Disclaimer: I don't own Trials of Apollo

APOLLO XX

A heart-to-heart talk
Hades says some bizarre things
I don't understand

"Thank you." The words were a rough husk, a far cry from how Apollo was used to hearing his voice, but at least they were words again. There would be no singing or even impressive refrains of poetry with this voice, but even being able to talk again was a vast improvement – and more than Apollo had feared, given the source of the curse.

Hades scoffed. "I had no desire to listen to that unholy racket," he said dismissively, but he didn't pull his hand back despite a twitch that seemed as though he'd considered it, for a moment.

Apollo wasn't sure what to make of that – not Hades considering pulling his hand back, that was less surprising than Hades reaching out in the first place, but the fact that Hades had chosen not to. Hades had defended him from the Arai, too – an equal exchange because Apollo had certainly not held back once the first curse hit his uncle with a vengeance that made all too much sense, seeing as it was a curse – and as he felt the surprising warmth of his uncle's power run through him, chasing away remnants of the lesser curses until only the coil around his throat and the uneasy feeling that he couldn't reach any arrows remained, his mind started presenting him with other moments.

His uncle had had no reason to defend Asclepius' ascension, but he had done – even before that, he'd rescued Apollo and Asclepius from the mob they should have been able to defeat, if not for Orion's earlier attack leaving them too vulnerable. Apollo was certain he would still have won that fight – he would not be an Olympian god if opponents of that ilk could destroy him – but that Hades had interceded at all had been strange at the time, and seemed no less strange in hindsight.

Except it was far from the only time Hades had intervened on his behalf. Orion sprang to mind, the giant ignoring Hades entirely until Hades forced himself into the fight. He'd stood guard while he recuperated, dragged him through rivers – and away from Styx, when she'd threatened his children, threatened Will.

There were logical reasons for all of the interventions, of course, but a small, traitorous part of Apollo was starting to feel something a bit like disbelief that his uncle would somehow intervene every time, and not always only when Apollo was in desperate need.

The only thing that didn't make sense was this – the healing, when Apollo was the god of healing and Hades was the god of the Underworld, of the dead and everything Apollo wasn't. It had helped, but Hades hadn't needed to, and it went against everything he expected from his uncle.

And now he was healed, or near enough healed. Why was Hades still channelling strength into him?

Apollo's fingers dug into the armour over Hades' shoulder, his own power hitching for a moment in confusion before he brought it back under control and pushed it through Hades' essence once more, chasing away the echoes of Demeter's ice and shying away from the prickles of lightning on instinct until Apollo forced it to address that curse, too.

No matter how much the static charges made him want to cower.

"This curse is from Styx." Hades' observation cut through his thoughts, and he looked up at his uncle – even sat down as they were, Hades still insisted on being a few inches taller, apparently – to see dark flames regarding him with an unreadable expression.

It hadn't been a question, but Apollo let out a breath and nodded his head in agreement.

"It fits," he agreed in a voice that was still too hoarse, still rasping rather than melodic, and blinked, startled, as Hades' grip on his own shoulder tightened for a moment, something that felt a lot like agitation swirling through his essence.

It was a natural conclusion of entwining their essences so deeply as they healed each other, but still Apollo found himself surprised when he realised he could sense a torrent of emotions behind Hades' carefully guarded expressions. He couldn't remember a time when Hades' face wasn't impassive or furious, but the swirling of his essence betrayed a depth of emotion that made sense, but had never occurred to Apollo.

They were not so entwined that Apollo could confidently isolate and identify each flicker of emotion, but he could catch impressions of the ones closer to the surface. Fury was an easy one to read, and agitation flickered around. Both were unsurprising – Hades had not asked to return to the Pit, had not asked to face the Arai for what Apollo suspected was not the first time. It was the other ones, some degree of fondness which must have been reserved for Nico and if Apollo was optimistic, Will, and something that was unmistakable as concern, that he hadn't expected.

Apollo didn't have the faintest idea what was causing concern to spike in his uncle's essence so distinctively that he could feel and identify it with ease.

A faint strain of confusion swirled its way into existence, before being snuffed out by a flash of… understanding? Comprehension?

Hades yanked his hand back as though Apollo had burned him, pulling away from his touch entirely, and Apollo let his hand fall to his side.

"Apollo…" his uncle said, the words almost a growl and simmering with the same emotions he had just sensed – far more emotion than his uncle usually allowed to show in his voice. Apollo pulled a reassuring smile onto his face; it felt fake, even to him, but that didn't stop him.

