"I should get back to work."

"Oh. Uh, yes, of course, just let me section off this part of myself from the rest of me and we can go."

"...actually I think I would prefer to be alone, this time."

"Oh."

That's very reasonable, he probably needs time to think and freak out too, his boyfriend has left the Underworld and might not ever come back, but she's a little hurt all the same. "Right, of course, um." Off of his shoulder she goes, and into a proper person shape in front of him.

".... May I hug you before you go?" she asks, a little shyly.

"Of course," he says, and does a double take at how immediate his response was.

He doesn't regret it, though.

Argh. Feelings.

This earns a little brilliant smile, and then a hug.

Then he is free to depart to do his job.

Guh-dong.

Well.

There's still a lot of Asphodel to renovate, so. Off she goes to do that. And if she takes a while to sort through her feelings and what she wants to do before doing anything in particular, then that's perfectly normal. Gods work on a timescale of centuries, apparently.

Thanatos... has so many feelings.

He hates it when this happens but it's been happening so much over the past few years since Zag decided to start doing his thing. And then Yvette showed up a couple of years ago and that's even more feelings. And then she encouraged Zag to talk about feelings and to be honest Thanatos is wondering if he should take a hundred-year vacation from his breaks and just work nonstop, that sounds more pleasant than having feelings.

But it's never worked whenever he tried to stop them while they're happening. And he's tried. He's tried a ton. He can only shut them off when they're mostly not there already.

Inconvenient.

(Unlike his new glasses, which are very convenient, actually. The sun doesn't bother him nearly as much as it did, with them, and he's feeling even more thankful for them now that he's got to try them on. ...which just compounds the feelings.)

He is once more floating through a battlefield. Time is slowed around him again, but that also happens sometimes when he has so many feelings, so it is doubly slow now. This little nifty power he got from his cousin, Zag's grandfather, the titan Kronos, is not really a full power so much as an affordance to let him do his job properly. And apparently it considers that his emotional state is not conducive to the most efficient reaping of souls, which he honestly thinks is just making it a much bigger deal than it is.

Okay, one feeling at a time, then.

The first thing he wants to deal with is Zagreus. Zagreus, who... succeeded. He did it. He escaped the Underworld.

He's never coming back, not if he has the choice. Regardless of whether he finds his mother, he may be chthonic but he is not of death and he is not coming back.

(A small part of Thanatos's mind is saying that actually Zagreus is of death, because Zagreus is his and he is death.)

But is he? Zagreus is free, now. Thanatos reaps these souls, dying of war wounds, of battle, of combat, and it brings to mind all that has killed Zagreus, and all that he's survived. In hindsight he realises that he always knew, he always felt it every time Zag died. Partly as the god of death—he knows when anyone dies, or is about to die, they call to him—but he doesn't reap Zagreus, he just feels the call nonetheless. Zagreus can find his way to the Styx on his own, he doesn't need Thanatos's or Hermes's help. Part of it is just because he's been connected to Zagreus since long before he admitted his feelings. Being a god sucks and he thinks Lady Aphrodite is probably having a lot of fun at their expense.

Lord Zeus and Lord Hades and Lord Poseidon can wax poetic about being in charge of the world but all three of them are wrapped around her finger.

Zagreus isn't going to die, anymore, though. Zagreus is a god, he is immortal as a god, he is as unkillable as the titans who were quartered by the Olympians and sealed under the (metaphorical) earth, who could come back as soon as someone put them back together. And now that the things that were trying the hardest to kill him are no longer in his way, he'll just... live. God of life, Thanatos is sure of it despite Zag's denials, and he gets to live. Lord Hades cannot reach him on the surface, that is the price he paid to be Lord of the Underworld.

And Thanatos? Thanatos is the god of death. Thanatos does not live amongst the mortals, Thanatos does not live. What will become of him and of Zag, of their nascent relationship, of their existing relationship?

A broken leg that renders a soldier vulnerable to an axe. Someone falling from a horse, torso already cut most of the way in half by a sword, dead before he even hits the ground. An arrow, so many arrows. A concussion that damages the brain's blood vessels and floods the neuronal membranes, slowly but surely squeezing the life out of him. A boy not out of his teens, his lower body trampled by his own horse in a panic, not a chance of recovery. All deaths Zag would have survived, and will never face, forever on the surface.

...Thanatos can still feel him. He knows where he'd have to go, to find Zag. But Zag isn't dying, so is he even able to?

A punch, an actual punch, that shatters someone's airways and they choke in their own blood. A blade cutting clean through someone's femoral artery. A disembowelment that was not clean and not even very thorough, but this person is going to die of it anyway.

