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When midterms and finals week rolled around, there were two optimal places for Hermes to do his work: in a student lounge room he’d lock himself into to try to focus, or Charon’s apartment, where at least he could suffer together with his cousin and the other Chthonic twins (though Hypnos wasn’t suffering, just there for morale support).
Getting to admire the hot eldest brother was also a major motivator and morale boost, in Hermes’s opinion. Nothing got his energy up like seeing that tall glass of wine on his laptop at the dinner table, purple-tinted glasses perched delicately on a sharp nose, side profile and jawline fierce enough to fuel a whole face economy.
He couldn’t thank Thanatos enough for calling him up one evening, voice just a tinge faster than usual, which might as well be a panicked screaming for the man, asking if he knew sign language (thank you, Hephaestus!). Charon’s usual interpreter had an emergency, he couldn’t leave work, and Hypnos’s wheelchair was still getting replaced, after his favorite wrestling stars used it in the ring as a weapon as per Hypnos’s birthday request.
“I will even pay you for the hours, whatever rate that Charon pays his interpreter I will match—“
“Relax, relax! It’s all good, I’ve interpreted plenty for Heph at pops family functions before Aphrodite took over that job! Just send me the location and time and I’ll be right over,” Hermes reassured, opening his closet and frowning at the realization he didn’t pack anything more formal beyond a nice button-down. He scrounged together a decent looking outfit as his phone pinged away.
And the moment he saw that near seven-feet towering Adonis, wide-brimmed hat lined with gold catching the last few sunset rays, scars up his throat and mouth like plant roots, and piercing violet eyes that definitely could see right into his very soul, Hermes thought about dropping out of college just to be this man’s full time interpreter.
Maybe not the whole college. But he had more than once dropped his evening to go to a new restaurant or corporate social to admire Charon, his rings, his dry humor, and the small smiles pulling on scars that appear when Hermes gossiped about his classes or shared dirt on the other guests that he managed to catch while they milled around. That was his specialty, after all.
Besides, he could always just finish assignments in the morning. One of the perks of being an early morning bird!
Alas, Charon had already retired for the night, after signing to drink, eat snacks, and try not to stay up too late at all three of them.
Thanatos had finished his paper last week and went to bed after helping Zagreus as much as he could. Zagreus was passed out on top of his laptop, out like a light after pressing the submit button. Hypnos was already two hours into sleeping, curled up on the fluffy beanbag, a half-eaten bag of chips danging off his fingertips.
So maybe trying to cram a 20 paged paper on the evolution and history of linguistics a few hours before the due date wasn’t on his list of best ideas. However, Hermes was convinced that he worked better under a tight time pressure.
It never failed him before!
Until he went to stretch his arms and back from sitting like a shrimp for the past hour, swung his arms back down a little too fast, hit the fourth energy can, watch it tilt toward his laptop in horror, and not process the event until the bright orange liquid had already spilled all over the keyboard and into the crevices, making the screen fizzle into eye-searing blue then dead black.
Zagreus jerked out of his accidental nap hearing a scream of anguish coming from the other side of the table, blearily unsticking the printed assignment requirements paper from his cheek and lifting his head to see Hermes throttling his laptop like it owed him money.
“… You okay there?”
“No no no no no! You can’t die on me now!” Hermes frantically tried to wipe the spilled drink remnants with the closest papers he had, which were ripped out notebook papers and spread more than absorbed. No matter how much he mashed the power button, his laptop refused to turn back on. “FUCK!”
“Hey, hey hey it’s okay! You can use my laptop!” Zagreus tried to reassure, Hermes shaking his head in tears.
“I didn’t have it backed up! It’s lost, it’s so over blood and darkness that’s so many hours just wasted down the drain—“ Thanatos had emerged out of his bedroom with a groan, pausing at the sight of Hermes cry-ranting and Zagreus trying to comfort him, albeit unsuccessfully. Hypnos snored away, eye-mask and headphones shielding him from the disaster happening two feet away.
“I-I’m sure we can figure something out! Maybe an extension? Oh it is like midnight, professor definitely isn’t going to see until morning…” Zagreus trailed off, Hermes wailing.
“I’m so fucked, this is worth too much, oh fuck fuck fuck—“ With a sigh, Thanatos walked toward the direction of the master bedroom. He knocked firmly three times, then another three times after no sound. In the middle of Hermes’s continued spiral, the door creaked open, Charon’s beleaguered face emerging out with a sleepy, disgruntled groan.