"The curses will fade in time," he said, deliberately continuing the topic of Styx and her latest bout of vengeance – of course she'd stripped him of the abilities he'd sworn off of, the justice was poetic even if it was a form of poetry Apollo couldn't say he was enamoured with when he was the one on the receiving end of it – and allowing Hades the dignity of not being forced to confront what he'd inadvertently learnt about his uncle. "I'm sure of it." His voice broke on the second word, betraying a degree of his own concern because curses tended not to stick forever on gods, but this was the dues for a broken oath on the Styx and the rules for those were different, but he refused to back down.

Hades dark eyes bored into his, his uncle not replying to the hanging fruit of a non-emotionally-charged (for Hades) topic and instead feeling more like an assessment. It took Apollo a moment to realise that if he had been feeling Hades' emotions, then the link had probably gone both ways.

It took him less than a moment to realise he really, really did not like that.

"We should keep moving," he said, pushing himself to his feet and pretending he was completely fine – physically, his wounds had all gone, and the only curses that lingered were the ones that made him sound like a centuries-long chain smoker and the yawning gap where the sensation of his bow should be. Mentally…

Well, Apollo wasn't planning on tackling that.

"Staying in one place down here seems like a bad idea," he continued, uncomfortably aware that Hades had yet to stand, and was still staring at him with black flames that seemed to be trying to sear directly into his essence. "I can keep watch if you need a bit longer?" he offered, recalling how the Acheron had rendered his uncle near-comatose. "You took a worse hit from-"

"Apollo, be quiet."

The words – the tone – left no room for argument, and Apollo's jaw clacked shut almost of its own accord. He didn't really need an excuse not to talk – he was delighted that he could, that Styx's curse had deigned to let him have at least that much back, but it still pained him to hear what had become of his voice. That didn't make the way Hades was looking at him any easier to handle.

"There is nothing in our immediate vicinity right now," Hades continued, gesturing to the wide expanse of membrane. He was right, of course – they had a clear line of sight in all directions far enough that not even Orion would be able to sneak up on them. "Time may be of the essence but that is no excuse to rush ahead foolishly."

Apollo thought about Will, worrying over him and how long he'd been gone, about Asclepius' gentle misdirection as he reassured the demigods that he and Hades would be fine despite knowing better, about Nico and whatever plan the three of them were concocting and carrying out from within the confines of Nico's bedroom in Hades' palace, and disagreed. The faster the quest was over, the sooner he could rest easy knowing that the prophecy would not signify his bright son and his son's boyfriend being dragged down into Tartarus after all.

His uncle didn't budge. Apollo wondered if it was the first time he'd ever been taller than his uncle. It felt strange… wrong, somehow. Hades never let anyone else be the tallest in the room, not even Zeus.

The only conclusion Apollo could come to was that Hades needed to rest for longer. Maybe he'd missed a curse during their healing session, which rankled against his pride as a healer – he might be used to being second best to Asclepius, but he was still not used to failing – but he reminded himself that Hades had been the one to pull away.

The reason why clobbered him over the head once again, rudely refusing to let Apollo push it from his mind to never be thought of again.

He really didn't like the way Hades was looking at him, a searching gaze that made him want to duck behind cover – not that there was any where they were, because its clear lines of sight was why Hades had led them there in the first place.

"Apollo." There was something heavy about the way his name fell from Hades' lips, and it trapped Apollo where he was, cutting off any avenues for escape that he might have been able to otherwise find. "You…"

Hades never hesitated, not in all the millennia that Apollo had known his uncle. There was an echo of Nico in his expression, a frustration he recalled from when Nico had been told he couldn't help, that the best thing for him to be doing was something completely different to what he wanted to do.

Black flames finally flickered away, scanning the barren landscape surrounding him, but Apollo didn't – couldn't – relax. The air between them was still charged, still heavy with suspense, with expectation, and his body wouldn't move. Something was coming – not physically, not a new threat to face, but something to fill the gap between them, and Apollo didn't know what it was but he did know that whatever it was, he wasn't ready for it.

Hades' next words were slow and measured, low but clearly audible even if Apollo wasn't the god of music with a keen ear to match.

"I did not return to this place solely for Nico's benefit," his uncle said – confessed, the words were a confession, the tone was that of a confessor. Apollo froze at the unexpectedness of it, once again feeling like one of the ice goddess' statues, but it didn't seem like Hades was done. "If my intent had been to simply ensure Nico never set foot in here again, I would have stopped him through any means necessary and been content with that."

