To this very day, you still remember the pain when you were ripped out of Yoongi’s loving arms. You remember your father’s rage, you remember it all too well. You still ache, heart bleeding black love as you stare out of the marble window. The Sun, shining blindingly bright and delightful, hurts your half-lidded eyes so you look away because there are no blinds or curtains that can shield you now, no salvation from this torture, a prison you know too well. You miss the vast darkness of calamity dearly, the calmness and the silence. You miss the way the stone floor felt cold under your bare feet, the silk of the sheets and you miss, oh you long for the heart made of anger and solitude that only beats for you.

“Shush, my child, it’s for your own good,” Demeter tells you in a light voice, fake smile blemishing his motherly features. She comes every morning to see you in a suite of a diamond palace you can’t escape. Brushing your hair, she tells you stories of misguided innocent souls. Then she braids your soft locks and tucks flowers behind your ear. She doesn’t care that it hurts, that your heart is breaking into smaller and smaller pieces with every inhale you take outside of the kingdom of death.

It is supposed to hurt. They claim it happens like this, that it’s a sign that you are healing, transforming back into the obedient daughter you were meant to be in the first place. They keep telling you the distance is the cure to get rid of your false thoughts. They believe that the God of Underneath brainwashed and manipulated you but they are wrong, so wrong. They knew nothing about you. Yet they call you Kore fondly like you were a child and you loathe its implications, the pet name of a maiden. So every night, before sleep claims you and sprinkles bittersweet dreams over your eyelids, you close your eyes and remember.

You remember the softness of his touches on your delicate skin that treated you like glass and porcelain. The hands that gripped you firmly like you were his, the sharp white teeth that marked you, the kisses that left bloodstains behind and you never loved anything more than being under his control and knowing that you had the same disarming effect on him. The glint in his eyes was pride as you sat on your throne beside him. It was made of dried roses, tendrils curling around the metal and it smelled like nothing on Earth. Just like Yoongi who was made of blood and bones and something dark that you loved deeply, madly. No matter how many sunsets passed he was engraved in your skin and that immortal, still-beating heart you had.

No matter how much your parents tried, how much they threatened or begged, they couldn’t erase the other god’s touch off you. Never, you swore because it was the mercy in eternity: you had all the time in the world and for Yoongi you would have waited centuries.

“Please forgive her. She didn’t know what she was doing…” Demeter murmurs, shedding the blood of innocent animals on an altar built for the God of Thunder. You scoff.

She of the Grain, the loving, worrying mother you once knew is now your prison’s guard, always keeping an eye on you and praying for your impure soul. Like you were somebody who should be saved from doom.

However, you wanted nothing more than those black cells, the burn of iron on your touch and the screams echoing in your ears. The power you found and had there, in that damned place itself, might have intoxicated you but you wanted it back. You wanted the life you chose over the one that was assigned to you.

“I don’t need your prayers,” you snapped at your mother grabbing at your dark clothes you refused to change to the colour of rebirth. Yoongi had gotten these gilded robes only for you and called you Queen, called you love when the night black dress matching your souls fit perfectly on your curves. His touch burnt through the layers but you enjoyed its warmth, bathed in the flames itching closer as his cool lips touched your throat.

“Zeus won’t forgive this disobedience if you don’t beg for it,” your mother warns you harshly, teeth gritting and you launch yourself onto the small altar of the room shoving its decorations away.

“I don’t care,” you cried frustrated, fingers crashing a rose in your fist until nothing but damaged petals paint your skin red. Lighting strikes outside, flashing angry white over your skin, shaking the walls, signalling that Zeus was indeed listening. “What’s the worst he could do? Kill me? Death sounds a lot better than this prison. Or will he exile me? Then why did he bring me back in the first place? Don’t you see, ma? I don’t belong here.”

Ever since you were a little child, growing up among gods and goddesses of harvest and prosperity, you knew you were different. You were the error in the perfect system, the mistake of an unwavering structure, the flap of the butterfly’s wing that could cause a hurricane on the other hemisphere of Earth. Oh, Chaos, the father of everything, would have been so proud of you. You craved finality of things instead of this boring infinity. You fancied destroying more than creating and that, that made you feel sick. Because what was wrong with you?

“Nothing,” Yoongi would have whispered into the seam of your lips. Loving and kind, sweet like death is for the tortured souls. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

And beside him, you really didn’t have to pretend nothing at all. You could be yourself, you could be angry, you could be at your worst and Yoongi loved then too. He loved your flaws, your mundane needs and naive wishes.