This boy wasn't going to die anyway, necessarily. Thanatos gets to his knee and inspects the wound—it's a tiny cut, relatively speaking, to the side of his stomach. It was mostly the momentum of the blow that pushed him off his horse and broke his shin so he can't walk. Couldn't, not without being seen and finished off. And by the time the battlefield is safe enough, he'll have bled too much. Bled to death.

Yvette could've saved him. Stopped the bleeding, healed the wound a little bit, told him to lay low until the dust settled and he could limp away in safety. It's one of those wounds that are only circumstantially deadly, that could've been fixed.

Thanatos has a bit of his sisters' understanding of the future. He can see the timeline of this man's life. The man would not die right now, but he'd surely die anyway. Thanatos could give him a push, make his heart stop earlier, just to spare him the suffering.

...he doesn't need to be the one to decide.

He touches the boy's hand and the boy can now see him.

The boy recognizes him for who and what he is.

“Lord Thanatos,” he whispers, and, and he’s not dead, not yet, he knows this because he still feels pain. It hurts. It hurts so much. The dead don’t feel pain. He’s heard of something like this happening, and so like a man reaching desperately for a lifeline, he says, “Your, your lady, where…?”

...so word's gotten out.

Well, it would. True rumours about the gods tend to spread themselves more quickly and reliably than they naturally should. Thanatos is not sure whether this is the work of some god or just the way the world is. He's not sure whether there's a difference.

"She is... not here. Not this time. I'm sorry."

“W-what? But, but I could, I could live, it’s not that bad, and I see you while I still draw breath, so…”

"I am here to offer you a choice. You will die today. I can take you now, stop your heart and guide you to Hermes; or I can wait. The hours from here will be painful, you will suffer, but you will only die when your body can no longer keep you alive."

“What kind of choice is that?!”

"The kind I would usually not offer. But 'my lady' has taught me that there are ways to be kinder, to ease the passage of souls into the embrace of death, without shirking my duties or thwarting the Fates."

He stares, unbelieving, then shakes his head.

“No. No. I can live. I’ll, I’ll wait. She’ll come. She will.”

Than shakes his head. "I'm sorry."

He releases the boy's hand and lets him return to real time. Then he closes his eyes, covers them with a hand, and lets out a long, shivering breath.

Why? He has taken thousands of people, more people than he could count, except that's not true, he could count all of them, he remembers every single person he has ever taken, he can never forget. So why is this so hard?

Something is missing. He has... gotten so used to it... He can't comfort the boy. He can't offer the boy false hope.

Because hope won't come today.

And it's his fault.

Death isn't as bad as mortals think it is. And it gets better, it's getting better. Because of hope. A hope he could never bring people, before, and then he could, and today he did not. He did not, because... because he wanted to understand how he felt about her. About hope. Because that's one of the other feelings.

Of course the god of death would be in love with the god of life. And of course the god of death would be in love with the goddess of hope.

It's... so obvious, when he thinks like that. He probably wouldn't have noticed, if he hadn't already known he was in love with Zagreus. And she made it happen, too, didn't she? Or helped along. Would they have worked, would he and Zag have found their way together, without hope? He doesn't know.

Gods don't change. Except for Zagreus.

And her.

...and, Thanatos guesses, himself, now.

But he can't go find her, now. He doesn't know why, but he knows that if he left to find her, too much time would have passed, and the boy would already be dead. There's something symbolic, here, but he's too steeped in it to see what it is.

Well. The boy can hope for life, and then he can hope for death, and hope will listen to one of those. And hope will build him a good death, a death that he doesn't have to fear. He doesn't know, yet, but his death... will be good. He will mourn his life, he will curse Thanatos's name, spit in his face, but... he will live again, in death, in a world that hope helped build.

It takes as long as promised, but the god of death knows his craft better than the petty wishes of a dying mortal. One of them is correct, and it’s not the mortal.

He curses her, too, before the end. For drawing out his suffering with a visage of a promise that never came true.

He doesn't have any words, when he comes back later (after, subjectively, a very, very long time and many other souls) to finally take the boy.

It does help, that death isn't as bad as the boy thinks it'll be. Thanatos is not doing an unspeakable crime to him, the way mortals often feel he is.

And he'll know this is it, this time, because there will be no pain.

He’s too angry to do anything more than glare venomously. If he’s thankful, not even the gods themselves will hear him admit it.

He doesn't have to spend much time with Thanatos, because Hermes soon shows up to take him, and time bends even lower before the messenger god.