The Beloved of the God of War

13 - Secret

Ares watched her as she lay against him, soundly sleeping despite the fact that she shouldn’t have been tired at all. Sometime in the past hour, her head had lolled to the side until it came to rest on his bare shoulder, and her dark tresses spilled down his arm and tickled his skin with every breeze that snaked its way into the cave. The palest glint of muffled moonlight glimmered along the curve of her nose and cheek, as if someone had dipped a single fingertip in a pool of silver and brushed it gently, carefully, down her face.

She was so fragile, so weak. It was hard for him to think of her as a god, but there could be no mistake: if the Mark of Virgo at the base of her throat wasn’t proof enough, that she had tasted the ambrosia and nectar from Amalthea’s horn and yet lived surely was.

She looked just the same as she had when he first saw her. Her dark hair was a little longer, down to the middle of her back now, but everything else had remained untouched these past three years since she had appeared and then disappeared like a wisp of smoke. Still small and as shy as a deer. No, not shy, Ares thought. Fearful, and cautious. She had every reason to be. She had enemies who wouldn’t hesitate to snuff out her life simply because of what she was and what her existence meant to them.

That was Zeus’s plan, at least, and there was no one who would stand against him. Ares’s hand twitched where it lay in his lap.

How was it that she could be so helpless? Even the plainest of nymphs and satyrs commanded powers more fearsome. Any mortal man could easily overpower her, all the more by someone like Zeus.

Or himself.

She was right to fear him. He could destroy her with a touch, a word. A thought. She wouldn’t have a sliver of a hope of surviving. If he wrapped his hand around her throat and crushed it like he had done to so many of his enemies, would she even try to resist, or would she hang there and stare at him with those sad, pitying eyes that he would never forget -

Who did she think she was? Who did she think she was to pity him, to look with wide eyes upon his weakness, when he had never permitted anyone such a violation before? Yes, Hermes and Artemis had been there, too, and had looked upon his shame, but that he could forget, even if he couldn’t forgive: they had never tried to speak to him about it again.

They had never disgraced him.

It was her fault, Ares thought. She was the one who had made a spectacle of him. She had done all of this to him, had seen him weak and crippled and diminished. And even now, he saw it in her eyes every time she looked at him - she was remembering him as he was before, not seeing him as he was now. It didn’t matter that he had recovered and regained his godly strength and vitality since then, had cleansed himself of all his wounds and scars. It didn’t matter that he carried not a single reminder on his body of the year-long imprisonment and torture inside the Aloadae’s urn:

When he had found Astra again after three years, she had recognized him instantly, had connected the Ares of now to the Ares she had seen dragged out of the filth, weak and disgusting. She had known instantly that they were one and the same with a single glance. She had seen him. Seen through him. Had seen him as he was inside, still crippled and shamed and broken.

Still weak.

When Hermes had refused to tell him what he knew, citing the binding power of a god’s oath, Ares had shoved him aside and vowed to find the girl himself. 

Feeling her here, next to him, lying against his side and pressed skin to skin - it destroyed him, it exhilarated him. It consumed and electrified him. Why? Why did it thrill him to feel her touch, to feel her breath ghosting over his arm, knowing that she still carried the memory of his greatest humiliation? Why, whenever she shifted against him and murmured in her sleep, did his heart thrum and groan like Hephaestus’s forge where it burned deep in the gut of Mount Olympus? Why, when she was one of the pretender new gods prophesied to rend the whole of Olympus asunder, did he feel nothing of the urge to destroy her? What did it mean that he wanted to draw her closer and closer, until he didn’t know where he ended and she began?

She stirred against him, turning her head slightly so that he could feel the barest hint of her cool lips brush upon his heated skin. He nearly threw his head back and howled.

She was so weak, he thought, as he smoldered bright and heavy in the coals of the crumbling heat inside him.

So what did it mean that he was weaker than she?

“Astra,” he whispered, tasting her name on his tongue. It felt too soft and gentle to be uttered by someone like him, but he would be damned to the underworld and back before he gave it up. To say her name in secret, in the dark, where no one could hear him - this was all he would ever have. All he would ever allow himself. “Astra,” he said again, and his hand twitched in his lap again. Could he? Could he dare to run his calloused fingers over the curve of her face, feel the hint of moonlight that dusted her cheek? Would she wake?

He froze when she shifted again, and his hand that had half-risen fell back onto his thigh when he saw her eyelids flutter open. She made a confused sound, groggy and defenseless.

“Astra,” he said for the third time, but his voice was hard now, rough and unkind. “Wake up. It’s time to go.”