There's a funny thing that happens once one has lived the years that Medea has. Every hero's story starts to look the same.
Really, by now, Medea can only quite see a distinction in just how far each hero is going to fall on their plummet from Olympus.
Will they be a mirror of Hercules?: A vicious narcissist claiming to be a victim of circumstance. A scourge on any who hold love for him. A murderer. A tyrant. A legend.
Odysseus?: Impressive and clever. Capable, loyal, and yet too prideful to heed the counsel of his betters. Those who follow him meet their ends at the hands of their own leader's self righteousness.
Jason?: Selfish. Vain. Handsome. He who leaves behind the corpses of those whose hearts he still carries, bloody and raw and beating in his unworthy mortal hands. He who lays waste to the powerful for his own self interest, only to let it all be for nothing when he takes his own life and climbs his way to Elysium using the backs of those he damned.
Medea has seen variations of these stories come and go during her two lifetimes. She's become talented at guessing which will be which.
Juliette Aster will live the same life as Orpheus. Kind natured and intelligent. A product of Aphrodite's weak heart. A patron of the arts. Driven by her love for another - by her love for a demigod greater than herself. She has spent her life reaping consequences for the wrongdoings of her patron, and that devotion will be her undoing.
Medea figured Jason Grace to be Theseus. Powerful. Prideful. Annoyingly resilient. Like a cockroach. A demigod of legendary power set on glory and prepared to use the women he's ensnared however he pleases to achieve it.
When Juliette became the Triumvirate's prisoner, Medea expected the events following to be confirmation of this. She sighed and leaned back and waited for the girl, like Ariadne before her, like Patroclus, like Medea herself, to be left out to sea to drown in the great hero's sins.
Yet here he is.
"I take it you are here to steal my favorite toy," Medea sighs. She is mildly impressed that the two demigods have made it this far. Caligula's pandai aren't often so lax with security. For Meg McCaffery and Jason Grace to have reached Medea's research vessel with all eight limbs attached, Medea suspects quite a few large-eared heads will be rolling at the next staff meeting.
The boy has to reach a hand out to stop his younger companion from charging her. The girl has bristled, snarling her ridiculous little battle cry as Medea drapes one leg over the other and takes a sip of wine from her chalice. The fluorescent lights in her lab are horrendous. She has to squint across the white tiled room at them, but she's found they are the only bulbs that will not affect the cooking time of her brews.
One of which is steadily boiling beside her desk, the violet liquid in the bronze cauldron smoking a toxic green. She'll need to stir that soon. Then it can join its duplicates in the storage halls.
"Where is she?" The boy asks her, voice quiet and threatening. Medea smiles.
The medical table behind her is empty. The straps are hanging limp, burnt in places, stained in others. She heard these fools coming the moment they set foot onboard the first ship. She made a point to leave their friend's bloodstains on the floor for their viewing pleasure.
"With her master, of course."
The child manages a step away from the boy. "If you stupid idiots hurt her-"
"The pun seems rather drab at this point, but I believe that ship has sailed," Medea sighs, gesturing to the stained tiles. She watches both intruders notice them. McCaffery's tough-girl act falters.
The boy does not react, but thunder rolls in the sky.
"What did you do?"
Medea raises an eyebrow. "Hmm?"
Jason Grace continues to stare at the drops of violet on the tiles. At the holes burned into the floor in places. At the needles on the surgical tray. At the cauldron.
The sorceress sips her wine again, unable to hold back the giddy smile. She does so enjoy breaking the hearts of young heroes.
"What," He repeats. "Did you do?"
Medea giggles. She can't help it. Gods, he looks so much like her late husband. Or is that just the name that they share that's making this moment so sweet?
That expression of agony in his eyes...how Medea wishes she could have seen that in her Jason. Or in the eyes of the whore that he left her for - just before she pulled them right out of the wench's skull.
"I put her to use," She tells him sweetly. She twirls a strand of dark hair around a finger. "She was quite entertaining. I did enjoy listening to that horrible voice of hers cry out for mercy. She asked me to kill her quite a few times. You'll be relieved, of course, to know that I did not grant her request." Medea sets down her chalice and stands, long black dress sweeping her ankles. "No, I needed her in working shape. She had resources within her. Valuable resources."
Medea steps around her desk, approaching the demigods slowly. The McCaffery girl looks shellshocked. The poor thing will probably be waking up in a cold sweat for months once Caligula returns her to her so very disappointed stepfather. The boy has not looked away from the bits of his lover splashed across Medea's laboratory.