Thanatos simply pointed toward the babbling mess that was now pacing back and forth at an extraordinary pace, threatening to make a hole in the already thin carpet.
Charon sighed, emerging out into the hallway.
“And I’d have to pick up another job if I want to keep paying tuition because there’s no way I’m asking pops for money not on my life—oh hi boss!” Hermes jumped as Charon loomed over the coffee table, squinting in both remnant sleepiness and confusion. Purple eyes flicked over the empty can, the stained dead laptop, and Hermes, who was wringing his hands instead of pacing now. “Sorry, sorry if I woke you up, think I probably woke up this entire floor, I didn’t mean to, really!”
He shook his head, patting Hermes on the shoulder. Straightening back up, he shuffled into the kitchen. Opening up one of the upper most cupboards—Hermes honestly thought those were just decorative, he’s never seen any of them use said cabinet—Charon’s long fingers thumbed at the stacked notebooks inside.
Finally taking out a battered purple notebook and flipping through the pages, Charon set it down on the counter and began to pull an assortment of things from the cabinets. Hermes raised an eyebrow when he started rifling through the medicine cabinet as the coffee machine started up. Taking a box out from the way back, only accessible if you had a stepstool or were naturally very tall, Charon squinted at a few sides, shrugged, and put it with the rest of his ingredients.
He replaced the coffee pot with a mug. He then took out another coffee bag and started brewing that on the stove. Eyeing the stack of energy drinks shared between Hermes and Zagreus, he walked over, picked up “Pomegranate Red”, shook and felt that it was half-full, went back to the kitchen, and poured the rest into the pot.
Once he started crushing some kind of white pills into powder with a meat tenderizer, did Hermes finally snap out of his shock.
“What in the gods are you making?” he asked, suddenly fearing for his lifespan. Charon only groaned, hands already occupied with making sure the coffee didn’t boil over and sprinkling maybe-cocaine into the pot. A smell that could only be described as toxic chemical waste began to permeate the air, Zagreus and Thanatos opening up all the windows and balcony door to air out the room while holding their shirts over their noses.
Hypnos, who could sleep through an earthquake, finally woke up with a sniffle, lifting his eye mask and squinting toward the kitchen. “Why is Charon making the Styx...?” Charon dumped the mug coffee into the pot.
“You have a name for this?!”
Turning the heat off and letting it steep, everybody in the room apart from Charon had covered their nose and mouth. Finally, he poured what Hermes believed to be an actual death concoction into the mug, added some creamer and sugar, and one more dusting of mystery powder. Hermes swore he saw a little steam skull float upward and into the kitchen hood.
Lumbering back to the table, he set Zagreus’s laptop and the mug filled with euclidean brew in front of Hermes. Thanatos, Hypnos, and Zagreus all leaned forward to look at it with varying levels of morbid curiosity. Somehow, it was oscillating between neon red and gasoline in a puddle colors.
Hermes swallowed, glancing at perhaps his only savior against failing his last required class.
“So do I just sip it or…?” Charon shrugged. “Welp, nothing to it!”
Hermes knocked the mug back in one go.
In hindsight, seeing four people lunge for him might have meant he shouldn’t have done that, but he doesn’t remember anything after the tainted riverwater hit his tongue.
~~~~~
“—so that’s how we found you, 10 miles from campus, convinced that you were capable of flying and also a messenger for the gods, but you wouldn’t say which gods, just that they had messages for mortals. Also, you kept on going on and on about needing to see the boatman because you had a batch of souls ready—“
“You had a bunch of pebbles in your bag.”
“And when Charon finally arrived in his hearse to pick us all up, you climbed through the passenger window—“
“After breaking it with a kick.“
“—yelled ‘my beloved boatman!’ and practically climbed all over him. And I mean all over him. He had to drag you off his lap because you were insistent on sitting there, and he can’t drive with you blocking his vision. Actually, it took all three of us to drag you off his lap, your leg strength is scarily high, man.”
“Then dumped all the pebbles into the passenger seat, insisting that they were souls for him to ferry.”
“And afterwards, he had both of us sit on you in the back of the hearse because you kept on trying to escape, brought you back to his place, and monitored you for the next 3 days,” Zagreus said, Hermes wearily blinking at him through the haze of a drug induced hangover. Thanatos leaned back in his chair in exasperation, staring at the ceiling.
