Clockwork

APOLLO

THE MEDICINE MAN, they call him. 

They liken him to a god with his sun kissed hair and his sun kissed skin and the skies present in his eyes, with the lean muscle covering his haggard frame and his biting jawline.

You are of the divine, they say with wonder in their eyes in the tongue of another world as he stabs a needle through their skin. You, sir, with the fair hair. You are a god, no?

They praise the ground he walks on, worship the things he says with a rapt curiosity that he yearns to capture and bottle and sell.

He could make a fortune of that stuff; it being something that adult men and women have spent years trying to rid of, only to find that they'd like it back and that life is quite dull without it. 

He gains the title because he has lessened their suffering with his gifts of healing; little drugs packed in thin sharp needles that work magic they can only hope to understand inside their bodies, fighting a minuscule yet incredibly important battle. 

It is a macroscopic miracle, his coworkers cheer, the power of science. 

The irony is not lost on him.

Science and religion have never mixed well, but Apollo is almost always the exception. 

Always has been. 

"Medicine man, medicine man!" 

They dance around him with wide eyed smiles and a wild gleam in their eyes, jumping nimbly on the balls of their feet, bouncing around with an uncontrollable madness. Their skin gleams in the African sun, a macabre and incredibly powerful sight; their dark skin bears a testament to the hardiness of their ancestors, of the will to survive and to carve a space in the earth for themselves to keep, beautifully browned and darker with every beam of the sun that it catches.

Apollo smiles softly, removing their tiny fists from his clothes, and wonders how long it was since he's been able to feel free like that. 

It has been a long time since he has been able to express himself so without a care like that; it was a simpler time, when he did not have the title of APOLLO, GOD OF THE SUN AND MEDICINE AND MUSIC AND MORE (always more) hanging above his head. 

The title settles a ghastly weight upon his shoulders -- he holds himself tighter, sits up straighter, more wound, like a taut wire just begging to be snapped in two every time it is used. 

He wants it to stop, this madness, this goddamned idolization.

When, he wants to scream at the world, will you understand that gods are just mortals who decided they should defy the very balance of the universe?

But he knows it will be futile. There will rarely be anyone there to listen to his pleas. There hasn't been, now, for several hundred years, and he fears that as the years pass and stretch beyond the time of the people walking this earth, he will drown in the radio silence.

(For when they depart, he will not be able to go with them.)

He is merely a mortal playing god, and he wishes that everyone could see that, could see what his brethren for what they really are: manifestations of everything that human race stands for that time has left to fester and rot over time. 

Everything good shriveled up several millennia ago, all that's left is corruption and hatred and a sense of unbelonging. 

Time is the catalyst for what the gods have become -- they are merely mortals that have lost all sense of what truly makes them human. 

They are masquerading as people, yet they're anything but, with gold running through their veins and centuries of war sacrifice love loss betrayal pressing down on their souls. 

Apollo thinks the real Apollo -- the one who shone with pride and took the titles like a fish to water, like a second heartbeat, like he was meant for glory and gore and gold with a shower of adoration upon the thrones of Olympus -- died a long time ago. 

Immortality is the only thing that holds him up by the skin of his teeth, sinking its long claws into rotting flesh and breathing life into something that no longer wants it. 

He just wants it to end. 

(But even Apollo is not so foolish that the wishes of gods are written down somewhere. He knows that this is path he chose, and so this is the path he must suffer.)

He walks around the camp then, watching as children -- god, they are just children -- cough until their bones explode out in a vision of red because of a disease he cannot cure. Only slow down. 

Time is not precious to him. Not anymore. 

But these people? These people with hope in their hearts so grand that he thinks they could soar above the heavens if they really tried, these people who smile despite their bodies failing them, these people who take the words of a strange man who claims he can help to heart and allow it to propel them towards joy? 

Time is precious to them. Apollo knows this; he's lived through it all, has seen the scores of bodies piled up in times of war and disease and famine. 

Knows that to mortals, time is everything. 

Yet he cannot do anything about it, this disease that is sweeping across a nation that lives in a constantly dirty state, this disease for which they still have no cure. 

It's still a breakthrough, his colleagues reason. We have advanced so much further than before. Thanks to your help, we are one step closer to finding the cure.

It is just a puny step; lives are still being lost, he wants to scream back. People are still dying. Good people, with hearts of gold, people who are happy despite the cards the Fates have dealt - they do not deserve to die.

(It is a foolish thing to want to say; Hades is not picky with the taking of his souls, after all, they accumulate by the billions in his underworld palace and suffocate him alive, so why should he care for who is truly good and who is not? In the end, they all are bits of pieces of what they once were.)

It will not do any good, realistically, except for the releasing some of the hulking, breathing, all-consuming guilt trapped in his soul.

He scoffs, kicking at a rock and sends it flying across the sand.

What kind of deity is he if this is a time where he is simply not strong enough? 

He looks across the barren desert that swallows the children of the earth without a single thought, across the camp at the people who go without so much that he can see their ribs pressing along skin begging to be let out, across at the poverty splashed across the faces of everyone despite the laughter still ringing warm and vibrant in the air. 

Apollo knows the answer, though he is loathe to say it.

There are some things even a god cannot heal.