Bound| Fantasmical 2023

WattpadMythandLegend: Love Story?

It's not fair.

I kick the pomegranate through the bars of my cell, my mouth watering at the sight of it.

It's just not fair.

I suck the blood from my blistered knuckles, pacing slowly. Everything about the Underworld here is different. In my reality, the Underworld is a bit ancient Greek mythology, a bit hell, a bit ancap dystopia, but here it's oops! all Tartarus. And Hades isn't my alluring (if intimidating) southern gentleman. Though he's more boisterous, he's more...effective at breaking me down. The Devil respected me even if he hated me, regardless of what he said. But this Hades is only bemused by me. I'm his Cassy. I'm a thing he looks at through glass.

And instead of 'palace living' I'm stuck in a cell to "simmer down." Maybe I shouldn't have kicked him in the nads that many times.

I think it's the third day of my captivity when the mysterious stranger visits me. Hades has come by to look at me a few times, his eyes alight from the prospect of having a partner. Nothing, not even me spitting at him, will remove the glee from his face when he looks at me.

This stranger is hooded with a cloak. He's very slim, his movement closer to a slither than a walk. He doesn't talk to me, he talks into my thoughts. This box will bring you luck, so long as you don't open it. You can thrive here, Louie. You can be happy.

"Louie?" My voice is a rasp. No one here has called me that.

The box slides into my cell. I don't see the hand push it through, and the stranger vanishes. I'm talking thin air vanishes. I shiver as I handle the box.

It's hardly larger than my thumb, and I squeeze it in my hand, studying it head-cocked. Don't question a good thing , I guess. I need all the help I can get.

I'm not going to open it, I decide, tucking it under my sheet, but I will test it.

"Hades?" I call as loud as my tired voice allows.

I wrap my hands around the bars, and I hear Hades' heavy footsteps. He's a bearish man, that's for sure. Christmas Present kind of guy. Big and jovial, minus the whole kidnapping thing. As soon as his eyes come into view, I collapse with a whimper onto the ground.

Where the Devil might view me with suspicion, Hades genuinely rushes to my aid.

"Maybe I've been a little too hard on you, my flower. Would you eat if we go to the surface? It's only food from the underworld that will keep you here."

I nod weakly. And I mean it as an act, this weakness, but it's real. My eyes feel heavy. The thought of standing makes me dizzy, now that I'm on the floor. And it's an awful truth, that I'm so starved there's no way I can escape this place.

"Don't go anywhere," he says, before returning with the most incongruent items I've ever seen. A picnic basket and a rusty length of chain. He opens my cell quickly, as if this act will save me, and links his arm in mine. In an instant, we're no longer in the dark.

Outside, on a grassy knoll, sunlight streaming through a canopy of trees. There's a distant pink castle, a sharp contrast to the underworld I've seen. He strings my waist to a tree with his loop of chain and then opens the picnic basket.

Everything smells delicious. Sugary. I'm so hungry I can't stop the drool and he respectfully offers me a napkin.

"The king of the Underworld gets great chefs." He lays out plates of cookies, cakes, and cups of ice cream. More than could possibly fit in a picnic basket. "Go on," he says, "the rule is food in the underworld not from the underworld that will seal you there. At least, it works like that in this dimension."

I can only trust him (and my luck). I grab a cookie and give a happy laugh at the taste, at finally having food.

"Do you enjoy picnics?"

Maybe it's the sunshine, or the cheery castle in the distance, but I feel light and open. "Oh, I do. Where I'm from, we used to have them all the time." I pause, feeling bold, and add: "Aside from kidnapping people, you don't seem that bad."

He shakes his head. "Hades has to have Persephone, but I try to be fair. I leave these people alone and enjoy traveling dimensions with my counterparts." He drops his voice. "I can show you unimaginably beautiful things."

I lean my head back against the tree, my eyes closed. "I guess I could live with that."

"Guess? What does a man, a god, have to do to make you happy?"

I don't know what possesses me to do it. I wink at him.

He howls and then shoots me a knowing smirk. 

"I, I, mean, make me laugh."

He clears his throat. "Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

"Orange."

"Orange who?"

"Orange you gonna crack a smile?"

It's so bad. It's so bad that I burst out into laughter, and he hands me a spoon. We dig into separate ice cream cups, talking and laughing. My chest feels lighter with each bite, and soon, the sun sets. He unchains me and brings me down into the underworld.

"You don't need to sleep in that cell, you know," he says.

"Nah, it's okay. I'll pretend it's my lavish bedroom."

I lay down in my cot and blow him a kiss as he closes the door.

And that's when I feel the box poking the back of my neck. I'm not going to open it. I'm not.

I turn over.

I turn the other way.

I can't help it.

I tear the box apart.

Inside is the skull paperweight the Devil, my Devil, sent me to find. 

And I cry. I want to go home.
Scratch that; I'm going home.