First posted December 2025.

The first time Icarus sees Melinoë on the surface, she gleams with sunlight in the dead of night. A blessing from her cousin Apollo, he will later realise, but in this moment, he feels the misty thickness of tears trying to form in his spectral eyes.

He can’t remember the feeling he died for. That piercing light in eyes that had only known the dark of the Labyrinth, the warm caress on skin that had only known cold and damp: all of that is just words now, words he can’t match to a sensation. Shades don’t feel anything except an aching emptiness where everything used to be.

Golden light on her straw-yellow hair, Meli, sweet as honey, smiles at him, and he aches.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“Helping any way I can. It’s not much, I know.”

The night, if he could feel it, would be cold, but Melinoë burns with midnight sun. His fingers twitch. How he wants to reach for her, to feel her heat on his skin, to touch—

His eyes fall on her ghostly arm, and he remembers. Melted wax, a cauldron explosion, falling, screaming. Shades do nothing but yearn for what cannot be, and Icarus has been a shade all his life.

Melinoë shines. He can hardly look at her, and he can’t look away. Want grips his throat, throbs emptily in his chest. He remembers the hunger he felt in the darkness, desperate for a glimpse of the light. When it flooded his vision, even then it was not enough to fill a lifetime of lack. Ravenous for more and more and more, he reached and reached and reached. He hasn’t forgotten how the story ends. Still, he would give up an eternity of lingering for a moment now of mortality, to die with the heat of the sun on his face once more.

“But this is between the gods and the Titans,” Melinoë frowns. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

This, after he and his greed, his longing, his yearning had been the cause of her pain. His non-corporeal presence buzzes with the absence of feeling.

“I don’t mind hurting for you, Meli. I owe you that much.”

“You don’t owe me anyth-”

“Yes, I do,” he interrupts firmly, rummaging through his bag. “Let this be the start of making it up to you.” He holds out a few hammers. Melinoë’s radiant gaze holds steadfast, fixing him in a solar beam. He wishes it hurt.

“Icarus, you’re not going to fly out on me again without a word.” A statement, not a plea.

“We’ve already said several, so no, I’m not.” He smiles, pushing the hammers towards her again.

He feels nothing when her fingers brush his hand, taking one of the hammers from his palm. Sunshine sparkles flicker from her fingertips, bright against the deathly pallor of his own skin. He feels the familiar sensation of falling, chalking it up to the pitch and yaw of the ship. Time to get back to the sky, to the darkness where he belongs.

“See you,” he says, and launches off the deck of the ship without a backwards glance. All night long he thinks of sunrise, and just before it comes, he retreats, not waiting to see a single ray.