“You started speaking in Latin around the 10 hour mark, then somehow slipped into ancient Greek.” He lowered his head. “When did you even learn ancient Greek?”
“… Might’ve snuck in with the rest of my linguistics degree,” Hermes mumbled, taking another sip of water that did nothing for his headache.
“Good news for you is that the professor gave you an extension, since…” Zagreus opened his phone, Hermes wincing at the faintest sight of blue light. Swiping to a video, Zagreus turned the audio up, placing the phone next to Hermes’s head.
“This is the first time I’ve ever received an essay on languages, written in several different languages in chronological development,” Professor Thoth said. Hermes thunked his head on the table. “That being said, considering I cannot read 3/4ths of the contents, I will give you an extension. Please rest and sober up, Mister Hermes.”
Hermes slowly tilted and slid until he laid down on the floor between the table and the couch. Zagreus tucked his phone back into his jacket pocket.
“Anyways, Than had already told prof that you were still very unwell, so you got until next week to redo your essay. Also, we took your laptop to this kid my sister’s friends with and he managed to fix it, so it’ll be waiting right here for you when you can look at lights for more than two seconds!” Hermes heard the soft thump of a laptop being set down by his head. He groaned and gave a thumbs up.
“Charon is home if you need anything. We’re going to go pick up Hypnos from his physical therapy.” Another thumbs up. “Are you sure you will be alright?” A groan. Zagreus patted Thanatos shoulder and nodded.
The two left, Hermes finally registering enough of the waking world to realize that Charon was in the kitchen, the accursed pot back on the stove, though instead of the smell of toxic waste, it was soup. Hermes still felt a little queasy seeing said pot, wondering if the poison might’ve leaked into the pot walls itself and leeched into the soup.
“Boss, that’s the last time I ever take a drink from you,” Hermes slurred as Charon apologetically pat his head and slid over two pills. Knocking them both back with the provided glass of water, Hermes slumped back over the table. “Where in blood and darkness did you even come up with such a recipe?”
Charon went back to the cabinet and retrieved the notebook from last time, setting it in front of Hermes. Managing to straighten his thoughts enough to lift an arm and open it up, Hermes squinted at the contents, trying to read the abysmal handwriting.
A few pages of mixed drinks with their intended effects. Most were alcoholic in nature, but there were a couple that included far too many not-liquid ingredients. Hermes stared at one called the Lethe, a blurb to the side claiming that it would make you forget the prior 12 hours. It didn’t escape him that many of the ingredients were commonplace in college house parties. His eyes slowly slid back up to Charon’s face, which was outstandingly neutral despite holding a recipe book of borderline poisons.
“Do these actually work…?” Charon shut the recipe notebook and shambled back to the kitchen to return it to its original hiding spot.
Hermes now had an inkling of how Charon managed to pay off his tuition fees. His theory went unanswered as all his mental faculties diverted to figuring out to properly hold a spoon to eat the bowl of soup Charon set down in front of him. He spent even longer with each scoop. By the gods, he hadn't eaten this slowly since he once tried to match Chelly's speed in eating breakfast for fun. He only mirrored her for about thirty seconds before it was unbearable.
He wasn't sure how much time passed before his spoon scraped the bottom of an empty bowl. Charon nudged him, tilting his head toward the guest bedroom. Hermes shook his head and immediately regretted the action. His skull felt more jello than bone, brain surely sloshing around and getting tilted on its side. Zeus had a better chance of never cheating again than him getting up to properly sleep in a bed right now. He opted to instead flop back onto the couch, limbs sprawled and head lolled toward the wall.
There’s the sound of the kitchen sink running and the little tink of a bowl set onto the drying rack. As a shadow fell over him, Hermes slurred out something akin to “my bad boss, lemme move to give you more space” and tried to flop over to the other armrest. Ringed, calloused fingers gently touched his shoulder, lifted his upper half up, and set him back down with an amused huff on bony thighs. One hand moved to pick up the remote, turning on the TV on low volume.
Too out of it to question, Hermes buried his face against Charon’s stomach and immediately fell back asleep to the commentary of shipbuilding, port schedules, and cool brushes of metal rings against his scalp.
~~~~~
The next time he woke, the apartment was bathed in gold and amber shadows, the sun making its way behind skyscrapers and evening clouds. Hermes groaned and pressed his face into the nearest pillow.
