Hyacinthus and Apollo

Chapter 2 - Lysanias

A gasp broke the steady and comfortable silence of the early morning followed quickly by the loud and obnoxious beeps of an alarm clock.

Lysanias Paxton jerked up in his small bed with his light blue comforter tangled around him, rushing to turn his alarm off (fighting against that very same comforter to do so) and sighing when he finally did so. Rubbing a hand down his face, he blinked sleepily around the room.

Sun was steadily trickling in through his closed blinds. At times, he found himself so desperate to see that light that it shocked him. At others, however, he couldn't stand it. Like now, for example. Just after having woken up from whatever psychedelic hellscape his dreams had recently become, he couldn't wake up to the sun laying gently across him.

There was a part of him that always felt like he was being watched when the sun was on him. It wasn't generally a problem (he was even reluctant to admit that he sometimes took comfort in it), but he just can't when he wakes up like this.

What had he even just dreamt? Trying to hold onto the last moments of the dream seemed harder and harder the more Lysanias thought about it. With each attempt, the dream seemed to become more and more absurd, so he couldn't trust whatever he supposedly remembered. And, if it didn't take on a life of its own, it would slip through his fingers like water or fine grains of sand.

It would seem that his life just couldn't be normal in any way, not even in his name.

Now, it was probably best not to question Lysanias' name. He definitely had asked about it enough times as a kid to know this better than anyone, but it was still a big talking point whenever he met someone new... and they didn't even know his middle name.

Everyone always asked him, "Oh, what does your name mean?" or "Why'd your parents name you that?" or "How do you even spell that?".

It got annoying after a while. He was probably done answering all of these questions by the time he was in the second grade. (It likely would have been sooner, but Lysanias had the same questions himself until sometime around the middle of first grade when he realized how stupid his parents' answers were).

Now, at the young (emphasis on young, no matter what his cousins wanted to say) age of twenty, Lysanias didn't even try to answer the questions let alone offer any sort of acknowledgement to them. No one needed to know that his parents had originally wanted and planned to name him Michael but had changed their minds at the last possible minute. Literally, they were about to fill out his birth certificate with the far more normal name Michael when his mom changed her mind and wrote down Lysanias. Whenever he asked his mother why she had decided on Lysanias, she would only smile at him and say that it had just popped into her head after labor.

Of course he got his name because his mother was still high on some drugs used to make the procedure easier, why else would she have chosen it.

It didn't matter though and neither did his current train of thought. Lysanias was meant to be getting ready for a new job interview. Being home for the summer obviously meant that he was supposed to get a job and start saving more money to pay for his fancy new degree (even if he wasn't sure what that degree will be in just yet).

His father was pressuring him throughout the past semester, dropping little hints whenever he could about the fact that Lysanias needed to find a job. It was exhausting. And now, he had to find a job immediately or his father was going to burst like a big and violent volcano. Or, that what it seemed given the general red hue that his father seemed to permanently have on his face every time Lysanias was in the same room as him.

Sighing and rubbing a hand down his face again, Lysanias moved out from under his comforter. A part of him was desperate to stay under the comforting warmth, but he knew he couldn't. He ran a hand through his hair, his fingers sticking in the tangles created by the red and mahogany curls. Looking back at his messy bed, he briefly contemplated making it before deciding he didn't have the time. He grabbed some clothes from around the room, ignoring the overall mess and checking that they smelled okay before leaving his room.