Chapter Text
Though his heart and memories had been returned to him, he didn’t feel very different from the human traveler who stepped into the bathroom some minutes before. There was the deep pulsating hum of the land itself within his bones, but he was not any more swift-footed than he was before. No golden wings sprouted from his heels. The wind carried nothing more than the strands of his hair.
But he was not deterred. Hermes didn’t have much, but he had a fast car and a plan.
His divinity reached down like roots into the land, this limitless body resting between two oceans, chained by artificial borders drawn by human hands. While other animals were content living by rivers, lakes, and estuaries, the land’s ancient veins carved by millennial wind and water, humans carved new paths into the earth. The rivers of America may have flowed first, but the highways were much more well traveled by the humans whose belief in the country made it a reality.
If he were a god of older things—a force of nature made manifest—he might have taken the rivers to find Charon. Rivers were what the ferryman had traveled by, and Hermes was sure it would be along the banks of a river where they would meet again. But Hermes was a god of humans first; god of coins and cons, god of mortal inventions. So he followed not the ancient twists and turns of the Mississippi River, but the cities and interstates built along it. St. Louis. Memphis. Baton Rouge. New Orleans.
As he traveled south, Hermes reached out and took the horizon in his hand, and wrapped it gently around his neck, the sunset becoming a golden scarf.
He found himself in the bayou, standing knee deep along the banks where river became gulf. Mangrove roots extended above the water like the tentacles of an ancient being, casting intricate shadows as night fell. There was no light along this stretch of abandoned shore save the distant glow of street lamps along the interstate, and the sunset resting on his neck. Gnats and mosquitos buzzed along the water, though none dared to drink his godly ichor.
After waiting for an indeterminable amount of time, fog began to rise from the water. Hermes smiled and looked up briefly to the bright Pleiades, before the night sky was swallowed up in the mist.
He inhaled deeply, the scent of magnolias and sea spray heavy in the air. The brackish water carried memories of the rivers and snowcaps from further north; the cycle of rains and rivers intersected with the cycle of life.
Death flowed along the river, carcasses of animals whose rot had seeped into the water, and the waste and chemicals humans poured into its outflow. It did not make the water less holy; on the contrary, it was thick with spirits, so thick the excess escaped upwards into the air, becoming a purple miasma that Hermes sucked in and savored like the finest incense.
Deep within his body, a memory older than himself stirred. He didn’t know as a god if his bones were made of apatite or marble, and if the blood in his veins had turned into golden ichor. But still he remembered the skeletal hand against his cheek.
He held the fog inside him, waiting for it to settle in his lungs and dissolve into his bloodstream, where his blood would carry it to his heart. He imagined the purple tint of the fog mixing with the golden light inside him, becoming the color of sunset, of twilight and transitions. Just as Charon returned his heart to him in the rest stop bathroom, Hermes hoped the fog would take the heart inside him that he had kept beating all these years, this heart that was not his own.
Hermes breathed in the shoreline mist, and when he exhaled, he exhaled a man.
No, not a man, though his body vaguely gestured towards a human form. Charon’s bones were made of stardust, his musculature a translucent grey through which his skeleton glowed. And deep within the furnace of his ribcage, his heart glowed with the faint tragedy of distant supernovas.
Charon manifested with his arms around Hermes, who was at the perfect height to rest his head against the ferryman’s chest, watching his heart beat within the glowing cavity of his ribcage. The heart he had worked so hard to return back to him. And he knew as he watched that his heart was beating in time with Charon’s, these two hearts they had exchanged when their divinity was torn from them.
“Told you I’d find you again,” he said, smiling.
Charon breathed out a plume of smoke in response, and Hermes, god of languages spoken and felt, understood him perfectly.
“I missed you too.”