She’s pissed and she probably has a right to be, but I’m so fucking frustrated, I can barely focus. “I should have killed literally anyone else. I’m not cut out for this fucking job. All the people who answer to Hephaestus—”
“You’re Hephaestus now.”
I ignore that. “Every single one of them is a fucking snooty asshole who graduated with some obscure college degree that I’ve never heard of. Even with Adonis there, they all played innocent while they updated me on shit that doesn’t even make sense. They made me wait four hours for a bunch of reports I can’t even read. I know they’re written in English, but they might as well be Latin for all I understood it. And, those fuckers, they know it.” I am smart enough when it comes to the things I care about, but I never did well in school and college wasn’t even on the agenda.
Minos didn’t pick me because I can talk fancy and invent shit.
He picked me because he looked at me and saw a capacity for violence that he could hone into a weapon. I made my peace with that a long time ago. I don’t try to be anything but what I am.
Except now my very role in life is something that I’m not.
“Oh, Theseus.” Pandora squeezes my arm. “We’re basically invaders. Of course they weren’t going to welcome you with open arms.”
I know that. Of course I fucking know that. “It would have been better if I’d become Ares. Or even Athena or Artemis.” Unlike the Minotaur, I wouldn’t have fucked up that kill. At least then I’d be in charge of a realm that made sense to me.
“It will get better.”
I give her the look that deserves. It’s not going to get better. Minos hasn’t shared the details of his plans going forward, not now that I’ve served my role, but if he gets his way, I doubt Olympus will be standing by the end of this. That should be comforting. I am Hephaestus, but who knows what that will mean in six months, or a year. I should be happy.
Instead, it’s hard not to feel like I’ve sacrificed so much for shit-all.
“It won’t get better for them,” I snap.
“It doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to act this way.” Pandora shifts and tucks her hair behind her ears. “I know what we were taught, but maybe they aren’t as bad as all that. Really, they’re not that much different from us.”
She’s not wrong. The way the center city lives is still alien to me, but the same could be said of Aeaea before Minos took us in. The orphanage might as well have been on the moon for all our lives there had in common with how we lived in his house. But that doesn’t make a difference. “We came here for a purpose, and we’re going to see it through.”
“What if the purpose is wrong?”
I sink down next to her on the couch. We’ve had variations of this conversation for months. Longer, even. Pandora doesn’t feel beholden to Minos the way I do. She doesn’t understand that I will do anything to keep us from going back to a place without power, helpless to the whims of those around us.
Even if lately I feel more in common with that child in the orphanage than I do with the man I’ve worked so hard to become. “It’s not for us to question the purpose. Minos has a plan.” A plan that seems to require sacrifice from everyone but him.
He hasn’t felt the weight of all the strings that tie me in place.
Or if he does, he hides it significantly better than I do; another lesson he never bothered to teach me.
“You have more faith in him than I do.” Pandora shakes her head, her dark eyes holding things I’m not ready to see. “I wish you would listen to reason, Theseus.”
No matter the shared history we have, Pandora will never look at Minos the way I do. To her, he’s a vicious man who ruthlessly adopted two teenagers to enact a plan fifteen years in the making. And she’s not wrong. But what she fails to acknowledge is where we would’ve ended up if not for Minos. He saved us, whether she wants to admit it or not. Without him, we would’ve been turned out onto the streets the second we turned eighteen.
And the streets of Aeaea would’ve eaten us alive.
I don’t know if I could’ve protected Pandora, not at eighteen, not without the skills that I’ve learned since joining Minos. She doesn’t want to hear that, though. We’ve had this argument more times than I care to count. I know exactly how it will go from here. We will circle round and round until we’re yelling at each other, and then one of us will storm off, only to crawl back and apologize within an hour or two.