Chapter Text
He was born a son of Apollo, and for this, he commanded respect.
There was sunlight in his eyes, and from the time he was able to hold one, a lyre in his hands.
Where children’s mothers usually placed kisses upon their brows, laurel was wreathed around his instead. Clothed in the finest cloth and fed the finest-picked olives, Orpheus, from birth, was already set apart from the rest.
He never truly talked to his mother. This was under Apollo’s orders. A muse is immortal, yes, but also lesser at Apollo’s side. Orpheus could not be lesser. And so, his father plucked him from the cradle when he was a babe and laid him down to the mortal’s lands. He gave him but his instrument, a knife, and his voice.
“You will become the greatest musician of your time. We will make them write legends of you,” he said. His voice was feather-soft on the vowels but flint-hard on the consonants.
They began their work at once.
Orpheus learned upon a stone, but it would better be called a mountain. It was wide as a god was broad and rose so tall that the eagles nested in it. Here, Orpheus grew. Here, Orpheus played.
He played until his fingers went numb at the tips and until his nails bled. When crimson stained the lyre’s strings, he wiped it clean with a washcloth and began again.
He did not sing. His voice was a private thing. From above, the gods watched him. From below, the mortals did, too. His voice was the one thing he could keep sealed tight as Pandora’s box. He hid it well, and rarely used it.
Apollo trained him, steadying Orpheus’ calloused hands over the turtle shell and carved wood, the golden nylon strings. “Play,” he ordered, even when his son was swallowing tears, because it was both a father’s order and a god’s. Orpheus obeyed. His fingertips boasted cuts like someone had shattered pottery and taken the shards to his skin, but still, he went on.
Under the open stars, he slept, he ate, and he played. Some nights, he traced constellations with his eyes while his father took back to the heavens, searching for an exit in the spaces between them. He saw emptiness and darkness, but he did not see a way to get there. He saw no boat nor path to escape on.
They began with the basics, as all musicians do, but Orpheus quickly excelled at these. By age nine, he could play scales and arpeggios with his eyes closed, upside down, half-dead, if that were what his father asked of him.
They moved past the rudimentary technique and onto larger things.
His father asked him to compose a song. Until now, Orpheus had only been playing melodies of past.
In the few hours he now had alone to himself, he could not rest or stop. He plucked new patterns and tunes from the strings. He sucked the blood from his fingers so that he might keep going.
He wrote a song. He told his father so.
Orpheus sat, legs crossed and lyre in his lap. Apollo towered above. He would not sit. He spoke.
“Play.”
Orpheus did.
The rhythm stilted throughout. Sometimes, his hands paused awkwardly around a string, and the reverberation would fall flat. He went on, cheeks red with shame and a weight gnawing at the pit of his stomach, but he did not stop.
He glanced at his father once his song was over.
Apollo shook his head.
“Not good enough.”
They began the lessons again.
---
His hands bled permanently now. They dripped rust-red constantly, and it seemed the wounds would never heal.
Once, he made the mistake of asking for cloth bandages. The expression he earned in return made him vow to himself never to ask it again.
He kept searching the constellations. He felt himself growing thinner, no matter how much he ate. He kept going.
---
He wrote another song. And another. He did not use scroll and quill. He committed every note to memory. Fifteen years old, Orpheus did not cease.
This time, though, he had to have done something right. He played a song to the mountain goats and they knelt to listen. Every tree atop the stone twisted to hear. Satisfied, he went before his father. He sat. Apollo stood. It was a practiced routine.
“Play.”
It began staccato, and then veered into a three-part melody, slow and soft. His bloody fingers ran up and down the strings, adept at paying mind to every miniscule detail. His brow was furrowed in concentration.
It was going well. It was being played exactly as he wrote it. He hit every note, every chord, every rhythm like he was attacking it.
And then a single slip-up. His hand moved not as fast as he wanted to almost at the end of the refrain. A string muted and, for one brief note, there was no sound where there should have been one.
Orpheus cringed. He very nearly gave up then and there. If he were stronger, more rebellious, he might have cast down the lyre and yelled that that was it. That he might never play again.
His father scrutinized his every move, though, and he was not disobedient, so the harmonies continued.
