Her emphasis did not escape his notice.

"Couldn't help yourself, could you?" Tamatoa leered, his grinning face drawing closer to her. "Had to have a little taste?"

Athena cast him a fiery glance before taking a deep breath and biting her lip as her gaze fell. Shaking her head, she continued, "It wasn't a rule. Being one of the three, protecting my virtue . . . It was what I was. It was who I was . . . until it wasn't."

Tamatoa's smirk softened, but his interrogation was relentless. "Got bit by the love bug, huh? You had it baaaad, didn't you?" he teased.

"He was a warrior," Athena said, eyes still glued to the ground. "He was strong . . . cunning, brave . . . curious," she said pointedly, now glaring at Tamatoa. "I'd seen plenty of others like him - Perseus, Odysseus - yet . . . no one was like him."

Tamatoa rolled his eyes. Waving his claw dismissively, he said, "Yeah, yeah. You fell in love, you got busy. Let's fast forward to the banishment."

Athena had had enough of the crab's interruptions. Her chest heaved with the labor of angered breathing, and a storm gathered in her eyes once more. "My father killed him, you know!" she roared, and Tamatoa could have sworn he saw slim sparks of lightning crackling around her. "He killed the man I loved when he found out what we'd done!" She shook beneath the force of her fury, and Tamatoa backed away from her as she shouted. But as quickly as they'd appeared, the thunderclouds receded, and she collapsed onto the cave floor with a clatter of her aegis and spear. "What I'd done," she whispered and began sobbing heavily for the first time since her lover's death. Lacking strength even to bear the weight of her helmet, that, too, she cast aside.
Tamatoa struggled with himself for what felt to him like hours. He weighed the tact of every response that occurred to him, bouncing between variations of "Hey, babe, it takes two to tango" and "How about this weather?" Finally, he settled on silence. He thought he'd be more used to the sensation, with silence being his usual state due to his largely uninterrupted solitude. But where company was concerned, Tamatoa was all braggadocio and derision. He couldn't remember being any other way. But the goddess had trapped his tongue. Busy as his mind was with thought and memory, he found it impossible to speak any of it into the void she had left. And whereas he would have felt pleasure at the sight of this emotional wreckage, had he extracted it from anyone else, he looked at her and felt nothing.

So he settled himself into a corner of his cave, the sound of Athena's weeping lightly echoing off the walls. Tears were something she seldom shed, he suspected, and despite her being an intruder in his home, he felt as though he shouldn't be there. Alone with his thoughts, they drifted to taking revenge on Maui and finding the Heart of Te Fiti. Tamatoa soon found his eyelids growing heavy, and with the strange lullaby of the goddess' sorrow still swirling around him, he fell into a deep sleep as night came to Lalotai.

When he awoke, the cave was dark and still. There was not a sound to be heard, and if it weren't for his own bioluminescence giving light to his lair, Tamatoa would have thought the goddess had given him the slip. But there she was, sound asleep, lying on the sand with her face buried in her arms. Even in the dark, her effects gleamed, still scattered about her. He rose and, treading carefully, crept closer to her. His eyes rested on the easiest target: the helmet. And with one slow and fluid movement, he pinched the soft, red plume, lifted the armor, and added it to his own. Next was the spear. Scraping his pincers across the sand, he clasped the weapon with a muffled clank and found a place for it, too, among his gems. Last was the shield. He grabbed it by the edges, and it was halfway to his shell when Athena began to stir.

Panicked, Tamatoa lost his grip on the aegis, and it fell to the ground with a thud. Muted as the sound was by the sand, he still found himself paralyzed, lips pursed, breath held, and eyes wide, searching for the shield with his left while keeping his right on Athena. When the goddess merely adjusted her position, brown curls spilling generously over her face, he breathed a sigh of relief. He reached for the aegis once more and this time successfully positioned it on his shell.

A self-satisfied smile spreading broadly across his face, he briefly considered swallowing Athena whole to top things off but decided against it after considering the horrible indigestion she would cause if she awakened in his stomach. Forgetting the idea, he had just begun to creep back to his corner when it occurred to him that perhaps he shouldn't leave her alone unarmed. Sure, she was immortal, and neither he nor she had reason to fear her death. But he knew that if one of those Lalotai lowlifes found their way into his lair, as they were apt to do, it would result in a noisy scuffle, and he couldn't afford to have any unnecessary disturbances to his beauty sleep.

