Chapter Text
May Castellan didn't think of herself as the type of person who could attract the attention of a god. The 20-year-old from Westport, Connecticut, didn't have much. The spacious house lived in was simply inherited from her father, who had died two years ago, when she was eighteen.
She didn't do anything particularly flashy for a job. She simply worked part-time in customer service at a convenience store that was literally almost an hour's walk from her house, which might as well have been in the middle of nowhere, while she studied marketing at the local community college.
The one thing that was special about May, however, was something no one ever believed her when she told them. She saw monsters everywhere. And not things like ghosts and vampires. Monsters straight out of a high school Greek mythology textbook. They never bothered her, so she didn't think they knew she could see her.
When she was a kid, her parents had always thought she had a vivid imagination. However, her mother had passed when May was fifteen, and when she was on her deathbed in the hospital, she'd called her daughter in. Her high school science class was supposed to be on a zoo field trip, but because of her mother's condition, May had been dismissed.
She'd stood crying in the hallway outside of her mother's room until who everyone else thought was a handsome young male doctor, maybe in his late twenties to early thirties, called her in, clipboard in hand. But May saw the man for what he really was. Another shimmering form was superimposed on top of the doctor one- a face with mischievous elfin features and twinkling blue eyes.
On his feet, he wore a pair of Ancient Greek-style leather sandals with shimmering golden wings protruding from the sides. Every so often, they would twitch and flutter, lifting the "doctor" a few inches off the ground. On his head perched a shining helmet with the same wings. And instead of a clipboard, he held the symbol often displayed outside of hospitals- a winged silver staff entwined with two green snakes. May wasn't quite sure what the staff was called.
The other doctor standing at the foot of her mother's bed in the room was superimposed with a different image- that of a tall, pale man with long black hair, giant white angel-like wings protruding from his back, and a wraparound blindfold covering his eyes. May swallowed nervously. She wasn't sure exactly who the two strange men were, but she knew with absolute certainty what their presence meant. Her mother's time was here. She straightened her light blue dress and walked into the room.
"Mom?" she asked.
"May..." her mother tried to lift her head, but she was clearly too weak. "Come here, precious." Tears welling in her green eyes, just like her mother's, May walked closer. May's mother stroked and held her face, kissing her cheeks. "I'm sorry I let you think I never believed you," she whispered. "All the things you see... I see them too."
"So you know the doctors aren't really doctors?" May asked, sitting on the bed and embracing her mother. Her mother nodded.
"They're here to take my soul to the afterlife... wherever that may be?"
"Oh, mom-" May choked back a sob. "I wish you didn't have to go. I don't know how to do this without you?"
"You're a strong girl, May," her mother whispered hoarsely. "You'll figure it out. Just... promise you'll take care of your father for me, okay?"
"I promise," May whispered. The man with wings pulled out a large black scythe and swung it as if he was cutting wheat. And in that moment, her head pressed close to her mother's chest, she could feel her heart stop beating and her last breath leave her body. She pulled away, stifling another sob. She was fifteen, and this was the first time she'd felt true loss, unless you counted when she was ten and her childhood dog, Clover, had passed to cancer, the same thing that was now taking her mother.
"Hey." May heard a voice. She looked up to see the man with the strange staff approaching her. He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. "It must be tough to lose a loved one." She sniffled.
"You say that like you've never experienced it."
"I haven't," he admitted. "Not many of my kind do. But I've been doing this job for centuries and watching never gets easier." And with that, he disappeared.
~
In the next few years, May started to think a lot about death and the future. She started dabbling in tarot cards as a hobby, and she practiced and practiced until she was better at it than anyone else she knew. Of course, her father, who happened to be a devout Catholic, disapproved of the hobby, sneering at it and calling it stupid witchcraft, but he still cared for her, and said it was tolerable as long as it was only a hobby and she didn't start doing it for a living. Besides, May didn't dabble in any other activities associated with witchcraft, and this was only because the future interested her.
The next time she saw the strange men was three years later in the hospital when her dad passed away from a heart disease he'd been battling since before May was born. This time, she didn't stick around to see the winged man swing the scythe, if only to spare her own feelings. Instead, she sat on a bench out in the hallway, spreading out her tarot cards on a table in front of her covered in magazines. That was when she felt someone sit beside her. She looked up and it was the man who had comforted her after her mother's death, the one with the strange staff and the winged sandals.
"You have an interest in fortune-telling," he noted.
"It's just a hobby," she shrugged, spitting a strand of blond hair out of her mouth. "And it's not like I believe any of this stuff."
"You'd be surprised about how real some of it is," the man said. "May, you have the sight. You already know more than most of your generation. A god doesn't meet someone like you every millennium."
"A god," she said, gathering her cards back up. "You're a god? Like the Greek kind?"
"Exactly," he said, and extended his hand to shake. "Hermes. God of messengers, travelers, thieves, et cetera, et cetera."
"Why have you been here for both of my parents' deaths?" May asked.
"You know the myths, don't you?" Hermes asked. "One of my jobs is also to escort dead souls to the Underworld."
"You're a psychopomp."
"Right," Hermes said. "Anyway, I should probably get going, but it was nice to talk to you, May."
"You too, Hermes."