When he finished, he had to force himself to pry his gaze up off the ground, to meet Apollo’s steely cerulean stare.
It had been so close to perfect. It had been almost.
Orpheus knew what was coming before his father even parted his lips.
A headshake. Crossed arms.
“Not good enough.”
The boy bowed his head. And again, the studies did not cease.
---
He was age eighteen now. Just beginning to show the signs of manhood. The baby fat sloughed from his face, leaving smooth, hard edges in its place. Tendons ran through his arms like lyre strings. When he flexed his hands, they danced. He had shot up like a sprout in the past years, tall and lean and limber. Somehow his father remained taller. They were similar in so many ways. They shared the same high brow, the same rounded nose. The same lips that curved like a bowstring and the same ears that rounded like a painter’s brushstroke.
They were nearly identical in all matters but one: Orpheus had his mother’s eyes. A muse’s eyes. They were dark, but in them, they carried the sun.
His father did not like to look at them often, but just this once, he did.
His own bright blue eyes narrowed to slits. The stare cut through Orpheus like a blade.
“Play,” his father said. (It was all he ever said.)
And Orpheus complied.
This was not a sharp melody. This was soft and low, mournful. It was the sort of song that a mother might play as she held a child that had not lived past a day old. The sort of melody that snipped at a soul’s heartstrings and rewove them so that the sorrow might flow freely through them.
He had crafted a melody so sweet that it rivalled the taste of ambrosia. It swept across the plains and over trees. It swept like one of Zephyrus’ winds. Even Olympus could hear it.
The music was a riddle; it begged every creature, high and low, to answer it. The laborers paused their work. The children corked their tears. The mothers silenced their chatter. The entire world felt the breadth of the lyre’s song, for it reached even the most impure, the most wicked of hearts.
Soon, Orpheus learned that when he moved his fingers across the lyre, the mountain moved with him.
And then followed the valleys. And then the trees. And the stones. And every living creature was bending towards Orpheus. The entire world was turning an ear in to listen to his music.
Each pluck of a string seemed to wilt his heart a little bit more, but a symphony cannot be started without being finished, and so he went on.
Hours or days later, his fingers tugged the last note. At some point during his song, he must have closed his eyes, because he found himself opening them and looking to Apollo to judge his reaction. He saw a glowing smile and a nod.
And at last, his father was pleased.
“Good,” he praised.
Orpheus’ heart soared far higher above than any of the eagles on the mountain had ever dare risen.
His father took him by the hand and led him to the edge of the stone. He guided his son’s vision downwards upon the vales, towards the expansive golden fields there.
Specks of shadows upon the earth. They had resumed to their work, thinking that they had heard nothing short of a wayward soul’s final goodbye. They tilled the soil with horses and carts. The men dragged the harrows through the dirt behind them and often collapsed into sweat and grime. Heavy labor with heavy tolls upon such mortals. Some, when they fell, did not rise after.
“Look, my child, at how they grovel and slave,” Apollo said. “Look and see how you are above them now.”
Orpheus looked. He did not quite see.
“You are their prince. They will bow at your feet. They will worship you.”
The laurel crown suddenly seemed heavy upon his head. He shifted its weight from side to side.
“I have formalities to attend to now. I’ll return to Olympus and entrust you to take your righteous place here. Heed what I have said. Hold your own.”
He was gone. Orpheus bit his lip and bitterly returned to his instrument.
---
A group of farmers and their wives approached the mountain. Each breath to them was arduous and strained, but they gulped down the thin air greedily and climbed just so that they might speak to this strange god’s son.
He saw them coming a long way off, and maybe he should have run. He could have hidden himself easily enough in the brambles and bushes. They would have passed him, craning their necks, and then left him alone. For some reason, though, he did not. Something in his heart whispered that it would be best to keep in place. He gave listen to it.
The people wore shawls and moth-eaten blankets that they clasped tightly around their shoulders. Not silk or chiffon clothes. Their sandals had holes through the soles. If Orpheus should have been bothered by this, he was not.
“Son of Apollo, we have heard how you play your godly lyre and were awed,” one began. His voice trembled. Orpheus hated that. Hated how they felt the need to shake in his presence.