"But… the prophecy," Apollo protested faintly. "Darkness-"

"I do not care for prophecies, as you must know," Hades interrupted him. Apollo did know, remembered the cursing of his oracle with no small burst of frustration bordering on betrayed anger – he'd sent her to warn Hades, to protect his children; his uncle had had no right to curse her for it. "Nor do I care for the greater scheme of things beyond that which affects my domain. My foolish brother has long since seen to that."

"Prophecies can't be avoided," Apollo reminded him, wincing at the raw rasp of his voice. "Darkness-"

"As long as it was not my own, I had no care for what might fulfil that part of the blasted thing," Hades dismissed. "You yourself have frequently reminded us that prophecies are fickle and need not mean the obvious."

There was something pointed in there, almost a mild accusation that Apollo was being a hypocrite for interfering in a prophecy, for daring to presume he understood what the Delphic words meant. Apollo ignored it, knew that Hades believed he had gone beyond his constraints in interfering and attempting to control the meaning of a prophecy, but with his son already determined to take sunshine for his own, the risk was worth it. His uncle's knowledge about prophecies was rudimentary at best.

"So why did you come?" he asked, rather than acknowledge the silent accusation. It was still a dangerous conversation topic, something warned him, a lump in the back of his throat that had nothing to do with his rasping voice. Hades' motivation – the fact that Hades was willing to divulge his motivation – was no doubt complex and riddled with landmines Apollo had no way of avoiding, but now the topic had been alluded to, Apollo was undeniably curious.

He hadn't claimed the domain of knowledge for no reason – he craved knowing things, always sought for the hows and the whys even when hindsight revealed that they'd have been better left unlearned. Curiosity killed the cat, mortals had started saying in Ireland sometime around the eighteenth century, a bastardisation of Ben Jonson's original care killed the cat – which Shakespeare had borrowed for his own purposes a year later, seeing the genius in that particular line – and Apollo had never been able to dispute either the original poets or the later reporter.

Right then, on the cusp of an exposé of his secretive uncle's inner thoughts, Apollo felt like it was about to be particularly apt.

"I returned here because of you."

Hades' words were slow and measured, each one weighted heavily enough that Apollo thought they ought to sink straight to the membrane that passed for the ground, but they were not hesitant.

For their perceived weight, they took a long time to sink in, floating around Apollo in a haze of disbelief before settling against his essence and pressing in as though they were the sky to his Atlas.

"Me?" he squeaked, somewhat belatedly, as they finally forced their way into his mind and demanded a comprehension Apollo couldn't give.

Hades' gaze was a different sort of weight, yet no less crushing. The slight hesitation in his face, and the soft, awkward clearing of his throat softened the blow somewhat, but Apollo still found himself no better equipped to deal with his uncle's next words as they carefully came into existence.

"You are… not intolerable," Hades said, almost tentatively as though he wasn't sure how Apollo would take his admittance.

Apollo couldn't even think of anything to say to that, let alone consider opening his own mouth to react. Silence hung between them, pregnant with something – expectation, awkwardness, gods never admitted to not hating each other – before Hades' posture stiffened into something a lot like determination, or resignation, or maybe a complicated combination of the two, and he spoke again, confidence starting to build the more he said.

"In fact… of my siblings' children, I find you the most tolerable," he continued, the edge of awkwardness still there, and no wonder because Apollo had never heard any god talk so openly about not hating another, and certainly not his reclusive eldest uncle. "Barring my beautiful wife, of course," he clarified after a moment that could have spanned a mortal heartbeat or a mortal lifetime. If he was another god, Apollo might have thought there was a smirk in those words – no, there was definitely a wryness to the clarification, Hades well aware that it didn't need to be said but leaving no room for misunderstandings nonetheless.

It helped, a bit, to centre Apollo's thoughts, the infinitesimal tonal shift enough to jerk his mind into some sort of progress again, no matter how sluggish and confused it was.

"Me?" he managed again, not a squeak the second time but rasping too thickly to just be his ruined voice at play. Apollo determinedly didn't analyse his own reactions deep enough to identify what else was involved, but from the look Hades gave him, his uncle seemingly had no restraint on that, although to Apollo's relief, he mercifully refrained from calling him out on his evasion or the emotions that were threatening to well up.

"Who else would I be speaking with?" Hades demanded instead. "The denizen whose form on which we sit?" The sarcasm was sharp, and far more like the uncle Apollo expected. It helped centre him a little more, despite the unfathomable meaning that seemed to be behind his words.

