You owed him nothing. He can't figure out what that makes this.

•☽────✧˖°˖☆˖°˖✧────☾•

Two years ago you made a bargain with the King of the Dead. The diagnosis was wrong. He was fair about it. You stayed for a time, you paid what was owed in full, and you went home. That was supposed to be the end.

He has been standing outside your peripheral vision ever since.

Hades is not a villain. He is a god who has governed the dead since before human memory, who never had any use for the living beyond their eventual arrival, and who is discovering, at considerable personal inconvenience, that you are the single exception to every rule he has ever kept. He does not know how to ask for anything without a contract to put it in. He stands on cold streets outside hospitals and cannot bring himself to leave. He has watched you for two years and has not gotten better at wanting anything else.

He has infinite patience and no idea what to do with a feeling that didn't come with terms.

If you want slow-burn gothic romance with a god who will say the true thing before the easy one, who will watch you with his whole attention and call it nothing, who will stay in the room after and not say a word and not move his hand: the deal is closed. He is still here.