He gave a small smile back. When he spoke, his voice croaked from misuse, and he winced away from it. “Thank you. I enjoy playing so the world might hear my creation.” It was not a lie. If Orpheus was forced to play, then he would much prefer that his audience was listening to him with excitement.
Another man spoke up. He seemed just a bit less fearful than the rest.
“It would be an honor and a blessing if your fine fingers would play one of our human instruments as well.”
A woman came forth from the back of the crowd. She held something dark, with nylon and metal strung across its length. The wood warped in some places and had scratched upon the mountain’s stone near the fretboard, but, to Orpheus, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The woman handed it over.
It was soft-wooded and fit perfectly in his hands. He inhaled sharply.
This was what he was born for. The gentle wave of wood under his hands. The clean chords ringing. He plucked the strings, one by one, with his bleeding, tired hands—the ones that never stopped bleeding—and he smiled, because the sound was simpler than a lyre, but more harmonious than one, at least to his ears. And they had made it for him, of their own free will.
Orpheus had nothing against the lyre. He did, however, hold a grudge against the man who made him play it.
“Thank you,” he whispered. His throat rasped with emotion.
“Will you play for us?” a little girl asked. She had straw-yellow hair and blue-grey eyes. A boy next to her, her older brother, shushed her, but she stuck her tongue out at him.
“Yes, I- I will try,” he said, because he could not refuse them. This was the greatest gift he had ever received, one of the only ones he had ever received.
He did more than just try. He succeeded. He strummed a chord and it rang. It was sweet and sad and a million breaths in one. It brought tears to his eyes.
Mortals were not beneath gods.
Orpheus was not a god, and he could no longer pretend to be one.
He clenched his fists around the instrument and made a choice.
---
By all rights, he, god-born, muse-born, with divinity diluted in his veins, could have spent his life lounging on a dais. He could have been a king of men. He could have been a god-not-quite.
He did not do any of these things. Orpheus fled to the lands of men. He shed his past like a snake sheds its skin and wandered into the forest. He took a name that he wrote for himself. He carved it with a knife into a tree.
Wilbur Soot named himself after the phoenix that emerges from the ashes, flame-bright wings covered in coaldust and dark powder.
Beneath the willow tree’s roots, he buried his knife, his lyre, and his crown in the soil. He kept walking.
---
Nothing gets past the gods, especially nothing as outrageous as one’s son breaking his father’s rules. Helios, who circled the planet each day and saw all, was the second person to notice what had happened. (The first saw and felt only guilt.)
Helios mentioned the matter to a brother, who mentioned it to a son, and before a day had passed, Apollo, dining with fellow Olympians, was informed of his prodigy—his son—Orpheus’ betrayal. The chalice in his hand shattered as his hand tightened around it. He apologized and, dismissing himself momentarily from the banquet, strode to the edge of the clouds.
It was easy to spot his son. Orpheus was a fumbling, uncertain thing, unknowingly traveling in one large circle within the foliage. Like a newborn fawn, he swiveled at every sound. He was no hunter like his father.
Apollo sneered and drew his bow. A gift from his sister, it was carved from moonshine and silver. He always used his own arrows, though, ones golden as a thousand medallions.
He drew an arrow and, with an exhale, released.
It arced down into the woods, a blur like the sun itself. He spun on his heel and returned to dinner before he even saw if it had hit its target.
---
It did.
Something horrible lanced across Wilbur’s torso, cutting right between two ribs and scraping flesh off of his side. The arrow went clean through and landed in the forest next to him.
He did not remember the moments between the arrow hitting and him collapsing, but surely, they must have been painful. Otherwise, he did not know why he was screaming.
It was bleeding.
It was not going to stop.
He gritted his teeth and tried to stop himself from screaming. He should have known this was coming. He was a damn fool for thinking he could escape without being spotted. Apollo was a master hunter and, in this case at least, Wilbur was nothing more than some prey to be hunted.
He turned to what little medical knowledge he had, which was not a lot, considering his hands never stopped bleeding. Pressure should be applied to wounds, he remembered, but when he clasped a hand over the bone and tissue, he cried out. It was a new pain in itself. It was unbearable.
