Even for those living without time effecting them, twenty years pass slowly. There's never anything particularly interesting happening on the Isle - villains trying to take over from one another only to be displaced a month later, children running around, attempting to emulate their parents despite no actual approval from said parents. Hades didn't bother trying to impress this on his girls - they were both in their hundreds, had formed their own personalities and powers - his opinion didn't matter to them very much, anymore. He didn't really impress it onto Zagreus, either. His kids were being punished for his hubris, and he knew that whenever he got off the island and they did something wrong, he'd end up being punished for it too - after all, why punish the guilty party when you can make their entire family hate your guts too?

So, Macaria and Melinoe created lives for themselves in their prison.

Macaria had always appreciated her own space to live in, so she adopted an empty crypt for herself, using as a bedroom and workroom for projects - the Hades family quickly became known as one of the few places you could go to when injured or sick that would actually try to make you sicker. Macaria became something of a midwife for the isle; helping mothers in labour birth their children as healthily as possible. She was there when the new generation of villain children was born, watched their parents not shower their children with love, but gaze upon their babes with the glinting eyes of someone calculating their child's potential.

Melinoe took to creating magic-harnessing trinkets for her family. As magic was leaking through the barrier in incremental amounts, like a droplet of rain falling from the heavens once a decade, Melinoe scavenged for anything that would work to trap that magic: precious stone and metals, scratching runes into the walls of her home and the graves in the cemetery. Sometimes, when the time of year was just right, the four-member family would sit in their headstone-dotted yard and try to lap up the magic as best they could.

When the girls weren't doing either things, they worked to create. Melinoe, when scavenging to magic utensils, also collected bits of wool or fabric, and she spun them into lace or clothing, before selling them in the isle's marketplace. She was very good at avoiding theft, despite the denizen's best efforts. Macaria ripped sections of the isle's sparing flora raw, harvesting their seeds and planting them in her own sections of soil, figuring out how to grow vegetables that could actually be eaten without poisoning you, growing herbs useful to her nursing practices. The girls kept busy.

Hades, for his part, ran a casino in one of the crypts. Well, casino is a strong word. More of a back-alley poker club, but it was popular - money wasn't often the stakes, instead information or useful trinkets being the betting prices. He had Pain and Panic accept their ability to scare people again, to work as bouncers at the door, or to keep an eye on the players while dealing, ensuring that if cheating was happening, Hades wasn't the one getting swindled.


Zagreus isn't special. He's the son of a god, the first child born to the isle, and he isn't special. He doesn't have the grey skin of his father, the otherworldliness of his sisters, he doesn't even have fire for hair! He's just . . boring.

Except for the part where a lot of people don't know anything about him. They know who his family is, they know where he lives, they know he's deathly pale to the point of ashen-skinned, capped with dark hair that, when it catches the light right, give the impression of being blue. They 'know' his name is Hadrien.

So really, the denizens of the isle don't actually know Zagreus. He's going to be twenty next year, but he looks barely sixteen. He's smarter and more experienced than most of the isle kids, but gives off the impression of being too stupid to be alive. Zagreus is actually pretty proud of himself for it, actually.

See, he decided when he was about four or five to not let anybody know much about himself. Weaknesses were currency on the isle, everyone picking at their neighbours to get a leg up only to be crippled at the knee for their efforts. Hades made sure his son knew all about it, as soon as Zagreus made his sentience clear. Once he had, Zagreus decided that the best way to protect whatever weaknesses he had would be to pretend his weaknesses were something else entirely.

He convinced his dad that putting off enrolling him in school for a couple years was a good idea. He was enrolled under the name 'Hadrien', to fit better with the rest of the hellions his 'age', because the isle is full of people creative with names. Fortunately, his longevity of life that had been predicted for him ensured that he clung to the appliance of childhood longer: it made passing an eight year old as five years old a lot easier.

It was a con, mostly done for Zagreus' own amusement. Watching people constantly under-estimate him and draw their own conclusions made him crave popcorn to watch the show with.

When not curating his lies, he trained the hounds. Seven little hellhounds, plus the mother. With them in tow, he had his own gang, making sure that anyone wanting to rob his house didn't get very far. He brought at least two to school with him at all times, and noticed the children of the de Vils giving him a wide berth. It made him grin. Despite their fierce appearance, the hounds were not actually violent animals by nature. Most of the time, he just played with them in the house, throwing balls made of knotted cloth for them to rip apart, rubbing their bellies.

Life on the isle was not the worst, for the family of the Underworld.


i think this is the end of this fic. mostly because i don't want to make it into a narrative (yet). these characters may make an appearance in my other stories, but i wanted to do this.

if anyone wants to use my characters in stories of their own, you can do that, but please let me know (and give me a link to your fic, because i'd wanna read them!)