The Blood of Salmacis

Title: The Blood of Salmacis
Pairing/characters: Hermaphroditus, Thanatos
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Inspired by the story of Hermaphroditus in Ovid's Metamorphoses
Prompt: 546. Mythology - Greek: Hermaphroditus. How does his assimiliation with the nymph immediately affect him and his sexuality?
Summary: After Hermaphroditus pronounces his curse.

The boy, thus lost in woman, now survey'd
The river's guilty stream, and thus he pray'd.
(He pray'd, but wonder'd at his softer tone,
Surpriz'd to hear a voice but half his own.)
You parent-Gods, whose heav'nly names I bear,
Hear your Hermaphrodite, and grant my pray'r;
Oh grant, that whomsoe'er these streams contain,
If man he enter'd, he may rise again
Supple, unsinew'd, and but half a man!

- Metamorphoses by Ovid, Book IV, The Story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, translated by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et. al.

THE BLOOD OF SALMACIS


The surface of the spring warped and writhed. In the shallows, it surged in too-ambitious waves, mud spattering the hands that tore at its edge. There was a red shadow in the water.

He had cried his voice out, screaming his curse. He had. She had. Would he, she, it now have to –

Gasping deeply, he bowed over the wild water, breathing in the heat of it. He. His mind was still there, unchanged, even if the water now obeyed him.

He knelt on the sand at the edge of the spring. The water covered his hands. The naiads had always told him he had beautiful hands, but now the bones no longer showed. Softer. Female.

He flexed his fingers and watched the knuckles appear.

The naiads... the naiads would laugh at him. Hermes would not care, but then he never did; his father had thoughts as flighty as his feet. And his mother.

Hermaphroditus let the surface of the water calm and smooth. His reflection stilled from a monster to something – not unlike him. More of his mother's face, Aphrodite Cytherea's kindness that he'd always seen. Cytherea held the key to male and female. Perhaps his mother-

No. She had touched the spring, putting his curse to work. She had not unwound the nymph's body from his own, undone this monstrosity.

The water surged again between his fingers. He was not a god. He had almost drowned, fighting off the nymph, before she'd cursed him, melted into him, consumed him. If he let the water flow within him too, it would end.

The water darted higher and higher, spattering his lips. It had been Salmacis' spring. Salmacis was lost in him, a malign mutation, a shadow in his-her-its body (but not his mind, and he clung to it, the gratitude a flame). The spring was his. Its. Theirs.

He followed the movement of the water with his hands. The waves were like Cytherea's sea, darting, knowing. Over his knees, scraped in the fight. To the sides. To his left, a tongue of liquid lapping against pale fingers.

There was a man crouched at the water's edge, some years Hermaphroditus' senior and pale as a bloodless body. The hem of the short black chiton was stained with the mud of the spring bank. Long black locks half-obscured the man's face, but not the dark eyes that cut so deeply apart from the paleness of the skin. Pale as the children of the Night, Hermaphroditus thought, and then he knew who his visitor was.

Hermaphroditus had no wonder nor horror left in him. "Greetings to you who are death," he said. The voice was too high, too soft. The naiads would laugh. "How fares my mother's sister?"

Thanatos inclined his head. "The Lady of the Dead fares well. How fare you?"

Hermaphroditus laughed, choked, hid his face against the water and the mud until he could breathe again. It felt strange. His chest was narrower, different-shaped.

He chanced a look up, and almost laughed again. "It's – an inefficient way of drowning?"

"I've seen worse." Death spoke in a pleasant voice, each word separate and rounded. Like someone who read books and talked to philosophers.

Hermaphroditus thought he shouldn't be thinking like that about a child of Chaos. Like an Olympian, higher than everyone. He'd never been to Olympus.

He took a breath. The words escaped with the exhalation. "Are you here for me?"

Thanatos' lips moved a fraction, and Hermaphroditus drew another breath. He was not a god. Only a demigod. He had been raised by nymphs, without ambrosia, without eternal youth while he still had his own to live through. He could die.

"Salmacis," Thanatos said.

Hermaphroditus caught his own face, pressing on the jaw, forehead, smaller, hers.

Thanatos' eyes followed the path of Hermaphroditus' fingers. "She was not as gracious."

"No." Hermaphroditus heard himself smiling. "No, she wasn't."