He tried to run, and when he found he could not, walked at a pace more like a crawl through the undergrowth. He stumbled upon a river. He knelt beside it and cupped water in his hands. It stung like hell itself when he soaked his side with it. The ground he sat on turned red, and eventually, so did the water around him, swirling a rose-colored copper that he knew meant nothing good.
He tried to pick himself up again.
He failed.
He forced himself to get up again.
Through this all, he refused to let go of his guitar. His knuckles went white around its handle, but even when he began to lose feeling in his fingertips, he held fast.
The forest was a blur of yellows and greens, the colors of late spring in full. If he were not bleeding out, maybe he would have stopped to observe the beauty of it all. Persephone must have been truly hard at work.
He stumbled through the woodland. His clothes snagged on branches. He thought he might faint at any moment. The trees parted.
There was a meadow. It was blooming with flowers that swirled in his spiraling vision, and at its center, just as wide as he was tall, was an enormous oak tree. It looked to have seen its fair share of time, ancient in a way Wilbur could not describe if asked to in song. Its roots curled up from the ground, making a little shelter of wood and dirt from the storm.
Yes, Wilbur thought, nodding once to himself. This will make a quaint little place to die.
He slumped down under the tree. Wilbur played the guitar for a bit, and when the blood loss seemed to be hollowing out the space behind his wound, leaned back. The oak’s bark was sturdy but soft. It made for a good pillow.
He spread his limbs across the roots and breathed in the sharp fragrance of flowers, deciding that if he were to die in his sleep tonight, he might as well die with all he called his own. The few possessions that no one, not even a god, could take from him—his instrument and himself.
He did not dream. Instead, he drifted.
When he woke, his guitar was not in his grasp. He gasped instantly, scrambling upwards onto his knees, ignoring the sharp jab in his side. The instrument was not in the branches or the thistles close by. His heartbeat quickened, and he turned every which direction, searching.
Something in his peripherals caught his attention.
There, lingering at the edges of the clearing, was a boy.
He was not human. Wilbur could tell right away. It was a knowledge that came from within. Like calls to like and all that.
The not-human was holding Wilbur’s guitar.
“You! Thief!” Wilbur called out. The boy froze and, looking at Wilbur, tilted his head as if to ask “me?” It was almost a bemusing sight. Who else would Wilbur be shouting at?
“I’m no common thief,” the child crowed. “And this is mine now, so technically I’m not stealing anything.”
“Give it back!” Wilbur screeched. Queasiness rolled his stomach, and he swallowed the bile that threatened to rise in his throat.
“I would rather not come closer to return it. Come and get it yourself!” the child called out, glee sharpening his smile. He was still half-masked by the great trees’ shade, but he seemed harmless enough, save his antics. Wilbur nodded—more to himself than as a response—and, trying to suffocate every part of him which cried out, rose to his feet. As soon as he did, his vision swam at the edges. He righted himself against the tree.
Adrenaline gave him more strength than he actually had. He marched across the flower field and right towards the tree line. The child did not move. He just waited.
Upon closer inspection, Wilbur noticed he was young. Quite young, actually, visible in his smirk alone. He had blonde hair. Blue eyes. All quite normal features really, but there was something about him that was off. Wilbur could not place it.
“You stole my guitar!” he accused.
The boy turned his nose up in indignation. “And you were sleeping under my tree!”
“Your tree? I do not see your name on it.”
“All of these trees are mine. You’re in my forest.”
Wilbur’s eyes narrowed. “And who might you be, then?”
His eyes gleamed with mischief. “I am Tommy.”
That was a human name. Maybe, he too, had thrown his original one away.
Hesitantly, Wilbur gave his own. “Wilbur Soot.”
He bit his lip and waited to see if Tommy had noticed the gold in Wilbur’s eyes. If Tommy would cry “Orpheus, Orpheus” and ask for a million songs more.
Then again, maybe he would not. It was, after all, a mortal name that Wilbur had retitled himself to. Perhaps this boy was blithe enough that he would not notice the way that his music was captivating in a divine manner and not a human one. He had to have been somewhat unthinking if he had dared to steal knowingly from a son of a god.
“Sounds pretentious,” Tommy said fiercely. “Mine is better.”