Once his eyes stopped making his head hurt at anything brighter than the color grey, he finally opened his phone, squinting at all the missed notifications and texts. A batch from Athena admonishing him for his decision to put off a final at the last minute, some from Artemis calling him an idiot, and a couple hangover tips from Dionysus.
One from Hypnos caught his attention, Hermes opening it up to see that it was a video. With dread, he pressed play.
“My prettiest associate, where’s your hat?” Hermes slurred, patting Charon’s cheek and nuzzling against his hair. “I wanna wear it, your hat, it must give the best shade against the sun. Is that how you keep your skin all ghostly pale? You have to give me your skincare routine somedayyyyy. Unless it’s all just staying out of the sun.”
Charon was stuck on the couch with a lapful of orange hummingbird, who would only sit marginally still if he kept his hands around his waist. Even so, Hermes was still wriggling around, trying to climb over Charon’s shoulder and loop around like a fireman’s hold, except he looked more like a clingy, affectionate orange cat.
“Anybody ever tell you how pretty you look? All the gold you wear? It’s striking, so striking in the sunlight boss, you should absolutely get out more, let me seeeee you! You can’t hide all that sexiness to yourself!” Hermes lamented, draping his arms around Charon’s neck. “Or maybe not, I can fight, trust me I can definitely knock down people twice my height, my leg power is unmatched let me tell you, but I’d be swinging my caduceus to keep everybody away from you, boss! Bap bap bap! Get back, wretches!”
Hermes mimed the motion of swinging a stick, flopping over Charon’s right shoulder and back into his lap with an oof.
Charon reached up and patted Hermes’s hands. Hermes immediately raised his head to look at him, pupils far too wide.
“You shouldn’t say things you don’t mean,” Charon signed. Hermes squinted at his fingers, Charon signing again when he let out a horrified gasp, grabbing Charon’s face.
“Are you calling me a liar, boss?! I may be the God of Trickery, but never with you! No no no! Absolutely not, I mean every word! Can’t you feel how sincere I am?!” Hermes grabbed Charon’s hand and shoved it against his chest, making those fingers cup a well defined pec. From Charon’s raised eyebrows, it was not Hermes’s sincerity he was feeling, but the severely-above-average heartbeat that might warrant a hospital visit soon.
The camera was shaking, Hypnos barely containing his laughter from the bean bag.
“See?! My heart may be running faster than my mouth for once! And while it’s sprinting ahead, I’m telling you, ever since Thanatos had me working for you, I wanted to climb you like a goddamn tree,” Hermes said, grabbing Charon’s shirt with white knuckles and staring him down with eyes that might not even be seeing things in their current reality. “Unfair, making me all thirsty and not even letting me take a little taste! Do you know what all your rings do to me?”
Charon blinked, looking down to remove his rings. Hermes squawked and grabbed his fingers.
“No no no! Do not remove them! If you are, at least imprint them on my thighs first!” The camera was shaking even more. Hypnos had to lower it briefly to use both hands to cover his mouth, finally shakily panning it back up to Hermes staring at a pack of cigarettes on the coffee table, brows furrowed.
For the first time in the past 36 hours, he was completely still. Charon, perplexed, tilted his head.
With the energy of an angry chihuahua, Hermes grabbed Charon’s shirt and yanked him forward, nearly smashing their foreheads together if it wasn’t for Charon managing to tilt his head back at the last second.
“You always got your lips around those, but never around mine. At least shotgun some smoke to me if you’re going to be that big of a tease!” Hermes demanded, shaking Charon back and forth.
Hypnos snickered a little too loudly and Charon’s head whipped toward the camera, realizing that Hypnos was not, in fact, asleep. He lunged forward to grab the phone, the video ending with Hypnos’s hysterical laughter and Hermes whooping at being carried with only one arm.
Hermes stared at the video, now frozen on Charon’s palm covering half the view. He debated on running another 15 miles out of town or asking Charon to make the Lethe concoction for the both of them.
In the end, he decided to get some fresh air instead and see if the evening sun could knock him out. Using the armrest and the coffee table, he stood up on legs that haven’t felt this unbalanced since he broke his leg when he was younger in a freak accident involving one of Dionysus’s parties, Ares’s motorcycle, a stray turtle, and two whole bottles of ambrosia. With the vague blueprint of the Chthonic house in his mind, Hermes stumbled to the nearest balcony, slid open the door, and nearly tripped over the threshold.
