Doing a thing.

[failure]

Alphabetical prompts.

Pick one song for each letter from Spotify. Write a drabble for that prompt.

A - Awkward Goodbye - Alfred
B - Baby We'll Be Fine - Wayward Son
C - Call Them Brothers
D - Daughters of the Soho Riots - Hyun and Rhea
E - Edward is Dedward
F - Flightless Bird, American Mouth
G - Growing Up Beside You
H - Ho Hey
I - I can't make you love me
J - Jesus Saves, I Spend - Llewelyns
K - Keep the Home Fires Burning
L - Little Talks
M - Madame Van Damme
N - National Anthem
O - Oxford Comma
P - Paris is Burning
Q - Quelqu'un M'a Dit
R - Romance is Boring
S - Sleep All Summer
T - This is a Flag. There is no Wind.
U - Understanding Salesman - Iris and Rhea
V - Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks
W - Welcome Home
X - Bonus W round: We Almost Had a Baby
Y - Your Ex-Lover is Dead
Z - Bonus Y round: You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing

That playlist in full. If you'd like to suggest characters or other songs, drop em in the comments.

Comments

Iris and Rhea - U - don't let me down this time

[rightest]

“How long have you been sleeping with Ullr?” Iris asks on the fourth eveing of her visit. Rhea chokes on her coffee. Iris raises her eyebrows. “Was it a secret?”

“Did he tell you?”

“No,” Iris shakes her head, her blue eyes burning into Rhea. “After you went to bed he went into your room.”

“Oh yeah, that would give it away,” Rhea looks at the table and has the good grace to flush, at least. It had been only cuddling before. Then it hadn’t been. She wasn’t certain when the change had taken place, some weak moment after a call with her son perhaps, or late at night when everything was always at its worst. “It was literal sleeping. Then it wasn’t. Now it depends.”

Iris thinks for a little while, considers this. “Do you mind it?”

“No,” Rhea says and hesitates for a moment, wondering if she should add more. “He’s very handsome, objectively speaking. And I like him as a person, when Thor isn’t around.”

“Where is Thor?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know,” she frowns at the table. “I think they went skiing. Father-son bonding.”

“Oh,” says Iris. On her first day here she had had to pick her way over Thor’s prone body in order to get to the cabin. He’d passed out in the snow; the valleys had echoed with his snores. Thor is distasteful, a bad influence on his son. She purses her lips. “I don’t suppose there’s anyway to encourage Thor not to visit?”

Rhea lets her head rest on the back of her chair. “All boys need their fathers. Even the boys who are four thousand years old.”

“All of us revert in some way,” Iris says. “There’s always someone who manages to make us revert, age backwards, feel like a child.”

Rhea touches her lips and when she looks up at Iris she looks much younger than her twenty five years. “Even you?”

“Yes, even me.”

“Wow,” she looks down again. Gods seem like gods until they were in the company of other gods. After that they appeared human, only too human. Their dramas were nothing but petty squabbles and problems magnified over thousands of years to something epic; even she doesn’t feel as much like a failure when faced with their shortcomings.

“I suppose,” Iris begins, “After everything that’s happened it must have been nice to have someone there.” A person to invest in, a person to be there, always. Always is, she is learning, never tangible, never definable.

“No,” Rhea says. “I was angry at him, at first.”

She looks down at her coffee. A faint sheen of ice is forming over the top, so she gets up and makes a new one. Rhea and Ullr’s farm house is tucked away deep in these mountains and the building is so old it loses heat as easily as anything; they have to wear thick jumpers, thick socks, layers against the world. It doesn’t help that its inhabitants are a god of ice and his pact, who freezes things when stressed. “It’s silly, isn’t it? But I was. He showed me I could be happy without—without my husband. That I could be happy again. And I didn’t want to be happy without my husband.”

“I see,” says Iris. She understands suddenly, only too well. Sometimes it’s not about love, or hatred, or even being hurt. Sometimes those things are only undercurrents, symptoms taking away from the larger problem: did she even want to be happy without Zephyrus to share in her happiness? Did she want to be unhappy, to punish herself, to eat bullets and feel bad for the sake of feeling bad?

Rhea still isn’t done eating bullets. She washes her mug slowly, the water freezing on her fingers. When she comes back to the table her digits are turning raw red and swollen from the cold. Back at the table with a fresh mug, she looks up at the ceiling, the sea of thoughts she’d fallen into clear on her face. “Sometimes, I suppose,” she says, “it’s hard to want to hope for the future, when everything’s been so bleak before.”

“Because why would it ever be bright again?” Iris nods. “Yes, I recognise the sentiment.”

“It’s tough when people try to drag you out of that,” Rhea says. “When they try to drag you back into hoping…being happy…and you’re not sure you’re ready.”

“Do you think that’s it?” Iris sips her tea, falling easily back into her usual patterns; ask questions, decipher, learn. Rhea is frowning and she’s not sure if she’s pushing her or not. “You don’t want to be happy?”

“I don’t know,” Rhea says, simply. “I don’t think I know very much. But, no offence, I don’t think anyone does, whether they’re four thousand years or four seconds old. All I can do is decide,” she spread her hands on the table, the skin on them all cracked and red from cold; ice marked. “Do I want to stay where I am and sink or struggle forward a little longer? And you know…sometimes I look around and it doesn’t matter that I’m sinking or that there’s quicksand up to my knees. Sometimes when I look around and see where I am, I’m almost mesmerised. Even at the worst moments in a person’s life, there’s still beauty all around.”

