A sequel to the Persephone!Cress AU I wrote for ship weeks where Cress had been cursed into a human form and she didn't remember being Persephone.
~:~
Kore
Prompt:
our love's a monster
with two heads
and one heartbeat
She still calls him Carswell sometimes. Says it fits.
He calls her Cress. Because she likes her new name, and he finds that it tastes just right on his tongue—like stardust and pomegranate seeds.
She smells human, still. He had thought she would stay this spring, but she doesn't. Her absence is a bone-deep ache, bittersweet and cloying. He mopes mostly, annoys the Furies a little, curses a few demigods, procrastinate with the paperwork (things were so much easier when his father was in charge and he was free to turn the occasional satyr into honeybees, and waste away his days in Elysium.)
She comes back with the first snow, tasting like saltwater. He pulls her against a tree and kisses her until she's gasping.
Her hair dissolves into petals under his fingers. Xonaru blossoms tickle his cheek, feather soft. The hair by her waist starts turning into cherry blossoms even as he gently cards through it. He moves to kiss down to the hollow of her throat and the barren tree she's leaned up against explodes into full bloom.
The squeak she makes is almost apologetic.
He buries his face in her flower-hair and laughs.
.
She tells him she's probably not going to talk to her father for the foreseeable future. Carswell finds that he has no problem with that. He never liked Demeter anyway. And Demeter more than just hates him.
Turns out it was he who had cursed Cress into a human. His own daughter! It was, Cress says bitterly, an attempt to get her away from the Underworld. Another attempt. How very like Demeter.
He calls himself Erland now, Cress tells him offhandedly. He's puttering about as a Horticulturist somewhere in Africa. Farawata-something or wherever. Carswell makes a mental note to simply stay away from the whole continent for a century or two. He'll just stick to all the other places on Earth that doesn't have one Dr. Erland in them. Maybe he'll visit the moon.
(Selene will make a fuss, but he knows she secretly loves him.)
"Let's run away," he suggests.
She bites her lip. "Didn't we already do that?"
.
He hates Spring. And it's only because he loves her.
.
When he first meets her, her hair is so long he's a little scared of it.
She's been following him for a while, he knows. With her eyes, with whisperings of her feet. He doesn't care enough to confront her, and just like that one fine day there she is by the gates of his realm, chatting away merrily with Cerberus, who looks less menacing, and more star-struck.
He swallows a frown and smiles something charming as he takes her hand and kisses it, eyeing the coiling, winding, tumbling waves of her messy, messy hair. She looks a little ridiculous, he thinks. A lot ridiculous actually.
She let out a startled squeak and everything, including Cerberus's fur explodes into flowers.
.
She sends him a postcard from Assam, and a photograph of her with a foxtail orchid woven in her hair.
He fiddles with his wedding ring—twisting it round and round and round. The tree he kissed her against is barren again. He watches the last flower wither away and feels a branch twist in his heart.
Round and round and round.
.
He doesn't break hearts like hers. He avoids them entirely.
He knows what she feels, can see it in the way she bites her lip as she pretends to not stare at him, and he knows it's in his best interest to stay far, far away.
And yet, he gives her a tour of the Underworld and smiles as she blushes when he smoothly winds his fingers through hers.
.
He follows a trail of daisies growing in the Fields of Asphodel, through the Fields of Punishment, and finds her sitting in a grassy corner of the Vale of Mourning with butterflies hovering around her hair. She turns and the butterflies flutter around her eyelashes. She smiles and everything hurts less.
"Hello," he says, sitting down beside her.
He brushes a fingertip against a daisy. A tendril of smoke curls around it, and the petals give a shudder. She gathers herself up on her knees to reach up and brush a quick kiss against his lips. "Hi," she whispers breathlessly, and her voice melts into his bones like honey down his spine.
The butterflies recoil away from him, but she leans forward again for another, longer kiss.
Her hands clutch at his shirt while his jacket dissolves into petals.
.
When her trail of daisies starts withering in spring, he tries to learn all he can about gardening. It doesn't help. He only needs to touch a petal for it to crumble away.
"Stay…stay…stay!" He finds himself pleading hopelessly to a flower, kneeling in the Vale of Mourning, dirt under his fingernails, mud on all his clothes. Surrounded by dead plants.
"I'm not crying," he mumbles to the Fury holding the watering can for him.
Scarlet rolls her eyes, "I didn't say you were."
.
She stays.
That whole summer she stays, wandering the Underworld, befriending the Furies. He keeps finding new things growing all over the place—hydrangeas by the Styx, Venus Fly Traps in the Fields of Punishment.
He finds notes in the corner of his parchment, by the margins of his list of the damned and the punishments they're due: suggestions. He doesn't recognize the hand so he assumes it to be hers—the strange, doe-like creature who seems to have infiltrated his kingdom almost soundlessly.
When he catches one of the Furies teaching her how to carry into effect the curses of men on the souls of the dead, he merely watches her as her ridiculous hair flutters in the wake of her power.
.
Hermes's scrawny new intern quakes under the gleeful green-eyed gaze of Cerberus. Though he's in his single-headed, human-looking form, his still looms large enough to even give the stoic ferryman the shivers (which is saying something because nothing gives Jacin the shivers). Cerberus smiles; makes a show of examining his nails.
Carswell takes his time signing for his package because he's rather enjoying this.
The messenger boy shakily hands him a box, wrapped in neat brown paper, and scrambles off without even waiting for a tip. Cerberus smiles wider.
The package contains a small vial of seeds and a larger vial of something murky and brown with instructions on the label about dosages. The seeds he learns are of daisies, and the disgusting liquid is some sort of plant elixir.
He thinks it's from Cress until he reads the accompanying note:
"You don't deserve her."
.
He sends the dear Dr. Erland one of those "I'm sorry for your loss" cards, but with the words sloppily crossed out and replaced with "Thank you."
.
When they come for her, to bring her back to Olympus, she stays put, tugging at the weeds in the garden behind his palace.
Why are you here, he wants to ask her. Instead he sits down beside her, listening to her frustrated mumbling with bemusement. He picks up a strand of her hair and winds it around a finger. It remains for a moment, before unraveling into snowdrops.
She lifts her head, staring up at him with large, wide eyes—blue like a summer sky and big enough to swallow her face whole. He leans forward and with growing amusement feels her gasp against his neck as he kisses the tip of her freckled nose.
"Would you like to stay?" he asks.
.
She's small and bright and likes to grow flowers. Everywhere.
Yet, the souls of Tartarus shudder to mention her name, recoil from even whispering it. He holds her name on the tip of his tongue and tastes its honeysuckle sweet hurt through all the months she's gone.
.
He runs across the Styx, uncaring about Hermes's laughter and Jacin's disapproving tsk, and envelops Cress into a hug. She comes in the summer this time—just like the times of old.
Her laughter in his ear is like the first taste of ambrosia.
"You missed me!" He doesn't understand why she always exclaims it in a marveling, unbelieving sort of way. How could he have not missed her?
"Of course," he says. "Without you here, Scarlet makes me do all the work. Me. Work." He shudders dramatically.
She laughs.
.
The gods find them in the garden, breaking off from a kiss.
She licks away the last of the pomegranate juice from her lips, but they remain red, red, red. He grins. She grins back.
Demeter swears something ugly.
"Farewell," she whispers, leaving a snowdrop on his palm.
.
He doesn't break hearts like hers. She breaks his.
Spring returns to the world and the flowers in the Underworld start to wither.