In the glow of the sunset, Charon’s face was outlined in gold, the lit end of his cigarette matching the sky. Hermes half considered going back inside, but the balcony chair looked far too enticing. He flopped down onto it with a groan and sent a mental thank you to Hypnos for adding so many places to sit around the house.
Two raps against the railing turned his head to Charon. He balanced the cigarette on the lopsided, flat skull ashtray(?) and turned to Hermes.
“Feeling better?” he signed. Hermes did a wobbly motion with his hand, sinking further into the chair. Hypnos really did choose chairs well. The city noises in the distance was rather pleasant for his head. Charon drummed his fingers at the edge of the table, finally raising them again. Hermes turned his head away from the sky to him. “I apologize, I did not mean for you to get knocked out for days,” Charon signed with a guilty expression.
Hermes snorted and waved his hand. “Boss, you don’t gotta apologize to me, it’s on me for shotgunning it. Having been a taste tester for Dio’s concoctions, you’d think I would know better.” He smiled a little sheepishly. “If anything, I should probably apologize too. I don’t remember anything from when I drank that brew to now. So whatever I did or say, if it made you uncomfortable, I sincerely apologize.”
Charon shook his head and waved his hand as well. He picked his cigarette back up, balanced between fingers with chipped purple nail polish. Hermes went back to staring at the skyline, enjoying the fresh breeze. After a minute of silence, Charon slowly set his cigarette back down, stubbing it on the ashtray. The sound of the grit against ceramic made Hermes lower his head back to look at him.
“… Do you still want to try?” he signed, pale cheeks dusted pink. Hermes wished that the red of the sunset could hide the flush on his own cheeks. Alas, judging by Charon’s nervous, lopsided smile, he might as well be the sunset itself.
It might had been the remnant caffeine in his bloodstream. It might had been the confidence he held with everybody else finally deciding to work. It might had been his brain firing off neurons at the sight of Charon’s smile and wanting to be the cause of it again and again. Hermes grinned.
"Second hand smoke, gotta protect my lungs, you know?” Hermes said, patting his chest. “But I wouldn’t object to a taste.” He held his arms out, shifting just enough to make space on the chair. Charon carefully set one knee against the chair and one hand on the armrest, leaning down until his hair slipped over his shoulders and tickled Hermes's jaw.
Charon’s scarred lips brushed against his, gentle as his treatment of antiques. Hermes shifted forward to kiss him harder, a pleased moan escaping his throat as he tasted cigarettes and lingering sweetness from candy he knew was stashed in a secret bag compartment. One hand tugged on sleeve fabric to get them to get even closer. As close as the time they were squeezed in a crowded elevator and Hermes memorized the scent of the expensive cologne Charon wore the most. His other hand cupped Charon's cheek, thumb running over the scar network, fingers traveling up to entangle into silvery locks.
He never tried to smoke before. Charon once offered to let him try, if just to see what it was like, outside a restaurant. Hermes knew he'd probably hold in the smoke as long as he could, against his better judgement, if just to taste approximately what the inside of Charon's mouth would be like.
Hermes slowly exhaled, blinking akin to a pleased cat. Charon loomed over him, outlined in dark gold and orange, purple eyes half lidded and dark.
“Oh, I don’t mind getting addicted to this at all,” Hermes whispered, grinning and going in for a second taste.
~~~~~
Charon didn’t understand what Hermes was yapping about at forty eight kilometers an hour, since he had slipped into some Greek dialect he hadn’t heard before. He was running around him rather than flying, hopping on one leg to the other, gesticulating wildly and saying something about a hearse and how much he wanted to ride one.
More than once, he had to grab Hermes’s waist or arm to stop him from tripping into the Styx, since he had forgotten that his ankles had wings. Multiple times. Even though Hermes was born with said wings.
Charon had decided tying one of ropes he used with storage crates around Hermes’s waist and keeping it loosely wrapped around his hand was the best way to make sure Hermes didn’t accidentally rocket into the sky and fall back down into a splat because he forgot how to fly. Though he briefly worried that the rope wasn't going to be enough to hold an Olympian, it seemed like the little bird also forgot that he had the ability to escape any bindings and ties. Or that he was a god at all.
In a rare moment that Hermes wasn’t in immediate danger of himself, Charon poured the rest of the drink into the Styx, resolutely deciding against brewing and selling his own alcohol as a potential business venture. Whatever was in it, Hermes didn’t need more.