mpzeus

[mpzeus]

zeus steps a little further into the space, surprisingly barren, and cold, although one shouldn’t be surprised knowing his brother, knowing the kinds of decorations that were always sort of lacking from hades’ personal touch-- if one ever such existed. although, it’s been so long now since zeus has seen hades on his own; of which is definitely true, there’s just no way persephone wouldn’t plant a flower somewhere or doodle a drawing on something, give it something lively. but a look around the place affirms a distinctly male setting, all pointed and with a purpose, serving a function with efficiency the same way zeus would always associate with hades.

still though, he blinks a moment down at the couch, debating whether it’s safe or not to engage, before turning around and flopping down onto it, arms spreading out across the backboard-cushions, his legs crossing over themselves in a lengthened, comfortable way. every space is zeus’ space, every drop of air, every ounce of breath belongs to him, and even when that’s not entirely true and even when that’s not entirely felt and even when that’s not entirely what he can get away with, it’s still the atmosphere he portrays, it’s still what he does everything to appear as.

he decides not to outright mention persephone, but something has to be addressed here. “so what’s the issue? this place is a wasteland-- are you depressed or something? desperate?” another look around. “you don’t even have a bookshelf or anything, are you planning on disappearing soon or what?” he clears his throat, barely looking directly at hades while he prattles on but tilting his head slightly, as though in concern. “it’s actually kind of important that i know, see, i was planning on asking if i could stay with you a while but if you’re heading out, i might as well just take the whole place. though i can’t imagine why you’d leave now. or where you’d go.” another head lean to the other side. “do you have a plan here or are you more just traveling through? like me?”

a swipe of his tongue across his lips and a second later, he recognizes the fridge on the other side of the room. “hey you’re the god of riches, aren’t you? tell me you at least have some beer or something. come talk to me.”

as usual, the cavalier demeanor zeus shields himself with is drenched and dripping with arrogance, a million dollar smile to encourage the charm, and enough ego to instill the matter, but there’s something sitting on his chest, something burning the tethers in his eyes that he knows he can’t hide well from his brother, not from hades. maybe anyone else in the pantheon, but hades had been there from the beginning, hades had been birthed and swallowed before him. like zeus, he can probably remember the universe before the gods, can probably remember that darkness. can probably see it in zeus’ eyes, if he tries to make eye-contact.

so he tries not to.

now is the climax to our story

[mpzeus]

bad advice

@mpfreya

the phone is buzzing.

the phone is buzzing and zeus doesn’t really have the sort of mental capacity to deal with this all right now, what with the lightning storm brewing on the horizon and sleep being so disastrously unattainable for hours now, visions of past loves and past hauntings swimming up before and behind his eyes, stirring at his heart even when he consistently begs it to calm. the buzzing unnerves him momentarily, frays at the edges of his already quite sheared edges, making him bare his teeth and growl low at the base of his throat-- it is past two a.m. in the morning and he feels like he hasn’t rested in a millenia.

still, though, if there’s one thing anyone can ever say about zeus, former king of the gods, it’s that he never passes down a chance to talk at someone, no matter the time. stars are just as good as sunlight in his opinion, just as bright if not a little further away, a little bit more mystical than our own solar star. he blinks into the fluorescent light and yawns, shifting on the couch he’s currently staying on, courtesy of hades. “muh?” he answer halfheartedly, somewhere between a word and a moan into the speaker of the phone. one may be worthy enough for a response from his majesty, but a full on conversation? that’s yet to be seen.

[mpzeus]

[mpzeus]

past | i won’t fall in love with falling

@mpxtohil

it’s valentine’s day and the world is quiet here.

some people don’t sleep very well, their thoughts caught in the spin of the earth, melting in with its molten core, their bones shifting beneath their skin like snakes wrapped in thin blanket sheets, thinner than the bedding they toss and turn on, thinner than their eyelids trying desperately to keep the light out, keep the noise out, keep the world out. everything in their breath begs for rest, begs for peace, for a silence that doesn’t drown them into the bottom of the ocean, for a lightness that doesn’t cast them out into the furthest reaches of space. some people cannot sleep, and when they do, they cannot sleep well.

