Love Story: Chapter Four
Venus
With a whisk of something even unearthly to us, the Fates linked their arms and disappeared - leaving Aphrodite, Cupid and I to decipher how severe the punishment they had mentioned was.
I swallowed back before attempting to speak, aware that my colleagues where just as frightened as I had been. Before I could, however, Aphrodite’s cynical tone rang out “Damn Eris...” Cupid and I looked at her with mild shock. Eris had never come to mind straight away; in fact the Fates had made it out like this was my entire fault. I questioned Aphrodite with my eyes. She sighed.
“If that selfish hag hadn’t cancelled on us we wouldn’t be facing, what, death? The Fates should go knocking on her door before they start ruffling our feathers, because believe me my feathers get ruffled easily. I have every right to follow them through that stupid little portal and spit on their even stupider cloth of prophecy.” Aphrodite huffed as if to say she was finished. I was about to respond to that when I was cut off again, this time by Cupid.
“Good luck with that... it’s not Eris’ fault. We shouldn’t be relying on someone else to do our job - it’s called laziness. If we had completely relied on Eris for this one job then maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation. We need to be smarter.” I nodded quickly, agreeing more with what Cupid had said than Aphrodite. Aphrodite however began to pace. She ran her hands through her blonde hair frantically, trying to search for an answer to our problem.
“But how do we do it? Who’s our problem anyway?” Aphrodite’s tone was verging on hysteric, I noticed my hands were shaking in worry as well as I moved over to our endless stacks of paper to find the pair we’d matched up before Eris had cancelled on us.
I held up the same man and woman we’d seen not a few hours ago before everything started to spiral out of control. “Uh... Jonah G-green and K-Kitty Adams...” I stammered, looking at Aphrodite. “You remember them?”
“Like hell I remember them!” Aphrodite threw her hand in the air and started to pace again, as if the information I had given her was useless. She should have remembered them, it wasn’t that hard.
I tried to help her out a little, without annoying her further.
“You said something about Jonah needing to break a leg while Kitty was in California...?” I waited anxiously as Aphrodite stopped pacing. “It can’t be that hard to...” Aphrodite cut me off and narrowed her eyes, before placing her fingers over her temples in concentration.
“Is that all we need to do? Break that guy’s leg to get them together?” She looked at me, as if I would have the answer.
“Uh... I suppose...” I felt an instant sense of pessimism wash over me. “But you and I just write the pairs, we can’t physically do anything about it, only you Cupid could, right? And if that’s the case I think breaking a leg is a bit out of Cupid’s league, I mean all he usually does if fire an arrow and...” I trailed off as Aphrodite slumped down on the nearest chair, obviously as puzzled by all of this as me.
“We’re doomed.” Aphrodite’s words hung in the air like a sickly fog. We were all silent while the possibility of losing our place here dawned upon us. Even If Aphrodite didn’t really appreciate love to its fullest I didn’t suspect she wanted to fall into a limbo of forgotten Gods. Or perhaps worse - become human. I pondered the fact, as if being condemned to that fate was our only other option now. We probably were doomed. The silence seemed to linger before Cupid's voice pierced through it as a small smile spread across his face, like he had some ray of hope in our dismal situation.
“Venus, do you remember what I said about Hades?”
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