The wind caught his words, carrying them over the surface of the pool. The air was cool on his skin. A strand of Thanatos' hair shaped into a curl, anchored behind an ear, then escaped and cut across the pale forehead.

"Can I die?" Hermaphroditus asked. "Now?"

Two fingers caught the strand, setting it back in the wave of Thanatos' hair. "Everyone can die."

"If they want to." Hermaphroditus smiled, lowering his head. "I'm sorry. I-"

"Complete other people's sentences?" For the first time, Thanatos' voice was more than neutral, colouring towards amusement.

"Don't make me laugh," Hermaphroditus said. "I don't think I'd be able to stop."

Thanatos shifted, sitting down on the edge of the pool, long legs stretched over the water.

Hermaphroditus sat back on his heels. "What would it be like? The Realm of Hades? Elysium? Is it dark?"

"Not where the souls walk." Thanatos turned his head to the side, the strand of hair falling free again. "They walk through fields of endless grain, under an eternal sun."

"Never changing?"

"Never."

Hermaphroditus looked down on the water. "I wanted to see more."

Thanatos flicked a finger, sending a lump of dirt into the water. For a moment, it became a dark stain. Then it was gone.

"I wanted to see what the human world look like," Hermaphroditus said. "I wanted to walk in a marketplace. I don't know if I'd make a soldier, but I could walk with an army. Carry messages, like my father." He spread his fingers again, soft like a child's. At fifteen, he'd been a boy. "I wanted to be a man."

"Men die," Thanatos said.

"I'd like to have the choice." Hermaphroditus reached out, showing Thanatos his too-round arms. "It feels wrong. It's not who I am."

"It limits you," the one who was death agreed. "You will never father a child, nor give birth to one."

Hermaphroditus lowered his head. "I did not think as far ahead. I – my parents are gods, Olympians. I have no name that must be carried on."

"A limitation?"

"A freedom." Hermaphroditus smiled ruefully. "One less thing for me to worry about?"

Thanatos regarded him with dark eyes. Hermaphroditus had seen Hypnos once, from a distance, and the eyes of the twins were the same, star-scattered. He supposed it was Thanatos who had had them first, first-born and leader.

"I never fit," he said suddenly. "I mean, my parents are both Olympians. I should be one. But I don't have power, and I've never been to Olympus. I was raised by nymphs. I don't know anything else."

Thanatos' hand lifted, shaping the outside of Hermaphroditus' arm. He had not noticed when the one who was death had come so close.

"There is much you don't know," Thanatos said. "This is simply another item on your list."

"So what should I do?" Hermaphroditus asked. Death was malicious, he remembered. Death was cruel, and merciless, and destructive.

Death was taking his hand.

"You should learn," Thanatos said. "Until then, you cannot decide."

Hermaphroditus blinked sudden dryness out of his eyes. "Learn what?"

"What it means to be you." There was a tint of a smile in the shadows under Death's cheeks. "Then I shall see you again."

Hermaphroditus moved his fingers along Thanatos' palm. There were no calluses, though the skin was not smooth.

"I don't think I'll like eternal grain." He thought he saw the smile appear truly. "And don't laugh at me."

"I am death," Thanatos said. "I can laugh at what I please."

"Don't."

Thanatos' fingers moved, squeezing Hermaphroditus' wrist.

"I'll learn," Hermaphroditus said. "I didn't choose this, but I choose to learn about it." His lips trembled. "I don't think I would have had children, anyway."

"Wouldn't you?" For a moment, the stars in death's eyes brightened.

Hermaphroditus smiled, bowing his head until his hair fell over his eyes. His hair, blond like his mother's. He wondered if he would see her again, or if it had been the last time she touched his heart, when she had answered his call to curse Salmacis' spring and bring his doom upon all men who bathed in it. If he could not have his gender, why should they?

He laughed, then stopped suddenly. "It was a dream, wasn't it? Trying to be like others. No-one can be the same as others."

"It was not a bad dream."

"It was not a true dream." Hermaphroditus brought Thanatos' fingers to his lips. Death's skin tasted of ashes. "Time to wake up."

He rose to his knees, then to his feet. He walked into the water, which parted for him, for the child of Aphrodite Cytherea, merged with the nymph the spring had birthed.

Thanatos watched him leave. Then he dipped his hand in the water and watched the blood of the nymph stain it and dissipate in it.

Hermaphroditus' curse would bring him often to this shore.

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