- ares -

I sighed. "Fine. Emma, excuse us, please?" Looking behind me, I saw Emma staring at Apollo with a fear and resentment that didn't quite make sense, considering how well they'd gotten along when they'd met.

She nodded. My gaze lingered on her for just a second, then I turned towards Apollo and pulled him to the other side of the room, still shielding Emma with my body. "What do you want, Apollo?"

"I could ask you the same question," Apollo hissed, continuing in Greek. "I told you to stop seeing her. And not only did you completely ignore that, you told her who you are."

"It's none of your business," I replied. I closed the distance between us, just a bit, with a step forward.

He didn't move. "You made it my business the moment I saw her. Seriously, Ares, what the hell are you doing with her? What's your end goal?"

"There's no end goal."

"So what then? You're actually into her?" He laughed skeptically. "Does she get you off that good, or is it just about her looks?"

Within a second Apollo was against the wall with my arm pressing on his throat. "Don't you talk about her like that," I hissed between my teeth.

"Careful, baby brother," Apollo sputtered. "You're scaring your girlfriend."

I turned my head and instantly dropped my arm. Emma looked from me to Apollo and back, clearly unsure of what to say or do. And of course, she had no idea what Apollo had said or what we'd been talking about - she looked so confused. I wanted to hold her in my arms, tell her everything was alright, run my fingers through her long caramel blonde hair, give her all the time that she needed -

"Ares. We're not done talking." Apollo rubbed his throat.

"Give me a second, will you?" I said, not taking my glance away from Emma. "Are you okay?"

"I… I think so," she said. "Is he?"

I looked at Apollo now and chuckled softly. "He's fine. It takes a lot more to truly hurt him, huh, golden boy?"

"That's never stopped you from trying," Apollo scoffed. "I'm waiting, Ares."

Emma nodded when I looked back at her. She pulled her phone out of her pocket, unlocked it, set it back down again without really looking at it, glanced uncertainly at us and eventually pulled a book from underneath the coffee table. She opened it and demonstratively began to read.

I turned to Apollo. "I'm not having this conversation if you can't be respectful," I said, in Greek again.

He stared at me incredulously. "So you're in love with her."

I shot him an annoyed look, but didn't say a word.

Apollo threw up his arms. "Why, Ares? How can you be so stupid to do this when you know this isn't fate?"

"It's not like I wanted to fall for her!" I exclaimed. "That just happened! Trust me, Eros is not going to forget the scolding I gave him any time soon, and he said he had nothing to do with it." Poor kid - we had a fraught relationship as it was, even after so many years, and now I'd unfairly given him quite the verbal beating too.

"Oh, come on, Ares. Get your head out of your ass. If you didn't want that, you could've just kept your distance."

"Don't tell me you would have kept your distance."

He rolled his eyes. "I don't know. Maybe! But never mind that. It's bad enough that you're stringing her along, stringing yourself along really… When this ends and she breaks your heart, and you know she will because you're not meant to be, you're just going to go on another rampage and we will have to fix your mess. I don't want it, dad doesn't want it, Athena doesn't want it, nobody wants it. It'll be another bloody Third Century Crisis!"

"Spare me the lecture, Apollo." I crossed my arms tightly - I felt heat rising and an agitation coming on that made my hands tremble. I did not want to lose my temper in front of Emma. I felt that, with a little time, I could truly be myself with her, would be safe with her, but not yet. I had to restrain myself.

Apollo ignored me and continued speaking vehemently. I knew what was coming and he knew that I knew, but that didn't stop him from making his point. Nothing ever would. "But not only that, you just had to fall in love with her. Her, of all people! You didn't really think you'd get a second chance at Virginia, did you?"

That stung. I pressed my fingertips into my biceps. "I thought I'd be able to do things right this time," I muttered, looking away.

"Get over her, Ares!" Apollo said, the volume of his voice now nearing a shout. "She's dead! Gone! Accept that and move on! But not with Emma. Emma is nothing but a temporary infatuation and you could have ended it cleanly, but now that you've told her about us, you mean too much to her. She deserves better than that. Do you really want to hurt her that much? Just because of a little crush?"

"She's not a little crush!" I fought to keep control of my anger but it was getting more difficult - outside, a couple started to argue, and I felt a feverish energy growing in my neighbor's apartment.

"If she's not a little crush then what the hell is she? You know damn well you'll never end up together!" Apollo was now close enough to jab his index finger into my chest.

I seized his wrist - loosely, I thought, but he groaned in pain just briefly and I let go. "Maybe we will."

"I know what I saw, Ares! Have my prophecies ever lied?" He held his wrist and the bruising faded.

"But this has to be fate. It has to be." I ignored Apollo's insulted grimace and paced back and forth. "Why would I just happen to move to her country and her city a few months before meeting her? Why would she go to your concert the same night I went?"

"You're there all the time," Apollo countered.

"I've been there four times in the past three years." Honestly, Apollo should add 'god of hyperbole' to his titles. "Why would she be put in my path? Some sick joke that father played on me? And on her, too? We all know how much he loves playing with mortals."

I looked at Emma as I turned on my heel. She was still studiously perusing the book, but I hadn't heard her turn a page in a while and although she couldn't understand a word we were saying, she'd clearly noticed we were talking about her. But she didn't look up, not even when I stood staring for a few seconds. The argument outside had ceased as I cooled down. "Why, Apollo, if it's not fate? Why would she even exist if it's not fate?"

Apollo silenced as he pondered my remarks. "I've asked myself that question since I met her," he finally admitted. "But it's not fate. You know it isn't. I'm not wrong about this."