"Tell me what you did," He says again. Quietly. Shining blue eyes focused downward.
Medea sighs impatiently. "Do you really need me to explain it to you?"
Finally, Jason Grace meets her eyes.
If Medea did not know better, she would think the son of Jupiter had just struck her with lightning. But, no. All he did was connect their gazes. That thrill through her body was electricity of her own making.
The darkness in the boy's eyes...Yes. It thrills her.
"Tell me what you did," Jason Grace demands. "So that I know how much to hurt you."
Medea's heart skips. She cannot tell if it does so in fear...or excitement.
She laughs breathlessly and curls her ruby lips upwards.
"Did you pass through the halls of vases on your way here?"
He stares her down. Meg McCaffery is the one who nods nervously, shaking and attempting unsuccessfully to match Jason Grace's glower.
Medea steps to her surgical tray, the click of her heels echoing off the tiled walls. "You know, undiluted nectar is toxic to demigods. Even a sip will burn your little bodies to ash from the inside out. You simply aren't made to withstand it." She picks up her surgical shears and brandishes them. "Regular demigods, that is."
Jason Grace seems to be understanding. His eyes are getting darker by the word.
Medea's heart is racing. Her blood is simmering. She is giddy. She has not felt so alive in millennia.
"Heartbreaks are different. Thanks to his curse, their blood carries a piece of Zeus' essence within it. A portion of his divinity. Pure nectar is not only nontoxic to their systems," She snips the shears in the air, smirking. "It enhances them. If they live through the pain without losing their minds, of course."
Meg McCaffery is staring up at her older companion, waiting for permission to strike. Jason Grace is eerily still.
"Enhances them how?" He questions roughly.
Medea smiles. "An excellent question, darling. The truth is, I have no idea!" She throws her hands up and shrugs. "Observing her body's changes is not the end goal here, just an added interest of mine. I am more focused, as of now, on the healing aspect of pure nectar in a Heartbreak's veins. After all," Medea sets her scissors down.
"I needed enough blood from her to fill all of those vases."
There is a beat where not a soul dares move.
The boy stares at her, bright blues swimming with pain, strong jaw slack, tanned arms shaking beneath the sleeves of his battle-worn dress shirt, and Medea realizes that...
No, he does not look like her Jason at all.
Her Jason never cared about anything so much in his entire life.
"I bled the little bitch dry." Medea snips, heart quaking with excitement. "And then I healed her until she was filled up enough to drain her out again."
If it weren't for her instinctive wind shield, Medea would have been reduced to ash in less than a second.
Lightning strikes just where she was standing. It blasts apart the roof of the ship. The entire upper half of Medea's research vessel is ripped clean off like the hood of a chest. The ship lists to the side, electricity cracking along every metallic surface to be seen. There's a maelstrom swirling above them. The formerly pristine white tiles are rubble. Everything is rubble.
Jason Grace is standing, Meg McCaffery shielded beneath his arm, on the only untouched patch of what is now a floating island of rock and lightning.
The moon is high in the sky.
There is laughter in the air.
"Did you hear her, Jason Grace?"
Medea's chest is heaving. Her magic is purring beneath her skin. The wind is raging in a deafening, deadly swirl around the open ship deck. Rocks, rubble, even entire swords are being carried at high speeds all around them.
Jason shields himself and the girl with the winds, but barely.
The boy is too enraged to keep much control over the skies. Medea plans for that to be his doom.
From the eye of the tempest, Medea raises her hand and calls forth her venti. Her dark hair whips around her. She smiles a sharp toothed grin as her pets arrive at her side, brushing her ankles, her arms, her chest. She feels their power influence hers. Strengthen it. It makes her mind sizzle with bliss.
She rakes her eyes down the boy's form, allowing her minions to encircle the foolish demigods.
"Did you hear her crying out your name?"
Yes.
He must have.
Medea can tell from the way his face contorts in agony.
McCaffery releases a battle cry, and the venti, a menagerie of creatures formed from wind and rain and lightning, charge to defend their mistress. Medea's pets become a whirl of black wind that cloaks the girl from view. She can hear the clashing of the child of Demeter's swords, but she pays it little attention.
Her focus is needed elsewhere. Jason Grace is seeking vengeance.
Medea meets every strike of Jason's gladius with a blast of wind.