But Goddess of Harvest is relentless. Despite your resistance, she still thinks you aren’t a lost cause but you are, at least for her and the purposes she wants, you are beyond help. It isn’t until the cherry trees bloom that she has to realize that every action had a consequence. Just because she is a goddess and Zeus is the head of gods, they are not allowed to do anything without atonement. Nobody can go against the sacred rules of the world. One cannot just claim something that belongs to the Underworld because the darkness will reclaim it back. And Yoongi wanted you back.

It starts with blackouts, disgust of food and then you can’t make the flowers bloom anymore. Greenery dies under your footsteps and Demeter, she is horrified. She keeps you hidden in your room fearing the havoc your downfall might bring but this act angers the people even more. The farmers think their corns lose their value because you aren’t there to relive them. They have no idea of your new powers of destruction, the way you life out of any living thing you touch. It should terrify you yet you only laugh because the humans whom your mother tried so hard to please now despise her and do not make more ritual offerings for her altar. She blames you and pleads to Zeus to do something, anything but they are both helpless. Ancient laws like this can’t be played out.

It takes a while for them to understand that you aren’t from around here anymore, that they can’t keep you here, can’t make you bring spring for them. Your heart and soul, they draw you back to the Underworld, to your king.

“The leaves are falling and the nature is dying,” Demeter watches the colourful leaves swirling around in the wind and the grief in her voice is familiar. It’s regret and surrender, the recognition that she lost.

“Don’t worry, mother. I will come back when it’s time. But I will come on my two feet and I will be welcomed like a queen and not a kidnapped daughter,” you tell her standing up and this time, the doorknob doesn’t resist. The door’s wings part in front of you and you follow the darkest ray of sunshine to the edge of mortal world.

You greet the Styx like you greet a lover, lips touching the surface of the deadly water and murmuring confessions. However, before you could cross the river, hands from your dreams grab on your waist pulling you back. You fit perfectly onto the wide chest you lean against and gasp at the sensation of chapped lips pressed to the underside of your jaw. It takes your breath away, suffocating you in the best way possible.

“Little bird… you came back,” a raw sigh escapes Yoongi, its exhale fanning over your neck dressing you in goosebumps as you relish in the feeling of his arms caressing your middle keeping you close like he never wanted to let you go. Not ever again.

“I will always come back to you,” the promise slips your mouth like the light always finds its way in the darkest tunnels and the waves crash onto the rocky shore. It almost hurts how true these words are, how unalterable they are. It may have been the seeds of pomegranate, the taste of Underworld that overpowered the will of higher deities and brought you back. It might have been for the unwritten rules nobody could break yet you would have crawl your way back here anyway.

“Have you been searching for me?” you turn around in Yoongi’s embrace to face him and the yearning so clear in his onyx eyes catches you off guard.

“I looked everywhere. I turned the world upside down. I wanted to break down the walls of Olympus to get to you but they didn’t let me. They kept you locked away from me,” he admits and your heart shares his misery.

“I’m here now,” you whisper like a secret and standing on your tiptoes you kiss the God of Dead on the mouth. It feels like the first gulp of water after thirst or the first inhale of fresh oxygen after drowning, it tastes sweet like spring and bitter like the blood that rushes in your veins. It’s everything you’ve missed and more so you let yourself get lost in him.

You may spend half the year up on the surface, watching as the first snowdrops peep out of the frozen ground and heat scorches through the fields on hot summer days. But you are back in the realm of darkness during wine harvest and when the temperature drops below zero. You take spring with you and give it to Yoongi as you make love. You breathe life in him and plant love into the scratches on his back that your nails leave. You bring new hopes and kiss him like it’s a first, eager and hungry. With swollen and split lips you swear you can taste his devotion on your tongue.

“I missed you,” he groans into the juncture of your throat every single time and draws colourful flowers all over your body with his mouth, tongue lapping over the bruises and marks you wear proudly as accessories adorning the canvas of your figure. And you will remember it, his whispered words, how it felt murmured into your skin, the pleasure and pain, all of it when eventually you will have to leave again. So that you will never forget.

And after six lunar months spent missing him, when you come back and he traces a finger on your waist as you lie on his bed, your bed, in his arms, you finally, finally feel at home.