“If you say so.” Wilbur paused. His mind was swimming. Everything was becoming unclear.
“You play good,” Tommy said suddenly.
“Thank you.” He was not thinking properly. If he were, he probably would not have thanked a thief.
“I think your guitar is magic. It's what makes you good. It's heaven-sent.”
Well.
“It is not.”
“It is. If I keep it, I can play just as well as you can.”
Wilbur’s lips quirked downwards at the edges. “That… is not at all how that works.”
“Isn’t it?”
Wilbur opened his mouth to answer. (He would have answered.)
But he swayed, and everything felt murky.
The boy’s eyes furrowed. “Are you alright?”
Wilbur was going to say yes, he truly would have, but his voice seemed to be slipping away from him. His hearing was going all fuzzy, too.
Realization sinking in, he brought a hand to his side. It came away smeared bright red with blood.
Tommy’s mouth formed the word “oh” but either he did not say it aloud or Wilbur could not hear it, since the next thing Wilbur knew, his knees were buckling beneath him.
---
He came to with wet cloths pressed against freshly applied bandages. Where these had come from, he had only a suspicion. He glanced to the silhouette of the boy at his side. It was night. The world was cold.
“What are you doing?”
A snort. “I’m healing you, idiot.”
“Are you now? I thought you were stealing from me just a few moments ago.”
“That was over a week ago.”
Wilbur could not veil his surprise. He didn’t have the energy to.
“Yeah,” Tommy grimaced. “I’ve been stuck here with you since then.”
“You were not. You could have left.”
“Yeah, well-.” Tommy paused. “I was the reason you got up and fainted. Here.”
He held a spoonful of something that smelled rancid in front of Wilbur’s mouth.
Wilbur gagged, nose wrinkling in disgust. “What is that?”
“Food. Now eat it. You’re all bones,” Tommy said simply.
Wilbur recoiled at the smell but opened his mouth. The taste was bitter. Something with mushrooms. Probably a stew. It was awful. It was over-salted and tasted just as bad as it smelled.
“Did you make this?” Wilbur whispered in conspiratorial horror.
Tommy waved the now empty spoon. “I make all my food.”
“I can tell. This deserves to burn in Tartarus.”
“It’s good,” Tommy shot back.
“Is not.”
“Is too.”
Wilbur grinned. “Then you have some.”
He knew he had won when Tommy scowled, refusing to.
Wilbur realized briefly that this was the most he had ever talked in his life. Surprisingly, he did not hate it as much as he thought he would.
He flexed his fingers into the dirt beneath him. He did not make a face. He could not let his gratitude show.
Because, no, he was not expecting the bandages that were wrapped around his hands there, but he would not let this child know that.
The stars were bright overhead. He went to sleep feeling full for the first time he could remember.
---
The first time Wilbur saw the flowers, it was an accident. He had not meant to wake up when Tommy was not at his side.
He had not meant to watch quietly as the boy picked the herbs in the nearby bushes.
As said, he had not meant to see the flowers, but it was hard to look away when he did.
They grew where Tommy walked.
Tansies. Yellow and green. Bright. Startlingly so. They shot up out of the ground as if by magic, as if at the command of something greater, wherever Tommy stepped.
Wilbur watched with wide eyes, and when Tommy eventually glimpsed over, pretended to be asleep.
---
The child was actually more of a teenager. Wilbur asked him his age once, while Tommy was reapplying the bandages, and would not get a reply. There were more questions on the tip of his tongue, the most pestering one being “what are you?”. He refrained from asking.
Tommy did not leave Wilbur’s side.
Why don’t you go? Wilbur wondered.
Not that he minded.
It was a pleasant, if not odd, sort of company.
Apollo had been aiming only to seriously injure and not kill. His shot was always true. There was no doubt in Wilbur’s mind of that, but still, he wondered why his father had not drawn his arrow to his son’s heart.
Maybe it had been to leave Wilbur feeling helpless. Alone.
If that was the case, his plan had backfired horribly.
Wilbur, in spite of his situation, smiled.
---
Day after day, Tommy changed the bandages and checked up on Wilbur. At first, the cloth came away soaked with red, but over time, it faded. Wilbur always bit his tongue so that, when the fabric occasionally was stuck to his side, he could keep himself from flinching as Tommy had to peel it away. This was definitely not the best first aid he could have been receiving, but he could not get up to heal himself, so this would have to make do.