Truthfully, Juliette Aster had done little more than squirm and cry beneath her restraints. Medea had thoroughly enjoyed watching the usually loud and brazen girl turn to a squealing coward as she pumped the drink of the gods into her cursed, black veins. But it had hardly been the great show she is making it out to be. Just a little girl finally being shown what a pathetic whelp she really is.
The boy looks close to tears, though. He looks like he wants to hurt her. Badly. And that makes Medea's knees tremble with anticipation.
"She whispered to you when I drained her out for the first time!" recounts the sorceress, shouting over the roaring of the wind. Jason yells and tries a stab at her midsection. Medea wraps his blade in a tendril of sky and forces it from his grasp. He grunts his anger and rolls over one shoulder to avoid her next projection of razor sharp air.
Medea cackles. "'I want to see you,' she said. 'For real this time.' So romantic."
The mumblings of a child delirious from blood loss. Nothing more. But the words pull a cry like a wounded animal from the boy, and the darkness in his eyes swells so greatly that Medea's attacks stop landing. Her magic starts to come an instant too late to her defense. Her breath catches in her chest as she watches the boy let go of his propriety.
His Roman praetorian honor is cast aside, and Medea is facing a boy raised by wolves.
Jason Grace releases a sound that sends sparking rockets through Medea's lungs. He meets Medea's next attack with a wind blast of his own. She tries to block it. She fails.
Her magic fights to respond to her, and it feels as if the winds, the sky is pulled right out of the cells in her body.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Medea laughs cruelly, giggles like a thrilled little child as the boy's sword returns to his hand and the night sky is split by lightning.
"Have you ever seen pure nectar enter a mortal body?"
A clash of wind on wind.
"The sight is extraordinary!"
A crack of lightning. Rain plummeting from the clouds. It feels like needles sent down from the heavens. Medea shudders in exhilaration, remembering the smell of Juliette Aster's blood. The sound of her cries. The sensation of her skin splitting beneath the points of Medea's syringes.
The boy wants so badly to kill her. She feels fevered from head to toe, pleased to the point of deliriousness at the knowledge that he will fail.
Medea is pure magic.
She cannot be beaten.
"Her black veins turned yellow! Golden and shining."
Wind on wind.
Gold on flesh.
Medea is bleeding. But she is not bleeding half as much as his lover did on Medea's table. Bits of that girl are still beneath Medea's fingernails. She laughs in his face when he gets close enough to strike the wall behind her with his sword. She smiles at the memory of making his heart's desire scream out for her mother and brother and lover only to go utterly unheard.
"Her ears bled black," Medea recounts, sneering. "Her eyes and mouth smoked like a spitted pig's."
A scream tears from Jason's throat. He snaps.
Medea's stomach is airborn briefly before the tidalwave of wind that he emits blasts her from her feet. She hurtles through the night sky and right into the only surviving steel beam. The force of the collision dents it, bends it like paper.
Pain blooms. Erupts. She chokes. Her spine bends and bends and bends until she hears and feels something within her crack. And then it feels like...nothing.
She falls forward.
Medea's face slams into the sharp tile shards littered across the deck. She gasps.
What...
No.
What just happened?
Her legs will not move, no matter how hard she tries, so Medea calls forth the winds to lift her from the floor.
Jason Grace calls them back.
Her magic cannot hear her.
It does not hear her.
Medea is powerless.
No.
What?
Medea is powerless.
The boy approaches her, and the winds do take her into their embrace - for just long enough to prop her against the steel beam. Her legs are useless. Medea cannot feel the deck of the ship beneath her broken body. She can feel the cold bite of the wind, but only on the skin of her face and her neck.
Everything beneath the neckline of her dress has gone numb.
A shadow covers her. She looks up.
The excitement she was high from changes. It shifts, distorts until Medea feels it for the first time since the Fields of Punishment.
Terror.
The son of Jupiter is simply looking at her. Looking through her. Right through to her bones - her shattered bones - and to the blood in her veins.
She wants to hide it away. She wants to cover herself as if she is nude. She feels flustered. Ashamed.
Medea cannot be beaten.
She cannot be killed.
She...
Jason Grace is not even blinking. Medea can feel the winds caging her in like the confines of a casket. She is buried. Lost to the earth beneath the wrath of the Sky.
'I needed enough blood from her to fill all of those vases.'
"Why?" He asks.
A simple question.
One she has heard a thousand times.
Medea scoffs. Blood splatters from her lips. She can feel it trail down her chin.
