Prompt #018 - Black

Prompt # 018 - Black

In Shadow

Time Frame: After Maria Di Angelo’s Death

Pairing: Vague Hades/Marie

POV: Hades

**

“Without black, no color has any depth. But if you mix black with everything, suddenly there's shadow - no, not just shadow, but fullness. You've got to be willing to mix black into your palette if you want to create something that's real.”

-Amy Grant

**

He hasn’t seen the sky for six months—not since the last council. Not since her. Upon his throne of shadows and death, Hades sits, having ordered Persephone away—wanting only to be alone in this blackness this is his and his alone.

She is dead, and it isn’t fair. Sweet, kind Maria.

He glances upwards towards the shadowed semblance of a sky. He is simultaneously furious and empty—Zeus had no right to kill his Maria, attempt to murder his children. If the places had been reversed: a prophecy made about a child of Zeus overthrowing Hades, Hades’ actions would have been shocking: out of line. To kill a son or daughter of Zeus would have been unacceptable.

But because the situations are not reversed, Maria is dead, his children forced to hide, and he is once again trapped in the underworld while Zeus remains no worse-for-the-wear.

Rage floods him, and his pale, thin fingers grip the obsidian armrests of his throne. Just because drew the short straw in the beginning, he is destined to eternity of forever being below his brothers, forever underground while they reign in the world above.

Unfair, he thinks, unfair that Zeus should get the wide open skies as his domain: clear and vast and beautiful. Unfair, he thinks, that Poseidon should rule the immense oceans: blue and open and endless. Unfair, he thinks, that he is forced to remain in this dark black abyss beneath the world of the living,

But it is a necessary job. The death is more important that the sea and the sky, he realizes. For it is their people, their subjects that matter. And it is only death that is a true part of them. When humans fade from the earth, the sea and sky will remain, but death will be a distant memory. And without humans, the gods will fade with them: forever tied to their initiative and ingenuity.

As god of the dead, Hades is more in tune with the human world than his brothers that rule among them.

He is needed, he is necessary…but no one sees.

He is an outcast—the shadow of the gods. He is exiled from Olympus, his children finding no acceptance, his domain feared and hated.

He is cursed to live the rest of eternity in shadow—gazing longingly upward at a black sky.

~fin~