zeus has always been that person, always too heavy in his bed, whether it be gilded or wind-born, either in olympus on the mountain or before that, before the war, before the terror, before his mother had ever explained about his father and his destiny-- zeus has always hated sleeping. there is a disquiet inside the very fabric of his genealogy, the tapestry of his existence fearful of fading into nothingness unless it’s in constant motion, in constant turmoil, in constant disturbance. he doesn’t know himself if he’s not right on the edge, if he isn’t clinging to a lightning bolt, gnashing on the hemlines of cold space and burning stars. he doesn’t know who he is without that inner pandemonium.

but for tonight, for just this one night, he doesn’t care. here, he is on the highest suite of the tallest hotel in the country, here he has the best view of every other building, two walls of his bedroom full-length plated window-glass, affording him the undying, effervescent sights of both the city sprawling below and the stars harkening above. all is quiet despite his vantage point, but he isn’t looking at all that right now.

here, his bed reclines in the middle of the room, and here, a body reclines fitted into his arms, tucked against him as though they’ve always been together, they’ve always matched this way, their usual fire and brimstone relationship always simmering down into a night of hungry kisses, slow sex, sleepy murmurs. but it’s well past midnight and zeus can’t sleep and they won’t always be like this, will they?

he pulls away from his lover and drags himself into a sitting position, sighing heavily and rubbing his hands over his face. he should be happy. why isn’t he happy? it’s not tohil’s fault, not at all, but there’s still something nagging on him, something pulling at his ribcage. after a moment, he realizes the other is awake and glances back at him in the dim darkness. “sorry i woke you. had a nightmare.” an ongoing, continual nightmare, like the boiling underground pit he’d once thrown his father into. eternally tortured. the both of them. “do you ever wish we could just… start everything over again? rewind the world?”

does he ever regret knowing zeus the same way zeus sometimes regrets being born at all?

[mpzeus]

the world is too thin for us

@amaterasuxmp

the frustration is the worst bit, the boiling, the blazing nonsense that coils in his veins, pressing in on all his limbs and joints as though he doesn’t have enough things to worry about, as though he isn’t constantly tied down with his own threatening insanity, the memories, the nightmares, the deterioration he can feel climbing up his throat, searing through his gut-- no, even now, he still deals with all the perfectionist ploys of his breeding. that strained ocd that churns from the pit of his stomach, aches in his bones, begs him to do something, do something, do something, every time he passes a building that just seems so utterly…. wrong.

fix it, fix it, fix it.

he can’t help himself, can’t train his own blood to quit pumping, can’t hold his voice back from the dial tone of his cell phone, can’t retract the numbers his fingers push, the call going through, the words tumbling off his lips despite every thought in his brain needling him to shut up. this isn’t his job-- this isn’t what he should be doing. he knows this. yet still.

“ama, have you even ever been to downtown lately? this city’s organization is a mess, nothing makes sense map-wise, it’s worse than the minotaur’s labyrinth-- we’ve got posh shops in the worst ends of town where no one can get to them, there’s no parking besides on the street, and the streets are horrifically thin-- seriously, have you ever been to downtown? this place is a mess, i can’t believe you people named it after olympus, i never let olympus get this bad.”

honestly, her giving him her personal number had probably proved a mistake.

[mpzeus]

i think i love you

@mpxkrystal  |  continued from here

suffice it to say, tonight has been a thoroughly wild night, and zeus can’t even remember who he’d spent most of it with, in true king of olympus fashion.

he holds a vague recollection of three burly men in a bar, all about as wide as he is tall, laughing very loudly at his table around their ridiculous mustaches and beer mugs, as well as the startling image of a set of stone stairs coming up very quickly to meet his face ( of which he thinks he recognizes as the steps outside city hall ), but beyond that, he’s not entirely sure. he enters into the hospital with ink all over his hands, half a poem written on his hip in lipstick, and no idea where his shoes have gone-- not that he isn’t absolutely rocking these heels. because he is, of course. but still.

so when the very lovely young lady leans over him, her cool skin breaching through the heat of his alcoholic maze of a mind, he blurts out the same thing he’s been blurting out since the dawn of time: whatever the hell he wants to. “to be fair,” he muses, the slight slurring of his voice slowly draining out of him, poison leaking from an open wound, “not many can ever tell the extent of my injuries, they always seem to come and go with a vengeance.” he chuckles which becomes a cough and suddenly he’s worried if he might have snapped his own neck trying to leave that dirty limerick in the mail slot of the city hall building--

Oh! that’s right, that’s what he’d been doing there! it’s all getting clearer now. he stuffs his hand into his hair, obstructing the young healer’s view and access, and starts laughing harder.