And then nothing. She does not feel when it lands on the bodice of her dress.
"That is always what you heroes ask," She spits. "Always 'why?' As if you cannot comprehend that progress may be procured through suffering. As if your feeble lives are not built upon the suffering of those deemed lesser than you in centuries past. As if it were not WE who first suffered so that you could stand, high and mighty above us, and ask us why we seek retribution!"
Jason. Her Jason. Who vowed to be hers for all of time.
She loved him.
She loved him.
She loved him.
She loved him, and he ruined her. He ruined their children. His selfish mortal heart had torn her open and left her to the crows. He feasted on her potential. On her wasted greatness. And when she was all but picked through, he discarded her.
He never even said goodbye.
"I have lived for too long in the shadow of Olympus' heroes!" Medea screams. "I have been pulled from my home and my power for seeking retribution for the injustices their heroes inflicted on me! Unprovoked and unforgiveable. I will not be asked WHY I SEEK ROME'S JUSTICE!"
Caligula saw her. He sees her. He found her beaten form in the ruins of that shopping mall Jason Grace and his lackeys left her in. He raised her anew. He saw her potential, and he harnessed it.
Medea finally has what she always wanted.
She is finally being acknowledged.
Jason Grace presses the edge of his sword into Medea's throat. She snarls at him, eyes burning in their sockets.
"Talk, and I'll make it quick."
No he will not.
"Refuse, and I'll make sure you suffer more than she ever did."
He is lying. He is going to do that regardless.
She knows because that is what she would do. What she did.
Her Jason stole from her just what Medea stole from Juliette. Her pride. Her innocence. Her peace of mind and the ownership of her own body.
The very power from her veins.
Medea laughs bitterly.
"One girl nearly ended the Hunters of Artemis. She felled a drakon single-handedly. What do you think my lord will be able to do when I give him an army just like her?"
Medea revels in the pallor of the boy's face. She does love breaking the hearts of young heroes.
At least she will die in the sweetness of her murderer's agony.
"Her blood was the final ingredient I needed," Medea taunts. "All I needed to bring your little camps to their knees."
The boy shakes his head, digging his blade into the flat of Medea's chest. She does not feel it.
"The New Sun is rising, Jason Grace. Your petty gods will not rule from on high for much longer."
Something strange flashes across the boy's face. The threat does not pull the anxious response from him that she was expecting. He looks...apathetic to the fate of Olympus.
When he raises his blade to her throat, what he says is "I hope that you feel helpless right now."
Like she did.
Helpless.
Powerless.
Medea's useless limbs lift with the winds. Her eyes stay on Jason Grace's. They are as empty and cruel and blue as his father's.
He says nothing else. Neither does Medea. She cannot.
Fairly soon, she is sinking to the bottom of the bay. Fairly soon, her lungs are invaded by the rage of the Sea, and she wonders what stake in this boy's revenge the great Poseidon might hold.
Medea reaches her conclusion as she sinks back down into the realm of the dead. For good. Forever.
Achilles.
She never would have guessed.
Caligula is bored.
The throne room is silent. Dull. He is kicked back on his throne, staring at the base of the staircase from the deck with his chin rested on his palm.
Caligula always enjoyed theatre. What those uninvolved in the arts do not understand is the amount of preparation that goes into putting on a good show. An impressive production is all about atmosphere and timing.
The atmosphere is set. Caligula's throne room is dark, lit only by Greek fire torches every few feet. The staircase down holds all the weapons of his defeated foes from the last few millennia - an intimidating number of them to remind Apollo just who he is dealing with. Caligula's best pandai are stationed on either side of him. Medea should be wrapping up handling Jason Grace and Nero's ward. Apollo should be walking down those stairs any minute now, and Caligula will have him clapped in manacles for transport to Helios' prison, where he may transfer the fallen god's energy to himself and rise to his true potential as the New Sun. All he must do is wait until the timing is right.
So, for now...Caligula is bored.
He sighs, flicking at his gold cuff link. His eyes wander to the teenage girl lying at his feet.
When Medea told him her plans for the Heartbreak, he had agreed without complaint. Keeping a cordolium has never particularly interested Caligula. They require too much upkeep. He briefly bound a lamia to his service during the first years of his reign.
Lamia eat far too many children to be worth the effort, though. Feeding the creature had become a laborious pain in Caligula's royal behind.
This one does not seem to dine on mortals, thankfully. Medea certainly did a number on it, though.
