@hubrisisterminal asked for:
daphne (greek) laurel
Daphne was born in the water.
No, seriously. Her mom was going through some sort of new-age phase and she got a midwife who doubled as the neighborhood witch, complete with a crooked nose and warts and everything. She got it into Daphne’s mother’s head that the water was good for the baby–the tides, or something–and in the weeks leading up to Daphne’s birth, her mom spent more time in the ocean than she did on land.
And so, Daphne was born in the water. Sometimes she thinks she’s made out of it. She knows that the average human body is 65% water, but Daphne thinks she might be more than that. Sometimes she floats on her back for hours, well into the night, and she thinks one day she might just never get out again.
Daphne swims the way most people walk, or sleep, or breathe. Like it’s just another part of existence. Sometimes she’ll wake up as the sun rises over the ocean, still bobbing in the shallows, nightgown like a second skin, and she’ll realize she’s been floating all night.
“You can’t live your life in the water,” her father teases, and Daphne is completely serious when she says “Watch me.”
Yia Yia is the only one that understands the way Daphne loves the water. Like it’s an organ, or a limb. She loves it in the mindless way that you love the different parts of you. It’s where she thinks and sleeps best. When Daphne thinks about her future, it’s in shades of green and blue, with sunlight filtering through above her.
Yia Yia is peeling potatoes when Daphne stops by her cottage, on the walk back from school. She’s taking morning classes, only because her mother made her. Yia Yia’s kitchen is filled with leeks and bay leaves drying from a clothesline, and root vegetables shedding soil where they roll. It smells like earth, and autumn. Yia Yia is always covered in dirt and weeds from her garden. Sometimes Daphne thinks she sprouted up from the ground, the way that Daphne came from the water.
“Yasas, little laurel tree,” Yia Yia says, as Daphne drops her bags to the floor.
When she was younger, Yia Yia would wear an enormous sun hat and lotion that smelled like flowers and she would drag her creaky knees down to the beach to watch Daphne play in the ocean. Daphne would splash with her sisters until they lost interest, and sing made-up dolphin songs that bloomed in her head, and every time she looked back to the shore, Yia Yia would be watching.
I’m a mermaid princess, she’d call, making a crown of seaweed to knot in her hair.
Of course you are, Yia Yia told her. The most beautiful and gracious princess to ever rule over the ocean.
I’m a sea monster, Daphne said, splashing furiously, creating her own private monsoon.
A fearsome creature, Yia Yia agreed. The rest of the sea kingdom have nightmares about you.
I’m a whirlpool, Daphne decided, spinning around and around and closing her eyes so she wouldn’t get dizzy.
You will swallow passing ships and spit them back out, splintered and broken beyond repair, Yia Yia said wisely. Yia Yia always knew what to say.
She’d say My Daphne, my little laurel tree, you are what the ocean dreams about.
“Daphne,” her mother would chide, shading her eyes with carefully manicured fingers, her stomach firm from pliates and glistening just so with the perfect amount of summer sweat. “Come out of the water! You’re going to look like a prune!”
Prunes are good for you, Yia Yia said, but Daphne’s mother ignored her. She may have been Daphne’s godmother, but her mom had given up the new-age fascination for tai chi and kale.
But when she wasn’t looking, Yia Yia would tuck Daphne’s blankets up to her chin, and tell her old stories about ocean women, who came out of the water and wore skins that weren’t theirs, and had scales down their legs and gills like a fish. Women with teeth sharp like fangs, that could bite through bone like toothpicks.
I want to be like them, Daphne told her. Tell me how to do it.
You have to swim, Yia Yia said. Faster and harder and longer than you’ve ever swum before. You have to swim until you can’t move any further, until you can’t see the shore. Swim to the middle of the ocean, and then they’ll find you, and you’ll never have to leave the water again.
It’s been years since those childhood stories, but Daphne still dreams about drowning. But in her dreams, she never drowns to die. She drowns to be reborn.
Today, she clears a small bit of counter from carrots and loose dirt, and slides herself up. Yia Yia peels her vegetables expertly, a flash of silver blade and worn, weathered fingers.
