Persephone

(Notes: It does help with understanding this story to know the myth of Persephone and Hades)

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When Freddie comes home from work, throwing his bag on the kitchen table, he sees Jared, red staining his lips and fingers, the liquid dripping down his arm and leaving a sticky trail over his veins. For a wild, irrational second, Freddie thinks it’s blood, and before he can open his mouth to scream, Jared raises his other hand, and Freddie sees he’s holding a pomegranate in it. All Freddie’s complaints about his day fly out of his head as Jared offers the uneaten half of the pomegranate to him, red flesh of the fruit mixing with the dried paint caked under his nails, and Freddie can’t think of anything other than eternal winter and Persephone and Hades and damnation.

He never takes the offering of fruit, but he spends the rest of the night with the tang of pomegranate juice and damnation heavy on his tongue, red stained lips and wrists and hips.