Thanatos loves not gifts

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Quiet, creeping Death can sense the sick, the weak, the old and dying. They're spread far and wide, these gods past their prime (certainly their time). Thanatos feels as if he stretches out his long arms and spreads his thin fingers, he'll be able to touch each one of them.

His sword hand itches. He tells it "patience".

There's a point where he thinks of his family -- his twin, his parents, his three mad sisters and all the rest of them -- and for the briefest moment he considers inviting them along. (Whether the offer would be sincere or manipulative, Thanatos doesn't stop to dwell.) Hypnos lives at the back of his mind. Mania crosses the front. In the end, he decides on selfishness and merely edges closer to his tired prey.

He follows her day in and day out, patient as the grave. Thanatos has fallen silent on the god blogs because mundane conversations are just that; all his inner workings are rattling around unhinged, and while perhaps some kin may be able to sense his descent into madness, into chaos, he's not telling.

So he carries on, follows the time disguised as a woman. With her mistress gone, Death can sense that she, too, is adrift at sea (servants unable to serve anyone but themselves never do end well). Something hot and arid flits through his gaze when he watches her in the park, where she tracks the sun across the sky and counts the passing hours. He almost smiles when she starts at easterly breezes, makes unconscious, sad little noises at the southerly ones.

Soon, Thanatos tells himself. Soon these long years of waiting will bear fruit.

Somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard, Thanatos smiles his thin-lipped smile. He has embraced madness, cradled it close to his chest and let it envelop him in blood-temperature warmth. Now he understands this new world, his new purpose.

Now he's finally found the first of his targets. When he spots the girl-shaped creature with the radiant smile, Death answers it in kind. She's old. She's tired. She'll be his, soon.

His twin has fallen back into poppy-deep sleep, and without soothing Hypnos, Thanatos has become fitful, colder than ever. Yet there's something to be had despite: creeping, quiet Death has found quarry. Anyone else would smile at such fortune. He doesn't -- instead his gaze becomes more intense, his fingers flexing in anticipation of the inevitable.

Soon, soon.

There's a faded god wandering the streets and roads of America, a half-there thing barely holding itself together. Thanatos has stopped pretending to be anything other than what he is. Death has removed its mask; he is restless and he is hungry for purpose. These days he'll haunt his fellow gods just as much, if not moreso, than he will the mortals descended from Greece. He's always been there for them, after all, patient and sure. With their collective existence being what it is, it's just a matter of time until his sword is put to use on them.

Let it all choke and die.

Comforting, but pointless.

Hypnos

What's a Titanomachy without Titans?

Hypnos has retired back to familiar slumber. Ordinarily his twin would be willing to follow, but there is something -- something -- which has set the old death-god's teeth on edge. On a leave of absence from his mortal facade, Thanatos has spent the past couple of weeks wandering the city (country), skulking about with sword nearby and just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The ever-distant, always-waiting, eternally patient Thanatos has finally succumbed -- if only privately -- to an urge for action. Teetering on the desire to interfere rather than wait for carrion, he stands outside dwellings and universities and libraries and contemplates burning every book to ash. Because then, at least, he'll have work to do.

Then there will be dying things of consequence which he may tend to.

Short attention spans:

• Children
• The senile
• Goldfish
• Olympians

Tick tock.

Keep my brother outside your doings, Kratos. My impartiality only goes so far, and strength is nothing to me.

[Hypnos]
Out with it.

Hm.

PLAYER: "We're more of the blood, love, and rhetoric school. [...] I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory -- they're all blood, you see."

( [Nyx] )

Talk of war's all well and right. More important is that we do what we were made for.

My friend in the wheelchair's dead. He died believing. It felt fine.

( [Hypnos] )

My friend in the wheelchair doesn't care for the Christmas music. Happily, he's starting to believe the things I have to say.

Soon.

Half the staff has gone off for the holiday. It's been too quiet for the residents and regulars; they get unsettled when they come in and hear nothing but scratching pens, gasping respirators.

My friend in the wheelchair's had a setback. There's a break from the menial tasks, at least -- no more need to try and teach him knitting if he can't use his fingers.

( [Private; viewable to Hypnos] )

No more knitting. Fingers take a long time to heal, and as my friend in the wheelchair has discovered, this weather plays merry hell with once-broken digits. Arthritis is almost as painful to watch as to feel.

Instead we sat on the roof last night and watched the sun gods flee. He knows how to handle his liquor, at least. By the end of the bottle, he thanked me.

For what?

For being cruel. For not caring whether he wanted to give in to his own weaknesses.

He had half of it right, at least.

Today saw nothing but coping mechanisms through knitting needles. My friend in the wheelchair is doing considerably better, but he's as bored with scarf-making as I am.

The path to health and wholeness is such a long, upward climb, and it's so easy to slide back down. Tempting, tempting. Bugger it. He'll keep. The beer in the fridge, on the other hand...