Eventually, the wound closed. It had been bruised, and Tommy said that it had cut close to something vital, which way why the blood had been running so thick.
His voice was quieter, though, when he mentioned, more of an afterthought than anything, “I expected your blood to be gold. Ichor.”
Oh.
There it was.
Wilbur did not know why he had been thinking Tommy did not suspect. It had been a foolish hope.
“No. I’m mortal, thankfully.”
“Thankfully?”
Anger swelled in Wilbur’s heart, not at Tommy, but at someone who was watching above. “Gods,” he spat, “are not as kind as you might think they are.”
He thrust a hand towards Tommy, about to grab the wet washrag from his hand, but the boy flinched backwards and shuddered, like he had thought Wilbur was going to deliver a slap. Immediately, he whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Wilbur understood, though. He knew that feeling. Even now, he felt the phantom touch of his father’s hands forcing his to his lyre, the grip painfully tight.
“Don’t apologize,” he said. The words came so fast that Tommy startled. “Don’t ever apologize for something like that.”
Tommy nodded, once, slowly, as if it had not been something he had considered possible before—the fact that he did not owe the world a damn.
He did not. Owe anyone a damn, that is.
Wilbur hoped that if Tommy didn’t know that, he would soon.
---
Wilbur could not help it. He undid the bandages on his fingers one day, just so that he might see beneath.
There was no blood.
Wounds, yes. Great, ugly tears across his fingertips, white and scarred. Those would plague him forever. They would serve as a reminder of the man he hated most.
But the blood had stopped, and for the first time in a long time, he felt the kiss of the wind on his skin there.
---
His side was fully healed. He went to sleep certain that when he awoke, Tommy would not be there.
He was wrong.
“Why?” he asked.
Tommy was strumming the guitar, not at all in tune, muting half the strings. Overall, a mess. But it was his. His beautiful mess. And to Wilbur, it was a better tune than anything he had ever played on the lyre.
“I wanted to stay.” Tommy shrugged. “So, I did. Do you mind?”
“No,” Wilbur said. He grinned. “As long as you don’t run off with my guitar one day, you can stay.”
“I just might,” Tommy smiled, then stopped. “There’s- well, there’s something you should know about me, if I can stay. I’m not- I’m-.”
“I know,” Wilbur interjected.
Tommy’s jaw unclenched. “You do?”
“I saw. I faked that I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
Tommy’s lips pursed in thought. “You don’t hate me?”
“Why would I?”
“Usually, people tend to.”
“For that? It’s flowers.”
“It’s not normal. I’m not normal.”
“No one ever said you were supposed to be.”
Tommy breathed in sharply.
They were silent for a moment.
“Besides, I’m not much one for normal myself,” Wilbur beamed. “We’ll be a matching pair.”
Tommy beamed right back.
---
“I am not eating that.”
It was a sunny day. The clouds were visible in the meadow’s sky. Wilbur craned his neck to watch them and almost poked his finger on the needle in his hand. He had visited a nearby village, just briefly, to gather supplies. Some coins, some cloth. A needle and thread. The necessities needed for two to survive in a field for any given amount of time.
“It’s berries. How could it be that bad?” Tommy asked.
Wilbur shot him a look. “You are a terrible cook.”
“Am I the worst?”
This felt like a trick. Wilbur answered dubiously, “Yes?”
“Good, then I am the best at what I do.”
“Making food inedible?”
“Yes.” Tommy nodded solemnly.
“I guess so.”
“The best,” Tommy repeated. Wilbur shook his head in mock condemnation.
Tommy grinned. “Careful, or I’ll poison this.”
“Do it, then.”
Tommy scoffed, then gestured. A diversion. Wilbur would keep an eye on his meal tonight. “Look at you, being all responsible. Making clothes.”
“Mine are covered in blood,” Wilbur said pointedly.
“I bet the new ones won’t fit.”
Wilbur rolled his eyes. “You place too many bets.”
“What’s there to lose?” Tommy shrugged.