When they first received her as prisoner, Juliette Aster had been fair to look at. Fair enough that Caligula almost went back on his word and claimed her for himself. Long waves of rose gold, bright green eyes that bleed scarlet with just a brush of his fingers. She is a bit young for his tastes, but he'd be lying if he claimed not to understand Nero's infatuation with the girl.
But, his court sorceress had insisted, and Caligula is a generous ruler. He allowed his witch to have her fun so long as she delivered on her promise to him.
A potion. A potion to turn any being's will into that of a Heartbreak's. With enough of it to administer to his enemies and the stores of Tiberii donum that are somewhere in Commodus' possession, he will be able to make the world bend to his pleasure.
He thinks he will begin the endeavor at the next meeting called for the Triumvirate. A drop or two into the pitcher of wine should be more than enough. His colleagues never have watched their alcohol consumption.
Caligula absently prods the girl's shoulder with his gold toed dress shoe. The nudge rolls her onto her back.
He grimaces.
He had forgotten. Mortals are disgusting.
Medea never bothered to change her prisoner out of the thin pink stola she arrived in. By now, it is torn, burnt, and flimsy, hanging limp from her shoulder down to her mid thigh. The girl's face, once smooth and colored like sand on a shoreline, is mottled with black and yellow bruising. Her eyes are slightly sunken, the long lashes looking like blonde wolf spiders resting on either of her cheeks. What Caligula would have once considered to be an attractively long neck is pulsing. Along the delicate skin of her throat, veins glow luminescent.
Some are gold. Some are black. The skin between them burns and smokes.
Caligula sighs again and shakes his head. All this fuss Apollo is causing. All for one silly mortal girl.
The doors at the top of the stairs crash open, and Caligula sits up abruptly, heart lifting with excitement. Finally!
He arranges himself on the throne, returning to his slouched position, legs crossed, elbow resting on the arm of the chair and holding up his head by his chin. He grins down at the girl's twitching form at his feet.
She may not be very pretty at the moment, but she has the damsel in distress look down perfectly.
He waits as footsteps echo down the stairs. There are two sets descending towards him. He hears them pause to take in the weapons he has hanging from the ceiling. Good. His atmosphere is being appreciated.
The steps continue towards him, even faster now, more urgent, and Caligula smirks to himself.
The curtains are being drawn open. The show will begin now.
It is not Apollo who appears at the base of the stairs. It is Jason Grace.
Caligula frowns.
What is that witch doing?
Oh, well. He can work with this. He is nothing if not a flexible showman.
Jason Grace has been buzzing around Caligula's fleet for months. Swatting him has been on his to-do list for a while now, but who has the time?
A boy of sixteen who thinks he can dance with emperors. Hardly a threat, son of Jupiter or not.
Meg McCaffery stands at the boy's side, the blades that her stepfather gave her clutched in white knuckled fists. Caligula almost sighs. Nero has let his pets get away from him one too many times. He is ready for the day when the man is finally under his control.
"Well, hello there," He greets his new guests. "I don't suppose you've seen a rogue sun god running amuck through my things, have you? He might be hard to recognize. I hear he is looking quite pale these days."
Neither of the children laugh at Caligula's joke.
Rude.
Meg McCaffery steps forward. "Let my sister go, you creep."
Hmm? Sist-Oh, the girl.
Caligula glances down at his cordolium. He nudges her head with his shoe. It lolls to the other side, revealing her face to his guests, and Nero's ward lets out a growl like a bobcat. "No, I would rather not. She may not be of much use to me now that Medea is finished with her - pathetic little thing - but she has proved herself excellent bait thus far. And I do crave Apollo's presence. Sooooo," He sets his shoe atop her head. "I think I'll keep her. You know, for now."
"Medea is dead."
Caligula looks to Jason Grace. His eyes are fixed on the girl at his feet. Unblinking. Unwavering.
"What?" Caligula asks, sure he must have heard incorrectly.
Jason Grace adjusts his grip on his gladius, and thunder rolls outside. "Medea is dead. I killed her. Give me Juliette back, and maybe I won't kill you too."
Medea...dead?
Impossible.
Caligula stares the boy down. He is so clearly a son of the Sky. His blonde hair may be sweaty and mussed, his dress shirt battleworn, his hands and arms scarred, and his right eye swelling, but this young man is the spitting image of Jupiter. That fact annoys Caligula. It annoys him greatly. He removes his shoe from the girl's face and sits up.
"Juliette," He orders. "Awaken."