slight TW here for vague reference to suicide. this is left of canon, obviously.
She was beautiful, Hera could admit that much. Snow-pale with startling black hair and curved half-moon eyes, Leda had a kind of birdlike delicacy to her, nothing like Hera’s more — shall we say, solid beauty. Hera watched the girl fiddle with her silverware, then with the stem of her glass, as she waited, clearly nervous, for Hera to arrive.
Hera hadn’t been sure that she would come. Leda hadn’t committed on the phone; Hera had said I only want to talk to you, had needed to physically bite down on her tongue to control the maternal instinct to add you’re not in trouble. Leda had laughed anxiously and mumbled back, Don’t — is it me you really ought to be talking to?
Clever answer. Clever girl. Pretty, clever, young. So, so young, it hurts Hera just to look at her.
She takes a deep breath and enters the restaurant.
“Hello, Leda,” she greets, pulling out her chair across the tiny two-seater and lowering herself into it. Leda’s thin fingers go still around her empty wineglass; she’s old enough to drink, Hera thinks, but probably only just. Maybe this year. “Thank you for coming.”
“Professor Jove-Juno,” Leda says. She has a musical voice, Hera thinks; airy, light. “Um, hi. No problem.”
For a moment, they only look at each other. Hera wonders what it is that Leda sees. She wonders if she’s noticing the crows feet that have begun to gather at the corner of Hera’s eyes, if she can see the dark place on her cheek where she had to get a suspicious mole removed. She had prepared to come here, has plucked the hair on her chin that has gotten thicker as she’s gotten older; had moisturized for days, used Retinol, gotten a facial. There is no turning back time, and Hera will never again be dewy and young, but she had wanted to come looking human, looking like a woman who had aged and was still beautiful, still worth loving, still a woman and not a thing.
Leda starts fiddling again, then takes a deep breath. Hera lets her. She waits. Eventually, the girl says, “I don’t know what you want me to say. I know it’s — I know we should have gone about it all so differently. I’m sorry if we hurt you. But we love each other. We can’t help it.”
Hera closes her eyes.
This is what they always say.
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