[mpzeus]

[mpzeus]

for a breath, zeus wonders if he’s made a mistake, wonders if the world has tilted too much for the two of them, shifted too much beneath their feet to call themselves still brothers, wonders if the words that bound together in an invisible yet impenetrable barrier for so many years are still coiled there, wired and strained and biting. he wonders if hades holds grudges the same way their father does, if he looks at zeus and only sees the mantle plated across his skin, everything he’s guarded himself with, everything he’s collapsed around himself. he wonders if hades is going to sneer or scoff or even worse-- if he’s going to want an apology before letting zeus come inside.

he lets nothing shine through the cruel curve of his lips though, showing nothing of his sudden apprehension, his momentary glitch of confidence, and he’s infinity glad of that given the sigh that breaks through hades a second and a half later-- a small, short release tearing its way through his own throat as well (and he ignores how similar to a sob it sounds). his grin widens even more as he puts a hand up to his chest, over his heart, the contact making a dim thud, as though he’s been shot there, his face a mask of mock-pain. “how dare you. i’ll have you know, this body is award-winning custom built, thank you very much.”

he almost doesn’t even wait for hades to sidestep out of the way before bursting into his apartment, his atmosphere spreading out from him in jovial waves, nothing dark or ominous clinging to the edges of him, nothing worrisome in his stride, shoulders back and relaxed, tall and instantly comfortable in the space, like he owns it all already. “nice digs. no dogs?” sharp eyes scan around the interior, noting the design structure, the flaws, the strengths, colors and mesh, where the support beams would most likely go, how the furniture sits to its own advantage.

he doesn’t answer hades right away, letting himself walk a few more steps inside the main room, his smile smaller now but still plastered to his lips, his fingers straightening the cuffs of his jacket. “heard about this place from a halfling in seoul, some kind of haven place, like a step away from time. i didn’t know you’d be here, since i thought you had more important things to do, but as soon as i stepped into town, i could feel you.” he chuckles a bit before turning back to his brother and tilting his head a fraction. “what in all of creation are you doing here anyway, hades?”

now is the climax to our story

[mpzeus]

tap on the window

@mpxmia

this is going to be a disaster and he knows it.

it’s not hard to imagine many situations in zeus’s life descending into chaos, given his particularly troubling track-record, his history painted and woven into the very fabric of time and reality, the blame for every catastrophe laid across his shoulders, branded in his wake– and true, some of it is honest as the dawn is bright, but not everything. history often gets written and rewritten by liars and schemers, butchers and empty-headed scholars, very rarely containing anything real, anything less myth, anything less fantastical, but the darker corners of history, the messier bits and pieces, those tend to be factual, heavy as lead, strong as steel. and zeus has made many, many mistakes.

and tonight is about rectifying at least one of them– which is something that will once again surely end in disaster simply from his mere involvement, though he knows he must try. never having been very much of a father figure, despite the slew of offspring he’s garnered for himself, tonight is about reconciliation, about compromise, about peace ( peace amongst the raging, thrashing insanity boiling just below the surface, below the earth, below consciousness, where the pit churns and boils and roars in the core of him, in the core of all creation, the monster that hides, that gnaws, that eats and eats and eats ), and he’s hoping this step forward will be fruitful enough to enact another step, sometime in the future.

dinner. with his daughter.

he gets her flowers, he gets her comfort, he gets the perfect setting and the perfect atmosphere, makes reservations to the best restaurant in town, at the highest table he can catch in such short notice, rents the whole vip floor for the evening in question and sends a driver to pick her up. he waits for her in his sharpest black suit, an image cutting enough that he sets the table knives on display to shame. he’s not sure exactly what he has to be so intricately nervous about but the intensity of his emotions cannot be overlooked, despite however much she may or may not receive him.

to err is normal. mistakes are part of the process. she’ll understand that, won’t she?

