Chapter 13: The Morning After
The silence after Milly’s question was a tangible thing. It filled the room, thick and cooling like poured cement. Y/n didn’t pull away, but the arm around Milly went from relaxed to rigid. The warm skin under Milly’s cheek felt like stone.
Milly bit her lip. “Shit. That came out wrong.” She propped herself up on an elbow, looking down at Y/n’s profile, sharp against the pillow. “It’s not about your… body. Trust me, I’m a fan. No questions about your dick, I promise.” She managed a weak smile. “I want to know about you. How did you know? Like, before the whole godly revelation. How did you know you weren’t… mortal, like the others?”
The rigidity softened, just a fraction. Y/n blinked slowly, staring at a crack in the whitewashed ceiling as if it were a star chart.
“I was taller,” she said finally. Her voice was flat, distant. “Not just a bit. By the time I looked like a ten-year-old mortal child, I was already your height. My proportions were… off. My shoulders too broad, my hands too big for the pottery classes the other girls took.”
She shifted, turning onto her side to face Milly. The moonlight caught the green in her eyes, making them look shallow, like sunlit moss on deep water.
“I spoke differently. The words I knew, the concepts. I’d mention the River Lethe and get confused stares. I’d talk about the weight of a soul as if it were a normal measurement. The other children in the village thought I was simple. Or cursed.” A ghost of a smile, devoid of warmth. “They weren’t entirely wrong.”
Milly stayed quiet, her hand resting on the dip of Y/n’s waist, a silent anchor.
“My mother told me,” Y/n continued. “Persephone. She sat me down in a field of asphodel, right at the edge of a mortal grove. Spring was ending. She had that look she gets… like she’s already tasting the pomegranate seeds on her tongue. She told me who my father was. What I was. What I was supposed to be.” Y/n’s gaze drifted to the shuttered window. “A guardian. A bridge. A weapon. Never just a girl.”
She let out a long, slow breath. “It hurt. For a long time, it felt like a sentence. It meant I’d never get to have that… normal life. The one with boring problems and a mortal span. I’d watch the village girls grow up, marry, grow old, die—all in what felt to me like a single, frustrating season. I learned to stop watching.”
Milly’s thumb stroked a slow arc on her skin. “That sounds incredibly lonely.”
“It was my function. Loneliness is a structural flaw in a bridge. You just reinforce the supports and bear the weight.” The words were clinical, practiced. A story she’d told herself for centuries.
Then Y/n looked back at her, and the clinical distance shattered. Her eyes were suddenly, painfully present. “And then you. You with your sunburn and your cheap sandals and your absolute, world-altering refusal to be appropriately afraid. You asked me for a bathroom. You argued with me about pre-Socratic philosophy while I was literally escorting you out of hell. You looked at me… not at a myth or a monster or a function. You looked at me.”
She reached up, cupped Milly’s cheek, her touch whisper-soft. “For the first time in centuries, I didn’t just resent the mortal life I couldn’t have. I saw you living yours—fierce, short, brilliant, messy—and I… I wanted to feel it. I wanted to feel normal. With you.”
The words hung between them, a confession more vulnerable than any physical nakedness.
Milly leaned into her touch. “Normal’s overrated. I signed up for a dig because I wanted to find pieces of dead people. That’s not normal.” She kissed the palm of Y/n’s hand. “But this? However this works? However long it lasts? This is the most interesting thing I’ve ever found.”
A real smile then, small but genuine, thawing the last of the winter in Y/n’s face. “An interesting artifact.”
“A fascinating one. Needs further study.” Milly grinned, lowering herself back down to nestle against her. “Lots of hands-on research.”
They lay like that as the moon tracked across the sky, the silence comfortable now, filled with the rhythm of shared breath. Eventually, the deep indigo outside the shutters began to soften to gray.
Y/n stirred. “Dawn’s coming. The dig site. Your supervisor will be missing you.”
“Screw Dr. Poulos,” Milly mumbled into her shoulder, but she was stretching, feeling the return of the world outside the stone walls. The reality of deadlines and dirt and disappointed academics seeped back in.
They rose together, moving around each other in the small space. It was domestic and strange. Milly pulled on her dusty clothes from the previous day. Y/n dressed in simple dark trousers and a linen tunic, the warrior again, but her movements were slower, less sharply defined.
At the door, Y/n paused, her hand on the rough wood. “I can shadow-step you back. Near your tent. No one will see.”
Milly thought of the dizzying, cold void of traveling through Y/n’s shadows. “Or,” she said, “we could walk. It’s what, an hour? I’m already late. Let’s be properly late.”
The look Y/n gave her was pure, unadulterated fondness. “A walk.”
The morning outside was cool and silver, the world washed in monochrome. They walked down the hill path, not touching, but their arms brushed with every other step. The scent of thyme rose where their feet crushed it. Birds began to test the silence.
As the first golden spear of proper sunlight broke over the eastern ridges, illuminating the dig site in the valley below—the grid lines, the scattered tents—Milly stopped.
“So what happens now?” she asked, not looking at Y/n, looking at the mortal world waiting for her.
Y/n followed her gaze. “I don’t know,” she said, and for once, the admission seemed to carry no fear. “You dig up your past. I’ll… be around. The Underworld has its own schedules. But when I can.”
“Guardian duty?”
“No.” Y/n turned to her. “Because I want to.”
Milly nodded, swallowing around a sudden, unexpected tightness in her throat. This was the deal. A goddess with one foot in hell, an archaeologist with both feet in the dirt. No promises of forever. Just when I can.
“Okay,” Milly said. She leaned in, kissed her once, hard and quick, tasting of morning and resolve. “Don’t be a stranger.”
She turned and started picking her way down the final slope toward the camp, feeling the heat of Y/n’s gaze on her back like a physical touch. She didn’t look back. She knew if she did, she might not leave.
From the tree line, Y/n watched her go, the vibrant blonde head moving through the organized chaos of the mortal world. The dawn light felt different on her skin—not just an astronomical event, but a countdown. A measure of time she now cared about.
She melted backward into the gathering shadow of a towering pine, the darkness cool and welcoming. But for the first time, the embrace of it felt like a departure, not a homecoming.