The gods gave moly to mortals as protection—white petals, black stem, grown at the edge of magic and dream. It was never meant for divine lips.

But Hermes, god of roads and wrong turns, took it anyway.

He plucked the flower under a moonless sky, turning it in his hand like a secret. He was tired of rules, tired of pretending he was untouched by longing. So he bit into it, bitter and cold, and waited.

The effects were not as expected.

It wasn’t sleep, nor poison. It was ache. A heat beneath the skin, a looseness in the limbs, like wine mixed with memory. His thoughts unraveled—past, present, and desire threading into one.

And in that soft, delirious blur, he thought only of Tiresias.

The one who never ran. The one who sat, still as stone, in the grove beyond Thebes, blind eyes turned always toward the truth.

Hermes stumbled there, barefoot and wind-tossed, moly in his blood like fire in water. Tiresias sat beneath the fig tree, as he always did, head tilted as if hearing footsteps before they formed.

“You’re not walking,” Tiresias said softly. “You’re falling.”

Hermes dropped to his knees before him. His breath trembled. The god, the trickster, the untouchable, was trembling.

“I took the moly,” he whispered. “And I can’t… I can’t stop wanting you.”

Tiresias said nothing. He only reached out, touched Hermes’ face with fingers worn from prophecy. He traced the line of his jaw, the curve of his mouth, as if reading a sacred text written in flesh.

Hermes leaned in. The kiss was sudden—but not stolen. It was surrendered.

It was the kind of kiss that should not exist between god and mortal, not in the way it burned. Not in the way it healed.

He clung to Tiresias like a man drowning, hands grasping at linen and skin and silence. “Don’t let me go,” he said. “Please.”

Hermes wept then—quietly, without shame. Not for the moly. Not for the kiss. But for all the centuries he had passed by love, thinking it a place he could never stop long enough to touch.

Hermes buried his face in his neck, wings limp, heart raw.

And in the still grove, beneath the watching sky, a god rested.

Not because he was defeated.

But because he was, at last, seen.