We exchanged a look; his of sympathy and compassion, mine of disappointed frustration.

"I'm sorry, mate. But this has to end."

Did it? Did it really? Emma glanced up from the book - she'd progressed no more than three pages since opening it - and our eyes met. My heart sank at the thought of letting her go. Sure, I could admit I'd led her on in the beginning, when I'd only wanted to figure out who the hell she was. But no matter how hard I'd rationally tried to keep my distance, to prevent her from wanting me, I'd been drawn to her and led by my emotions. No surprise there, really - I knew better than to rely on my own rationality. I'd fallen for her, fallen hard, and now I couldn't imagine a life without her. I wanted to give her everything, give her all of me and all of the world, make her life as full and as fulfilling as she could wish for. I wanted more than anything for her to be happy, and if Apollo was right, then the only way to achieve that was to remove myself from her life and allow her to live it out without me.

But as we looked into each other's eyes and the seconds seemed to last forever, I knew in my bones that Apollo was, uncharacteristically, wrong. I'd never doubted his prophecy before, not even when Virginia had died and essentially proven it wrong. But now… everything with Emma felt so right. Maybe, somehow, she was my forever.

Emma didn't leave. I would have understood if she did. She had every reason to - I had, after all, just turned our entire relationship upside down, I'd told her things very few humans alive knew (although if it were up to Apollo, everyone knew and revered us as gods again), and I'd lost control over my anger twice in one weekend.

But she didn't leave. She was a little distant, yes, and when we finally went to bed that night I caught her gazing at her stuff in the drawer I'd cleared out for her a few weeks prior, but she did not leave.

Once Apollo had finally left us alone at my urging him to, we'd stared at each other for too long, neither of us knowing what to say. She hadn't understood a word of the conversation I'd just had with my brother, and there was no going back to what I'd said right before he had shown up. That moment had passed.

"You said you were hungry," she'd finally said, and her stomach had rumbled right as she said it, and we'd laughed and gone to the kitchen together without mentioning Apollo again.

She'd sat at the kitchen island and watched me throw together a simple meal. She'd acted relaxed, laughing occasionally and talking about things like her latest challenge at work and her friends, but she'd never been a good actor and in the quiet moments when she thought I wasn't looking, I'd seen her frowning at my expert handling of the kitchen knives and studying my body as if she expected me to sprout wings or float away on a cloud or something.

I hadn't sensed any anger in her, though. No, as tumultuous and chaotic as her emotions might have been, anger wasn't one of them, not at that moment. She seemed mostly still confused and unsure of what to do with herself, and with me.

Now, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to her soft and regular breathing next to me. I'd given her a dream, as I always did - it had taken only one night of us sleeping together for me to realize that she had recurring nightmares that rendered her restless, anxious and exhausted. I tried to let her be and not break into her dreamscapes but every now and then I'd catch a glimpse of scenes that did not make any sense to me, but that I wanted her to never have to see again. So I'd started to give her dreams, boring but peaceful ones, and while she'd never mentioned them I knew that she was sleeping better than she'd had in a long time.

But I couldn't smile at the sounds of her sleep now as I usually did. Everything had changed in this one evening - and of course I'd known that was coming, I'd orchestrated it after all, but that didn't mean I had the slightest clue of what I could expect. I racked my brain for the consequences of when other gods had revealed themselves to mortals - Apollo as a prime example, he loved being special, being exalted, venerated, and he got a kick out of the reactions from humans when they saw who and what he really was - but I knew none of those situations could compare to the one I now found myself in. They'd received shock and surprise, but never disgust and hardly ever terror.

Apollo, after all, was a god of beautiful things, of good things. My father, Zeus, flawed as he was, was king of the gods. Hermes... well, Hermes, he could fly, he had a way with words, he brought luck for crying out loud. Dionysus brought the party. And Aphrodite - who could resist Aphrodite?

None of them had ever truly been hated. They hadn't been maligned in stories that humans still told each other, the way that I had been. They weren't complete rage and chaos in every fiber of their being and every part of their soul. I didn't know how much Emma knew about me or rather of these stories about me - she'd at least recognized my true name and she'd known Apollo was the sun god. It wasn't inconceivable that she knew more than that, that she knew I was seen not just as god of war but also and more specifically of aggression, violence, bloodlust and murder.

It wasn't untrue. But it wasn't the whole truth either.

I worried that Emma might not realize that we were all also the opposite of what we were known for. Aphrodite could create ugliness. Thanks to Hera's latest discontent with Zeus, divorce rates soared. Apollo could lie like no other. And as for me, well, an absence of war, my blessing, meant peace.

And I wasn't just Ares, I was Mars too. I'd grown up in Rome, calmed down a little. I'd taken my responsibility and helped the Romans build a city, a nation, an empire. Rome had made me different, given me morals, taught me to care.

But maybe Emma didn't know that, maybe she'd never heard any of the Roman stories. And what they couldn't have told her, anyway, was what had happened since. If she saw me any differently than she had before - and I was quite sure she did - then she was basing her opinions on stories that were thousands of years old and written by poets, most of whom had never even met any of us. I wished at that moment I hadn't grown so damn respectful of her privacy - it would've been so easy just to breach her mind and see what she was thinking, how she felt, why she hadn't left. But that would've felt wrong, and… too easy. I kind of liked the not knowing. The challenge. The novelty.

So I lay listening, with not a clue in the world what I was going to wake up to the next morning. Was I anxious? No, not really. Fear and anxiety were wasted on me. But I did lie awake thinking, brooding, until finally I fell asleep long past midnight.