Xena’s Share Day

let’s share some love! show me a loving scene, and i don’t just mean romantic. platonic love, romantic love, familial love. i want to see all of it!! how do your characters show love? how do they accept love? do they accept it at all?

“We cannot be lovers, in the traditional sense.” 

“Perhaps we are—in the very traditional sense,” Hades muses. “Heartless goddess in love with a heart-starved god.”

Persephone studies the dark, wondering how a love-starved God could conceive such sweet words. Could he see her ache, even now?  Did their strange, tethered pull provide him insight into what she longed to hear, even if it shattered the anger she walled around her. No one had ever left her so maddened before, not in life or death. No one would ever burrow under her skin again, even once Hades passed and she assumed his mantle.

“I don’t feel heartless,” she admits softly. It’s difficult for her anger to burn in such stifling darkness. “I long for my mother, wherever she is. And try as I might, every time you pledge your sorries to me… it makes me feel…”

But she didn’t know if she could call it love. Romantic love had never visited her before. Between [redacted] and Hades, betrayal left her swathed in rage, yet beneath the cinders, she could find glassblown remnants of undeniable affection for both. Her selfless, jealous, determined [redacted]. This fleshless beast who kissed her into flowers, then siphoned away her ability to grow them, and still pledged her his heart.

“What if loving me meant letting me go?” 

Hades watches her, she assumes, as his skull never shifts, but she can only faintly trace the outline of his skeleton frame. Her eyes struggle to see into the night, though the cave harbours paintings long-etched by non-Greek mortals and soft moss that cushions her back. Even the bats chirp quietly above, as they settle in from an eve of hunting. “I have no right to bind you any longer. All this catastrophe. If I had the gift of foresight, perhaps I would’ve known better,” he admits. 

Persephone offers no word to console him. 

“Whatever you ask of me, I’ll give you. If you wish to stay here on the surface, then I’ll close the borders of the Underworld to you. If you want to find your mother, then I will move until these bones collapse to bring her back to your side. And if you want my love, you needn’t wait a moment longer. I have loved nothing all these eons, not myself nor my kingdom, but I will perish knowing my heart belongs with you.”