In which Saskia Martinez met Eros, the god of love himself, and got her heart entangled in a major love disaster. Except nobody told her the supposed mythical being was a teenage boy wearing a ripped varsity shirt, who dangled men in the air-by the...
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HE WATCHEDTHE clock's hand as it did a full cycle.
Eros expelled another sigh, glancing at the door for he didn't know how many times already. Another minute passed. And another. There were still no knocks on the door.
He was expecting a visitor—well, visitors, really, but one of them just came and went out of the house as he pleased that he didn't really qualify as one.
Saskia, the exasperating mortal, had managed to argue and convince him to let her drop by his house that day—or as she liked to call it "your home as a mortal in disguise"—so she could drag him to a 'book shopping'.
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, adjusting the straps on his shoulders, and then sprang up almost immediately when there was, finally, someone knocking on the door. Eros swiftly opened it and he scowled when he saw the figure of an eleven-year old kid, standing at his doorstep.
"You seriously need to get your own house," Eros said, greeting him with a frustrated sigh.
The boy stared at him for several seconds. "Tell me, am I in the wrong era, or did the mortals decide to move Halloween earlier this year?" he asked, eyes regarding his attire in perplexity. "Why are you wearing a warrior tunic and... hounds of Hades—are those wings?"
The newly-arrived guest still gaped at his small pair of wings when he strode inside the house, making Eros pinch the bridge of his nose in exasperation. Apparently, book shopping for Saskia was not done conventionally, and he must've been entirely detached from his sanity when he agreed to don the costume of a winged warrior—his small pair of wings being something symbolic to his said Roman counterpart, Cupid. The whole thing was enough to drive him to the edge, and yet there he was, playing the part as her book shopping companion, in all his winged warrior glory.
He sighed yet again and shook his head. The things he had to put up with, all because it was damnably hard to say no to the maddening human—she was persistent, and crazy, and just painfully persistent.
"I was told they call it 'cosplay' around here, Ares." Eros walked back to sit on the couch beside the one occupied by his guest. "And why are you still in that human form?"
It was Ares' turn to sigh. "My father is acting up again," he said, and then absently added, "I left my bottle of sunblock here," as he rummaged in his backpack. "Apparently, Zeus wanted to reminisce non-existing memories of his children's youth." Ares looked up and regarded his attire again, lips pursing. "So, it's true then. That your... complication with a certain mortal is not yet resolved?"
Eros did not respond, just took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. But Ares had known him for far too long to take that as answer enough on the affirmative.
Despite his youthful human form, Ares was nowhere near young. This was someone who had seen more of the worst of everything, who charged on battlefields without a glance of mercy to spare. His guest's home was somewhere that was brimming with rage and violence. But whenever he was in the mortals' world, he enjoyed traveling everywhere, claiming that it was a 'well-deserved vacay'—his exact words. As much as it was hard to believe, the god of war loved beaches, as evidenced by his wearing of swimming trunks right now, and taking all the trouble to come to Eros' house just because of his bottle of sunblock.
