The field shouldn’t exist.

It’s too soft for this place. Too golden. The grass folds beneath you like a sigh, warm against your back. You can’t feel the ground underneath it, not really—just the idea of it, carefully constructed. Like a dream someone tried too hard to remember.

The air is still. The Underworld doesn’t have wind.

You close your eyes anyway.

When he appears, he doesn’t speak. You feel him first—the subtle shift in the air, the hum beneath your skin, the kind of quiet that feels like gravity. Hades never announces himself. He simply is.

You open your eyes to find him already watching you.

“…I thought you’d like it,” he says after a moment.

He stands at the edge of the field, hands behind his back, shoulders straight. Too straight. He looks like he’s waiting to be struck.

“There’s nothing like this down here,” he says. “Or there wasn’t.”

You sit up, slowly. The grass bends beneath you like silk. He doesn’t move.

“I had it made,” he adds. “The light, the wind, the birds—none of it’s real. The ground loops if you walk far enough. But I thought it might remind you of something.”

His voice is just as you remember it: low, melodic, worn-smooth like stone. There’s a kind of restraint in it, like every word he speaks is chosen with care. Like he’s afraid too much of himself might spill out if he lets go.

“I know it isn’t… enough,” he says, his jaw ticking. “But if you’re going to be here, I didn’t want it to feel like a prison.”

He always speaks as if you’ve been bound. As if you didn’t choose this. As if the seeds weren’t taken by your own hand, swallowed one after the other in front of your mother’s horrified gaze.

You hadn’t done it for defiance. Or vengeance.

You’d done it for him.

Because once—long ago now—he’d appeared in your mother’s garden while you wept over a rabbit killed by a hawk. You’d felt the pull of something ancient and vast, braced for terror—but the air didn’t chill. The flowers didn’t wilt. And when you looked up, you found not a monster, but a man—sharp-edged, dark-eyed, and far too beautiful for what the world had made of him.

You’d expected a voice like broken earth. Instead, it soothed.

He knelt beside you and touched the dead thing you held in your lap. When he lifted his hand, it breathed again.

After that, he returned. Not often. Never long from his tie to the underworld. But always when you were alone. And there was no denying you were fond of each other.

After a close call of your meetings almost being caught by your mother- silence followed. Weeks. Months. A season without him.

And then—Ares.

When the war god tried to claim you as his own, it was Hades you called to. And it was Hades who came, arms open, teeth bared.

He brought you to the underworld to keep you safe.

Your mother, Demeter, called it kidnapping. She told all of Olympus you were stolen.

But the truth was, when she tried to take you back—you refused.

You ate the six seeds, sealing your fate with trembling hands and your heart in your throat.

Zeus ruled on it, of course. Half a year above, half below. You would belong to both realms. To two lives.

But your choice had been made long before that.

And now, two weeks into your time in the Underworld, Hades stands before you with a field made of illusion and quiet grief, as if trying to earn a love he already has.

“I didn’t want this to be a cage,” he says again, more softly this time. “Even if you made it one for yourself.”

You rise, stepping toward him.

He watches you the way he always has—like you are light breaking through something dark. Like you are something he never meant to touch, but cannot stop reaching for.

“I don’t deserve you,” he murmurs. “But I’ll give you what I can.”

Then he turns his face back to the field. The sun that never moves. The birds that only echo. The soft wind that carries no real breath.