[mpzeus]

so i feel like this is a song that’s been sung before but i’ve been having a super busy week asfdghdfjg sorry for being so absent! i definitely plan to get to my replies and posts and plotting things tomorrow tho~ 

[mpzeus]

and the light will set us free

@mpxwheein

he steps into the small floral shop and lets the scents of the room cascade over him, sweets and bitters, colors and flavors, a thickness that threatens to overtake him, coaxing him to simply shut his eyes for a moment and remember what eternal fields felt like to wade through, back when the world was young and virginic, back when the highest buildings could go was a good eight meters up, back when entire hills rested untouched, unsullied, unknown by humanity, full of flowers waving in the breeze. he remembers how tall they climbed towards the ever-shining sun, how it felt to have fought for this, burned for this, won all this. lost all this.

he opens his eyes and takes a few more steps inside, his eyes meanders through the shelves and decorative fountains of greenery and vines, everything offerable for any occasion, any dalliance, all your party-planning needs, and he can’t help himself from grinning loosely at the silliness of some of the plants. design flaws perhaps, he couldn’t say-- he’s not the god of flowers, fortunately. but at least they are all entertaining and if there’s one thing he can say for certain, it’s that it’s definitely taking effort coming here and doing this. it’s not really his style, but then… he’s trying something new. for someone new.

he hears a person, a girl from the edge of her breathing, come in from behind him, feels her presence behind the counter, that earth and green atmosphere coiling off her in waves, and determines that she obviously works here, come to help or check him out, but before she can speak, he’s already voicing his dilemma. “how do you get flowers that say ‘i want to be your family even though i’ve missed the last… couple thousand years of your life.’” he pauses without looking back, studying a great big bloom of sunflower. “wait, actually, i don’t even know how long she’s been alive, so maybe not a couple thousand years.”

[mpzeus]

now is the climax to our story

@mphades

the night is clear and blinking with stars, and zeus hates every single one of them. dead gaseous balls of fire, of light, of havoc raining down from millions of meters away, constant reminders that everything dies, everything burns, everything shifts and changes and explodes into fresh forms, brilliant with color and destruction, just so someone somewhere far enough away to never see that color or destruction can make wishes on them. every time he looks up to see those shattering, blazing crystals, he grimaces and pulls the cloud-cover over him, over the neighborhood, over the town, like a shroud, a blanket to blot out the moon.

his stride is measured yet hesitant, calm only beneath the prism of tight control harnessed and fisted through white-knuckled authority, his muscles taunt and charged, his pace steady and heavy and long. perhaps he’s walking ever so slightly slower than he usually would, reluctance only visible through the smallest of tinges across his nervous system, his fingers stretching, his jaw tightening, the breath threatening to catch and sizzle inside his lungs-- but the street is dark and empty, his hands pressed into the deep pockets of his coat, his head slightly covered by the collar. he is as invisible as a thunderstorm can possibly be, shock-white hair, dark strong eyes, taller than most, sharper than most, all bundled up in his effort to keep from drawing too much attention to himself too quickly. he’s been playing this game a long time; why stop now?

he turns from the main sidewalk, turns and heads for the manticore apartments, knowing exactly where to go and how to get to the rooms designated for the higher gods of his pantheon, already guessing how the layout inside must look, how it must curve and carve and form, where the restrooms would sit, which edge or side of the building would have the better views-- his hundred-plus years as an architect kicking in without his focus. he ignores the idea of taking a space for himself, despite the invitation from city hall, ignores the expectation anyone or everyone might have for the once-king of an entire sect of divinity; strives instead for what he’s sure his brother at least will find most surprising.

he knocks on his door.

and when hades opens it, zeus is not in the least bit surprised that no matter what changes might have occurred in the past millenia since they’ve seen one another, no matter what hardships or blessings, no matter what difficulties or plans or plots might have affected them…. he can still always count on his brother to look thoroughly wry no matter what.

he grins wide and devilish. “well aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

[mpzeus]

wow i’m late with this i need to do Better whoops

hello hello !! sorry i’m 64 years late, but i’m tabi, i’ll be the writer behind this lightning god, Mr. Problematic himself, and i’m super excited to start plotting and writing with you all !! little heads up: he’s a whole-ass mess, fighting off both insanity and emotions all at once, so ya know it’s gonna be havoc~~

i’ll be rollin into dms soon ( not tonight because i’m exhausted, hopefully tomorrow tho ), but i also have a discord ( dinotabi#5273 ) so feel free to add me, message me, let me know if you wanna make something just hit that like button, we can get things going~

[mpzeus]

~tags~

[mpzeus]

“And then, together entwined, with love-broken mouths and frayed souls time will find us utterly destroyed.”

— Federico García Lorca, [trans. Paul Archer] from Sonnets of Dark Love; Sonnet of the garland of roses. (via xshayarsha)

[mpzeus]

[mpzeus]

"Black tears, Bright smile, Colorless me, A world without color."