“Shouldn’t you move forward,” Iris asks. “Isn’t that the only logical route?”

“Yes, I think so,” she sips her coffee and looks at the thick wooden table. “But it’s tiring to try and move on, when you don’t know where you’re going.”

“I would have thought Ullr would help with that,” Iris says, gently. “Can he?”

“Oh, maybe,” Rhea looks out the window, chin balancing on her palm. “I don’t know what I’m doing here…with him. He’s lovely to me, but we don’t love each other. It’s going to end eventually. And when we’re having fun, playing scrabble, watching television…sometimes I look over at him and wonder how much this’ll cost me, how much it’ll hurt in the end.”

“Maybe it won’t hurt. Maybe it won’t end like that.”

“Maybe,” says Rhea and looks away. All things end, of course. No matter how long, how established, everything can be ripped away. “But it will end, won’t it? I mean, me and him…it’s almost sick but I know that no matter what happens, even if we fell in love, more of him would belong to his pantheon than to me. I’m just a passing shadow, after all. Just a mortal. What are my seventy or so years, to the thousands he’s spent with Thor? There’d always be a large part of him I’d never have access to, devoted to Thor and Sif. It’s like realising that a room you thought you knew has an entire world inside it, locked away behind a door you never noticed.”

Iris thinks for a little while. She thinks of Apollo. She thinks of Zephyrus. “I understand,” she says, finally.

“Besides,” Rhea’s mouth twists into a wry smile at the table. “Impressing Thor is more important to him than anything else. When Thor grew a beard, Ull had to grow a bigger one. When Thor gets a haircut, Ull does too. He’s always competing with him, trying to get his attention. They hold drinking competitions, fight, race around the mountains…Ull goes from serious and sensible to ridiculous in no time. How long can I take dealing with that?”

Iris’s tight smile grows a little on her lips, blooms into a real smile. That is true. Thor had that effect on most of his children. They all regress at coming into contact with him. Would the same be true of her father and herself? She rarely sees him. She has always been independent, cold. Now she finds herself wondering if she had been the problem. She feels as though she is on an ice flow, floating away, Zephyrus and Apollo on the far shore together as she becomes a tiny speck in the distance. “I suppose we must decide if happiness is worth the risk, even if it is temporary.”

“Along with if you want to be happy.”

“It’s difficult, isn’t it? Quite the conundrum,” she reaches across the table and touches Rhea’s arm. 'Ull,' she thinks. Once Rhea had found out she was a Spirit, she had ceased to be Angeline, only Iris to her. Theo was Zephyrus, Cory Apollo. It seemed strange that a woman who shunned nicknames and aliases should only refer to someone by one. “Perhaps, if life is throwing you a chance to be happy, to hope again…perhaps you should take it. Even if it will end.”

Rhea doesn’t look at anything much but the corners of her lips curl slightly. Iris folds her hands back into her lap. “I hope the same for you,” Rhea says quietly. A silence grows between then like a thin film of ice; Iris can feel it moving into place around them, a dome of frozen water and absolute empty quiet; calm and deep and clear and true as any ocean.

The door opens and the calm shatters. Ullr comes in, shaking snow from his wavy blonde hair and stamping his boots. Thor isn’t with him. He nods to Iris and takes off his heavy coat and thick scarf. He unties his boots and places his socked feet firmly on their wooden floors. “I’m glad I’m out of that,” he says, scratching his whiskers. He doesn’t say where Thor is, but there’s an underlying current of sadness in his voice and Iris can tell Thor’s left him alone again. Thor is that sort, the sort to play with his children as long as he is amused, then leave them alone without warning; leave them alone in some snowy valley, desperately calling his name, searching fruitlessly until the full shock of abandonment sets in, time after time after time. The Greek pantheon is not much better, but she still feels sorry for the boy.

“You’ve got windburn all over your face,” Rhea tells him and leaves the room. Used to these strange moments, Ullr shrugs and sits down next to Iris.

“What were you drinking?”

“Tea,” she says and Ullr nods and sets the kettle on. It whistles when it’s done and he pours more hot water over the tea bags in the pot. “Here, take some more.”

“It’s alright,” Iris tells him. “Thank you very much. You are very kind.”

Rhea comes back with antiseptic cream and Ullr smears it over his cheeks as she pours herself another cup of coffee. “Ice burns as hot as any fire, any passion,” Ullr explains. “It’s just subtler about it and sometimes people don’t realise they’re burning.”

“Or they realise,” Iris says, “But they’re frozen and cannot move. Thank you for the tea, I think I’ll be heading up now.”

On her way up the stairs to her room, Iris looks down. Rhea is drinking coffee with her back to her, still thinking about something. Ullr comes in and bumps his shoulder to hers. Her hands still locked around the coffee cup, Rhea leans over and kisses him gently. It’s such a gentle kiss, weighed down by everything she suffers from all of her fears and anxieties and that most weighty thing of all: hope in another person.

Iris looks away and turns her attention back to the stairs, before she finds herself admitting how much she’s truly lost