I know he loves me because of his rage.
His trembling, forceful, powerful anger that charges and shocks the very air around him. Our games are not just games. When he sleeps with another and I unleash my wrath and he bites out his fury until he makes the ground tremble and we create heavy, flashing storms. We don't allow any of Olympus to ignore it. Ruling the heavens and all immortals has made our power vast. We cannot be ignored.
I have never worried for his love.
His hands hung me from the sky, gripped me powerfully when he transformed from bird to god in the rain, hurled a thunderbolt at the giant who thrust me against a mountainside. His eyes have flashed with dark betrayal, all heat and vivid color—bluer than blue and gripping me just as powerfully as his muscular arms. His lips have condemned Ixion to an eternity of suffering, have swallowed drugged nectar from my hand with a trusting smile. Call it perverse, but we are the gods and we are the King and Queen… who decides what is perversion?
I used to know that he loved me through his tenderness, persistence, and the light in his eyes—not his darkness. For a hundreds of years of constant courtship and over three hundred years of a happy marriage, that is what I knew, barring one single day in the rain. And he doesn't think I know…but I do. I know that moment I lost the light in his eyes. And perhaps he cannot admit it to himself, but I know his truth.
I sought my husband atop a mountain when the clouds were heavy and dark. It was a curious thing then, for him to leave without word… as common a thing as it is now. And it gave me pause when I saw that our son, Ares, still but a babe, had been taken from his nursery by his father. Zeus' eyes were set upon our son with an intent curiosity that stole my breath. I did not announce myself but remained hidden from their sight.
When Ares was born he was golden-eyed, a trait not inherited from myself, my eyes immortalized in my own peacocks fashioned after their color… or Zeus, whose radiant blue eyes were also his most arresting feature. The peculiarity was not lost on Olympus, especially as Ares' proclivity was undetermined at such an age. His dark hair glistened with a god-like aura that took the faintest, beige color that also left us puzzled.
Ares did not notice his father's scrutiny, but watched the looming clouds above with deep interest. Ares loved storms, his usual restless motion only stilled when he could sense an impending one. He would sit on my lap or suckle at my breast and stare unblinking at the sky above. But only when storms threatened.
My husband then raised one arm and called his signature instrument to his hand with an obnoxious crash that had Ares fixating on it with renewed fascination. And like a child will do, my son reached out a hand to touch this new creature, the lightning bolt...
Terror doesn't do my feelings justice, I knew that only one had influence over lightning and that its power of destruction was unparalleled. I had seen other gods try to touch the lightning bolt that Zeus handled so readily, including our own brothers, only to reap injury and singed robes. My marriage to Zeus awarded me a tolerance to his weapon of choice, but even I could not wield them.
I should have known then what my husband was experimenting with. I should have known the purpose of this excursion. But perhaps on some level, Zeus and I are alike. I didn't know my motive then, but I didn't move to announce my presence or to stop my only son from laying hands on something that could harm him, no more than his father did. Perhaps it was the same curiosity that brought Zeus to this mountain with Ares, but I waited even as my heart pounded…wondered as his hand edged nearer with clumsy, newborn reflexes.
And my heart did not beat again until several seconds after my boy's touch rested on his father's bolt…and nothing happened. I had expected something, anything—but likely terrible. And yet, nothing happened at all.
The boy laughed, a small rumble, and snatched the toy from his father.
He could hold it. He was immune to it. He liked it, even. My heart soared in relief as I watched him wave the bolt larger than himself in a chubby fist. And I saw, truly, that he was his father's son.
My eyes went immediately to Zeus, expecting a shared delight in our child.
But it wasn't there.
Instead, there was a shadowed, grim resignation on his face… a suggestion of a purpose in all of this. And the purpose was wrought in fear and selfishness. I had known the darkest in Zeus in that moment when he tore my chiton and violated my body to secure a bride in me. And now I knew the darkest possibility in him again…
For a flash of a moment, as he snatched his bolt back from Ares' eager fingers, I thought he may try to strike him down. I say "try" because my body had already tensed, prepared to throw myself before any deadly blow aimed at my son. But there was no need. Though the darkness did not settle in Zeus' eyes, he tossed his bolt back in the sky whence it came, and the air around us shattered. Ares whined at the loss and then, with all the malleability of his age, clapped delightedly at the display that his father created. But it did nothing to soothe the very real, cold pit in my stomach…that something had changed this day.
Zeus swung our laughing boy into his arms with a quicksilver smile, expression clearing like the heavens. They never saw me. And now, I knew better.
With an immediacy I hadn't thought possible, Zeus was no longer had any desire to be a father to our son, and his casual abandonment rippled out accordingly. Ares' eyes bled to red, his aura heated to a blaze, and his roar shook pillars. He grew tall, muscular, and nearly as physically powerful as his father, always clad in battle armor. He became the god of war, sword in hand. But Zeus never spoke of that day on the mountain, never offered his son the weapon that seemed his birthright. He was kinder to his illegitimate children and even our daughters…because those are the children that Zeus preferred—the kind that had no ability to usurp him. The kind made with women who had less power. And how could I, Queen of all the gods and the heavens, shield Ares from it? How could I be Zeus' queen and take action against him?
I made my choices. And still, Zeus struggles.
But as for me, I know why Zeus strays from our marriage bed and why he can hardly hide his irritation when I fall pregnant. And there are days when I wonder whether knowing makes it easier or harder… I can't leave him and he won't leave me. That is why it is so hard for him—he loves me and he loves his own power…and being Zeus, he will never give up either. So I stay in a limbo of his making and there we reside on golden thrones—ruling, screaming, and making love.