Apollo had no choice but to concede to that point, at least.

"Why?" he rasped, unable to form more than a monosyllabic response, to clarify which why he was asking – why was he Hades'… least not-favourite? Why was that enough for Hades to accompany him to Tartarus? Why was Hades telling him this?

Perhaps Apollo couldn't clarify because he didn't know himself which one he meant.

Hades didn't respond for so long, Apollo began to wonder if it was too vague a question, if the single syllable had stumped his uncle as much as his own mind was short-circuiting. If it wasn't for the fact that the dark, dark fires of his uncle's eyes didn't leave him for a single instant, he might have thought Hades didn't intend on answering at all.

He started to wonder that anyway.

After what felt like an eternity, Hades shifted where he sat. It was a small movement, normal for demigods and mortals and something Apollo himself had got used to doing during his months as Lester, but for a god as far removed from human impulses as the one before him, it was a deliberate action designed to capture Apollo's attention, and hold it there, regardless of the fact that Apollo couldn't break away from the topic even if he tried.

"The Pit is cruel, and unforgiving, even to the most powerful of gods," Hades started, words slow and unhurried, each one thought out before falling into existence. "It is also the near antithesis of you and most of what you represent."

Apollo knew that. It was hard not to, with the oppressiveness of the Pit and its primordial surrounding him from the moment he arrived, slowly moving to try and smother the brightness of the sun and leeching his strength away at a glacial but steady rate. It was the whole reason why he'd been adamant that Will would never step foot inside Tartarus, why he'd been so furious at finding Asclepius trapped there.

It was impossible to think that Hades had the same thoughts about him, however, but his uncle was not done speaking and Apollo had no words to say regardless.

"I thought it would be a pity, if the Pit destroyed you," the older god finished, his eyes finally flitting away from Apollo to look elsewhere, signalling the end of his confession.

It had taken him long enough, part of Apollo thought a little hysterically, as despite itself his mind started to whirl, re-assessing events with a new viewpoint, a different lens through which to observe his uncle's actions and reactions.

Any thoughts he might have entertained about Hades lying, or perhaps exaggerating, found themselves systematically dismissed as Apollo's mind sorted through memories, seeing the small things Hades had done that had seemed a little strange, a little out of sorts, unusual in a way Apollo didn't have the wherewithal to analyse when he had the quest to worry about instead, in a new light.

He still couldn't actually believe that Hades had come down specifically to aid him – to protect him, even, if his uncle's words were taken rather more literally – but he could see how those actions could seem protective, in the right light. That maybe those moments when Hades had interceded against Orion, when he'd stood back to back against the Arai and batted them away, weren't just protective by coincidence, but by some form of intent.

Why, he almost asked again, this time with the specification of why do you tolerate me enough to protect me in mind, but he knew that was an answer he wouldn't be able to take. Not now, and likely not ever.

Perhaps that was one piece of knowledge that would truly kill the cat, more so than even Apollo could take.

He swallowed the plaintive question back, where it couldn't destroy him, and instead dredged up what was, in this context, a safer, more appropriate thing to say.

"I… thank you." He meant it, too, a small bundle of warmth coiling within his essence that was relieved for the help, for aid unasked for yet given nonetheless. It reminded him of the demigods, of mortals with their big hearts and determination filled faces. Of Meg, his beloved demigod master who loved with her actions more than her words, of his children who gave him everything he asked for and more despite the fact he'd taken too much from them already, and given them pittance in return.

Hades didn't say you're welcome, or something as inane as thank me by not getting yourself destroyed, like some of the aforementioned demigods would have done. In fact, he didn't say anything at all, still looked across the exposed plain of membrane they were resting in the centre of rather than face Apollo directly, but his head tilted, just slightly, in an unmistakable acknowledgement of the words.

That was fine. That was more than fine. Clearly Hades had reached his limit of emotional confessions, which had been a much higher limit than Apollo would ever have credited his uncle with, and Apollo himself was definitely far past his limit in that regard, too – especially when it came to receiving them.

The silence that settled over them was one that could be classified as comfortable. Apollo didn't reach out to help Hades heal any further, nor did his uncle do the same, but barring Styx's curses, Apollo was more or less curse-free once more, and Hades' posture suggested the same about his uncle. It was better for them to sit in silence – comfortable silence – with their backs to each other, keeping a watch for any unwelcome company, while they finished healing and regaining their strength.

Olympus knew they were going to need all the strength they could muster to finish the quest.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari