Once Upon A Time: UnderBrooke

Chapter 1

His fingers danced around the rough edges of the loose asphalt scattered on the arms of his throne, eyes rolling around in utter boredom. The cavernous space seemed to echo out a chorus of tortured screaming. To him, it felt like nothing but white background noise. It just droned on, endlessly.

"This is getting tiresome," he muttered under his breath. The burly wraiths encompassing his throne bristled, exchanging uncertain glances. He took a deep breath.

"I said... That this... Is getting..." His voice rose in delicate steps. Each pause crept beneath the dead thugs' skins and stabbed through their veins. And the silence suffocated them, held up by just a fraction of a second, but ice pierced their blood and burst out against the heat and humidity of the sulfuric air they breathed. "TIRESOME"

The foundations of hell shook.

"Yes, sir, Hades, sir!" they choked out. The faces of the trapped souls flushed different shades of purple and red around the immortal. Those who staggered out of their positions evaporated into wisps of dark smoke. There was no room for weakness in the echoing caverns of his throne room.

The god looked up. Piercing blue flames in his eyes merely glanced over the poor unfortunate soul in front of him. His men ambled to the chains and brought the bloody, panting figure to his feet. He scoffed, unimpressed, as the disfigured body of the miller's daughter trembled in front of him.

"Now, I won't ask again." She tried to shirk away and the wrinkles creased further into her face. Her expression was outlined by the blood seeping from her wounds, drying and setting in like a tattoo of her torment. "Tell me," his voice whispered, so dangerously low.

She burst into tears. "A... April..." Her crumpled up heap floated shakily above the ground. Her limbs writhed and convulsed, panic intensely written in her eyes. "It's April! I swear, April! April 15th!" she screamed out as her figure slammed into the rock.

"Thank you, Cora," he drawled out of the cruel corners of his smirk.

As she spat out the last syllable, the battered old woman vanished amongst hazy tendrils. He got up from his chair and lazily strut his way to the center of his domain. In his head, he tenderly filed away the date and held it softly, as a bittersweet promise.

A promise for a woman who glowed in emerald lights.

He tried to say her name, to hold it in his tongue like a prayer that sustained him through the long decades. But it caught in his throat, choked with the acrid taste of memories he tried to stamp down. Memories that tore between the only tender glimpses of joy he had with her, and the impossible force he could never even hope to come close to.

He missed her. Dare he even say --

No, he didn't dare. She didn't want to hear it then, and to repeat it would be to taint those words. Not that being the King of the Underworld meant he was pure anyways. He resigned to letting her dissolve into a knot in his chest.