“Tell me about the dragons again,” she says, nudging Yia Yia’s old lady hip with the toe of her sneaker.
Yia Yia grunts, playing at disinterest. “You’re getting too old for stories.”
“You’re never too old for stories,” Daphne counters, and she doesn’t miss Yia Yia’s smile, the hint of delight gone just as quickly.
“Deep in the belly of the earth, dragons hatch from eggs as big as mountains. That’s what makes the ground shake and move underneath us. They breathe fire, and light volcanoes like matches, sending lava and smoke from their lungs.”
“I wish I was a dragon,” Daphne hums, hopelessly out of tune, a gene passed down from her mother.
“Every girl has a dragon inside her,” Yia Yia says. “That fire you feel building up in your chest, sometimes? That’s your dragon, trying to get out. That’s why you can never be still.”
Daphne loves Yia Yia the way she loves the smell of salt, and a cool breeze in summer, but she isn’t a little girl anymore. When she was younger, she snuck out on a full moon night, because everyone knows that full moons make things special, and she tried to swim to the middle of the ocean. She swam and she swam until her legs burned and her fingers went numb and she couldn’t keep her head above the surface.
In the morning, she woke up on the shore, carried in with the tide like driftwood, aching and shivering and emptier than she’d ever felt before. She’d tried to find the ocean women, she’d followed all of Yia Yia’s rules, but the water didn’t want her. The water sent her home, and Daphne realized that sometimes it doesn’t matter how badly you want something. Sometimes the stories just aren’t true.
But she still likes to hear them.
Daphne nudges Yia Yia again with her shoe. “Tell me about the river horses,” she says, and Yia Yia does.
Daphne is sitting underwater in the school swimming pool, when Apollo taps her shoulder.
She lets the water drip into her eyes when she opens them, and finds him looking at her with the kind of smile that worries a line of little knots into her small intestine. It’s the kind of smile that most people want to wear on their skin, the one that Apollo uses like a master key that fits in every lock. Daphne tightens her lips like a vault.
“What were you doing?” he asks, and even his voice sounds like a melody. Apollo is the sort of boy that everyone likes before they know him, and then they like him even more.
Daphne frowns. His smile widens. “Thinking,” she says, honest. “I think best underwater.”
“That’s cool,” he says, and she’s not sure she believes him. “Hey, Dionysus is having a party tonight. You wanna come?”
Daphne glances around the room. While before its emptiness had felt like sanctuary, now it feels suspicious. “Where’s your sister?” Artemis and Apollo are joined at the hip, until Apollo breaks off to go hook up with a frat boy in a closet, or something. In the doorway, she sees the tell-tale pink tuft of Eros’ head, ducking out around the corner.
Very suspicious.
“She’ll be at the party too,” he assures her. “So, will you come?”
“I’ll think about it,” Daphne tells him, because she gets the feeling that he won’t take no for an answer.
Apollo beams and his whole mouth becomes a sun that makes her want to orbit around it. It’s a peculiar sort of charm that makes her lightheaded. “Good,” he says. “That’s good. I’ll see you there.”
Daphne stutters a nod and sinks back to the tiled pool floor, to clear her head in the chlorine.
She isn’t an idiot. Daphne’s had six classes with Apollo, and he’s never given her so much as a first glance before now. And, beyond his penchant for nude modeling and illicit blow jobs, Apollo is known for one very specific thing: he can never back down from a challenge.
Daphne knows what she looks like: nineteen year old virgin whose only friend is the old neighborhood witch. Skin roughened by saline, hair constantly tangled and wet, eyes too deep to be anything but disconcerting. She catches attention in all the worst ways, like the ink stain on an otherwise white wall that you can’t help but look at.
Part of her, the smallest part, the one that sometimes wishes she looked more like her mother, thinks maybe I should just let him win. She thinks about his mouth, shaped like a bow just asking to be untied. She thinks about his hands, soft and paint-stained, and how he hadn’t even touched her but she could just tell he was warm.
The rest of her thinks over my dead body, and she means it.