shanastoryteller:

Pandora is made from
earth, shaped by the hands of Hephaestus and made in the image of his beloved
wife. Aphrodite gifts her with grace and charisma. Athena teaches her to weave
and bestows cleverness upon her.

She stands in front of
Hermes, and the god frowns and touches her with a single fingertip on her chin,
moving her head one way than the other. “They’ll eat you alive,” he says, and
she doesn’t understand.

She tilts her head to the
side and smiles a vacant smile. All of the cleverness in the world will do her
no good without any context. “We are the same,” she says, pressing a hand to
Hermes’s chest. She is made from earth and has the skin to mach. He is a
celestial god, and his skin is the same rich shade of brown.

He did not ask to be born
any more than his mother asked to bare him. His creation, just like hers, is at
the whims of Zeus. All for some little lost fire, all because Prometheus wanted
his people to be warm, and, well, he is the god of the thieves after all –

So he gifts her with
deceit, with selfishness, with cunning. Her smile leaves her face all at once
as she’s filled with self-awareness. “He’ll be angry with you,” she says, “I am
not what you were supposed to make.”

“Gods have short
memories,” he says, and doesn’t bother to hide the contempt in his voice. “Do
not worry about me, gifted child. You have larger problems than my fate.”

He has turned her from
something pure into – something more like him. Her face darkens even further as
her perfectly crafted mind slots all the pieces together, and he can’t help but
find her lovely. It’s how she was made, after all. “I can’t stop it, can I?
Whatever they’re planning for me to do?”

“No,” Hermes says, “but
now you might be able to survive it.”

“Will I want to?” she
asks, and he doesn’t answer. She doesn’t expect him too.

~

She hides from everyone,
lives in a cave at the edge of the city. The gods had called her the first
woman, but that’s not true, she can see.

There are women. They
smile and laugh have work roughened hands. She aches to join them, but she has
the beauty of a goddess. They will know. If she joins them, they will know she
is not of them, and it will set into motion whatever trap Zeus has planned.

She is not human, not in
the same way, molded from clay by a god’s hands. But she is of humans, and not eager to bestow upon
them the harm she’s destined to bring them. She bathes in streams where only
nymphs reside, steals into the city in the cloak of night and pilfers from the
baker’s trash.

“When they said they sent
my brother a wife,” a low, amused voice says too close behind her one night, “I
had not expected a begger.”

She whirls around, hard
bread clenched tight in front of her, an incredibly inefficient shield. Her
breath catches in her throat when she sees him, dark and tall and eyes like the
night sky. He looks like Hermes. Like her. “Who are you?” she demands. They’re
in an alley corner, and of her gifts flight is not among them. She’ll have to
fight him to get away.

She’s not afraid of him.
Maybe another mortal would be, cornered in the middle of the night by a man she
doesn’t know. But she’s no normal mortal woman, and besides – he has something
comforting about him, like the hearthfire attended by Hestia. Something warm.

“I am Prometheus,” says
the man, and no wonder he reminds her of fire. “What do they call you?”

“You are meant to be in
the deepest pits of Hades’s realm,” she snaps, and shifts her grip on the stale
bread so that she can throw it at him. He’s the whole reason she’s here to
begin with, him and his thievery.

He shrugs and walks
closer to her, watching her like one would watch a wild animal. Good. Here, in
this dark alley where no one would find a cooling body until morning, it is he
that should be afraid. “Gods forget,” he says, “and Hades had grown cold in his
place beneath the earth.”

She pauses, considers. “You
stole fire for Hades?”

“No,” he corrects, “I
stole fire for the people. But Hades benefited as well. Enough that he was
willing to forget the terms of my
punishment.”

“What do you want?” she
asks for the second time. “Why are you here?”

He stops, too close to
her, “The question is why are you
here?”

She steps into his space
now, following him as he backs away from her, “I am here because of you,
fire-stealer, because gods may forget but they do not forgive, and I am the
punishment they have unleashed upon the world.”

“What a punishment you
are,” he says, looking at her lips, and she forgets to hate him only long
enough to kiss him.

~

Hermes watches her,
watches them. He doesn’t know Zeus’s plan, if this is part of it or not, but he
watches her, and he worries. He thinks it is, he can see Aphrodite’s magic
clinging to Pandora, but he doesn’t know why.

He would go to his
mother, but she’s always difficult to find, Gaea preferring to live in streams
and rivers rather than face the man she bore a son for. But his mother’s
father, on the other hand, is always in the same place.

“Grandfather,” Hermes
greets, touching lightly down onto the earth, “How are you?”

“How am I always, boy?”
Atlas grunts out, legs and arms straining as he holds up the sky above the
earth. “Tired.”

Hermes lips quirk up the
corners. Some days, he thinks he’s more Atlas’s grandson than he’s Zeus’s son. “I
need some advice, Grandfather.”

Atlas raises an eyebrow, “I’m
listening.”

So Hermes tells him
everything, from beginning to end, because he can’t figure out what his father’s
plan is, but Atlas might. He’s known the man for longer, at least.

Atlas nods, slow, and
says, “A bride of gods, a gifted child. I can think of only one reason to
create such a child.” Hermes waits. Atlas sighs and says, “There is a jar,
within Olympus, that becomes sealed when it leaves the realm of the gods. After
that, only a being neither mortal nor celestial may open it.”

“What are they planning
to put inside?” Hermes demands, heart spiking. What are they planning to unleash
upon the unsuspecting earth?

His grandfather smirks, “It
doesn’t matter. What matters is this – what are you going to put inside?”

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