a boil in the pit of her stomach and she leaps on him, stabbing at his milky dream eyes with arrows and screaming. Look what you've done, she says, even when she's sitting by him as they're healed. You've broken the sky and killed yourself.
(Zoë has not sunburned for a thousand years.)
Don't talk like that, said Apollo. We're the same, you and I. I just got there first, princess.
Zoës stares at the fire in stony silence, then slips nightshade in his tea and he lies in a godly comma for two weeks.
-0-
Later, when she discovers acid, she smokes it in copious amounts behind warehouses, the buzzing blare of the psychedelic colors and pinwheels crafting a world where he smiles from between her sheets and her Lady is all painted red.
-0-
At night, Zoë closes her eyes and prays that she will have rest. Instead she is greeted by the familiar picture burned inside her eyelids: her Lady, her bow, a river with blood. And if she rests her eyes a second longer, she'll see arms and legs and a tangle that isn't her and him but another woman.
(Understandably, Zoë doesn't sleep much.)
-0-
When her Lady cries at night, Zoë does not know how to comfort her. She tries teas and blankets, chocolates and sweets, stories and songs and quotes and humming. She does lullabies, she burns incense, she consoles her in whispers. But in the end, every morning finds them silent and cold in a formal embrace, neither healed an inch. Glass has been broken somewhere deep inside her Lady's heart, and though it is beautiful- mesmerizing, breath taking- it is sharp and cuts scars that never heal.
Zoë holds her through the nights and rocks her softly and sings and murmurs, but she knows there is no use. It doesn't work for her, so it certainly won't work for a Goddess.
-0-
When Zoë cries at night, it's in the inside. She lies like a plank and lets it roam about her with knives and arrows. Her heart is already one large scar: all it can do is cut deeper into what has already been cut.
(Somewhere morbid and clenched within her heart, she likes the pain. It keeps her breathing, this tormentous shamble of an affair.)
-0-
There was a day, in a city, by a river, in winter, with fog, when the sky was grey and the air was murky, when a boy Zoë had met a few months earlier found her and sat her down and talked to her.
Sitting on that bench (with the sketchy paint job and cold screws), smoking pot (just enough to make everything in the harbor smell like myrrh and amber and that musky oil he rubbed on his muscles before he wrestled), talking idly (about hunting and gods and children and the cost of bread and not his new girlfriend and boyfriend), laughing softly (making her head throb and hum pleasantly), everything seemed to get a sort of seal over it. The lighting was so similar, the dust so pleasant, everything so muted with cotton wool that she could almost forget he had ever hurt.
-0-
Even now, the instinct to kill Apollo has not faded in the least.
-0-
Zoë tries salvia.
(She dreams a terrible life.)
When she comes back, she is as a ghost, thin, gray, loose, transparent and frail, wandering the corridors and loosing her breath, trying to come back to reality, to forget that life on that faraway star, where he smiled just for her and gave her all her children.
For months, she is an echo, weak as paper, sober, straight.
-0-
His kiss lingers in corners and sneaks up behind her from the shadows, papering her shoulders, stealing away her breath. It's wrong, very, very, dreadfully wrong, for Zoë to keep this kiss, to remember it and repeat it, hold it up against her mouth. It's bad enough that it is a kiss-but with her Lady in mourning, she feels like a godsdamned thief.
Zoë does not like thieves. If she could give the kiss away, she would, she would without a second's thought.
(But that is not entirely true. That kiss is everything spicy in her life, everything dark and cunning and clever and painful, everything that cuts her up and breaks her down, everything that makes the next day worth living when she's trapped in this damned immortality.)
-0-
Perhaps it may have passed you by, but take a moment and register this- Zoë and her Lady are both very fond of stars.
-0-
Zoë has a wicked soul. (A selfish soul, an arrogant, pretentious, prideful, vain, despairing soul.) She doesn't deserve her Lady, she doesn't deserve her protection. It kills her to stay; it kills her to leave. (And she leaves every day, every night, every time she sees the cast of the sky.)
(Like it or not, they are a messed little triangle.)
(Or square, if you look at it that way.)
"My Lady, I have…a request, if you will grant it."
"Speak, Zoë."
"When I die…as I doubtless shall…will you not set me to a mortal death? Will you set me in the stars?…I ask much, I know I do…but it is the only, only favor I ask of you…"
The look is her Lady's eyes is nothing less than pain, of being snapped and broken, of being scooped out and hollowed, of the sharp, acidic bite of betrayal.
"Of course, Lieutenant. Of course."
Zoë doesn't deserve the stars. She doesn't deserve her Lady. She deserves to be tortured for eternity, but it has now been set- she'll be tortured by the absence of her chains.
-0-
This is the seventh shot (for the seventh time he touched her). Adequately, it nearly kills her.
-0-
Zoë at a funeral. There is vodka, and gin, and spirits, and every kind of clear, cold, biting liquors that gleam within their glass bottles, seductive. She doesn't drink because she wishes to loose herself, in the same way she doesn't get stoned because she likes it. She does it all because the intoxication, the thrill and rush, the breathless aching choke, it all is pain and agony and it is, I suppose, like cutting- proving, trying to prove, proving, possibly proving, that she is alive, that she can feel the suffering and the joy that comes with it, the acidic burn and the holographic insanity, the sobbing that howls along her inured ears. Zoë isn't alive, but damn it all, that doesn't mean she can't pretend.
-0-
Despite what anyone says, you can steal the stars.
(Zoë already has.)