Wilbur poked his finger and screeched like an eagle. Tommy keeled over with laughter. The berries spilled across the ground.
---
“And then you… what?”
“Put your finger there, on the third string up. No, a little more over.”
“Like this?”
“Press harder. The string will mute otherwise.”
“It makes my fingers hurt.”
“Yeah. It does. But you grow used to it.”
“Do you?”
“…Yeah.”
“Hm.”
“Alright, now let’s try this again. Strum, but not as hard. I only have a few more spare strings.”
---
The months passed quickly. Tommy was actually quite good at guitar, but he always preferred Wilbur to play. That way, the field would bend and sway with the music. Sometimes, Tommy would dance.
It was so peaceful. This was a different side to musicianship than anything Wilbur had ever experienced before. He was creating, but his song was being enjoyed not as Apollo’s son’s song, but as Wilbur’s. It was glorious. It made his pulse rush. He laughed, and the sound was light on the air. Tommy danced.
Sometimes, Wilbur sang.
---
“What are we, exactly?” Tommy asked one day.
Wilbur was not playing the guitar. For once, he was doing something else, lazily hanging up laundry over the old oak’s branches.
“Friends?” Wilbur tried out the word, but it did not taste right. “I don’t know.” He hesitated. “Family?”
That gave Tommy pause. He had been climbing the tree so that Wilbur could toss up the clothes to hang on the higher branches.
“We’re like brothers,” Tommy said approvingly.
Wilbur tried to shoot him a disapproving look but failed. “Don’t say that. I will cry.”
“You’d cry for me?” Tommy asked. Wilbur was half-appalled at the seriousness behind the question.
“Yes?” he replied, aghast. He tossed up another shirt.
“Huh,” Tommy murmured, catching it with ease. His thoughts were clear as day across his face. They were practically shouting I didn’t know you cared that much. It made Wilbur tense. He wondered just what Tommy had been doing before they had met. Surely, he must have had someone to watch after him growing up.
Tommy leapt down from the tree branches and grinned when a plume of tansies was sent billowing up from where he landed. Wilbur tried (and failed) to conceal his laughter.
---
One day, Tommy was not waiting for Wilbur to teach him guitar.
He was not in the tree nor the meadow.
Wilbur pursed his lips. This was not their normal. This was not part of the unspoken routine they had built over the summer. Tommy had been there every day—every day for the past months.
He searched farther out in the woods.
He found him only by luck. Tommy was crouched below a tree. It had no engravings, nothing to mark it different than any other tree there, but for some reason, Tommy clung to it in particular. The boy saw Wilbur as he approached. He must have known that Wilbur was not only looking for him, but also for an explanation. He offered one.
“She died this day, seven years ago.”
For some reason, Wilbur knew who he was talking about before he even said anything about her by name.
“Your mother, was she kind to you?”
Tommy smiled; his eyes were trained on the ground. “The kindest.”
Wilbur swallowed. “What happened to her?”
And the smile turned dark.
“They took her. They stabbed her.”
Wilbur almost did not want to ask, but his soul yearned to know. He wanted to know every last little thing about Tommy, about this boy who kept his secrets in his heart behind three steel locks and an iron bar.
“Who?”
“Him and his men. They made me watch. I was seven.”
Wilbur ran the numbers through his head. That meant Tommy was fourteen. Fourteen, and he was living in the wilderness by himself.
Him and his men. Tommy would elaborate no farther.
Always bad with words, all Wilbur found himself able to say was, “That’s horrible.”
“Yeah. It was.”
Wilbur paused, uncertain of himself for a moment. He did not know how to console. “Do you miss her?”
“Every day.”
Tommy dragged his toes through the dirt. The yellow flowers sprung up, new and bright and bold.
“Hey, it’s noon soon. Let’s go make some gods-awful soup.”
Tommy’s smile was sad around the edges, but he took Wilbur’s hand and allowed himself to be hoisted up. “I’ll drench it in salt.”
“And then we’ll eat it and spit it right up.”
“Of course.”
Wilbur did not tease Tommy or even mention when he refused to let go of his hand. They returned to the meadow like that. They watched the stars together. They fell asleep.