Huffing quietly in annoyance, Tamatoa turned toward her again but found himself pausing before scooping her up. Filled with a hesitant eagerness that he could not discern the source of, he reached out to brush the hair from Athena's face, and he felt the breath catch in his throat, so startled he was by how peaceful she looked. Calm and collected though she often was during her waking hours, there was always this intensity burning just beneath her skin and flickering in her eyes. She was never truly at rest. But here and now, eyes closed, mouth relaxed, she was as cool as the waters that surrounded Lalotai. The contrast was striking.
After gathering himself, he gathered her and placed her in the ribcage left from a former meal. Before he had time to make it back to his own resting place, he spied one of the masked sloths, chittering as it slinked over to the cage, reaching through the bones toward Athena, who was now better illuminated by the bioluminescent flora he had nestled her in.

"Shoo!" Tamatoa tried to keep his voice somewhere between a whisper and a bellow. "Shoo! Get out of here!" When waving his claw did nothing to ward off the creature, he picked it up and tossed it outside as far as he could, reveling in the sound of its fading chitter. But his enjoyment was short-lived as he heard the goddess stirring yet again.

"Good riddance. He was making a terrible racket," she yawned. "Where are my things?" He turned to see Athena sitting upright, patting the ground around her, only to have her hands coated in algae.
"Oh, I've uh . . . tucked them away for safekeeping." Tamatoa forced as much innocence into his voice as he could muster and hoped against hope that the goddess was too tired to press him on the matter.

Having turned her gaze from the cave floor to the crab for the first time in the dark, Athena gasped and fell to the ground in fear, clutching at the grains of sand beneath her. Her horror transformed from abject to mild as she ventured, "Tamatoa . . . ?"
"The one and only," he grinned and spun around, speckling the cave walls with blue light and motion. "You like?"

For a moment her face betrayed her: mouth agape, pupils dilated in unmistakable fascination. "Ugh." She immediately shook herself from it. "Don't flatter yourself." She took in her new surroundings. "Mind explaining what I'm doing in a ribcage? In a rib . . . cage?" she corrected herself.
"I also tucked you away for safekeeping," he said.

Noticing how easy it would be to escape if she wished, she found no reason to doubt him. "Thank you for your consideration," she said with a curt nod and settled herself back onto the ground, closing her eyes in preparation for further rest.

"And what do you think you're doing?"

On the defensive and testy when tired, Athena sat bolt upright. "What do you think I'm doing?" she spat. "I'm sleeping!" And she slammed her body defiantly onto the ground, facing away from Tamatoa.

"Not there, you're not."

"I swear to Zeus, if you lay a single claw on me -"

Tamatoa picked her up. "I just kept one of our resident monsters from doing to you what you did to those bats earlier," he explained as he picked some of the larger leaves that were growing in the cave and placed them on his shell. "So first of all, I'm not making the same mistake twice by letting you sleep in that cage, and second of all," he said, plopping Athena onto a now padded portion of his back, "you owe me one."

Too tired to produce an argument, Athena stayed where she was put and lied down. She closed her eyes and shed one last tear as she did so. Finally free of pests and worries, Tamatoa walked back to his corner and lowered himself down, resting his legs and emitting a low chuckle as he did so.

"What's so funny?" Athena muttered.

"You should've seen your face when you saw mine just now. You looked like a little sand crab with how hard you tried to bury yourself in the ground."

"Funny," she said. "I had a similar thought when I found you lying on your back earlier today."

"Goodnight, Anathema," he said, eyes narrowed in chagrin.
"It's A-then-a," she answered in sleepy sing-song.
Tamatoa had closed his eyes, his mouth set in a grimace, when he heard a tiny murmur above him.
"Goodnight, Tamatoa."
They both fell asleep with one corner of their mouths lifted.

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Sorry for the delay, but thanks to all for the favorites and reviews! Greatly appreciate the feedback and am over the moon that it's all been positive so far. Happy reading. (: