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Hermes likes spending time with the boatman. He likes that he’s one of the only people who understands Charon, and he likes that Charon doesn’t mind his company, and he likes that Charon’s a good listener, not because he doesn’t speak, but because he actually does engage in conversation via groans and hisses. He likes that Charon never tries to slow him down when he’s going a million miles an hour, and he likes that Charon makes him actually want to pause for a moment, and he likes that Charon never acts surprised or patronizing when he does. (Anytime he slows down up on Olympus his family always acts shocked and asks if he’s alright, or they make irritating jokes about him finally settling down. Charon just tips his head and lets Hermes chat, or sit in silence, or play with the obols strung around his neck before gently batting his hand away. It’s nice.)
But lately Hermes has started getting this nagging little feeling in the back of his head. And he... he knows what it is. But it’s easier to ignore it, at least at first. It’s getting harder by the day.
He’ll flutter into the Temple of the Styx, long line of shades in tow, and settle into a seat on a pedestal or pillar as the shades file onto Charon’s boat, dropping their toll into his palm. And the way Charon looks at him as he chatters, intent and gentle and... Well.
Or Hermes will reach out to snatch Charon’s hat, or trail patterns in Charon’s smoke, and Charon will snatch his wrist mid-air. But Charon’s grasp is always loose enough to be easily broken, and increasingly he maintains his hold until Hermes is the one to pull away. A few times recently he’s even taken to drawing his thumb in delicate circles along the tender inside of Hermes’s wrist and Hermes is far from stupid. He knows what that means. But damned if he’ll acknowledge it.
But of course that’s not so easy. Nothing can just be left indefinitely unacknowledged like that.
Hermes’s performs his usual routine. He brings shades to Charon, Charon ferries them onto his boat while Hermes flutters by his side and chatters about the latest Olympian gossip, Charon watches Hermes fondly, Hermes ignores it.
It’s been an exhausting day, and Hermes will only admit it to Charon. So when Charon steps onto his boat to take it down the river, Hermes lets himself drop from his hover to stand on the pier, shifting restless from foot to foot.
“Hey, Charon, not to intrude or impose although I know we’ve established before that it’s fine and I don’t really need to ask. But I do prefer to ask, common courtesy between coworkers, you know? Anyways, it’s been a rough day and I could use a little time off my feet, but you know how it goes when I do that in the mortal world or on Olympus, so, I was wondering—“
Charon groans and waves a hand amicably at the piles of cushions tucked at the back of his little store-vault-pier. (Hermes likes that too, that Charon knows the perfect balance of when to let Hermes ramble and when to cut him off because he won’t ever stop or get to the point.)
Hermes beams, and waves at Charon and the shades as the boat drifts off. Then he plops himself down into the pile of cushions and silks and sighs in pleasure as he finally can let go off all the tension in his body. He snuggles a bit deeper, knowing it’ll be a while before Charon returns, that he’s made sure he has a more than adequate buffer on his own duties, that down here, none of his family has the sight or influence to realize he’s taking a break. He can rest his eyes now. Just for a moment though! Not long! He’s Hermes, and he’s not someone who needs long naps or moments of rest to recharge. He’ll close his eyes and it’ll barely be a blink.
Hermes opens his eyes blearily to a soft, cold touch against his face. He’s cozy and comfortable and surrounded by rich golds and blacks and purples. Then he realizes what woke him, and he lurches up to his feet and then into a hover mid-air.
Sure enough, Charon’s boat is bobbing gently at the dock, and Charon is crouched next to the pile of cushions, hand still outstretched. He slowly stands, body creaking as he uses his oar to pull himself upright. Despite the adrenaline rushing through Hermes, the instinct to stay further back, out of Charon’s reach, that drove him so high in the air when he first woke, it feels... wrong.
Charon doesn’t say anything, or express any irritation at Hermes drifting overhead, but Hermes has gotten used to hovering at Charon’s side. He has to be close to be able to lean down and peer under the brim of Charon’s hat, to see clearly enough through the deep shadow it casts to track the micro-expressions on Charon’s face. So Hermes lets himself drift down until he hovers only a few feet above the floor, just enough to leave him at a height with absurdly-tall Charon.
“I must’ve been quite exhausted, I really didn’t mean to sleep. So, you know, thanks for always letting me occupy your space and all! Also, I’ve wondered about it for a while now, but how does your brother’s domain work? Especially on other gods. Because it’s weird thinking about taking a nap and being, what, under his influence? I guess the same thing holds true for Dionysus and Aphrodite though, it’s always weird separating out what’s just—“ Hermes flaps his hand a bit in the aid. “Well, you know what I mean. Point is, I’ve never met your brother. Hypnos that is, you know I’ve met Thanatos plenty, consequences of a certain shared job. I think I’d like to meet Hypnos some day though, from what you’ve told me he seems quite the opposite of you and Thanatos.”
Charon rasps out a rough laugh, rolling his eyes before meeting Hermes’ gaze. Clear as day it’s a You and Hypnos would be too much to deal with at once, and Hermes grins.
“Hey now, I think that’s all the more incentive to hang out! I like the idea that we’re opposites in a lot of ways, but we share some common ground in talking your ears off!”
Charon’s mouth twists in a smile. And then—
Charon’s hand once again reaches out and gently cradles Hermes’ cheek. Hermes has to resist the instinctive urge to lean into it, to turn his face into that cool palm. Charon’s stare is calm and level and the look in his eyes is practically broadcasting a specific set of feelings. The wings at Hermes’ ankles falter, and he shudders in midair. This is a new level of open and blatant that’s going to be hard to ignore.
“Y’know boss, I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to make of this! Communicating with you can be a real ordeal sometimes.”
Charon’s look is piercing; unimpressed but still just as calm and tender. His thumb sits just at the corner of Hermes’s mouth. Hermes bites his lip to keep it from trembling.
“Ok, yes, yes, I know exactly what you’re trying to tell me here, you got me. I just... don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it, so it’s easier to pretend I don’t known what it is, see? What... what do you want from me here, Charon?”
Mist hisses out gently between Charon’s teeth. He shrugs. Hermes stares incredulously.
“Ok sorry, what? I am actually genuinely confused now, what do you mean?”
Charon shrugs again, his hand stroking down Hermes’ jaw gently, before dropping. He gestures at Hermes, and then that mild shrug again.
“Is that... what, you saying you don’t care what I do? That it doesn’t matter to you what I do with this knowledge of your—your feelings?”
Charon waves his hand vaguely, his shrug now less noncommittal and more of a sort of, but not quite.
Charon looks down at Hermes—and when had he descended to the floor? How had he been caught so off guard to have stopped hovering? How had he been so off guard he hadn’t noticed?
And Charon leans forward, pressing his forehead to the top of Hermes’s hair. The brim of his huge hat shades them both, and in the increased darkness, Hermes eyes can adjust, can better see the near-skeletal contours of Charon’s face, the way his eyes glow, the way pinpoints of light glitter between his teeth and beneath the thinner stretches of his skin. Charon groans. It’s soft and from anyone else Hermes would call it bittersweet and it rings so clearly as of course I care, of course it matters, of course I have things I want, of course there is a way you could respond that I dream of, but also, but none of that is important enough to change things, no matter how you respond or what you do with this I will not be swayed, it’s all irrelevant in the face of how I feel and even if it’s never reciprocated, feeling this is enough.
Hermes feel like his heart has been plucked like the string of some instrument, reverberating and resonating inside him. It’s never felt like such a curse to be able to understand Charon so well. It’s never felt so frightening and overwhelming that something in their divinity began to connect the more time they spent together, that some twist of fate tied a line between them with which Hermes can begin to understand clearer thoughts and words and emotions.
He wants to back away, he wants to run, he wants to flee. But even here in the underworld there is light, just beyond the shadow Charon casts. Something in Hermes feels like stepping into it, out of this pool of darkness, will leave him exposed, flayed open, visible.
But it’s a—a paradox, an impossibility, two choices with the same result. Because if he stays here, pressed close to Charon, enveloped in his smoke and pinned by his gaze, he will be picked apart as well. Charon’s eyes bore through him, like a master key to a thousand locks that bind protective shells to Hermes’ form. Every moment he remains before Charon, it feels like a layer falls away. A shedding, both of excess weight but also of protection. If he stays here, it will all slowly slough off, leaving some fragile core of himself exposed to the open air.
Hermes idly realizes he’s gasping deep, heaving, panicky breaths. Charon’s expression is concerned and his hands gently alight on Hermes’s shoulders—not heavy or firm enough that they’d be any difficulty to shake off, but enough weight to be grounding. Before he can think he flings his hands up over Charon’s face.
Charon gives a startled, muffled noise of surprise that Hermes would find funny under different circumstances.
“Don’t! Don’t look at me right now, alright? I just! I need a moment!”
He expects Charon’s strong hands to pull Hermes away. Instead he feels Charon’s eyelids slide closed beneath his fingertips. Hermes startles and looks up. Charon is still and his eyes are closed and he simply stands there, Hermes hands all over his face as if that’s not frighteningly vulnerable. Reflexively Hermes runs his fingertips over Charon’s closed eyelids. They feel thin and dry and delicate as crepe paper, and Charon does not flinch.
“This is... I know I’m hardly the most dangerous of the gods, but even so, I am still a major god of Olympus you know! And yes, you are ancient and powerful and cosmic and so on and so forth, but this still seems a little dangerous to leave yourself so exposed like this, don’t you think?”
Hermes thinks his rambling will manage to elicit a reaction in the boatman, it usually does. And this time it does too but... Charon’s eyes stay closed. And he rumbles deep in his chest and his arms still hang loose and his head tips just a little and Hermes knows its not Charon disregarding his strength or danger or power, but rather that it’s an easily given trust, and that nearly knocks him off his feet.
He drops his hands from Charon’s face, stares resolutely at Charon’s chest, and then, without thinking about it, dives under the billowing folds of Charon’s cloak. The noise Charon makes is an almost perfect match for the surprised chirp a cat makes when startled from sleep, and this time Hermes does laugh. Charon stumbles back a few steps, and then brings his arms up around Hermes in something meant for balance but feels like an embrace.
“It’s just not practical to keep your eyes closed like that, associate of mine!” Hermes chirps as an excuse, “But I’d also like a few more moments to think, so I hope you don’t mind the intrusion!”
The folds of fabric surely muffle his voice the same way for Charon as it muffles Charon’s exasperated rasp for him. Despite Hermes’s impulsive decision, it’s oddly comforting here—dark and muffled and ever so faintly warm. Hermes rests his cheek against the warmth, and then abruptly realizes its Charon’s bare chest.
He’s still speaking a mile a minute and thank the fates for old habits because even without thinking, he doesn’t pause in whatever it is he’s saying, even as he goes wide-eyed at the realization. He’s had limited skin to skin contact with Charon, despite his frequent attempts throughout their acquaintance to ‘casually’ bump him, but Charon’s body has largely been cool to the touch. But here, pressed to Charon’s sternum, it’s... well, it’d hardly be considered warm by most standards. It’s lukewarm at best. But compared to the usual temperature, both of the air around the Styx, and the rest of Charon’s body, it’s practically toasty.
And beneath Hermes’s ear is a shifting, churning sound he can’t place. It’s nothing at all like a heartbeat, which comes as no surprise, but it’s also nothing like the ringing resonating not-noise divinity that resides in Olympians’ chests. There’s the volcanic rumble of muscles shifting, but beneath that something deep, like the ocean or an almost-boiling pot or thunder or explosions, and yet not at all like any of those things.
Hermes wonders what Charon’s true form must be like. None of the gods wear them very often—it’s just not practical to be so vast or amorphous or divine when you need to get tasks done that require arms and legs and eyes and a mouth. And there’s admittedly a certain ego in shaping themselves into ‘human’ forms, but malleable and perfect and crafted to their own desires instead of crafted for them. But Hermes has seen his father’s divinity and his uncle’s and most of his siblings and cousins. He has never seen a Chthonic god.
Maybe they’re incompatible. Maybe seeing a Chthonic god’s true form would tear him apart the same way his own would burn away a human’s entirety into nothing. But rather than a vaporization, it would be a disassembling. Maybe Hermes would look at Charon, and whatever primal chaotic stardust darkness that Chaos shaped existence from would take his own energy apart. Because whatever the Olympians are made of, it has been processed and solidified into a more contained form. They like to pretend they are pure energy, the most base raw source of everything, but that’s ego too.
The stardust that makes up the Chthonic gods was condensed and reshaped into the raw energy that forms the Olympians, then processed and condensed into its next base form of physical matter that comprises humans. Whatever the Olympians are made of, the Chthonic gods’ cores are the original, the first state, even rawer and purer.
Charon is laughing.
Hermes startles when the sound finally reaches his brain, and his words grind to a halt. He realizes, mortifyingly, that his mouth on autopilot hadn’t remained on its inane unrelated track. His thoughts have been so intense, so potent, that he’s been saying them aloud, or some version of them. Despite already being hidden, he buries his face against Charon’s chest in embarrassment.
(He then, of course, notices that Charon is incredibly muscular as a result of all his rowing. That’s an entirely different sort of fascination from his musings on Charon’s true form. It is, however, equally embarrassing. Hermes feels cheated, to be experiencing such an intense awareness of both divinity and base instinct simultaneously. That shouldn’t be allowed. The smallest mercy is that he manages to keep his mouth shut on this train of thought.)
Moreover, turned to face Charon’s chest directly, he can see the faintest glow. There’s the outline of ribs and the light is dimmed in areas of thicker muscle, but there’s a gentle swirling glimmering light that swells and ebbs as Charon breathes.
Hermes wants it. The vapor from Charon’s mouth is the echo of whatever is inside him—that essence sieved and filtered and made (relatively) safe. And Hermes wants to dig his hands inside of Charon’s chest and experience that unfiltered purest state and let it obliterate him. Embarrassing.
Hermes promptly shoves himself out of the mass of fabric and back out into the light.
“Well, associate of mine! I have business I should be getting to! I really didn’t mean to nap so long! So, you know, see you same time tomorrow and all! Bye!”
He flies quickly out of the Underworld, face burning, but not fast enough to miss Charon’s raised eyebrow, his amused rumble, and how entirely unbothered he seems at Hermes fleeing.
Hermes skips his actual duties—he’s far enough ahead that missing an evening will hardly make a dent—and retires to his private rooms on Olympus.
Each family member he encounters make an obligatory comment about Hermes actually coming home to rest that he ignores. Aphrodite says something about ‘the little bird retreating to his empty nest’ and Hermes pointedly avoids looking her in the eye because he’s not sure what she knows and he doesn’t want to know. Zeus laughs loudly and says something about ‘finally slowing down to keep pace with the rest of the gods’, Dionysus says something about ‘the benefit of being gods man, is that our powers let us just work things out at our own pace, there’s no need to worry man~’ or whatever. Athena only raises an eyebrow and asks if he’s well. Hermes even sees a silhouette down the hall, draped in lavish silks that he knows is Hera, and he immediately turns a corner and takes a detour to avoid her.
It feels like it takes forever to reach his rooms. (The reality is that it was probably two minutes, max.) As irritating as his family members were, they were admittedly a distraction from his thoughts. He flings himself on bed, buries his face in a pillow, and immediately remembers Charon’s broad chest and rasping laugh and strong arms and the sweet-sharp smell of the cosmic smoke that diffuses from his mouth.
Hermes tries not to imagine what Charon’s dry, thin mouth would feel like against his own. He tries not to imagine what that smoke tastes like, and whether the pinpricks of light in it would tears his lungs like knives or feel as bubbly and effervescent as sparkling wine. He tries not to piece together how Charon’s body would feel against his, what the entirety would feel like when his powerful arms and tall stature and warm-cool skin are put together in combination. He tries not to. He fails.