---
Tommy pranced around the field. It was well after the height of summer, but it was somehow even hotter and Wilbur, playing in the shade, wondered how the boy managed to spin without tiring under the scorching heat. He asked him.
“I run naturally cold,” Tommy said, words dripping with sarcasm.
“Ah.” Wilbur smiled. Then, he finally dared ask the question that had been pestering him since he had regained consciousness over three months ago. (Three months, since he had fled. It was a peculiar thing, the way time passed.) “How do you do that? The flowers? It should be impossible.”
“My mother was a nymph,” Tommy explained. “My father was human. I was a mistake.”
Wilbur startled. “Oh, I apologize, I did not mean to-.”
“It’s fine.” Tommy smiled. “Everyone always got so surprised. It is funny to give you such a shock.”
Yes, it is shocking, Wilbur thought, because a creature like Tommy should not exist. He did not mean it in a condescending way, but a plain and simple one. The nymphs did not enjoy human company, much less human affection. The idea that a forest nymph would have a child with a human was nearly inconceivable. The nymphs were the mothers of the woodland. They were tied to this place’s spirit. If they tried to leave it, they would turn to trees or flowers themselves. It was their duty to serve as the soul of it.
“Can you create other plants?” Wilbur inquired.
Tommy gave him a reprehensive glare. “I’m working on that bit actually, thank you very much.”
“If you figure it out, grow some blueberry bushes. We could make a half-decent salad out of those.”
“Alright, your highness. Always about the food with you, isn’t it?”
Wilbur snorted. “I’m a starving man! We should be dining like royalty out here!”
Tommy elbowed him in the ribs. It did not ache.
---
There was a chill in the air. Neither boy knew exactly when Persephone left for the Underworld again, but it was clear that she had, evident in the way all the trees, even the oak, were beginning to shed their leaves.
Wilbur was beneath the tree. He was playing, so he did not see Tommy approaching from behind. He only noticed when he felt the boy slump against him. He stopped instantly. Tommy never slouched by him like this.
“Did you fall? Are you sick? Are you alright?”
“Can’t I just sit down without you fussing?”
Wilbur scowled to conceal his smile. “I worry.”
“I know. You are like a mother bear.”
“I’m not half as menacing.”
“You are, though,” Tommy said. There was genuine concern in his voice. It had come abruptly, almost from nowhere. He had been upset sometimes before, but not like this.
“What?” Wilbur asked softly.
“You could hurt me. You’re taller than me. Faster, too.”
Wilbur set down his guitar and looked at the state Tommy was in for the first time. His eyes were red. His nose was, too. It was beginning to get cold, yes, but not that cold.
“Tommy, I-.”
“Everyone hurts me.” Tommy cut him off. He shrugged his shoulders. “That is just the way it is. Everyone has, and one day you will, too.”
“Who? Who has hurt you?” Wilbur begged for an answer, despairing to know, because he saw the way the boy flinched when he waved his hands around or spoke too loudly. He would track down whoever hurt Tommy and repay the hurt back thousandfold.
Tommy smiled sadly and looked away from Wilbur’s eyes. He plastered a smile across his face. It was just as fake as it was heartbreaking. “That is beside the point. All I am saying is that no one is innocent of inflicting damage on things like me.”
Things, he said, so assured of himself. Not people.
Wilbur felt his throat bob in defense. “I will never hurt you.”
Tommy smirked. “Yes, and the raven is red.”
Wilbur knew it was a deflection. That knowledge still did not keep his heart from squeezing. “I am serious, you know. I promise you that I will keep you safe from all danger.”
Tommy did not say anything. Wilbur was not sure if the boy knew how to properly respond to something like that.
“You do not believe me.”
The nymph’s son grimaced. “Promises are dangerous things themselves.”
“I will convince you.”
Tommy’s smile returned, though the uneasiness remained at the edges of his expression. “I bet you cannot.”
“I bet I can.”
“I bet you cannot.”
Rather than go back and forth like this until the sun set, Wilbur turned over the idea in his head. For eighteen years of his life, he had barely spoken at all, so he would not win Tommy over to his side that way. He could not paint his emotions out. He could not express them honestly, either.
There was only one thing Wilbur knew how to do: play.
“Then I will prove it to you. I will write you a song to keep you safe.”